Since she moved over here in September into an apartment close to the river (only about a mile from me as the crow flies), I have unsuccessfully tried to keep my distance from her, but the holidays are always difficult.
“This is just dinner.”
“Just checking,” my daughter says casually.
“I can tell she really likes you.”
It helps to have your main competition serving a life sentence. Jessie and I cross the street into the park, which many days, but not this one quite yet, is crisscrossed by mountain bikers, solitary walkers, dogs of all persuasion, and their purported best friends. It is easy going this time of the year, the shrubs and trees having shed their evidence that they had thrived during a long spring and hot summer.
I slip the leash from Jessie’s throat. She likes to nose around in the brush but never lets me get too far out of her sight. Sarah has probably told her that I shouldn’t be allowed to stray too far from home. Not a bad idea. Bear Creek was, as it turned out, a long way.
Angela. How can I be so attracted to a woman who would have an affair while her husband of thirty years lay dying? I’m not sure if she is a monster or one of the most attractive women I’ve ever known. If she tells me tonight that she has been lying and is still in love with Paul I won’t bat an eye. For all I really know, if Paul hadn’t pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in order to be eligible for parole, she might still be living in Bear Creek waiting for the right moment to slip off to the Peabody Hotel in Memphis. Once people lie, you never know if they are telling the truth.
Of course, we all lie, and if not to each other, then to ourselves. All those years I carried a grudge against Paul and his father because I didn’t want to admit how screwed up my own family had become. I thought I was so clear-eyed about my past, and I didn’t have a clue.
Thank God Paul didn’t have a trial. His plea agreement let Angela’s secrets stay secret. The fortunate thing about guilty pleas is that the real story never comes out. I will always wonder how Paul convinced Darla Tate to actually slit another human being’s throat, especially one who had been so good to her. If she hadn’t felt so much guilt, she could have pulled it off. Poor Darla.
Butterfield has told me that Paul figured out from her boys how desperate she was and began to put the scheme together after Willie turned him down the first time. Her payoff was supposed to be a farm that Paul owned. Instead, she is doing a life sentence as well.
According to Butterfield it was to be for her boys, something to pass on. I have wondered if it was my grandfather’s property. A nice irony if it was. Land.
Sometimes, it seems more of a curse than a blessing in this part of the country.
Jessie spies a squirrel and makes a dash for it, but it scrambles up a tree just in time. What if she had caught it? I’ve heard it said that it isn’t always such a good idea to get the thing you wish for.
Except for Eddie, all the Tings are gone forever from Bear Creek. Tommy has returned to D.C., and Mrs. Ting has moved to Memphis to live with Connie. The plant, according to Eddie, has begun to make a profit again. Good for Eddie.
Perhaps, because he is younger, and has experienced less rejection, he is more comfortable in a small town than his cousins. Poor Bear Creek.
So much tension, so little hope. Of course, that is a white person thinking out loud. Maybe some of the African-American population see it differently.
I squint at my watch. A quarter to eleven. Dan will be coming over for lunch in a few minutes with his new girlfriend, a schoolteacher he met through the personals column in the Little Rock Free Press. So much for his dating service. I smile at the thought of my best friend.
The idiot is wearing a gold ring in his left ear and looks ridiculous.
Some guys can pull it off, but not Dan. When I asked why, he grinned.
“It’s kind of a fuck-you statement,” he admitted.
“But it’s harmless. I don’t wear it to court.”
Harmless? As I call Jessie and head back to the house, I think of all the pain I stirred up in Bear Creek. Sometimes, I don’t think I am.