I heard gravel crunching in the driveway. Even without the odd rhythm his limp gave him, I knew it had to be Noah; our little bungalow was an okay place to eat and sleep but too small to be much of a gathering place. I stuffed the bills into my battered briefcase. He didn’t need to know we were struggling.
Squatter raced to the door to celebrate Noah’s return and accompanied him back to the kitchen in a state of high canine excitement. Noah looked a little glum, or bored, as usual. Without bothering to say hi, he poured himself some tea from the fridge, sat down in the chair next to mine, and took one of my shrimp.
“I would’ve brought you some,” I said. “I texted you from the diner.”
He shrugged. “I didn’t see it in time,” he said, feeding the crispy tail to Squatter.
“That’s a shame,” I said. “What were you so busy doing?”
He glared at me. That look was a one-two punch every time. He had his mother’s eyes, so it felt like the hostility was coming from both of them.
I knew I should back off, but I was never good at drawing the line in the right place. “Hanging out with Jackson again?”
He took another shrimp, got up, and went into the living room. At fourteen, Noah had perfected the art of sullen teenager. Now at nineteen, he’d turned it into a lost art as he immersed himself in the depression and apathy that comes with having your life turned completely upside down.
I was a big believer in surrounding yourself with people who had similar goals. Or at least not with people who’d just drag you down. Jackson wouldn’t have been my first, second, or twelfth choice of friends for Noah. He was a troubled kid. Maybe it was time for me to admit that Noah was too, and not because of Jackson. We’d gone downhill as a family. It was as much my own fault as anyone’s; although most days, I felt as though Noah blamed me for all of it. Many of those days, I was sick and tired of being on the receiving end of my son’s anger. For a man who made his living talking, I couldn’t seem to make any headway with my son.
In my head I apologized to Elise. She’d been dead nearly a year and I still talked to her, sometimes out loud. She would’ve wanted me to make peace with our son.
So I tried: “Y’all have fun, at least? I hope it was a pretty good day.”
“We hung out on his porch,” he said, digging in the couch cushions for the TV remote. “If that counts as fun.” From his tone of voice, it didn’t.
He found the remote and turned the TV on.
Later that night, when Noah had gone to his room to do whatever he did there, I parked in front of the TV to catch the local news. The big story was the body that had washed up. Unlike the guys at the diner, the newscaster displayed suitable respect for human life. “The condition of the man’s body,” as she put it, made identification difficult, but police were treating it as a homicide. She asked the public for assistance. A toll-free number scrolled across the screen.
Then she went from murder to town council elections, and I was glad to have the mental image of a decomposing corpse replaced with the perfectly healthy, smiling face of a man I remembered from high school. Henry Carrell was seeking another term. I didn’t know how he had time, what with running the yacht charter company he’d inherited from his dad. He’d brought the company back from the brink of ruin, bringing a much-needed influx of tourists and jobs, and the town regularly rewarded him with reelection.
It was strange to see a guy I knew from high school on TV. It was strange to be back here and recognize so many people and see they hadn’t really changed.
If the man whose body had washed up was from around here, I thought, chances are I’d known him too. I hoped not.
2
Tuesday, June 11, Morning
The next morning, Noah was gone before I got up. I wrestled down the urge to text him. At nineteen, he had the right to start living his own life. As I mixed my coffee, I reminded myself that worrying about him wasn’t helping my concentration any. I had to keep my eyes on the prize: building my fledgling practice into something that could keep us afloat. I’d gone straight from law school to the solicitor’s office—what most states call the prosecutor’s office—and had never learned the first thing about landing clients or running a business. It turned out all that was at least as important as legal acumen.
I was working for one of Basking Rock’s only prominent lawyers, Roy Hearst. “Of counsel”: a nice title on paper, but at Roy’s firm it didn’t come with a salary or benefits. Roy paid me hourly when I did work for him, and I was free to bring in my own clients if I could land them. I got a free office, and he got a bonus for his business clients: whenever some friend or relative of theirs ran into trouble—the usual DUIs or their kids’ frat-boy drunk and disorderlies—he had a former prosecutor right there in his office to help them get out of it. A one-stop shop.
And I should’ve gone straight there—it was past eight—but when I opened the cabinet, I noticed Mazie’s casserole dish. Jackson’s mom had taken to dropping off home-cooked food once in a while. I didn’t know if it was out of sympathy or if Noah had complained to her about my cooking skills. Either way, I had to return the
