Carter sat cross-legged on the floor, beside the batteries. She was writing over the faded price tags with a black pen, careful not to make it look as though the price had been raised. The screen door slammed as Roy came back in, the “Closed” sign rattling behind him. “He’s not pressing charges,” he said. “I suppose he’ll lord that over us, too. Him and his kin.”
Carter reached for another row of batteries and spread them on the floor. “These flashlight batteries are almost expired.” She made a pile of the oldest ones. “It’s the double A’s people buy now, not so much the C’s and D’s. A lot of things take double A’s. I bet we sell three times as many A’s as all the others.” She set aside two packs of C’s.
Roy stood for a time beside Carter and looked about the store. His grandfather had made most of the shelves from two big oaks that fell in a neighbor’s back field. Roy had climbed on the shelves when he was small; their freshcut smell and sanded edges were a vivid memory. Since he’d taken over the store, he would shop now and then for modern shelving with hooks and nooks and movable parts, only to realize the old shelves were just fine. Probably they could use a good shellacking. It wasn’t going to happen now.
Carter’s hair had fallen about her face as she leaned over her stacks. He could see her scribbles on the clipboard, the numbers he would have to work at deciphering, the nines that resembled fours. She picked up the batteries she’d set aside. “I’m going to put these in the truck,” she said.
“Okay,” he said.
She stood for a moment, studying him. The crease he’d noticed lately between her brows was more pronounced today. Shadows rimmed her eyes. “We could still get by,” she said.
“I don’t know,” he said, shifting onto his right foot, the one that wasn’t hurting. “I just don’t know.”
Carter went out, her shirttail a mess of dust from the floor. She moved toward the Silverado, where the harsh October sun, low in the sky, glinted off the hood that hadn’t been washed in a month. The day she’d sat with him in the dealer’s showroom, jittery about the numbers, flustered over add-ons, they’d agreed right away to order the metallic blue. They thought they would never tire of that, the color of sky. The morning Roy picked up the truck, he’d climbed into the driver’s seat, stuck a CD in the changer and turned the music up high. He flew down the highway on top of the world.
I was born and raised in Kiser, a dinky, third-fiddle town near the Sabine River, a rank and slither-filled water that keeps Texas apart from Louisiana. Kiser had a town square with a courthouse on it, a drugstore, a hardware store, two banks that fought over the town’s six wealthy families, a furniture store owned by one of those families and two empty storefronts that the ladies used for bake sales and quilt shows. In the winter of 2003, when Kiser was still my home, my ex-wife Holly had just opened a yoga studio on Main Street. People in town were either proud or leery of her place, depending on their choice of church, and their reaction was one thing Holly and I could still laugh about. We’d been separated six months and we buried the rancor as often as we could for the sake of our son, whose path in life was hard enough. Frankie was eleven, a gifted child who heard voices from the trees and could multiply seven times eight by the time he was six. Where he got all that is anybody’s guess. He didn’t get it from me.
One Sunday that winter—Groundhog Day to be exact, with no shadow in sight for the critter—I was hiding out in my dreary apartment, avoiding the ruckus that had arrived in Kiser the day before when the shuttle came apart. The town had flown into action—gawking, searching, trying to help—but my altruistic get-up-and-go was tempered by a rawness in my throat and the hangover of a NyQuil slumber. And there was this: I had a big lot of things on my mind. Change had sidled up to me, and more was coming.
With a belly full of orange juice and dubious hope for a clearing head, I reached for the bench chisel next to my chair. A handsome piece of oak lay waiting for me on the floor. In the months since my separation I’d shaped enough heron, deer and hunting dogs to cover the filing cabinet that doubled as a nightstand in the reduced decor of my new life. I’d collected a laundry basket of worthy specimens—my job was foreman for a tree service—but my ideas, not to mention my abilities, fell short of the grace of this striated oak. Fungus and decay had drawn a pink arc through the middle and outlined the arc in purple. There’s only one right time to work with a spalted piece like that. Too soon and it’s not yet interesting, too late and it’s weak and rotten. Someday the piece would speak. A vibration from its next life would reach the conscious me and tell my fingers how to begin.
A phone call from Holly snapped me out of my stupor. She was living with Frankie at her parents’ place, a thirty-acre ranchette north of town. Holly didn’t call often. I could tell she was bothered; the pitch of her voice was high. “You won’t believe this,” she said. “What Frankie found.” He’d gone out early looking for shuttle fragments. Guiding his pony through heavy brush, he looked up and saw an orange space suit wedged in the crook of a tall tree. There was an astronaut’s torso inside it.
“Did you go and see?” I pressed. “Do you know for sure?”
“It’s in those trees next to Parkers’ place. God, Wes. It’s awful.”
“A body still intact?”
“Fell out of the sky. Just like that.”
“Jesus. Where’s Frankie now?” A picture came to mind I didn’t much like: Frankie under a tree, looking up.
“Mom’s fixing him lunch. If he can eat it. I couldn’t. He wanted to go back. I caught him with Dad’s binoculars.”
“Jesus,” I said again. “Hide them.”
“Grady says for you to drive over with the bucket truck.”
My brother was chief of the volunteer fire department; I understood what he was asking. Someone had to go up in that tree and bring down what was stuck. “Twenty minutes,” I said. The company rig was just down the road.
“Wes?”
I knew this tone, a slight drawing out of my short name. Holly was going to change the subject. It was a pattern in our lives, her wanting to talk, and me wanting to duck.
“Grady’s your brother and he loves you,” she said. “You need to tell him what’s going on.”
“Right now,” I said, “I need to go.”
I put an apple in my pocket and grabbed an old pair of gloves I could throw out tomorrow. The dead made me squeamish, something Grady well knew. I’m not like him, steady and rock-solid. He’s the most honest man I’ve ever known. We were in the same state, marriage-wise, but when Eileen fell out of love with him, she just told him. There was no hemming and hawing, no philandering, no telling him she couldn’t love him the way she should, this last being what I told Holly. Grady left Eileen, walked away from corporate life in Tulsa, moved back to Kiser and bought a business for himself. He didn’t want his old life anymore and he knew it. In Kiser they loved him for that, rejecting the big city. He joined the fire squad and they made him chief right away, though the honeymoon wouldn’t last. He’s too conscientious for a town like Kiser.
I hadn’t spoken to my brother in two weeks, since we’d gotten into it while cooking ribs on Mom’s birthday. He thought Holly and I should reconcile.
“I didn’t second guess you about your marriage,” I’d told him. “Don’t second guess me.”
“We didn’t have kids,” Grady said.
“You think I’m happy about that? But for Frankie to see Holly and me like that, barely speaking, tension you could cut like wire, it was worse.”
Mom used to say that Grady was born into adulthood, very sure of what he knew. Growing up, everything about him was so measured, so wise, so ordered, it made me want to scream.