She broke our hug and looked up at me with those magnificent and often mischievous eyes. “Grandad?”
She always used a certain tone when she was about to ask me something she wasn’t sure about.
“Here it is. You’ve got that tone.”
Her bony shoulders shrugged beneath her T-shirt, which depicted a rock-and-roll band I’d never heard of. They were called the Flesh Eaters and she played their tapes a lot.
“I was just wondering if you’d be mad if I wrote it up.”
“Wrote what up?”
“You know. Somebody shooting at you.”
“Oh.”
“Mrs. Price’ll make us do one of those dorky how-I-spent-mysummer-vacation deals. It’d be cool if I could write about how a killer was stalking my Grandad.”
“Yeah,” I said, “that sure sounds cool all right.”
She grinned the grin and I saw both her mother and her grandmother in it. “I mean, I might ‘enhance’ it a little bit. But not a lot.”
“Fine by me, pumpkin,” I said, leading her over to the corner of the barn where several bales of hay would absorb a gun shot. “I’ll be right back.”
I figured that the shooter was most likely gone, long gone probably, but I wanted to make sure before I let Lisa stroll back into the barnyard.
I went up the ladder to the hayloft, sneezing all the way. My sinuses act up whenever I get even close to the loft. I used to think it was the hay but then I read a Farm Bulletin item saying it could be the rat droppings. For someone who grew up in the Hyde Park area of Chicago, rat droppings are not something you often consider as a sinus irritant. Farm life was different. I loved it.
I eased the loft door open a few inches. Then stopped.
I waited a full two minutes. No rifle fire.
I pushed the door open several more inches and looked outside. Miles of dark green corn and soybeans and alfalfa. On the hill just about where the mare was, I saw a tree where the gunman might have fired from. Gnarly old oak with branches stout enough for a hanging.
“Grandad?” Lisa called up from below.
“Yeah, hon?”
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, hon. How about you?”
“God, I shouldn’t have asked you if I could write about this for my class.”
“Oh, why not?”
“Because this could be real serious. I mean, maybe it wasn’t accidental.”
“Now you sound like your grandmother.”
“Huh?”
“She’d always do something and then get guilty and start apologizing.” I didn’t add that despite her apologies, her grandmother generally went right back to doing whatever she’d apologized for in the first place.
“I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings, Grandad.”
Lisa never used to treat me like this. So dutifully. Nor did her mother. To them, I was just the biggest kid in the family and was so treated. But the cancer changed all that. Now they’d do something spontaneous and then right away they’d start worrying. There’s a grim decorum that goes along with the disease. You become this big sad frail guy who, they seem to think, just can’t deal with any of life’s daily wear and tear.
That’s one of the nice things about my support group. We get to laugh a lot about the delicate way our loved ones treat us sometimes. It’s not mean laughter. Hell, we understand that they wouldn’t treat us this way if they didn’t love us, and love us a lot. But sometimes their dutifulness can be kind of funny in an endearing way.
“You ‘enhance’ it any way you want to, pumpkin,” I said, and started to look around at fields sprawling out in front of me.
I also started sneezing pretty bad again, too.
I spent ten more minutes in the loft, finally deciding it was safe for us to venture out as soon as we finished with the milking for the day.
On the way out of the barn, I said, “Don’t tell your mom. You know, about the gunshot.”
“How come?”
“You must be crazy, kid. You know how she worries about me.” Lisa smiled. “How about making a bargain?”
“Oh-oh. Here it comes.”
“I won’t tell Mom and you let me drive the tractor.”
Lots of farm kids die in tractor accidents every year. I didn’t want Lisa to be one of them. “I’ll think about it, how’s that?”
“Then I guess I’ll just have to think about it, too.” But she laughed.
I pulled her closer, my arm around her shoulder. “You think I’m wrong? About not telling your mom?”
She thought for a while. “Nah, I guess not. I mean, Mom really does worry about you a lot already.”
We were halfway to the house, a ranch-style home of blond brick with an evergreen windbreak and a white dish antenna east of the trees.
Just as we reached the walk leading to the house, I heard a heavy car come rumbling up the driveway, raising dust and setting both collies to barking. The car was a new baby blue Pontiac with official police insignia decaled on the side.
I stopped, turned around, grinned at Lisa. “Remember now, you’ve got Friday.”
“Yeah, I wish I had Saturday, the way you do.”
We’d been betting the last two weeks when Chief of Police Nick Bingham was going to ask Emmy to marry him. They’d been going out for three years, and two weeks ago Nick had said, “I’ve never said this to you before, Emmy, but you know when I turned forty last year? Well, ever since, I’ve had this loneliness right in here. A burning.” And of course my wiseass daughter had said, “Maybe it’s gas.” She told this to Lisa and me at breakfast the next morning, relishing the punchline.
Because Nick had never said anything like this at all in his three years of courting her, Emmy figured he was just about to pop the question.
So Lisa and I started this little pool. Last week I bet he’d ask her on Friday night and she’d bet he’d ask her on Saturday. But he hadn’t asked her either night. Now the weekend was approaching again.
Nick got out of the car in sections. In high school he’d played basketball on a team that had gone three times to state finals and had finished second twice. Nick had played center. He was just over six-five. He went three years to college but dropped out to finish harvest when his father died of a heart attack. He never got the degree. But he did become a good lawman.
“Morning,” he said.
“Pink glazed?” Lisa said when she saw the white sack dangling from his left hand.
“Two of ’em are, kiddo.”
“Can I have one?”
“No,” he said, pulling her to him and giving her a kind of affectionate Dutch rub. “You can have both of ’em.”
He wasn’t what you’d call handsome but there was a quiet manliness to the broken nose and the intelligent blue eyes that local ladies, including my own daughter, seemed to find attractive, especially when he was in his khaki uniform. They didn’t seem to mind that he was balding fast.
Emmy greeted us at the door in a blue sweatshirt and jeans and the kind of white Keds she’d worn ever since she was a tot. No high-priced running shoes for her. With her earnest little face and tortoiseshell glasses, she always reminded me of those quiet, pretty girls I never got to know in my high school class. Her blond hair was cinched in a ponytail that bobbed as she walked.
“Coffee’s on,” she said, taking the hug Nick offered as he came through the door.
We did this three, four times a week, Nick finishing up his morning meeting with his eight officers then stopping by Donut Dan’s and coming out here for breakfast.
Strictly speaking, I was supposed to be eating food a little more nutritional than donuts but this morning I decided to indulge.
The conversation ran its usual course. Lisa and Nick joked with each other, Emmy reminded me about all the vitamins and pills I was supposed to take every morning, and I told them about how hard a time I was having finding a few good extra hands for harvest.