by Nick Pirog
Show Me
Nick Pirog
SHOW ME
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY:
Deciquin Books
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Text copyright © 2020 Nick Pirog
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Smashwords Edition License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
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Cover design by Nick Venables
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Free Book
Author’s Note
About the Author
Also by Nick Pirog
Origin of how Missouri became
the Show-Me State:
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"I come from a state that raises corn and cotton, cockleburs and Democrats, and frothy eloquence neither convinces nor satisfies me. I'm from Missouri. You have got to show me."
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—Congressman Willard Duncan Vandiver in 1899
Prologue
Tuesday, October 9, 2012
Tarrin, Missouri
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She rarely got sick. The last time was four years earlier. She remembered because it was during the first week of the Summer Olympics when they were held in Beijing. Peggy loved watching the diving. She’d been a diver in high school herself, though far from a standout. Her best dive was a Reverse 1 ½. It wasn’t the hardest of dives, but one she routinely received her highest scores on. So, yeah, she obsessed over the diving coverage during the Olympics. Only she’d gotten a horrible cold and her head had been spinning for days, and she missed it.
Peggy hoped this cold wouldn’t be quite as bad, though it had swept its way through her office building like a swarm of angry locusts. Still, most people were back to work two or three days later.
It hit her about halfway through her second game. It was bowling night. She and Roger joined the league last year. She’d been terrible when she first started. She hadn’t bowled in more than fifteen years, not since she and Roger’s first date. But now that their oldest was thirteen, they felt comfortable leaving the boys alone for a couple of hours on a Tuesday night.
Peggy rolled a 178 her first game. Roger was so excited he’d given her a little pat on the butt. She blushed, then looked around to make sure nobody saw. No one had. They were too busy bowling themselves or eating wings or drinking beer or watching the Cardinals’ playoff game that was on the big screen.
The third frame of her second game, she knocked down six pins with her first ball. The four pins remaining were all on the right side. It should have been easy for her to pick up the spare. She picked up the ball, a purple eleven-pounder Roger bought her at the end of last year after she complained about putting her fingers “where a thousand people’s fingers had already been.” She was all set to roll when she sneezed twice—her sneezes had always come in pairs—then twice more. It was hard to cover her face with the ball in her hand, and Roger and the couple on the lane next to them all started laughing.
Not knowing what to do, she wiped her nose on her shoulder and rolled the ball down the lane knocking all four pins down. The spare symbol flashed on the screen, and Roger stood up to give her a high five.
“I think I’m getting sick,” she told him.
And she was.
By the sixth frame, she started to feel feverish.
She was so careful. She had little tubes of hand sanitizer stashed everywhere. She even had one on her keychain. But then, so many people had gotten sick the last two weeks, Peggy supposed it was inevitable.
And now she had it.
She didn’t want to roll the last couple frames, but Roger begged her to finish out. He had a great game going; he would end up getting a 237. And if she didn’t finish, it would hurt their seeding come the tournament in two weeks.
Once the game was over, she told Roger she was heading out to pick up some medicine. They’d come in separate cars, Peggy having to stay late at work to finish writing a report.
It was closing in on 8:30 p.m., and Peggy hoped the grocery store—Save-More—was still open. Technically, it closed at 8:00, but Odell, the owner, usually stayed open an extra half hour.
As she neared the store, Peggy could see there were still a few cars parked outside. When she was growing up, the store was called McBride’s and had been little more than a six-aisle grocery store. Over the past thirty years, Odell had expanded the store, changing the name with each remodel. Ten years ago, it became McBride’s Market, then five years ago, Save-More.
Peggy parked, jumped out, and rushed inside. She grew light-headed and stopped to take a couple long breaths.
Odell McBride, an exceedingly pleasant man in his early sixties, made eye contact with her. He was checking out the last of the customers. Tarrin being a small town of just two thousand, Peggy knew both men in line and waved hello. “Hi Jack, Hi Dr. Lanningham,” she said, then turned to Odell and asked, “Can I grab something really quick?”
“Sure, but make it snappy,” he replied with a soft wink.
“I will,” she promised, then started toward the medicine aisle.
She passed a woman standing near one of the two other checkout lanes. The woman was wearing a cowboy hat and had her face buried in a gossip magazine. Though Peggy recognized her from town, she couldn’t recall her name.
