With those oversized tires, I had to hike my Sunday skirt to make that long step up to the cab, but one glance at the diamond-patterned treads made me think that it might well be worth the price of a cup of coffee to hear what Reese had to say about yesterday morning.
18
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As the youngest of my father’s twelve children, I have nieces and nephews who range in age from four years older than me, right down to high school.
Reese, the second of Herman and Nadine’s four, had to be at least twenty-six, but going on for sixteen if the love and money he was lavishing on this juked-up truck meant anything.
The white exterior was waxed to a diamond sheen that dazzled my eyes, and the heavy chrome bumpers were even shinier.
The interior was lushly upholstered in a supple honey-brown vinyl that made everything—from the adjustable seat to the doors to the dashboard and even the steering wheel itself—feel buttery soft. Besides the standard accessories, the dashboard had a built-in CD player with extra speakers concealed in the doors, and the lid of the padded armrest not only had a place to hold drink cups, it flipped back to reveal a cellular phone. The golden oak gun rack across the rear window and the stock of the Winchester hanging in the rack both matched the light caramel tones of the upholstery.
“Done much hunting this season?” I asked as I buckled myself in.
“Naw. Don’t have time. Got a few doves back in September, but we been so busy wiring that new subdivision south of town lately, I’m doing good to get away by dinnertime on Saturday. Now that daylight savings is over, sunset comes mighty early.”
“What about sunrise?” I asked snidely.
He snorted and took the turn on the truck lane a hair too sharply so that we bumped up over the curb. “You sound just like Ma.”
“Bite your tongue, boy!”
Nadine’s a good woman, but she can be awfully rigid about the morality of early rising and hard work and going to church three times a week.
Reese laughed. “Yeah, I’m thinking of getting me a doublewide and putting it out near the long pond. Dad said he’d cut me off an acre or two if I wanted it. I shouldn’t never have moved back home again. If I stay out late on a Saturday night and then try to sleep in, they act like I’m going straight to the devil. I tell you what’s the truth—I’m getting too old to have to be up and out on Sunday mornings before they get back from church.”
We pulled into the drive-through at Bojangles and I told him I’d spring for a sausage biscuit as well, if they were still serving breakfast. “I got up too late to eat, myself,” I admitted.
The truck windows operated electronically. Reese pushed the button to lower his and yelled down into the staticky speaker, “Two sausage biscuits and two large coffees. No cream. No sugar. You do take your coffee black, don’t you, Deb’rah?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Good. Coffee stains’ll sponge right up if you spill it on the carpet, but that creamer stuff’s hell to get out.”
He sounded like Hints from Heloise.
When we drove around to the serving window, those oversized tires put us up so high that Reese had to lean out and reach down to take our order. “And could we have some extra napkins?”
“Don’t you trust me not to smear sausage grease on your seats,” I teased.
“Never hurts to be safe,” he said mildly.
That was so unlike the old devil-may-care Reese that I took a good long look at him as he reseated his ball cap so that his light brown hair lay smooth before he pulled out of the Bojangles driveway into the Sunday church traffic that clogged the main commercial street through town.
He has the clear, forget-me-not blue eyes of all our clan and the solid regular features of most of his cousins. None of my brothers are movie-star gorgeous and neither are their children, but nobody in our family’s ever stopped a clock either. Reese has always had girlfriends—“trashy girlfriends,” according to Nadine, but she’d say that about any woman he moved in with if there wasn’t a gold band on his finger first.
He’s been working for Herman and Nadine since high school and has never shown too much energy or ambition. All he seems to want is to put in his forty hours, then spend the weekends hunting and fishing and maybe a quick roll in the hay between football games. His younger sister Annie Sue is the only one of Herman’s kids with a real feel for the electrical business.
But ever since Herman’s brush with death left him in a wheelchair, we haven’t heard much grumbling either from or about Reese. He wasn’t slacking either. A couple of knuckles on his hands were scraped raw where he’d banged them when he was pulling wire across ceiling rafters or while he was trying to bore holes though hard-to- reach floor joists. For a moment, I almost wondered if the real reason he broke up with his last girlfriend and moved back home was so he could be there to help out as Herman adjusted to his loss of mobility.
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