Slow Dollar

“Better bring another glass,” he said off-handedly. “Andrew’ll be along directly.”

I about dropped the pitcher.

“Andrew?”

“That is what you wanted to talk about, won’t it?” he asked. “Andrew’s girl being back and her boy getting hisself killed?”

“You know who she is? How? Who told you?”

He gave a half smile. “Well, now, shug, you ain’t the only one knows people at the courthouse. I been keeping an eye on the Hatcher farm ever since old Rod Hatcher died. Watched the farm go to his sister, then to her boy, then back to the boy’s cousin three years ago, and he didn’t have but two cousins. Carol and Olivia. Tallahassee Ames won’t old enough to be Carol, so I figured she had to be Olivia. Had somebody backtrack on her and sure enough.”

“Somebody?” I asked suspiciously. “Dwight?”

“Naw, not Dwight.”

“Terry White, then?”

“I ain’t saying.”

He didn’t have to. Terry’s an SBI agent and would do anything for Daddy, long as it was halfway legal. I was the one introduced them when he and I were hanging out together a hundred years ago. They bonded over a bass right out there on that pond, long before I built a house in this pasture, and they stayed tight even after Terry and I moved on to other relationships. Veteran lawmen and old reprobates are just two sides to the same coin, which is probably why Terry and Dwight are so crazy about my daddy and why he’s right fond of them, too.

“She tell you how come her to change her name to Tallahassee?”

“That’s where she joined the carnival,” I said.

“Real sorry to hear about her boy. Just wish you won’t the one had to find him. You okay? He was messed up pretty bad in the face, I heared.”

But I was still reeling. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“What for?” he asked. “She knowed who we were and where we were. When she didn’t try to sell the farm, I figured she’d come looking us someday when she was ready to know us. We hadn’t done nothing for her growing up, so we didn’t have no claims on her now. Figured it was her choice.”

My brother drove into the yard about then, parked his truck beside Daddy’s old Chevy, and got out. There was a puzzled look on his face.

“Does he know?” I asked.

Daddy shook his head. “You want to be the one to tell him?”

“Tell me what?” said Andrew as he came up on the porch and joined us at the table.

Of my eleven older brothers, Andrew’s third in the birth order after Robert and Frank. He’s the one that looks the most like Daddy. His thick brown hair is fast going gray and will probably be all white in another year. He’s also the one that seemed to have the hardest time of it as a child. Didn’t get a chance to be a baby long before the big twins came along and pushed him out of his mother’s lap.

“Andrew was wild as a ditch cat,” Aunt Zell says whenever she talks about the houseful of boys Annie Ruth left behind, which explains why she always had a soft spot in her heart for him.

Although he eventually came to love my mother, it was hard for him to show it, especially since he was the one who initially resented her the most after Annie Ruth died and Daddy remarried. Took him a long time to find his way in life, to find April, who gentled him and brought him back to the farm and a settled life.

“Tell me what?” he asked again, beginning to get an apprehensive look on his face. “What’s wrong? A.K.? Ruth?”

“No, no,” I assured him. “I saw both of them when I was leaving the carnival and they were fine. Enjoying the rides.”

He didn’t relax. “What then?”

There was no easy way to say it, but I couldn’t help trying.

“Andrew, I heard today that Carol’s dead. She’s been dead for years.”

He looked at me blankly, trying to think who I was talking about.

“Carol Hatcher,” said Daddy.

Carol was more than half a lifetime behind him, and nothing I’d ever heard made me think there’d been anything other than sexual attraction between them.

“Olivia too?” he asked.

“No. She’s alive and she’s here.”

He swiveled in his chair abruptly as if he expected her to come walking from my kitchen onto the porch.

“Not here in the house. Here in the county,” I said. “She’s with the carnival over at Dobbs.”

“Yeah?”

“You heard about the young man that was killed over there last night?”

Andrew nodded.