gave them each twenty hours of community service. Finally, just so there was no misunderstanding on their part or their parents’, I explained that “suspended” meant that failure to live up to any of the conditions I’d imposed could mean time in a juvenile facility.
After that, I dealt with two cases of truancy, three cases of vandalism, and a thirteen-year-old boy charged for the second time with being a Peeping Tom. The boy’s father and I had known each other since grade school and my heart ached for him, but that didn’t stop me from sending the kid for a mental evaluation before I passed final judgment.
By then it was heading for noon, so after signing all the necessary documents to set my rulings in motion, I recessed a little early for lunch. Portland Brewer had begun maternity leave this week, and to inaugurate her new leisure, she’d invited me over for soup and salad.
Not that I could see any sign of leisure when I got out of my car. A shiny white Chevy pickup sat in her driveway. It towed a familiar bright red trailer filled with ladders, paint buckets, and a tarp bin. Brack Johnson had been painting for my daddy for forty years and he painted my house when it was first built. He’s choosy about who he paints for and he doesn’t usually travel too far from Cotton Grove, but Portland’s parents were old customers, too, so I guess he was willing to make an exception for her.
“What’s up?” I asked when she opened the door.
“I’m having the nursery repainted. Peach. With lemon and orange trim.”
“What was wrong with the—what was it? Key lime?”
“Lime was fine back in August, but it looks so cold now. And besides—” Her sudden smile was so bright it almost blinded me. “It’s a girl!”
“A girl? That’s wonderful!” I squeezed her hands. “But I thought you didn’t want to know.”
“I didn’t, but you know how I was scheduled for a final sonogram yesterday? Well, the tech slipped and said ‘she,’ and then was so got away with herself that she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t said it.”
“Does Avery know?”
“He was sitting right there. He never said anything before, but now he says he’s sorta thought all along that it was a girl. He says he kept watching the screen the other two times and he didn’t see any little peanut, so he was pretty sure.”
I took off my coat and hung it over the bannister. “Are y’all pleased?”
“Thrilled. Want to know what we’re naming her? Carolyn after my mother, Deborah after you.”
As soon as she said Carolyn, I’d started to burble, but the Deborah so surprised me that for once I was speechless. I felt my eyes fill up with tears.
“Oh, Por,” I whispered.
Her eyes were glistening, too. “Yeah, well don’t get too sentimental about it, and you better hope she’s more like my mother than you because we’re going to expect lots of free babysitting out of you and Dwight.”
“Anytime,” I promised and cupped her swollen abdomen with my two hands. “Carolyn Deborah Brewer . . . Hey, did she just kick?”
“Knows her name already,” Por laughed.
We went upstairs to see the fruit-colored nursery next to their bedroom. Brack had already capped the paint and was wrapping up his roller so it wouldn’t dry out while he went to lunch. Although he’d been painting all morning, there wasn’t a speck of peach-colored paint on the elderly painter’s immaculate bib overalls.
“Looks good,” I told him.
“Yeah, well, hit looked real good in that there green, too,” he said, “but I reckon this color does look more like a little girl, don’t you think? When I get this yellow and orange on the trimwork, hit’ll really shine. Be so bright she won’t have to cut on no lights till atter the sun goes down.”
I love to listen to how country people of Brack’s age talk. He sounds exactly like Daddy and Aunt Sister with their old-timey Colleton County accents and pronunciations that aren’t going to last another generation.
We chatted a few minutes more. He asked about Daddy, I asked about his collards; then he left for lunch —“Reckon I’d better go git me some dinner ’fore they sell out of today’s special”—and Por and I went down to her sunlit kitchen for canned lentil soup and salad-in-a-bag. Por’s even less adept in a kitchen than me, but with us, talk has always come before food.
“What’s this about a deputy gone missing?” she asked as she turned the burner on under the soup and pulled out bottles of dressing from the refrigerator.
“What’ve you heard?” I asked cautiously, trying to keep separate in my mind what was public knowledge and what Dwight might have confided. Not that he really had. Just mentioned that Don Whitley hadn’t been seen since Sunday night.
“One of the troopers told Avery that there’s an APB out on him. Is this anything to do with Tracy’s death?”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “And Dwight didn’t say when I asked him, but he was at Jerry’s night before last at the dinner Bo’s department gave for us and he seemed to be taking her shooting sort of personally.”
I had said something along these same lines to Dwight yesterday when he told me about Whitley, but saying it again now to Por was like seeing an eye chart pop into focus the instant the optometrist slips the correct lens into the viewer. Once again I heard Tracy’s words to me after court last week, but this time in the exact intonation she had used:
Emphasis on the
As in, “you don’t, but I do”?
“What?” asked Portland, who could always read me like a brief she’d just written. “You’ve thought of something. What?”
