Slow Dollar

ether. I found myself wishing I could call Tally and ask her at least a dozen frivolous questions based on what I was finding.

When I eventually surfaced, it was almost three o’clock. I put on my bathing suit, pulled an old T-shirt on over it and, since boys are always hungry, laid out a bag of nachos to go with a jar of salsa I’d unearthed from the back of my refrigerator. (There was just the teensiest bit of mold around the lid, which wiped right off. And don’t tell me you’ve never done that yourself.)

Three o’clock came. The boys didn’t.

At three-thirty, I started calling. Isabel answered the phone, sounding sleepy. “Stevie? He went on back to Chapel Hill right after dinner.”

“Didn’t he get my message?”

“Yes, but he said he had a paper to work on or something. Didn’t he call you?”

I punched the speed-dial button for Maidie and it rang eight times before she answered. “Sorry, Deb’rah. Him and Stevie left here before two o’clock. They said they had to get up with a friend or something before going back to school. Eric did tell him you was hoping to spend a little time with ‘em, but Stevie said you’d understand. Maybe next time, honey.”

Understand? Oh, yes. I understood all too well. Question was, what could I do about it?

Since coming to the bench, I’ve gotten a little spoiled. If I want someone in my courtroom at a certain hour on a certain day, they damn well show up or risk a contempt of court. And if that doesn’t scare them into appearing, there are bailiffs and deputies to go out and find them for me, whether in jail or at large.

Unfortunately, bad as I wanted to at that moment, I couldn’t sic a bailiff or a deputy on either of those two boys.

To cool off, I walked out on my pier, stripped off the T-shirt, and jumped in. It took a few minutes of serious swimming before the water did its job and let me look at the situation objectively.

There was a reason they hadn’t left their names with either deputy Friday night, a reason they were deliberately avoiding me now. All the same, Stevie and Eric arc two of the most laid-back kids I know. Did I honestly think that either of them would let a carny’s casual trash talk get under their skin?

Of course not.

And even if Braz had managed to slip the needle in, wouldn’t they both just walk away from him? That didn’t mean they didn’t know something or that they hadn’t been there when punches were thrown. And they could well have been the friends seen pulling the puncher away.

I swam out to the boat mooring that marked a tangle of old tree roots left behind on the bottom when this pond was dredged. Bass liked to lurk down there, and it was one of Daddy’s favorite fishing spots. Nobody was out fishing today, though. I had the place completely to myself.

The late-afternoon sun edged down behind the pines, casting long shadows across the pond. Floating on my back, gazing up into the sky, I watched the fluffy clouds above me go from snowy white to gold and pale, pale pink with streaks of deep blue in the crevices.

Drifting lazily on the still water, I let myself think about Kidd Chapin and gradually realized—the way you realize that a sprained ankle or sore knee has finally stopped hurting even when you put your full weight on it—that I was, at long last, completely over him, even though this breakup had hurt more than any time since Jeff Creech dumped me back in college. I no longer missed Kidd himself, but I sure did miss being in love, missed having my pulse quicken at the thought of someone, missed looking forward to seeing, kissing, being held. All the same, I had spent the whole summer learning to live without all that, and if I never had it again, at least I’d had it once.

(“More than once,” came the preacher’s stern reminder.)

(“More than twice,” leered the pragmatist.)

The gold-and-pink clouds above me deepened to orange and purple and I was beginning to think about food when something big landed in the water off the pier fifty feet behind me with an enormous splash. I was so startled that it was as if a featherbed had been yanked out from under me, and I sank beneath the surface to come up spluttering as I saw someone swimming toward me.

“Jesus, Dwight!” I said when he pulled up close enough to hear. “I thought you were an alligator or something.”

“Alligator?” Treading water, he grinned at me. “There’s no alligators for a hundred miles.”

“All the same, you should’ve hollered or given me some warning.”

“I really did scare you? Sorry, shug, but I did call. You must have been a million miles away.”

“Just running through the backwoods of memory. Clearing out some old underbrush.”

“Say again?”

“Never mind. What’re you doing here?”

“I thought maybe I’d get up with Eric and Stevie, but they’d already left. Maidie and Isabel both said you’d asked them to come swim this afternoon, so I figured you wouldn’t mind if I came in their place. I stopped by Mama’s, picked up a bathing suit, and here I am. Didn’t mean to scare you, though.”

“Just yell louder next time, okay? Race you around the mooring and back?”

I was a third of the way there before Dwight got his bearings and headed after me. My form’s better, but he’s got a longer stroke and stronger back and he finished up at the pier at least three strokes ahead of me. That was all right. Gave me a chance to get my thoughts in order before we talked. Not that I knew anything more about Stevie and Eric than he did.

The air was starting to get cool as the sun settled further in the west and I climbed onto the pier and wrapped a towel around me.

“Did you hear from Chapel Hill yet?” I asked.