The Hunt Club_ A Novel - Bret Lott [41]
I said, “What’s the plan?”
He was looking down, chin almost to his chest, thinking. Miss Dinah put a plastic tub of butter down on the table, and a cup of coffee, heavy on the milk. Just like I liked it. She’d seen me fix it this way for years at the club.
She leaned against the kitchen counter, arms crossed. Books were stacked on the kitchen counter, too.
Unc fingered his hat, Miss Dinah stared at me. Something was going on here already.
I tried a smile, said, “What’s with all these books?”
“As a rule,” she said, and turned her head, gave me the other side of her jaw, “we read them.”
“Ease off on the boy,” Unc said. “He’s scared as the rest of us, Dinah. So please.” Still he worked the hat.
I turned back to Miss Dinah. “I guess I meant how is it you got so many of them. Books, I mean.” I shrugged. “I mean, what did—”
“You mean how come a shanty like this one have a better library than any high school in the county. That’s because I know what to spend my money on. My baby.” She seemed to soften then, talk turned to her daughter. She smiled, looked out to the front room, all those shelves, all those books. She nodded at them. “We go to the library sale every year, stock up and stock up. Proud to say, too, Dorcas read every one of them.” She gave a sharp nod. “I home-school that girl since day one. She never seen the inside of a public school, and already she got the universities of Duke, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, and Stanford banging down the door to get ahold of her. Not to mention ten dozen other schools we don’t even wink at.” She nodded hard again. “She going be somebody of noteworthy mention. I tell you.”
Duke, I thought. Harvard and Yale. Stanford.
Shit.
I read. I’ve read all my life, and right then, right there, something started to twist in me, something had nothing to do with the matter at hand, namely what the hell was going to happen next. And I thought maybe that something had to do somehow with the word jealousy.
Here was Tabitha with offers already from places I’d only dreamed of.
“She got fifteen-twenty combined on her SAT, and she only a junior,” Miss Dinah said.
Shit.
Then here came Tabitha, walking fast from the hallway that led out of the kitchen. She had some paper in her hand, her forehead all worried up, and I thought she was even more beautiful than last night.
Fifteen-twenty SAT. Shit.
I looked down at my plate and didn’t feel like eating anymore.
“What you find, Missy Dorcas?” Unc said.
She sat beside him, spread the papers out on the table. She hadn’t yet looked at me, and it seemed she had no plans of it, either. She started in with her hands, motioning and motioning, her eyes right on Unc, as though he knew exactly what she was saying.
“She get in, start to download the information,” Miss Dinah said. Her eyes were on Tabitha, focused, translating. “Had seven baffles between the password and the line in.” She paused, watched Tabitha.
Unc nodded.
“Once she make it in, she find the file you looking for.” She paused, watched.
“Hello?” I said.
Still Tabitha motioned, eyes right on Unc: she made a fist, slapped it twice into the palm of her other hand. She crossed her arms, sat back.
“She say somebody find her.” She paused. “Somebody know she in there monkeying round.” Miss Dinah paused again, and now she looked down, shook her head. “Whoever it be cut her off. Just now.”
Unc stopped with the hat.
I said, “Why is it everybody knows more about what’s going on than me?”
Unc looked at me, then Tabitha. He said, “Do they know who you are?”
She moved her hands, all the while shaking her head. Miss Dinah said, “She had to break down seven baffles to get in, but she loaded in ten of her own on the way.”
Unc gave a small smile at this. “You get anything?”
She quick moved the papers on the table, shuffled them, lay