by Bryce Gibson
“Is something going on?” I asked.
“Cade Williston had a wreck last night.”
“Is he okay? I mean, he’s not hurt or...”
Dead, I wanted to add, but I left the final word hanging between us.
Dad shook his head. “He got banged up pretty bad, but he’ll be fine. Riley needs some help cleaning up your mess.”
OTHER THAN RILEY, THE brewery was vacant.
Riley was behind the bar wiping down pint glasses with a bright yellow dishrag. I noticed that he wore wide, leather cuffs around each wrist. He placed the clean glass on the shelf and turned it so that the logo was facing the same way as the others.
“Dad said you might need my help.”
“You can wipe down the tables.” He tossed me a rag.
The two of us worked in silence for a few minutes before Riley spoke. “That was a really stupid thing you did.”
“What do you mean?” I decided to play dumb.
“C’mon Blake, I’m twenty-one, not a hundred-and-one. I know you let Cade and those guys in here. Anybody with a brain can see that.”
I hadn’t been expecting to get called out on my stupid behavior. “Does Dad know?”
Riley nodded. “I’m sure he does. Rest assured that I haven’t told him, but don’t forget that he’s not that much older than us. He’s probably been around the block a few times himself. Look here.” Riley leaned on the counter. It was one of the rare times that I had seen his hands become idle. “I know what you’re going through.”
I kept working. “You do?”
“Here, let me give you something. Riley reached both of his hands behind his neck and began to unclasp one of the three necklaces that he wore. The black leather cord dangled from the end of his fingers. “I want you to have this,” he said.
I took the necklace from him and looked at the pendant that the cord was looped through. It was a silver square about the size of a stamp. It had the emblem of a tree etched into it.
“The oak tree is a symbol of truth. Somebody special gave it to me several years ago.”
“Why are you giving it to me?”
“When I was your age I had a girlfriend whose parents moved away. We were only sixteen, and she had no choice but to go with them. We tried to stay together and make it work. Every Saturday we met in North Augusta at the river. Usually I got there first, but one day she tried to beat me. When I arrived, it was already too late. They were in the process of pulling the car from the water. She’d had a wreck on the bridge and drowned.”
We both sat in silence for a long while.
“So what does this have to do with me or the necklace?”
“Her sister gave it to me. After the accident was a terribly dark and sad time of my life. She said that anytime I had doubts about anything, to just hold the pendant in the palm of my hand.”
I put the necklace around my neck.
Riley continued. “And now, here I am, working for your dad and collecting tips so I can buy an engagement ring for somebody else.”
chapter six
I WAS WALKING ALONG the paved road that wrapped around the opposite side of the hop yard when I heard a girl’s voice come from behind me. “Hey, Blake. Wait up.”
I turned to look and saw Lisa running to catch up with me. “Where are you going?” She asked me.
“I’m just walking,” I told her, and it was true. I had no destination in mind.
“Mind if I join you?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I guess not.”
Now, we were walking side by side. The summer sun shone down on us with a fierce intensity. “I heard about Mr. Williston showing up at your dad’s place this morning. What a jerk, right?”
I remembered the man in the black truck. “That was Cade’s dad?”
Lisa nodded her head. “Yep. Mayor Williston. He’s planning to open a new shopping center out on the 25 bypass.”
The bypass was a new road that would divert most traffic away from the main part of town. Without people driving through, the little businesses, like Dad’s, would suffer, and the franchises, like what Mayor Williston was involved in, would thrive.
“Dad did seem pretty upset,” I said.
“Believe me, Mr. Williston won’t stop until he gets his way. What do you say we fight back? I’m good at digging up dirt.”
“Why do you care?”
“What if I told you I had my own reasons? You tell me why you stay cooped up in your room all by yourself, and I’ll tell you why I have a vendetta against Cade.”
I realized that what Lisa was suggesting was sort of a version of I’ll show you yours if you show me mine. This, however, was not going to be nearly as titillating as it sounded.
I knew that, if I opened up to her and told her everything, there would be no going back. “Okay,” I said. “My stepdad murdered my best friend back in the beginning of the summer. My therapist says that, because of what happened, I have an anxiety disorder. It is really hard and actually pretty impossible for me to open up to people and make friends. So, I would rather spend my time alone. You didn’t already know?”
“I’ve heard a little bit about it. So why are you on your phone all the time? If you’re so alone, who is it that you’re talking to?”
“Charley. He and I read books together online.”
“Kind of like a reading buddy? I had one of those when I was five.”
“Okay, what’s your deal with Cade?”
“He’s telling people that he and I messed around.”
There was movement up ahead of us. I realized that it was a buzzard that was feeding off something on the ditch bank.
Out on rural roads, it wasn’t unusual to come across dead deer, possums, or raccoons that had been hit by passing vehicles. I assumed that it was one of those wild animals that the large bird was feeding on, but, as we got closer, I realized that what I was seeing was a black dog.
I had a sinking, sick feeling that Wolf had gotten out and it was her that had been clipped by a car and left to die on the roadside. The buzzard hopped away and into the taller, overgrown grass from where it eventually took flight.
