Page 34
Lucky snorts, almost on cue.
“This one here with the bum leg is Chester. He got caught in barbed wire last winter, and I thought I was gonna have to put him down. But he limped his way back. Eats anything he shouldn’t.”
Marjorie scratches the neck of a small gray goat whose ear is notched like a torn flag. “This one’s Dolly. She cries if I’m not out here by sunrise. Screams bloody murder. She’s dramatic.”
She moves to a larger, barrel-chested goat in the corner. “And this one, this is Larry.”
Larry stares at them with half-lidded eyes, unimpressed.
Perhaps nothing screams pining over a lost love like naming a goat after them.
Marjorie reaches into a bucket and grabs a handful of unidentifiable pellets, holds them out gently to Larry. “Did he send you?” she asks solemnly.
“Who?” Simone asks.
“Larry.” She’s not talking about the goat.
“No. He doesn’t know I’m here.”
Marjorie is looking down at the animal, so Simone can only take in half her expression, but enough to witness hope sour into disappointment.
“So what, then? Why are you here?”
Simone didn’t plan on having this conversation standing in a desolate barn surrounded by smelly animals with their breath billowing white clouds in the frigid air. But nothing that’s unfolded recently has followed any sort of plan. Simone is a million country miles past plans.
“Larry’s sick, Marjorie. Really sick. Dementia. My husband and I are trying to help him piece together different parts of his life. Since you two were…” Simone is loath to use the word again, given the reaction it elicited the first time, but she can’t come up with a better way to characterize their connection. “… involved when he was in school at Tate… I’m trying to figure out a few things that might have happened back then.”
“You know he said he was going to marry me?” Marjorie asks this question rhetorically, but it’s true or true enough; Simone had gleaned it from the letters, though these intentions read to Simone as fuzzy and half-hearted, the sort that could only convince a love-blind teenager. “Then he just left me… after everything.”
Simone’s internal alert starts blaring again with that one word. Breath held, she waits, trusting Marjorie will go on, and she does.
“God, he was a sweet talker, that one. And I was so young and dumb, which is a bad combo. But an unavoidable one, I suppose.” She turns to stare at the rafters barely holding up the roof, like they’re a portal to the past.
“Larry and his buddies would come into Doughboy’s all the time. That’s a diner ’bout thirty miles from here my grandfather opened shortly after he bought this farm. He was doing farm to table before it was all trendy like it is now. Then, it was just a way to make a living, if a crap one. Larry would flirt with me, leave big ole tips, but I knew better than to mess with those preppy kids. They were so snooty. But Larry wouldn’t let up. Always telling me jokes and offering to help me study when I’d do my homework at the bar when the place was slow. He asked me questions no one did before… about what I wanted to do with my life. What was I interested in? Stuff I hadn’t even thought to ask myself. What I was most interested in was gettin’ outta this place. I didn’t want to rake hay or roll dough forever. I wanted to do more with myself than be some girl who’s never left her town of eighteen hundred nosy people. Maybe he was blowing smoke up my ass about my silly dreams, like moving to New York, but with Larry, anything seemed possible. And that was like the nicest thing anyone coulda done for me—make me believe in my own damn future. Even if it was a load of shit. So when he kept pressing me to spend time with him, I stopped being able to come up with a reason not to. I said yes, even if the time we spent together mostly meant just coming out here and messin’ around up there.” Her eyes move to the hayloft.
“Yeah, I was being ‘fresh’ or ‘easy’ or whatever they called gals who rolled around in the hay with boys back then, literally in my case.” She pauses to let a rueful laugh slip. “But I thought we had a future together. I didn’t just make that up. He told me we did. Told me he would make an honest woman of me. What a joke. He was always going to marry someone like Carole. Someone rich and classy. It was practically arranged from birth. She was the daughter of his daddy’s best friend. They didn’t meet at that fancy summer camp by accident. He didn’t even have the decency to tell me about Carole, though. You wanna know how I found out? Seeing their engagement photo in the paper, that’s how. I’ll never forget it. My daddy showed it to me, ‘Isn’t this that boy who’s been coming around?’ He knew. And thing is, my daddy could be cruel as a rabid dog, but he wasn’t even trying to be that day. He looked downright sad for me, and that was worse.”
“I’m sorry Larry did you dirty like that,” Taylor says, pulling an actual handkerchief out of her pocket and offering it to Marjorie to dab at her eyes.
“Yeah, especially after what all I’d done for him.” Marjorie’s face slowly drains of blood as she loses herself to these memories. She looks like a ghost herself, or like she’s seeing one in her mind’s eye, and Simone’s heart rate speeds up in response.
“What did you do?” Simone asks. She’s hesitant. Maybe because she feels bad about probing these painful memories. Maybe because she’s terrified of the answer. Maybe both.
“He got into some trouble. Big trouble.”
“Did it involve Wade Freeman?” Marjorie meets Simone’s question with an explosive gasp.
“What the… what do you know about that?” Marjorie stumbles backward a few steps. “Who the hell are you? You’re not really related to Larry, are you? You with the cops?”
Now Simone is actually worried about that shotgun. This is going left fast. Taylor quickly pulls out her phone. “No, no. We swear! Look, look, here are pictures of Simone and Larry. They’re family. Here he is at her wedding. This is her with Alex.”
Marjorie calms… slightly. It’s hard to tell who’s more surprised when tears start welling up in her eyes as she grabs for Taylor’s phone and stares at Alex’s picture. “He looks just like him, the way he looked back then. So handsome.”
Simone knows this is true from seeing old pictures of Poppy.
“We aren’t with the police, I swear it, but why would the police come to talk to you about Larry? About Wade?” Simone asks. A heart twitch accompanying each inquiry.
“Can you pull over that stool, dear?” Marjorie asks Taylor. “I need to sit for this.”
