She had protested in sudden anger, but the funeral director had been gently adamant. “I’m sorry if this is a problem, Mrs. Ames, but Mr. Knott is an old and valued customer and he’s already paid me. You’ll have to discuss it with him.”
“Which Mr. Knott?” she’d asked, abruptly remembering that Andrew was hardly alone in possessing that name in this county.
“Mr. Kezzie Knott,” he’d answered.
“Oh,” she’d said, confused by such conflicting emotions.
If Andrew wanted to pay for the funeral, it could mean he accepted that she was his daughter. Unless, she thought angrily, it meant he thought he could make up for a lifetime of denial with a one-time check. But that it was her grandfather...? Well, Deborah did say he’d tried to find her for years.
As she slipped between Polly’s Plate Pitch and the Rope Climb to get onto the midway, Tally realized that she was smiling at the thought of having a moonshiner and a bootlegger for a grandfather. Over the years, passing through Dobbs on the way to gigs further north, she’d always made Arn stop here. While he loaded up on cheap cigarettes for bribing ride jockeys and greasing Yankee palms, she would spend the afternoon in the courthouse. Once she discovered that the library directly across the street also housed genealogical data, she started dropping in there first. The Colleton County Heritage Center on the second floor was just full of goodies. Its staff of volunteer genealogists seemed maniacally dedicated to documenting everything from obituaries and gravestones (which is how she learned that Susan Knott had died years earlier) to clipping news articles and filing them in folders that were open to anyone who wandered in.
A catchall Knott family folder was like dipping into a family scrapbook. Any time any Knott made the newspapers, someone had filed the article. Here was where she’d read about her stepmother (“April Knott Named Colleton Teacher of the Year”), her uncles (“Knott Brothers Pool Labor and Equipment to Control Rising Farm Expenses”), and her cousins and half siblings (“Cotton Grove Man Has Truck Damaged by Deer” and “Area Youths Charged with Vandalism”). Judge Deborah Knott had recently acquired a folder of her own with clippings about her career.
Finding a folder for Keziah “Kezzie” Knott had interested her the most, though. It held yellowed clippings that went back to his arrest, trial, and eighteen-month incarceration for income tax evasion forty-five or fifty years ago. It didn’t take much reading between the “alleged” and “rumored” lines to understand that this was the only way the Feds could get at a man everyone knew controlled the making and selling of illegal whiskey in the area. The crossroads gas and grocery store he’d bankrolled had been the equivalent of a game so slickly gaffed that nothing could be pinned on the agent. The later expunging of his record was just butter on the popcorn.
Ever since she’d read that, Tally had wished she could have known him while she was growing up instead of Grandpa Hatcher. Unless Kezzie Knott was a huge hypocrite, he wouldn’t have cursed her birth or scorned her for the life she’d made for herself.
Directly across from Polly’s was the Dozer. The flaps of the red-and-white tent had been tied down, and now she carefully set her coffee mug out of the way to untie the flaps and fold them back on both sides till the Dozer was open to the midway on both sides again. She unlocked the sides of the wagon itself and snapped out the hinges that held them up and away so that customers could get to the stations. Then she retrieved her coffee and stepped up into the well of the wagon.
The police had removed their yellow tape late yesterday afternoon, and she knew that Arnie had seen to having the floor scrubbed clean by one of the townies they’d hired on for the week. Today the Dozer would go back into operation.
“You sure you want to do this?” Arnie had asked her when she said she’d work it.
He thought she wouldn’t want to stand in the spot where Braz had been killed, but she certainly didn’t feel up to working the Guesser. Talking trash to the crowds as they streamed onto the lot? No way. Anyhow, the Dozer took less concentration than any of their other stores, which is why they’d put Braz on it. All you had to do was make change and occasionally explain which game pieces could be exchanged for which prizes. Besides, it was always too much temptation to green clerks. All those shiny quarters tumbling off the side spills into the baskets? For her to lay out another day would mean a serious financial drain.
Now she stood where her firstborn had died and drank a long steadying drink of her coffee. She was neither superstitious nor religious nor even particularly sentimental, but if anything remained of Braz, surely it would be here?
Incoherent thoughts crowded through her head. Images of Braz the first time they’d put him in her arms all red and screaming with colic that had gone on and on and on for what seemed like four solid months without a break. Braz as a toddler underfoot in Hartley’s grab wagon, curled up under the counter for an afternoon nap while she tried to be careful that no hot grease splattered on him. Braz at six hysterical with rage because she wouldn’t let him come on her honeymoon with Arnie. They were only gone two nights and he adored Irene Matusik, who babysat him and spoiled him rotten, but he’d never gotten over that sense of abandonment and hurt. She had spent the next two years trying to convince him that he was still loved and valued, but when Val was born—Val, whose sunny disposition and easy ways endeared him to everyone—it was like a huge empty hole had opened up inside of her first son and there wasn’t enough love in the world to fill it.
A low stool stood next to the end wall, and she sat down on it and rested her throbbing head against the cool metal ledge. Here in the morning dimness of the Dozer well, her eyes filled as she thought about his life.
“I’m sorry, Braz,” she whispered. “I’m so, so sorry.”
And even as her heart ached for his loss, she knew that part of her grief was guilt because Braz had been right.
“Tally? You okay?”
She opened her eyes, disoriented for the moment, then realized Dennis Koffer was peering in at her over the swinging flap. The show’s patch wore a ball cap with “East Bay Raceway” stitched across the front and his usual cigar poking out the side of his mouth beneath his neat gray moustache.
“Yeah, Dennis. Thanks.” She fumbled in the pocket of her shorts for a tissue and blew her nose.
“You sure?”
“Yeah. What are you doing up so early?”
“Just getting my ducks in a row about today. You opening the Dozer?”