Lisa hurried ahead of me. By the time that I caught up with her, she was standing over the carcass. What I saw below me was sickening. The buzzard had pulled at the guts and innards of the animal. “She must have had puppies recently.”
I immediately caught on to what Lisa was suggesting. The teats on the dog were swollen and flabby.
Lisa was getting back to her feet. “How could somebody do something like this and just leave her out here?”
The idea that somebody could be so cruel and heartless tore at my heart.
I watched Lisa’s eyes trail toward the long dirt drive in front of us. At the end of the dusty driveway, an old and gray ramshackle house stood in solitude. There was a single, ancient tree on the property.
“That was probably where she lived.” Lisa started walking down the dirt driveway, and I followed closely behind her. The fields on each side of us were overgrown with grass that swayed in the breeze.
The yard surrounding the house was mostly dirt. I noticed now that there were countless large rocks around the oak tree. We walked up the steps of the shabby porch. A wooden rocking chair stood by the door. “I’m not sure what the lady’s name is that lives here,” Lisa told me. “She has always seemed nice enough though.” Lisa knocked on the door, and the screen slapped back and forth in its frame.
Eventually, an old black woman who was wearing a cotton night gown appeared from the end of the hallway. “Can I help you?” The woman asked through the screen.
“My name’s Lisa and this is Blake. We were just walking along and came across a dog...”
“Oh, heavens,” the woman said. “Has she been hit?”
Lisa nodded her head. “I’m sorry...”
“She was always running out there on that dang road. Kept telling her she would get it one day or another.” The woman turned around and began walkin
g away from us. “Don’t go nowhere,” the woman called out as she was tuning the corner. “I’ve got something to give you.”
Lisa and I both looked at each other with the same amount of confusion.
When the woman came back just a minute later, she had a cardboard box in her hands. The woman pushed the door open and stepped outside to join us on the porch. “That was real nice for y’all to come clean with what y’all did. It means the world...”
“No.” I cut her off. “We didn’t do it...”
“A lot of bad can come from not telling.” She placed the cardboard box on the seat of the old wooden rocking chair.
Deciding that the woman was senile, I gave up on trying to convince her that we weren’t the ones that had hit the dog.
The woman reached into the box and pulled out a tiny, wiggling puppy.
“Is that one of hers?” Lisa asked.
“The only one that made it,” the woman said.
I stepped closer so that I could get a better look at the puppy. The dog was a rusty brown color. “Is it a boy or a girl?” Lisa asked.
“This here is a boy.” The woman held the puppy out toward us. Her fingers were knobby. They reminded me of thick, gnarled tree roots. “I want you to have him.” She was looking at me.
Before I had time to say anything, the woman shoved the puppy in my arms. When I finally had control over the dog, the woman was already standing on the other side of the screen door. “Go on now. You want to get home before dark. As far as my Molly goes, my oldest son is coming for supper. I’ll have him bring her here and we’ll bury her under the tree.” She nodded toward the big oak. “When you get to be as old as I am you find that you’ve lost a lot over the years, but you learn to appreciate the things you did have.”
I looked toward the old oak tree. So that was the deal with the rocks. They were grave markers.
“Like I said, get on. It’ll be dark soon.”
As we began to make our way down the steps. Lisa stopped and turned back toward the house. “Wait,” she called out toward the now empty hallway. “What is your name?”
From the dark confines of the house, we heard the woman’s voice. “Ziraili,” she said. “It means God’s helper.”
“That’s what you should name him,” Lisa said later. “But I’d just call him Zee for short.”
When we reached the same spot where Lisa had joined me, we stopped, and Lisa reached into her pocket and pulled out her phone. “What’s your number?”
I told her, and a second later my phone chimed with an incoming text message.
“There,” she said. “Now you have mine. If you change your mind and want my help, just give me a call.”
WHEN I GOT HOME, DAD was sitting at his end of the dining room table. Stacks of papers were piled around him. The lamp in the corner was on and reflected off the polished wood of the table top.
Dad looked at me and ran his fingers through his hair. He took off his reading glasses and sat them on the table. He was holding a single sheet of paper in his hand.
“Mr. Williston is forcing us to close the brewery,” Dad said.
“Why? He can’t do that...”
“He insists that it is my fault that Cade got drunk and wrecked his truck. He says I’m being negligent. According to this,” he waved the piece of paper, “we have to be completely closed and out of there by the end of the month.”
I felt my stomach drop. It was all my fault. If I hadn’t snuck off with the keys that night, none of this would have happened. I knew that Dad loved the brewery, and the idea of it being taken away from him because of something I did made me feel sick. Aside from all of that, what Mayor Williston was doing seemed ridiculous. Now, Lisa’s suggestion of me helping her dig up something on the Willistons didn’t seem like such a bad idea.
“Dad,” I said. “I’m sorry about everything. It was my idea to let them in there.”
“I knew it was,” Dad said. “What’s the deal with the dog?”
“An old lady named Ziraili gave him to me. I guess this is a bad time to ask if I can keep him.”
