Give Me Some Sugar

by Gen Griffin

  Katie was taken aback. “Because I'm your wife and I love you.”

  “Less and less every day.”

  “What?” Katie was more than a little bit horrified. “Why would you say something so ugly?”

  “It's the truth. You used to love me. Now you love Hannah Mae.”

  “Hannah Mae is our daughter.”

  “Do you love her more than you love me?” Ian still wasn't looking at her.

  “It's not the same love. You're being....ridiculous.” She was struggling to find the right words. “I love you and I love Hannah Mae. Y'all are my world. It's not a competition.”

  “Hannah Mae is all you care about. Is Hannah Mae happy? Is Hannah Mae hungry? Did you give her a bath? Did you use the baby wash cloths and not the dish cloths? Like there's any real damn difference. They're wash cloths.” Ian put his hands up in a mock surrender. “Ian, you're feeding her wrong. Ian, why did you dress her in that? Don't you know babies get cold easily? She's going to be the first human being in the history of Earth to freeze to death on an 80 degree day in the South, just because I forgot her cardigan. Ian, didn't you see the stains on that onesie? Change her. Ian, why is she wet? I thought you said you'd just changed her?” He mocked Katie's soft drawl as he mimicked her.

  “I don't sound like that.” Katie knew she sounded defensive.

  “Yes, you do. All the time. It's Ian, Ian, Ian. Ian you're doing it wrong.” He tossed his head and snapped his fingers on the last syllable of wrong. “I do everything wrong.”

  “No, you don't,” Katie said.

  “Really?” Ian choked out a bitter laugh. “Name one thing I've done right.”

  Katie swallowed the lump in her throat, but she didn't say anything. She didn't really know what to say. It would have been a much easier list to make a year ago.

  “Ian-.”

  “No. Just admit it. I'm a fuck up.” He glared at her with a venom in his eyes that took her by surprise.

  “We've all made mistakes,” she said.

  “Sure. It's just that no one else's mistakes matter.”

  “Ian...” Katie took a deep breath and tried to get hold of her thoughts.

  “Everything was fine until Kerry came to Possum Creek. My life was going good until he showed his face in my town. Stupid little turd. If it weren't for him, none of this ancient shit would have been stirred up. I'd still have my job.”

  Katie sat silent for a minute, debating the words that she'd been wanting to say for months. She'd held her tongue because she hadn't wanted this fight. Now that it was here, she still didn't know if she should burn the bridge or try to salvage it.

  “Stupid little prick,” Ian muttered. “David should have let Richard Perkins hunt him down like the mangy, worthless dog he is.”

  “You didn't have to confess to killing Casey,” Katie whispered. The words sounded too loud in the cab of the small truck.

  Ian stopped whatever he was going to say and turned to look at her for the first time since they'd left the others. “You think I made a mistake?”

  Katie took a deep breath. “Morally? I guess not. It's hard to argue with doing the right thing and being honest when I've spent my entire life touting the value of exactly that. I try to be a good person. I've always thought you were a good person.”

  “You're mad at me for confessing.” It wasn't a question.

  “We had a decent life, Ian. We were making it. We were happy.” Katie struggled not to cry as she spoke.

  “You were happy.” Ian sounded bitter.

  “So were you,” she said. “You liked being a deputy. You were bringing home decent money. We weren't exactly rolling in money but we were okay. I wasn't constantly worrying about how to pay our bills or if you were going to get hauled off to jail.”

  “I couldn't take the pressure anymore. I've lived half my life worried that someone was going to find out what we'd done to Casey. Kerry was like a dog with a meaty bone. I couldn't keep listening to him babble about finding Casey's killer. It was all he talked about.”

  “He didn't have any evidence!” Katie nearly screamed the words at him. She had to fight to keep her composure. “He still doesn't have any evidence. It's a huge part of the reason the investigation hasn't officially ended yet. No one can find Casey's body. Your old truck is long gone. You confessed, but no one can find a single shred of evidence that you really killed her. Some people still think you're making it up. Your confession has done nothing to stop Kerry's witch hunt against David. He's telling everyone that you're lying.”