In the medicine aisle, Peggy grabbed a box of Theraflu and some throat lozenges, then made her way back up front. Odell had finished with Jack and was checking out Dr. Lanningham, Peggy’s longtime veterinarian. Behind Dr. Lanningham was a young man in his mid-twenties, whom Peggy recognized from the lumberyard. He asked, “You got it too?”
She glanced down into his basket and saw a similar assortment of medicines.
“Yeah,” she said. “Hit me hard about thirty minutes ago.”
The front doors opened and a man walked in.
Neil Felding.
Peggy and he had gone to high school together. He’d been valedictorian if she remembered correctly. She heard he’d recently moved back, though this was the first time she’d seen him.
Right behind Neil was a second man.
The hairs on Peggy’s arms pricked.
It wasn’t the gun in the man’s hand, though that was frightening enough. It was the look on his face.
Rage.
He smashed the butt of the gun into Neil’s back, sending him flailing into a bin filled with an assortment of Halloween merchandise.
“Lowry!” yelled Odell. “What the hell are you doing?”
Lowry Barnes, Peggy realized.
He was in his late twenties. Thinning brown hair. Freckles. Vacant brown eyes. The last time Peggy had seen him was three weeks earlier when he’d still been working at Save-More and had bagged her groceries.
Peggy wasn’t sure why he’d been fired, but she assumed it was either drugs or alcohol. At least that’s what landed Lowry in jail. Or so went the gossip.
“Over here!” Lowry screamed, waving the gun. “Everybody over here!”
Odell.
Dr. Lanningham.
The woman in the cowboy hat.
The young man from the lumberyard.
Neil.
And Peggy.
Everybody.
“You don’t have to do this, Lowry,” Dr. Lanningham said calmly. He was in his late fifties, with a head of salt-and-pepper hair. It was the same voice that had told Peggy it was time to put her golden retriever, Betty, to sleep.
“Yes I do!” Lowry screamed.
He pointed the gun at Odell and said, “You never should have fired me. You should have just given me a warning or something.”
“I did give you—”
“No! You just threw me out on the street.”
Odell didn’t answer.
“Now move! Everyone to the back of the store!”
Peggy waited for someone to dart toward the door or make a run into one of the aisles.
No one did.
Everyone obeyed.
Everyone but Peggy.
Her legs seemed incapable of moving.
Lowry pointed the gun at her chest and shouted, “I said move!”
The young man from the lumberyard gave her a reassuring nod, then took her arm and guided her toward the rest of the group.
Lowry ushered the six of them to the back of the store and into the freezer bay. It was the size of a small bedroom, half filled with frozen items.
Lowry told them to sit on the floor, and Peggy fell to the cold concrete. The young man was to her left, Dr. Lanningham to her right.
Lowry stood in front of them. “I didn’t deserve it,” he said.
He pointed the gun at Odell and pulled the trigger. Odell’s head flopped backward, and he fell to his side.
Peggy screamed.
Lowry pulled the trigger again, the bullet hitting the young man next to her in the throat.
Peggy closed her eyes and said a quick prayer.
It would be her last.
Chapter One
Friday, May 27th, 2016
Seattle, Washington
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I got fat.
Capital F.
Capital A.
Capital T.
FAT.
There were a lot of variables. Lack of exercise. Netflix. That new Dairy Queen Blizzard with all the fudge in the center. But those all came after the fact. After Gina moved back to Bolivia.
I met Gina Brady under dire circumstances the previous summer in South Africa. She was a doctor with the World Health Organization and had been living in a small village in Bolivia for the couple of years before we met. After we started dating, she moved to Washington and took a job at a clinic. Everything was going great, we were even talking about moving in together, when there was an outbreak of tuberculosis in her old village. That’s when she dropped the bomb.
The B-bomb.
She was moving back to Bolivia.
And she wanted me to come with her.
Let’s see, stay in a beautiful house overlooking Puget Sound or live in a hut in the freaking Amazon.
So I went with her.
Just kidding.
I declined her offer and watched a Naked and Afraid marathon on television. And I ate an entire pizza.
That was the beginning.
Of the fatness.
In the past, I would have been able to dig myself out of the funk that I found myself in. I would have gone for a couple of long runs, maybe phoned up an ex-girlfriend, maybe shot down to Tahiti for a couple of weeks.
But I couldn’t.
Get my legs to work.