“Take him upstairs. We’ll talk about it later.”
I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the dog or to what I had done.
After shutting the door to my room so Zee could roam freely, I took a quick look at the progress chart on the wall. I realized that it was stupid to have rushed into trying to be friends with Cade, and now I was facing the consequences. In that moment, the last star that I’d placed represented him, his father, and all of the crap they were doing. I pulled my arm back and punched the star so hard that I felt the plaster of the wall crack behind the sheet of paper.
My hand was still throbbing when I pulled my phone out of my pocket and found Lisa’s number. I hesitated. What if I was making another mistake? But I wasn’t, I told myself. This was different. Lisa and I would be helping each other out. I hit dial. While I waited on her to answer, I glanced at the progress chart and felt nervous with the fact that I was giving the fourth star another shot. This time, I promised myself, I would make it work.
THAT NIGHT, WITH ZEE sleeping peacefully on the floor and Wolf on the foot of my bed, I wanted to read, but my mind was so preoccupied with everything else that I knew that concentrating on the story would be impossible. Instead, I was flipping through one of Dad’s brewing magazines and came across an article on how, in 79 AD, a man called Pliny the Elder made a reference to hops, calling them “willow wolf.” I dog-eared the page for later and sat the magazine aside.
With my phone, I logged onto The Reading Buddy site for the first time in two days. Charley17’s progress on our most recent book had far surpassed mine. He had finished, and I was only at seventeen percent. In the corner, the online status for Charley17 turned green, and, just a second later, a new message appeared on the screen.
THERE YOU ARE! I’VE MISSED YOU!
Until then, I had barely even thought of him as a real person. He had existed in my mind as pixels and data. Admittedly, it bothered me to think of him as someone that I could hurt. I typed up a reply.
I’M SORRY. STILL FRIENDS?
The next message I got was an auto-generated one from the site.
CHARLEY17 UPDATED HIS PROFILE PICTURE.
I refreshed the page, and the new profile picture loaded on the screen. It was an image of one of those vintage Halloween masks—a werewolf. At first, I didn’t know what to think. Then I remembered that on the day that I signed up for The Reading Buddy site, I’d marked werewolves as a favorite sub genre. Even so, I still found it a little strange, creepy even, but maybe what he was doing was just his awkward way of trying to connect with common interests. I sent him a thumbs up.
chapter seven
MY STEP DAD, MORRIS Heyward, seemed okay at first.
“Blake, this is Morris. You’ll be seeing a lot of him from now on,” Mom told me one night in the winter.
I was sitting at the Formica-topped kitchen table. Handmade paper snowflakes were taped on the wall all around me. An open shoe box was in my hands. I was using a sharp knife to cut a square in one end.
“Morris owns the pool store in town,” Mom said. “You know, on Main Street.”
I paused in what I was doing, left the knife sticking out of the thin cardboard, and took a moment to study him.
He was wearing his work clothes—a blue button down shirt that had a name patch on the left pocket, a pair of pants that were a darker shade of blue, work boots, and a cap with the company logo.
Morris reached out his hand to shake mine. I pulled the blade from the box, put the knife down on the table, and placed my hand in his.
“What have you got there?” He asked me, studying the empty shoe box.
“It’s a school project,” I told him. “When you look through the window, if you see the groundhog’s shadow, there’ll be six more weeks of winter.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Spring is almost here,” I told him.
“B
lake,” Mom said, “Morris is a pretty good artist. Maybe he can draw you a really nice groundhog that you can use.”
Morris sat down across from me. He reached out his hand and slid a blank sheet of paper across the table so that it was in front of him. Using a pencil, he drew the most perfect standing groundhog that I had ever seen.
I was busy coloring in the trees that I had already drawn on the inside walls of the box, and Morris carefully cut out the groundhog with a pair of scissors.
He left a rectangular tab at the groundhog’s feet that I folded over and dabbed with a big glob of glue. I stuck the little booger to the inside bottom of the box so that he was standing upright.
“What else needs to be done?” Morris asked me.
“I just need to cut a hole in the top of the box,” I told him. “Big enough for the sun to shine through.”
Morris pulled out his own pocket knife and cut a square.
When it was all done, I placed the lid on the box. Mom, Morris, and me all stood around the table. Morris pulled out his keys. There was a little flashlight on the key ring. From the hole on the top, he shined the light into the box.
At just the right angle, the groundhog’s shadow loomed across the background.
Change was coming.
From then on, Mom started bringing Morris around the house a lot. Even at seven years old I knew what they were doing when they sat in the swing after I had gone to bed.
From my bed that was pushed up against the window, I could hear them. I wouldn’t fully understand the desperate groans that he was making until ten years later when I found myself in a similar situation, in that same swing on the concrete pad with a girl named Katie Carmichael, who I worked with at Burger Heaven.
I’m not going to lie and say that I didn’t know that Morris liked to drink. Of course I knew. I even smelled it on his breath that very first day that I met him. As he leaned down to shake my hand, I could smell it coming from him.
I knew that people drank—I was seven, not dumb. Drinking was something that grownups did after they knocked off from work.
