The Best of Me - Nicholas Sparks [7]
Dawson said nothing. His father picked at his gums with a toothpick.
“See, all it would take for me to end this little life of yours is a crime out there in town. Maybe a burglary, maybe a fire. Who knows? After that, we just plant some evidence, place an anonymous call to the sheriff, and let the law do the work. You’re alone out here at night and you ain’t gonna have no alibi, and for all I care, you can just rot away for the rest of your life surrounded by iron and concrete. Won’t bother me none at all. So why don’t you just hand it over?”
Dawson knew his father wasn’t bluffing. Keeping his face expressionless, he took the money from his wallet. After his father counted the bills, he spat the toothpick onto the ground and grinned.
“I’ll be back next week.”
Dawson made do. He managed to squirrel away a little bit of the money he earned to continue his repairs on the Fastback and buy the sweet tea, but most of his money went to his father. Though he suspected that Tuck knew what was going on, Tuck never said anything directly to him. Not because he was afraid of the Coles, but because it wasn’t his business. Instead, he began cooking dinners that were just a bit too large for him to eat on his own. “Got some left, if you want it,” he’d say after walking a plate out to the garage. More often than not, he’d go back inside without another word. That was the kind of relationship they had, and Dawson respected it. Dawson respected Tuck. In his own way, Tuck had become the most important person in his life, and Dawson couldn’t imagine anything that would change that.
Until the day Amanda Collier entered his world.
Though he’d known of Amanda for years—there was only one high school in Pamlico County and he’d gone to school with her most of his life—it wasn’t until the spring of his junior year that they exchanged more than a few words for the first time. He always thought she was pretty, but he wasn’t alone in that. She was popular, the kind of girl who sat surrounded by friends at a table in the cafeteria while boys vied for her attention, and she was not only class president but a cheerleader as well. Throw in the fact that she was rich, and she was as inaccessible to him as an actress on television. He never said a word to her until they were finally paired as lab partners in chemistry.
As they labored over test tubes and studied together for tests that semester, he realized that she was nothing like he’d imagined she would be. First, that she was a Collier and he a Cole seemed to make no difference to her, which surprised him. She had a quick, unbridled laugh, and when she smiled there was a mischievous hint about it, as though she knew something that no one else did. Her hair was a rich honey blond, her eyes the color of warm summer skies, and sometimes as they scribbled equations into their notebooks, she would touch his arm to get his attention and the feeling would linger for hours. In the afternoons, as he worked in the garage, he often found he couldn’t stop thinking about her. It took him until spring before he finally worked up the courage to ask if he could buy her an ice cream, and as the end of the school year approached they began to spend more and more time together.
That was 1984, and he was seventeen years old. By the time summer ended, he knew he was in love, and when the air turned crisp and autumn leaves drifted to the ground in ribbons of red and yellow, he was certain that he wanted to spend the rest of his life with her, as crazy as that sounded. They stayed together the following year, growing even closer and spending every possible moment together. With Amanda, it was easy for him to be himself; with Amanda, he was content for the first time in his life. Even now, that final year together was sometimes all he could think about.
Or more accurately, Amanda was all he could think about.
On the airplane, Dawson settled into the flight. He had a window seat about halfway back, next to a young woman: red hair, midthirties, long-limbed, and tall. Not exactly his type,