Shine - Lauren Myracle [69]
“They’re gone now,” he said. “My Danielle, she was at the Piggly Wiggly when the wind started picking up. She shoulda stayed put, but she wanted to get home to me and the baby.”
“She loved you, that’s why,” I said, feeling as if I was being sucked into quicksand. “She wanted to be with you.”
“A tree knocked out the windshield, right in our driveway. They say she didn’t feel no pain. That’s good, don’t you think?”
I sighed. I’d heard all this before. Everyone in town had. The first few times, it was heartbreaking. Then it was just sad. It never stopped being sad, but it was a broken record sad, playing again and again on endless repeat.
I’d hoped to skirt around it today, but watching Ridings rock back and forth in his folding chair, clutching that beat-up picture, I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
“I think it’s real good,” I said, referring to his wife’s pain-free death.
“And Melody . . . my baby girl—“He choked up. “I tried my best. You know? I put her in her car seat. She took naps in it sometimes. I figured it would keep her safe.”
“I know. That was good thinking.” And it was. What else were you supposed to do when a tornado touched down right on top of you? Go to the basement, sure. But what if you didn’t have a basement?
“I strapped her in her car seat, and I put the car seat in the bathtub,” Ridings said. “And then I got in the tub with her. I lay my whole self on top of her.”
He shook his head. His eyes were red, and his sallow skin hugged his skull. The meth Wally had cooked up for him had gotten him bad.
“She died, too,” he whispered.
“I know. I’m so sorry.”
“Just a little baby. A tiny little baby.”
His lips were dry and cracked, with blood showing where some of the cracks had split open. Less than a year ago, he’d been handsome in his red neck, crew cut way. Then that tornado lifted his baby girl right out from under him, tossing her high and dropping her in a field three hundred feet away. She was still in her car seat when Ridings found her. No broken bones, just the life sucked right out of her.
“Why would God take a little baby?” Ridings asked, fixing his meth-addled eyes on mine. He answered his own question. “He needed another angel, I guess. She was too good for this world, her and Danielle both.”
“Um . . . Ridings?” I ventured.
“Yeah?” he said, the entire word a sigh.
If there was a right way to do this, I didn’t know it. So I said, “Didn’t you used to have a cow?”
His gaze drifted. It seemed like he was looking into the forest, but when I angled my head, I saw an open field. At the edge of the field was the shack where Ridings now lived, and also his pickup truck.
“I did,” he murmured. “She died, too.”
“How?”
“Lightning.”
“Lightning?!”
“Don’t that beat all? No insurance for an act of God, not when it comes to cows and lightning.” He thumped his bony chest. “I thought it was foul play, that’s what I thought at first. But nope, it was lightning.”
“Lightning. Wow.”
“I got her cut up into steaks and such, though I hated to do it.” He tugged on his ear, his face as scrunched and bewildered as a baby’s. “Least, I think I did. Man’s gotta eat, right?”
I had no response to that. Tommy killed his cow. Then Tommy had it butchered and got the meat to Ridings, either because Roy told him to or because his sins got to gnawing at him. Was Ridings’s brain so riddled with holes that he no longer remembered anything?
Ridings stood up from his folding chair. He came right up to me, and his confusion dropped away, replaced by a feverish intensity. I thought fleetingly that a person could do whatever he wanted if he knew he wouldn’t remember afterward.
“You’re a good girl, Cat,” he said. “A real good girl, just like my Melody. Don’t you let the world beat you down, you hear? Don’t you take no peanut butter and mayonnaise sammiches, even if someone gives ’em to you free, ’cause there ain’t no such thing as a free ride. Maybe they’re free at first, but then comes the strings. There’s always strings, and them strings, they tie you up and pull you right down