AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Chapter 3
Outside of his grandmother, there were exactly three things that Walker had missed about Greenbelt, South Carolina. The first was the lack of traffic. In Charleston, he had to leave home nearly twenty minutes early to get to work on time even though he lived a five-minute drive from the office. In Greenbelt, it wasn’t uncommon to get clear across town without catching a single red light.
The second was the quiet. He’d known what he was getting himself into when he’d decided to move to the largest city in the state, but he’d underestimated the noise. He lived downtown, in an older building near the city’s center, and something was always happening. Always. Here, things were quiet more often than not. He never had to worry about being woken up by a music festival two miles away or a news helicopter flying overhead. There was only sweet country silence in the woods next to Gram’s place.
And last, there was the peach cobbler at Minnie’s Diner.
Normally he hated cooked fruit. It was too soft and too mushy and no matter what it was put in, way too damn sweet. But Minnie’s cobbler had a special place in his heart.
He’d been six the first time he’d had it. The night before, he and his father, Benny, had been pulled over by the cops while driving home. The entire memory was blurry for Walker—whether because of his age or the trauma, he didn’t know. One second, he was buckled into the front seat of whatever hooptie his dad had gotten his hands on, and the next, he was standing on the curb watching Benny get ushered into a police car for possession of a controlled substance. They hadn’t taken Walker down to the station, and since his mother had split town years before, there was only one person to call.
Gram had picked him up right at the scene. The next day, she’d forced him out of bed early, cleaned him up, and taken him to Minnie’s, where she’d let him pick whatever he wanted for breakfast, nutrition and propriety be damned. He’d chosen cobbler. It wasn’t the first time Walker had eaten dessert for breakfast, but it was the first time it hadn’t made him feel all wrong inside.
Crisp, buttery crust; warm peaches covered in syrupy goodness; and ice cream to top it all off. It may have sounded ridiculous, but that cobbler had healed him. Not of his shaky childhood or the trauma it left him with, but the place in him that had never known true satisfaction before.
That feeling had never really gone away, even if he had. He’d been chasing it in peach cobblers around the state for over a decade and hadn’t been able to recreate it in a single one. Which was why he found himself standing in front of the Minnie’s dessert counter on an early Friday afternoon a week after arriving in town.
He’d shown up at the perfect time; heat was rising off the freshly made cobbler and steaming up the glass display case. He was sure the other treats were incredible too, but Walker’s eyes were on the only prize that mattered.
“Got your eye on somethin’ special, Sugar?”
He recognized the voice immediately. There was a singularly unique cadence, high and nasally, with an accent that was clearly exaggerated. At one point he’d been used to hearing it. Now it sent a shock through his system that made him jerk his head up.
Louise Smith hadn’t changed much in the twelve years he’d been gone. She’d kept the same dark, wispy bangs across her forehead, still used foundation a couple shades too dark for her pale skin and hadn’t bothered to switch up the dark purple lipstick she’d always worn. She would have been in her mid-fifties by now, and he could see lines and wear in her face that hadn’t been there before. Otherwise she was exactly the same. Almost as if she’d been preserved in time the moment his Greyhound bus had left the city limits. She looked him over but didn’t seem to recognize him.
As a teenager, Walker had been tall and gangly. He’d had no idea what to do with his long limbs, so he had simply carried them around with a begrudging sort of acceptance. He’d spent most of his adolescence trying to remain invisible—folding into himself, keeping his head down and his eyes ahead. It hadn’t worked—not after he’d become so prone to public panic attacks that he got pitying, but judgmental, looks everywhere he went.
He was thirty now—broader, bulkier, and less attached to his own shadow. Therapy and Zoloft had reduced his number of panic attacks by a whole hell of a lot. But he wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t free from his issues and never would be, not completely. But he was much more secure than he’d been. At least, that was what he’d thought until he’d gotten back to Greenbelt and found himself accosted by reminders of a past he’d done his level best to avoid.
But he wanted that fucking cobbler. And the only thing that stood between him and those warm summer peaches was Louise Smith. A woman who was decades older but had spread rumors about his life like they’d been in the same graduating class.
“I heard Wally Abbott’s no-good daddy got him strung out on meth young. That’s why he can barely go a month without freakin’ out like somebody’s about to kill him.”
“Somebody said when that granny of his finally took him from Benny, Wally tried to fight her. You know, like, physically.”
“That boy ain’t right in the head. Both of ’em fucked him up so bad, he never stood a chance. Poor thing.”
Louise, like his Gram, had a whisper a few decibels short of quiet. Unlike his Gram, she used hers to shit talk anybody she came across—even innocent, struggling kids. Walker had never liked her. He’d outright hated her at one point. Now all he wanted was to get away from her.
Just… not without having his cobbler in hand first.
“Yeah,” he answered, flashing her a smile so as not to display his disgust. “I’ll take two slices of that peach cobbler. To go.”
She nodded, already opening the glass case. “You want ice cream with that?”
“No thank you.” He and Gram had just bought a pint of Blue Bell French Vanilla, and house-made scoops would melt on the way back.
She was efficient as she spooned two slices of cobbler into a couple of small plastic containers and walked them the few steps to the register. Walker was pleasantly surprised that the price of his favorite dessert hadn’t even gone up a whole dollar. Their exchange halted when she narrowed her eyes at him. He narrowed his right back, his mouth pinching at the corners.
“Well, I’ll be good godd—” she stopped herself, putting a hand on her chest and giggling. “Wally Abbott, is that you?”
There were a thousand things he wanted to say, not a single one nice. Go fuck yourself was at the top of the list. It sat right there on the tip of his tongue, itching for him to spit it out, but he held back. His Gram had raised him better than that, and she would have been mortified to hear that he’d said something like that to Louise. And like any Southern boy worth his salt, he made it his business to offend his grandmother as little as possible. He was already on thin ice with her as it was. So he choked the words down but made a point not to appear too friendly.
“Yep,” he grunted. “I go by Walker now.”
“I had no idea you were back in town, Wally,” she said smiling, and he grit his teeth hard. “I know your poor granny had that bad fall. You here takin’ care of her?”
“Yep,” he answered.