  “I'm not lying.”

  “You aren't telling the whole truth.”

  “I'm telling my truth.”

  “Where is Casey's body, Ian?” Katie felt the anger that had been building under her skin for weeks slowly start to rise to the surface. “If you're telling the truth, where is Casey?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Does David know?”

  “No.” Ian let out another miserable laugh. “Cal's the one who buried her, and he says he doesn't remember where he and Uncle Ricky put her. Somewhere in the woods. I kind of think maybe he just doesn't want to tell me.”

  “Cal forgot where he hid Casey's body.” It wasn't exactly surprising news. Katie had never asked Ian, or anyone else, for the details of what had happened to Casey that fateful day when they had all be in high school. She really hadn't wanted to know. Her suspicions had been bad enough.

  She remembered waiting for Ian to pick her up after cheer practice. She remembered being scared that something had happened to him when he hadn't shown up. His drinking had been a problem, even back then. She wished she could go back to her sixteen year old self and shake some sense into her. Ian had always been a sweet guy, but he'd also been battling depression for as long as Katie had known him. The hopeless romantic in her had thought her love would be enough to save him from himself. Maybe it had been enough, for a little while.

  She didn't want to think about the day Casey had died. She didn't want to think about the look on David's face when she'd walked into his Daddy's shop and seen Ian's wrecked truck. Addison had come walking out of the bathroom wearing a pair of David's old coveralls and flashing a stunning smile that Katie hadn't trusted. It had been the first time she'd ever met him and she hadn't known he was the Sheriff's nephew. She'd had no question that something was wrong that night, but she'd believed them when they said it was a simple drunken accident. Ian had been shaken up, but wouldn't anyone be shaken up if they rolled their truck?

  She'd told herself his reactions were normal. She'd been happy when he'd sworn off alcohol and become a teetotaler. It had taken her a few weeks to put together the connection between the missing eighth grader and Ian's wrecked truck. Katie had almost been relieved when the rumors about David and Casey had started up, because, deep in her heart, she'd known the truth was worse than any rumor.

  Why didn't I walk away? The thought came unbidden and at the worst possible moment. Why hadn't she walked away? It was a question that kept coming back to Katie. Why hadn't she walked away from Ian when she'd realized that he'd been involved with Casey's disappearance?

  He'd seemed so genuinely sorry. So remorseful. He'd been so sweet to her. She closed her eyes briefly as she drove down the dark, lonely road. She'd stayed with Ian because Casey's death had always seemed more like a bad dream than a reality. It had been easy to forget all about Casey Black when Katie was standing on the porch of the house boat with a bass fish on the line and Ian laughing with his guitar. Why worry about Casey when she was busy being crowned first runner up on the homecoming court? Casey had been the last person on her mind when she and her friends flipped their tassels at graduation. She had a thousand pictures of the wonderful life they had been living. It had been simple to forget Casey. The rest of Possum Creek's residents certainly had. No one had looked very hard for Casey. Sure, there had been a couple of fliers put up around town, but it wasn't like police had been combing the streets. Most people thought she'd run away.r />
  Kerry Longwood was the only person who had ever actively investigated Casey's disappearance as a murder. Well, until Ian had up and confessed.

  Katie took a deep breath and the words started spilling out. “You should have talked to me first. Confessing to Casey's murder was stupid, Ian. It was stupid. You lost your job. You ruined your reputation. People glare at me in the grocery store now. They whisper behind my back. There's that little Cluster girl. You know. The one who married the murderer. Face it, Ian. You weren't thinking when you decided to confess.”

  “Trish got me a deal. I'm not going to be charged for the murder.”

  “I'm not talking about whether or not your facing formal charges. I'm talking about our lives. Everything is in shambles. We're broke. Our cable got turned off last week because we can't afford the monthly bill. I desperately need a car of my own but we can't afford payments or the full coverage insurance we'd be required to keep on a financed car. We're one missed day of work away from being completely screwed, Ian. I don't know how we're going to be able to take care of our daughter. We can't even afford daycare for Hannah Mae. I guess that wouldn't be that much of a problem since you're not working, but you won't stay home and take care of her full time either.”

