“Have you lost your dang mind?” he murmured into her ear. “You just kissed the piglet.”
“He gives us cookies,” Tabitha said in a defensive whisper.
“I don’t like you, Powers,” Wyatt suddenly growled, reminding them both he was still there. “You ain’t the boss of her.”
Clay responded by flipping Wyatt off and then standing up to walk to the doors. Tabitha sat next to Wyatt quietly for a few seconds, feeling embarrassed and awkward. Then she hopped up and followed after Clay.
The thing about Clay Powers was, he had a reason to be mean. Tabitha understood it even if none of the other kids did. He didn’t have uncles who would buy pizza sometimes like Tabitha did. Her mom had a lot of sober moments. If it lasted long enough, she’d clean the house when she started to get paranoid about the state coming over. Sometimes she bought food and stocked the pantry.
Clay didn’t have that. His mother never got paranoid about the state. She just didn’t care anymore. One night, when Sheriff Conner showed up at the trailer park, Clay flushed all her drugs down the toilet and woke her up and managed to make things look almost normal before the sheriff knocked on their door.
His mama didn’t go to jail, but when the guy who was staying with them found out Clay flushed all their drugs away, he beat Clay so bad he had to miss a full week of school. So all things considered, Tabitha thought Clay was pretty darn nice. He wasn’t cruel like Brett or his friend Vaughn, who’d beat her every day for the cookies Wyatt had been giving her if they found out about it. Mean was the wrong word for Clay; he was just shy in a growly sort of way.
Clay’s last report card said he had socialization issues.
He asked Tabitha what that meant, since she was the only one who read the darn thing for him. She wasn’t real sure, but she thought it meant Clay had a hard time making friends.
To which Clay had mused, “I guess you don’t count.”
And Tabitha had laughed. “Probably not.”
It was really too bad Clay hated Wyatt so much, because Tabitha was starting to think she had socialization issues too, and she found herself considering the idea of trying to be Wyatt’s friend. She sort of liked the way he talked all the time and filled in the empty space left by her shyness.
Plus, he did neat things like karate.
He was like a safer Jules Conner, who was easily the most popular girl in the class. Around Wyatt she didn’t feel ugly in her old clothes, with her red hair and freckles and all the things that made her a runt. Jules Conner was so tall she stood at the back of the class with the boys when they took their class picture. Tabitha was always in the front row holding the sign.
“Tabitha, did you hear me?”
Tabitha turned from looking out the window, snapping her attention to the front of the class. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
“Do you know whose birthdays we celebrate on Presidents’ Day?”
“George Washington?” she guessed.
Mrs. Hatly arched an eyebrow. “And?”
“Thomas Jefferson?”
“No.” Mrs. Hatly pointed to the open book in front of Tabitha. “If you were reading your social studies, you would’ve known it was Abraham Lincoln.”
The class laughed. Tabitha’s cheeks burned, and she sank down lower in her seat as she focused her attention back on the book.
“I didn’t know it either.”
Tabitha turned around, seeing Wyatt lean against his desk to make her hear him from two seats over and one back. She smiled.
“Mr. Conner, do you have something you’d like to add?”
He shook his head, looking undisturbed by the attention. “Not really.”
The teacher might have said more if the door to the classroom hadn’t opened. The principal came in, with her eyes bloodshot and watery. Everyone in the classroom just looked at her as she walked over to Mrs. Hatly and said something under her breath the rest of them couldn’t hear.
Mrs. Hatly cupped a hand to her mouth. “Oh no!”
She didn’t say more. The principal nudged her and then cleared her throat. “Wyatt and Jules. Gather your belongings for the day. Your father is here to take you home.”
“Why?” Wyatt’s voice cut across the silent room, and Tabitha turned around to see his gaze darting from Jules to the teachers standing at the front of the room looking horror struck. “What happened?”
“Grab your things, Wyatt,” she said a little more firmly, but the command lacked authority, as if she really wanted to hug Wyatt instead of reprimand him.
Wyatt and Jules collected their school bags and books. Tabitha saw that Jules was already crying, and she ran out the door first, leaving it wide open for the entire class to see. She stopped when her father stepped away from the wall, and there must have been something in the look on his face, in the slump of his shoulders as he stood there in his tan deputy’s uniform.
Jules let out an ear-piercing scream that Tabitha knew right then would haunt her for the rest of her life, especially when Tabitha turned around and saw the look on Wyatt’s face. He wasn’t crying. He wasn’t screaming, but it was as if Jules was verbalizing what he didn’t know how to express.
In that moment, Wyatt and Jules Conners’s perfect life tarnished in her eyes. How could they know without words what had happened unless there was an undercurrent of fear already? Maybe being in the sheriff’s family wasn’t as easy as Tabitha and Clay thought it was.
“Where is he?” Jules’s wail echoed in the halls. “Where’s my grandpa? I want my grandpa!”
“Come on, baby. Where’s Wy?” Big Fred Conner scooped her up, making tall and perfect Jules look small and broken as she wrapped her arms around him and started sobbing onto his shoulder. “We’re gonna go home and do this.”
When Wyatt walked out of the room, his father reached out and grabbed his wrist, pulling him to his side. Then he draped a big arm around Wyatt’s shoulders and turned to walk back down the hallway with his children.
Jules’s cries bounced off the walls until they left the building, but there were no apologies. No explanations.
Death was their companion, looming around the corner like a dark threat they understood more than the rest of them. It took years for Tabitha to figure out that most people get there eventually. They realize that life is fragile, that death is inevitable, but for Jules and Wyatt Conner, it’d been there from the very beginning. There was something so sad and terrible about it. Tabitha realized she’d rather go hungry every night than know by just a look that someone she loved was gone forever, as if expecting it all along.
Part Three
The Fallen Hero
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
Chapter Seven
July 1989
“Excuse me, Mr. Dower, but I was wondering—” Tabitha wrung her hands and glanced nervously at Mr. Dower’s wife Marisa. She didn’t like Tabitha, but she tried to forget that and glanced up at the dark-haired man. “Have you seen Clay?”
Terrance Dower stopped mopping the front of Maple’s One Stop shop and arched an eyebrow at Tabitha. He lowered his voice so his wife couldn’t hear him. “I try hard not to see Clay when he’s in here, if you catch my drift?”
Tabitha nodded, knowing what he meant. Clay had developed the habit of shoplifting. Which was the reason Marisa Dower hated her so much. She had inherited the store from her mother, and it was her pride and joy. She sat at the front counter where they sold the lottery tickets, watching the place like a hawk. Even if Tabitha didn’t steal, she was usually with Clay when he did. Mrs. Dower’s anger wasn’t odd. It was Mr. Dower who was the unusual one because he’d caught Clay stealing food plenty of times and just looked away when he did.