I haven’t been over here since I’d gotten back, but after leaving Sheriff Nash Hader, I walk a few blocks up from County Police and a few blocks over, suddenly feeling as if that’s more than enough distance to put between Hader and me, as if I’m really walking back into the Cross Rivers that I still want our town to be.
Telling myself that Nash Hader, no matter how much power his badge and his title give him, and no matter how much dick swinging he does because of all that, will never be the sheriff of the Cross Rivers I still so very much want to think of as mine.
And my father’s.
My visit here today is not entirely random, having been dispatched by EJ to pick up vegetables for the elaborate beef stew she isplanning to cook up for us tonight: onions, carrots, shiitake mushrooms. And, she’d informed me, she is out of potatoes, which she makes sound like some sort of national tragedy.
I take my time walking the aisles, stopping occasionally to oblige so many familiar faces who want to take selfies with me, some of the people still talking about the home run I’d one-handed out of Corley Park. All of them seem far more comfortable talking about that—falling into the universal language of sports—than asking about the accident that had brought me back to Cross Rivers, and not to the Pittsburgh Steelers.
I’ve collected everything on EJ’s list and am about to check out when I see Taylor McCarter Webb all the way down at the far end of the market, filling up a shopping bag of her own. Her back is to me. But I immediately know it’s her. I just do.
This time I sneak up on her for a change.
“Fancy meeting you here.”
She doesn’t seem startled when she hears my voice or surprised to see me when she turns around. She just smiles at me, a smile and a look coming over her that’s always told me she knows things I don’t. And might not ever.
“EJ wants you to pick up some parsnips, too,” she says. “She forgot to put it on your list.”
“She couldn’t text me?” I ask. “She had to call you?”
“Full disclosure?” Taylor says. “The call wasn’t entirely about her stew.”
“So what else were you two chatting about?”
“No biggie,” Taylor says. “Just keeping you alive.”
FORTY-ONE
I PICK UP the parsnips, as ordered, and then walk with Taylor while she finishes her own shopping.
“How’s your work in the kitchen these days, if I’m allowed to ask?”
“It remains a work in progress,” she says.
“Is Burt happy with it?”
“Ecstatic.”
“Ignorance is still bliss, then.”
“Hey,” she says. “Which arm can I punch?”
When we’ve both checked out, we walk out of Local Harvest and find a secluded spot in Corley Park, a bench tucked away in a corner and mostly hidden by trees, enough that no one will bother us. That’s my hope, anyway.
There’s never been a time in my life, even when I was too young to know any better, when I wasn’t happy to hang with Taylor, my best friend when she was a girl and my best friend now. So many changes in my life. Not that.
“Burt told me what happened to you,” she says. “And to Bumper.”
She’s wearing a powder-blue T-shirt and white jeans and sandals.
“Just told Sheriff Hader all about it,” I say. “Sparing no details.”
“He’s probably already made an arrest,” Tay says.
It gets a smile out of me. “Didn’t you once tell me that sarcasm is a weapon of the weak?”
“Not when you’re talking about someone who’s weak as shit the way Hader is,” she says.
