CALL EM, BITCH.
The rain come on hard, splatting off the headstones and dripping off the pine trees surrounding the cemetery. Fuck her. Fuck him. Fuck it all.
She heard a motor and looked up to see Hunter’s dumb ass driving back to where he’d let her out. She tucked the vodka in her pink camo backpack and walked down to where his Chevy idled.
“What?” she said.
“You just gonna sit out here all night in the rain?” Hunter said. “Jesus.”
“Maybe.”
“Get in.”
“I ain’t goin’ home.”
“You said that. I’ll take you to my cousin’s. Grab that damn towel. Shit, girl. Don’t get my seats all wet.”
She put on a pair of red sunglasses flecked with rain, and climbed in. She felt good and in control. “Okay,” she said. “Your cousin is cool.”
Kids only thought Rebecca was cool ’cause she was eighteen and had her own trailer. But she also had a two-year-old baby, bills, and a tenth-grade education. She’d ditched school about the time she got knocked up. When me, her, and the baby went shopping at the Walmart, folks stared like she was straight trash. Maybe it was all the bracelets she wore and the nose ring. People in Mississippi really got upset by that nose ring.
“What the hell, Hunter?” she said, walking barefoot from her trailer when she heard my truck. “What do you want?”
“To get out of the rain,” I said.
“This look like a motel to you?”
I shot Rebecca a look. She lit up a cigarette, stared down at Shelby all wet and chubby, and blew out some smoke. “Shit,” she said. “Come on in. Be quiet about it. Braden’s asleep.”
Rebecca tossed Shelby a clean towel as the rain drummed on the trailer. Shelby walked back to the bathroom while Rebecca pressed a hand on the kitchen counter. She was tall and thin and wearing a black T-shirt with the sleeves cut out. A tattoo on her right arm said, BRADEN. She’d gotten it done one night on Beale Street when she decided to quit drinking and smoking weed.
She looked to me and shook her head. “Y’all are screwed.”
“Why?”
“Johnny Law just called here about five minutes ago,” Rebecca said, smoke streaming from the edge of her mouth. “Sheriff’s looking for your girlfriend.”
Deputy Ricky Babb spent nearly a half hour with Leanne Dalton while she talked about how her daughter was a stupid, selfish shit and maybe crazy too. She said she wasn’t above committing Shelby, if things come to it. Leanne said her little girl didn’t make no sense most of the time and maybe she belonged in Whitfield. Babb wanted to tell her that if you could take a pill or do an electric shock for being a pain in the ass, he wouldn’t have a damn job.
But Babb just sat there on her tin-roofed porch, nodding along with problems kids got today, and waited to get some religion thrown in there. Just as he thought the woman had shut up, she mentioned a quote from The Purpose Driven Life. “God sometimes removes a person from your life for your protection. Don’t run after them.”
Babb never thought of God protecting a momma from her own child. But Leanne was pretty sure of it, saying that she didn’t have the money or time to put up with all Shelby’s bullshit and lies.
“How’s she lyin’?” Babb asked.
“’Cause that’s who she is,” Leanne said.
Babb sucked on his tooth, listening to the crackle of a radio call. A bunch of cows had broken out of fence on County Road 381. Son of a bitch. Nothing like herding cattle with a busted-ass Crown Vic. Least it wasn’t nighttime. Herding was a bitch at night. “What’s that, ma’am?”
“She accuses my husband of all kinds of things.”
“What kind of things?”
“What’s it matter?” she said. “Shelby’s a liar.”
“Yes ma’am,” Babb said. “These kids need to realize the road they’re paving to their future.”
Babb thought about all those cows heading down the county road, trying to break for the highway where they’d run out in front of semis and splatter the pavement with meat and blood.
He walked back to his patrol car, which he’d left running, and knocked her into drive.
“What do you think of that man your momma been seein’?” Shelby asked. “Jimmy or J.J. or whatever the fuck his name is.”
“Mac.”
“Yeah, Mac.”
“I guess I don’t think much of him,” I said. “He’s not my daddy or nothing. And he knows he’s not my daddy. My daddy lives in Jackson. He’ll always be my daddy.”
“My daddy is dead, but that doesn’t make it stop being a fact,” Shelby said. “Half of him is half of me.”
I nodded.
“Problem with Randy is he acts like he’s charge of me, my momma, and my brother,” she said. “Only reason he’s living with us is he’s paying the rent.”
“Yeah?”
“You bet,” Shelby said. “Payin’ it to my momma six inches at a time.”
“Shit, Shelby.”
“It’s true,” she said. “I hear him at night. His fat ass riding her like an old bicycle. I thought something was wrong with her one night, and I gone into the bedroom and seen her and him watching a dang porno movie and them doing it like dogs. His old fat, hairy ass on her, nasty breath in her ear. She seemed like she trying to get away. But him locking her down, holding her ass till he finished what he started.”
“Randy ain’t that bad,” I said. “They got a picture of him back in the day by the principal’s office. I heard he could bench-press three hundred pounds.”
Shelby looked like she was going to throw up. I slowed the truck.
“You okay?” I asked.
“Shit yeah.”
“You don’t look okay.”
“Just fucking drive, Hunter.”
“Doesn’t your momma work?” I said, hitting the gas, the dually pipes growling behind us. “I mean, she don’t need him.”
“She was working as a receptionist at an eye clinic for four years,” Shelby said. “She was real good at fitting glasses.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“I don’t care,” she said. “Somewhere. Anywhere. Put me out. Hell, it’s all the same.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I ain’t fuckin’ crying.”
“Ma’am, the school resource officer said Shelby Littlejohn rode off with Hunter this afternoon,” Deputy Babb said. “Have you heard from your son?”
“No sir,” Hunter’s mom said. “He do something wrong?”
The woman wore a big blue flowered dress that didn’t hide her big blue flowered ass, which was blocking the entire door. She looked down from the mouth of the trailer, soap opera blaring on the television, waiting for him to leave. The rain was in his eyes and soaking his uniform good.
“Where does he usually go after school?”
“He comes home,” she said. “Except during baseball season. You know he’s starting this year. Third base. I think he’s got a future.”
“Yes ma’am,” Babb said. “You think you might try and reach him on his cell phone?”
“He doesn’t have a cell phone,” she said. “Kids don’t need phones.”
“Lots of kids have them.”
“Good way for them to get in trouble,” she said. “With all that twittered and selfie stuff. Girls taking pictures in their panties and passing it around. That can just do nothing but make a teenage boy lose his mind.”
“Does Hunter work?”
“He sometimes works at the radiator shop over on old 7,” she said. “But that’s when he’s trying to get some new parts for his truck. You know how much he loves that truck.”