I loved Gina. And to be honest, I considered moving with her to Bolivia. It would only have been for six months, just until the WHO could get a couple more doctors down there who spoke the language. But I couldn’t leave Harold. He could die at any second. I mean, when you looked at him, you would think he already had.
So I stayed.
On the rare occasion that my legs did cooperate, I let them carry me to the Willow Springs Nursing Home, also known as Fake Key West for People Who Are Like Seriously on Death’s Doorstep.
There isn’t a whole lot to do at a nursing home, and if Harold and I weren’t watching horse racing or playing chess—which Harold would unabashedly cheat at, constantly swapping his dead queen for pawns and thinking I wouldn’t notice—we were eating at the cafeteria.
Salisbury steak.
Macaroni and cheese.
Beef Wellington.
Pizza.
Tacos.
Salisbury steak.
Apple pie.
Cherry pie.
Peach pie.
Salisbury steak pie.
And then there were the cakes. Someone was always celebrating something. Mable is one hundred and ten, get her a cake. Wally’s third hip isn’t making that weird creaking sound anymore, get him a cake. Blanche’s niece just had a recital, get her a fucking cake.
By February, I’d put on ten pounds, which might not seem like all that much weight. But for someone who’d been running five miles nearly every day for twenty years, this was a colossal amount.
But I didn’t stop there. I put on another eight pounds in March. Then another twelve in April. And as of three days ago, I was two hundred and fifteen pounds, which was forty more than I usually carry on my six-foot frame.
That was the day Harold died.
You would think it would have been cancer or emphysema that got him in the end. I mean, he did smoke two packs of cigarettes every day for fifty years. At least that’s what he said. But not everything Harold Humphries said was true, and you had to take some of his admissions, stories, and anecdotes with a grain of salt. For instance, when he confided in me that he was voted “Most Handsome” his senior year in high school. Granted, I only saw what he looked like seventy years later, but it was hard to believe the wrinkled, spotted, Gollum-ish looking specimen had once been anything in the vicinity of attractive.
I asked him countless times to provide evidence to this fact—a photo, a drawing, a bronze bust—but he never complied.
Now I’m not saying the old guy was a liar. I’m just saying he was prone to the occasional hyperbole. Winning $10,000 at the racetrack in 1967 might have only been $5,000. Or the twelve corndogs he ate at the town fair. I mean, maybe it was only ten.
All that being said, the most important story—the story of how he met his first wife and how he gave their baby daughter up for adoption when his wife died during childbirth—this was true.
I had Harold’s and my DNA tested against each another. Harold was my maternal grandfather. The little girl he gave up for adoption was my mother.
Anyhow, like I said, it wasn’t the cigarettes that got him. It was, of all things, his beloved ducks.
Each day at lunch, Harold would get two pieces of bread from the cafeteria, and he would make his way out to the little pond in the courtyard of the nursing home. He had one of those steel walkers with the tennis balls on the bottom, and you could watch Braveheart in the time it took him to walk out there. He would sit on the wooden bench near the pond and toss bits of bread to the ducks. He would always try to throw the bread between two of them and hop
e for a bit of a wrestling match. That would always get him going.
Three days ago, Harold was feeding the ducks when apparently one of the ducks hopped up on the bench next to him and stole an entire piece of bread. I didn’t have to be there to know this would have thrilled Harold beyond words. And he would have laughed and laughed and laughed, and then he would have died.
He was ninety-two years old.
I was numb when the phone call came. I always expected I would have time to say goodbye, that he would catch pneumonia or something and I would get a week to prepare. That I would be able to tell him how much the last couple years meant to me. Though, in hindsight, it was better he went out the way he did. No suffering. Just sunshine, ducks, and laughter. We should all be so lucky.
Still, it hurt.
Still, three days later, I was raw.
There was a knock at the door and I craned my neck up off the sofa. I wasn’t expecting visitors, nor had I had a visitor in many months.
I pushed myself up with a grunt and plodded in my bear claw slippers to the front door. I was also wearing gray sweatpants and a Seattle Seahawks sweatshirt, size XXL. There was a grape jelly stain on the front of the sweatshirt that looked remarkably like Texas.
So yeah, I looked good.
I pulled the door open.
“Mr. Prescott?” inquired a gentleman in a tan overcoat. He was holding a blue umbrella, which shielded him from the unremitting Seattle drizzle.
