LITMIR.BIZ

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top of his pants, like a woman in her final months of pregnancy, and his skin is slack and sallow. I haven’t inherited anything obvious from my father except his auburn hair, but today Hearty’s is the color of Georgia mud.

      “Came to get money…” He stops, as if trying to remember what he was just saying. “That grandmother of your’n,” he finishes, after a long moment during which he sways from side to side, as if considering which way to fall.

      “Gran doesn’t have any money, Hearty. Her check comes next week, and there’s nothing left of the last one.” I remember what my grandmother has told me and change the subject. “Listen, while you’re here, one of those girls up there said she saw your truck, and you got a flat tire in the front. I’ll go back with you. Maybe we can wrestle it off together.”

      “You…come with me?” He snorts. “Since…when you want to be anywhere I am?”

      “You want help with that tire or not?” I ask.

      “Ran out of gas.” He stares beyond me, as if looking for my grandmother so he can plead his case.

      Hearty works in the woods cutting and hauling lumber, but he rarely has money. When he manages to gather a little he buys gas and liquor, in that order, since this is a dry county and he needs the first to get the second. I doubt he’s really run out of gas, but I bet he’s run out of liquor.

      I hear a noise behind me and turn. Mrs. Pittman is coming toward us. Her dress has red-and-white checks, like a tablecloth Gran uses in the summertime, and the skirt snaps angrily against her calves.

      “That…ol’ scarecrow…” Hearty spreads his hands in some odd sort of illustration, and the motion nearly sends him careening into me.

      “What’s happening here?” Mrs. Pittman asks in a voice that says she already knows.

      “Nobody…ast you for a ’pinion,” Hearty says.

      “You owe this child better than showing up in public looking the way you do,” Mrs. Pittman says. “You’re embarrassing her and your mother-in-law.”

      “Don’t care.” Hearty waves his hands again. “I need money. You got some you want to rid yourself of, I’ll take it…and be gone.”

      “You’re lower than a rattlesnake, Hearty Hale. You ought to get down on your knees and beg the Lord for forgiveness. You’ve tried the patience of the rest of us for too long. He’s all that’s left.”

      Hearty spits on the ground at his feet. “Somebody here’ll give me money.”

      “Not as long as I’m standing here. Now you go back the way you came, you hear?”

      By now I want to throw myself off a mountain ledge. I know everyone is watching, and a glance over my shoulder shows two of the men from the service are coming up behind Mrs. Pittman, one of them the morning’s preacher, the other Sally Klaver’s father. I realize that most likely they are spurred by embarrassment that a woman has been forced to lead the charge.

      Hearty sees them, too, and realizes they aren’t coming to help him. With a snarl, he falls forward. I’m not sure if he propels himself in Mrs. Pittman’s direction, or if he merely loses his precarious balance, but without thinking I sidestep quickly and just in time. In a moment my father is sprawled on top of Mrs. Pittman, pinning her to the ground.

      The men launch themselves forward to drag Hearty away. As drunk as he is, he fights back, slugging the preacher in the stomach with a fist, kicking out at Mr. Klaver with the toe of his worn work boot. It’s all over in a moment. While sober he might have held his own, now he’s slow and uncoordinated. The men grab him under the armpits and haul him off Mrs. Pittman, who sits up, then manages, with my help, to get to her feet. By then Gran has joined us.

      Hearty is blinking hard, as if trying to remember what’s just happened.

      “You hurt, Mrs. Pittman?” Mr. Klaver asks, shoving Hearty to one side. “He hurt you?”

      She looks a little dazed, but she shakes her head and begins to brush off her checkered dress. “He wants money.”

      “You don’t give a man like this money.” Mr. Klaver looks at Gran. “What are you going to do about him? Why’d you let him come here, anyway?”

      I want to weep, but Mrs. Pittman intervenes. “What are you saying? She’s an old woman. There’s nothing she can do, but the men in this community might consider forming a plan. She and that girl need protection, not accusations.”

      “Hearty’s never hurt either of us,” Gran says. “He just drinks.”

      “And lies and steals,” the preacher says. “Don’t pretend he don’t. He’ll take anything that’s not nailed down and claim he didn’t, so he can buy himself more liquor. People ’round here pretend they don’t see, because they respect you. But one of these days he’ll go too far, and somebody’ll come after him with a shotgun.”

      “I’ll take…my shotgun to them first,” Hearty says, just before he bends double and vomits at the preacher’s feet.

      “You’uns leave us.” Gran shakes her head as her son-in-law retches and heaves. “We’ll get him out of here. But we’ll have better luck doing it without you. I’m sorry it’s come to this.”

      “No,” Mrs. Pittman says sharply. “These men will walk him back to wherever he came from. I’m taking you home myself. You got stuck with Hearty Hale when your daughter made a foolish decision, but you don’t have to be stuck with him today. Now come along.”

      I hope my grandmother will refuse, that the command in the other woman’s voice will anger her enough she’ll stay right here. I don’t want to walk back to the preacher’s car and face the knots of churchgoers again, not as long as I live. But Gran looks the way a dog does after he’s been whipped. She doesn’t have the strength to refuse. Instead, she starts hobbling after the preacher’s wife and beckons for me to join her.

      The walk back through the lot and over to the preacher’s car is the longest I’ve ever made. I can feel every eye staring at me, particularly Sally’s, and I know what everybody is thinking.

      If I ever harbored hope that someday people might overlook the man who fathered me and see me for the person I am, now I know that hope was foolish. I will always be Lottie Lou Hale, the daughter of no-good Hearty Hale. And as long as I live in Trust, North Carolina, my future has already been decided.

      Chapter Five

      THE COFFEE SHOP where Charlotte had settled to write in her journal had been recently remodeled. Now it was officially a bistro, with a newly painted sign announcing it had evolved, but it was still called Cuppa. The Orange Peel, a music venue down the street, was probably awakening for a long night and beginning to attract patrons, and she was glad she had arrived early enough to find parking.

      Cuppa had a row of tall windows looking over the street and fancifully trimmed topiaries between each set. Ferns hung in the window, and the hostess stand was flanked by trios of potted palms. Once past the hostess stand, though, Charlotte had seen just how casual the little restaurant was. Denim ruled, and several patrons had set up laptops on their tables. More were talking on cell phones with nothing in front of them except steaming mugs. A coffee bar jutted from one side of the room, and two young women stood there chatting and waiting for the barista to supply their order. Maybe the owners had added space for more tables and real food, but at heart the place probably hadn’t changed much.

      When she had asked for a quiet table, a young man in a green T-shirt had led her as far away from the hubbub as he could without pushing her through the emergency exit, and for a long time she’d had the area to herself. But now that she was finished writing in her journal, it was dinnertime, and a family with two squabbling preschoolers was divvying up a pizza at the table beside hers. A middle-age couple, who looked as if they’d either had a bad day or engineered one for everybody else, had just been seated steps away from both tables,

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