South of Superior - Ellen Airgood [57]
He worked at the prison because he needed the money, it was that simple. Every year he hoped he’d turn a corner with the pizzeria and be able to quit at the prison, but every year there was something that made that guaranteed paycheck indispensable—he needed a decent truck, a new cooler or two, there was always something. On a more metaphysical level, sometimes he thought maybe he worked at the prison because it was full of guys like Manny. Society’s screw-ups. Sad to say, a lot of them were not that bright. They were the ones who’d got caught. Even though a lot of them had never had a chance to do anything but end Up in prison, on a day-to-day basis dealing with them was tedious and annoying.
When he was a kid, he’d loved his older cousin Manny. Always full of energy and bad ideas, Manny had been exciting, a nonstop adventure. As an adult, Manny would have grated on his nerves. In retrospect he’d probably been ADHD and not just the wild kid his parents despaired over. But people hadn’t known about things like that back then, and if Manny’d just been full of youthful high spirits, he’d never had a chance to grow out of it. The motorcycle accident that had given Paul his limp had killed him.
Paul opened his book but couldn’t attend to it. He took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes. He wished he wasn’t alone. Two summers ago there had been Larissa from Kiev, and three summers before that there was Kate, a seasonal biologist with the Forest Service. With each of them he’d convinced himself it was something more than just a summer romance, but by Labor Day he’d known better, and so had they.
He thought about Madeline Stone. He’d driven past Gladys’s house one day and seen her out in the side yard, swinging an ax, flailing at a chunk of wood, trying to split it. Her efforts had been clumsy and awkward and he’d wanted to jump out of the car and take over for her. But he didn’t, he just watched. She bit her lip and repositioned the chunk of wood over and over, and when it finally split in two the look on her face was something to see. He wasn’t sure he was attracted to her, but he found himself thinking about her sometimes when he didn’t expect to, like now.
Paul sighed, tried to read again, but his thoughts nagged at him. He was nearly thirty-six years old and his life felt stale. He felt stale. He hadn’t even picked Up his guitar in how long, and playing Used to be as indispensable as air. Lately—well, more than lately, for years now—he’d been in a rut that just kept getting deeper. He didn’t know how to fix it, and he wouldn’t have had the time or energy to fix it even if he did know. Why couldn’t he be like Lily Martin at the store in Halfway and accept his life as it came? But he couldn’t. He never had been able to. Or maybe he had, back when he was a kid, before the accident, but that was a long time ago.
The accident had changed everything. Before it, he was a boy who pretty much trusted in life. Afterward he knew how fast things could go wrong. Trouble could smack you down at any instant, so you’d better be on the lookout. And you’d better be careful what you asked for, too, because you just might get it. Paul had asked for—insisted on—a ride on Manny’s motorcycle one summer afternoon. An hour later, Manny was dead.
A knock came on his outside door and Paul sat Up with alacrity, glad of the distraction.
“Hey,” Randi Hopkins said. She was wearing a short sky-blue dress that clung to her breasts but flared out from there, and flip-flops. She looked like summer.
“Hi. What’s Up?”
“Nothing. I saw your light. Wondered what you were doing.”
“Reading.”
Randi nodded, tipped her head a little to see past him into his room. He stepped aside and waved her in. “You want a beer, or a pop?”
She began to shake her head but then said, “Sure.” She settled down into a chair, looked around. “You like to keep it pretty basic, eh?”
Paul smiled. He appreciated Understatement. He’d kept two rooms for himself when he started the pizzeria.