The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [10]
“Mom,” I whispered. “I told him I called you. I told him—”
“And now you’ve gone and give him a dead body to look at like it was some sort of manly man thing to do,” Mom kept on. “I’m working my damnedest at providing for him a loving and virtuous home to live in, no small feat I figured you’d know by now, a single mom and the way the world is crouching at my door ready to take my precious love, my baby boy, any second now. But no. You give him this. This looking at a dead man.”
“Eugenie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry?” she said. “Sorry? Sorry don’t even begin to do it. Sorry don’t even—”
“Mom,” I said, and the word hurt.
She turned to me, her eyebrows up, mouth open, like she’d forgotten me altogether with what she was handing out to Unc.
Then she cried, her shoulders falling in on her, her mouth crumpling up, eyes squeezing shut. She was holding back, the sound only hisses, quick breaths.
Unc went to her, turned her to him. “Now, Eugenie,” he said. “Everything’s fine. It’s fine.”
Mom gave up then, leaned into him, cried into his shoulder.
It was something I hadn’t seen before, her giving up to him.
But it only lasted a couple seconds. She quick tensed up, took a step back from him. She put the back of a hand to her eye, looked at me, tried that smile again. She said, “I’m a mess,” and sniffed, touched at a run of mascara down one cheek.
“Now let’s not hear any more talk like that,” somebody said at the door, and I looked past them to a man in a white coat, stethoscope draped over his shoulders.
Silverado short-bed, teal blue. Adam’s apple big as a fist.
Buck, the name on his personalized license plate.
“Dr. Morrison,” Mom said, and quick touched at her eye again, smiled big for him.
Unc turned, and here came Buck, smiling at me. “How you doing?” he said, and pulled a penlight from the jacket pocket.
I said nothing.
“Now, don’t you worry none. I washed my hands since holding back them hounds at the club,” he said.
He was a member, a definite South-of-Broader, handing me redneck talk, like what he’d expect I might want to hear out of him. Like he thought that’s what might comfort us hayseeds.
He leaned over me, held the light to one eye, then the other. The room filled up with a white so bright my head hurt for it.
“Tommy Thigpen and Jervey Morrison here brought you in in Tommy’s cruiser,” Unc said. “And Yandle and me. Lucky we had a neurosurgeon out in the wilds with us.”
“Dr. Morrison’s on the faculty,” Mom said, her voice all candy. “He’s dean of Neurosurgery,” she said, “so I’d say it’s more like divine intervention than luck.”
He looked at my eyes a second time: white, pain. Then he was away, still smiling.
“Just out for the hunt,” he said. “Glad I could be there to help y’all.” He turned to Unc, crossed his arms. “Luck is that deputy being there to break his fall. Otherwise he might have hit that stump full on, cracked his skull open like an old muskmelon.”
Unc only nodded.
Buck looked at me. “We’ll need for you to stay the night. Just to make sure you’re all right. Then you can head on home tomorrow, if you’re feeling at all like it. In the meantime, we need for you to stay awake for long as you can. Watch some TV, football games.”
He turned to Mom, smiling, then back to me. “Divine intervention is having a momma as pretty as she is,” he said, “and working at the hospital we end up bringing you into.”
He glanced at Unc. “Leland, we be seeing you.” He turned to Mom, nodded at her to follow him.
She smiled at me, then Buck headed out the door, and she was gone.
Unc already had his hands to the railing. He grinned. “You should have heard Yandle pissing and moaning about his arm all the way down here,” he said, his voice down low, like we