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I start to play around with the website while Grady drinks his coffee. My phone pings and I pick it up.
Bee-Cee: I just heard that you’re naked with Grady Parker on your front porch, doing the deed.
I laugh and show Grady my phone. “That fucking grapevine,” I mutter.
“Small town life,” he says. “Everybody’s in everybody else’s business. You should know that already.”
I reply to Barbara-Claire.
Me: We are fully clothed.
Bee-Cee: Damn. I’d hoped they were right.
Grady reads over my shoulder. I feel his belly shake with laughter under my elbow.
“This is nice,” I say as I lean into him.
“Yeah, it is,” he says quietly. Then he glances at his watch. “We have to get to the lake. Mr. Jacobson probably wants us to paint that barn before tonight.”
I get to my feet and stretch up tall with my arms over my head, yawning as I do it.
“Clifford, I can see your panties.”
I reach back and jerk my shirt tail down.
“Nice ass,” he says with a smirk.
“Yeah, you can be a nice ass sometimes,” I toss back. “Do you need to go home and change clothes before we go to the lake?”
He blows out a sigh. “I probably should.”
“Do you want me to just meet you there?”
He shakes his head. “I can pick you up.”
“Are you sure?”
He stares into my eyes. “I kind of like spending time with you, Clifford, in case you can’t tell.”
I can tell. I can definitely tell. But what scares me is that I like it too. Love it, in fact.
20
Grady
I sit on one end of the little jon boat as Mr. Jacobson sits on the other end. I’m not sure what his goal is, but when Evie and I arrived, he sent Evie inside to help Katie do something, and he motioned for me to follow him. He’d loaded the little boat with two fishing rods, a tackle box, and what appeared to be a bucket of worms. Then he’d motioned for me to get in.
I got in, mainly because you do what Mr. Jacobson tells you to do. Then Mr. Jacobson had shoved off, started the tiny little motor and taken off down the lake.
We pull up in a small cove a few miles from his complex and he cuts the motor. We drift over the still lake. It’s the third week of October, so the calm stillness of the water is only marred by the wake of an occasional fishing boat and a few ducks that bob around.
“Do you ever do any duck hunting, Mr. Jacobson?” I ask. I bet the lake would be prime hunting ground.
“I used to,” he says, as he reaches over and extends a pole to me. “But I met a man who raised a duck from an egg. His name is Wilbur. The duck, not the man,” he goes on to explain. “That duck now flies in every spring and out every fall. So I had to ban all duck hunting on my end of the lake. I’m afraid that somebody is going to shoot Wilbur.”
“How’d you manage that?” The lake is a big place. And there are a lot of hunters in our small town.
“I went to a town council meeting, stood up, and notified everybody that duck hunting had been cancelled for the foreseeable future.”