  “I am working. You said we needed money. I got a job.”

  “You're mowing lawns under the table for $50 a day and you're only doing that part time.” Katie let her exasperation show. “You barely make enough money to pay your gas. Whatever little profit you do see, you drink before it makes it home.”

  “I'm an adult. I can have a couple of beers after work with the guys if I want to.” Ian scowled at her.

  “Its never just a couple of beers with you. You don't know when to stop. Your couple of beers can be two cases before you even notice.”

  “Drinking makes me feel better,” Ian said. “It helps me relax.”

  “It helps you relax?” Katie couldn't believe his crap. “From what? Why do you need to relax? You don't freaking do anything.”

  “I do plenty.”

  “Like what?” She demanded. “You work maybe two days a week for a few hours. The rest of the time you're either sitting on your house boat getting drunk or sitting in front of our television playing your Xbox while your Mom watches our daughter.”

  “I do plenty,” Ian said defensively.

  “You don't do crapola. I come home from a ten hour work day and the same dishes that were in the sink when I left are still there waiting for me. The same laundry that was on the bathroom floor in the morning is always still there at night. As best as I can tell, you don't do anything but relax. You're living the life of a deadbeat high school kid.”

  “You have no idea what I'm going through.”

  “Do you have any idea what you're putting your daughter and I through?” Katie countered. “I've always stood by you and I try my best to be supportive, but nights like tonight kind of make me wonder why I bother.”

  “Just because you don't like my friends-.”

  “Your friends are creeps!” She turned the truck into their driveway with more force than she meant to use. The tires squealed in protest as she slammed on the brakes in front of their tired little rental house. “Lowery and Joe are not good people.”

  “And David is?” Ian countered.

  “David's....family. He's different. Don't ask me how. He just is.”

  Ian laughed. “David's different. Yeah. I could see that. Cal Walker, too. He's different, right? It doesn't matter that he helped hide Casey's body. He's still Mr. Good Guy.”

  “Cal hid Casey's body to protect you,” Katie pointed out. “You would have gone to prison, Ian. The court system generally isn't nice to stupid, drunk teenagers who run over little girls.”

  “Cal hid Casey's body to protect Addison.” The bitterness was clear in Ian's voice.

  “Addison didn't run Casey over.” Of this much Katie was completely certain.

  “He'd just been discharged from the Navy. He'd dodged a dishonorable discharge by the skin of his shiny white teeth and everyone knew it. He'd been busted with weed more than once, but no charges ever got filed because he's Frank's nephew. Addison was maybe one more fuck up away from jail time when Casey died. He would have gone to jail if we'd called the cops that afternoon. He was the only one of us old enough to buy booze. We were all drunk and a little girl was dead.” Ian sneered at Katie from the passenger's seat. His hand was on the door handle but he hadn't opened the door yet. “Don't look so surprised. Addison's not the saint all y'all make him out to be.”

  “No one has ever called Addy a saint.” Katie was exhausted and this argument wasn't helping anything.

  “I like hanging out with Lowery,” Ian said unexpectedly. “He's funny as anything. He cracks me up. Its great. We sit the bar and he hits on every chick who looks our way. Sometimes they say no. Sometimes they're okay with it. One bitch threw her beer at us, but even that didn't bother Lowery. He doesn't give two shits what anyone thinks or what society says he should say or do. He's just living life the way he wants to live it.”

  “Car-less and in his mother's garage?” Katie didn't feel like being nice anymore. She didn't see the point.

  Ian frowned at her. He looked almost thoughtful. “You know, Lowery says you don't like him because he's not smart like you and he ain't got money. At first I thought he was full of shit, because if you wanted money then you would never have gotten with me, right?”

  “I don't-.”

  Ian cut her off before she could answer. “Now I'm kind of thinking maybe he's right. You say your problem with Lowery and Joe is that they ain't good people, but David and them have probably done worse shit than Lowery every thought about. Kind of fucked up, if you stop to think about it. You can drive around in Cal Walker's truck with your nose all up in the air and telling me that my new friends ain't quality folks, but you know Cal buried a little girl's body in the swamp. Can't help noticing that you don't say one word about Cal not being a good person when he hands you his keys and tells you to keep that sixty-thousand dollar truck for as long as you need it.”

  “Cal's our friend and you're making a big deal over nothing. Cal let us borrow his truck because Lowery borrowed yours and blew up the transmission. I didn't have any way to get Hannah Mae to her doctor's appointments or go to work.”

  “Cal didn't let us borrow that truck. He let you borrow it. He brought it to you at work. He didn't bring it to me.”

  “We work half a mile apart from one another. It made sense for him to bring it to me at work.”

  “He could have brought it to me, if he'd wanted me to drive it.”

  “You didn't have anywhere you needed to go.” Katie knew her argument was thin, but it was late and she was tired. “What is your point?”

  “My point?” Ian opened the door of the S-10 and got out. “I don't guess I know what my point is. Maybe it's that you're a hypo-whatchamacallit.”

  “Hypocrite?” Katie guessed automatically.

  “Yeah. That big word. Hypocrite. That's you.”

  “I am not-.”

  “You are. You say you don't care about money, but you're always chewing my ass because we ain't got enough. You say you love me for me, but you're always on my ass to be someone I don't think I really even want to be anymore. You tell me my friends are bad people and I shouldn't hang out with them, but you make excuses for people like Cal and Addison.”

  “I'm not making excuses for anyone.”

  “You've forgiven them. For everything. You don't hold it against Cal that he hid Casey's body. You blame me for being drunk when I killed Casey, but you ain't holding Addison accountable for buying the beer I was drinking.”

  “He didn't pour it down your throat.”

  Ian chortled back a laugh. “You're splitting hairs, Katherine. You don't want to admit that Addy and them are just as guilty for what happened to Casey as I am. Ain't none of us what I would call good people, and you ain't got the right to call Lowery and Joe ba
d people.”

  “They're not good influences on you, Ian. There's a good chance that you'll get your badge back before the end of the year if you just keep your head down, stay out of trouble and wait for the state's official investigation to end. You'll be back with sheriff's department. You'll have your benefits and retirement package back. You'll have your cruiser back and we can trade the truck in on a newer one. Everything will be just fine so long as you don't do anything stupid, like getting drunk and going mudding in the ditches on the side of the highway. What would you have done if a cop had come by, Ian?”

  “I guess I would have gotten a DUI,” he admitted with a shrug.

  “Right. Exactly. You would have gotten a DUI. Frank wouldn't be able reinstate you as a deputy if you got a DUI. Did you even think about that?”

  “Maybe I don't want to be a cop again.”

  “What?” Katie stared at him in shock.

  “Maybe I never did want to be a cop. You wanted me to be a cop. Frank wanted me to be a cop. Addison thought it was something I ought to do. I never said I wanted to be a cop. Y'all pushed me into it.”

  “You liked the job.”

  “I liked the job for the five minutes I had it before Kerry got hired on. After that, it sucked balls.”

  “You're saying you don't want to go back?” Katie's heart was rapidly sinking down into her chest. She'd been hanging onto the hope that life would get back to normal once Ian was reinstated.

  “Yes. I guess that's exactly what I'm saying.”

  “What are you going to do for a job?”

  “I dunno,” Ian admitted. “I don't mind mowing grass. No stress in the lawn business. No one gets shot if I run over the sprinkler head with the mower. No one dies if I'm late to an appointment.”

  “Cutting lawns isn't a career, Ian.”

  “It could be,” he said defiantly. “Me and Lowery are talking about opening up our own lawn service together. He's got an old riding mower at his house and I can use our push mower and the weed eater.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Just, no. You're drunk. You're not thinking clearly. Go to bed, Ian. Just go inside and go to bed.”