Next of Kin, page 9
Momma laughed. “You were more than a bit of one. But I’m talking about you and your cousin! Sweet pea, she’s acting out at you to make it easier on you both when she’s married.”
Sherrilyn pointed the iron at me again. “That’s right, it’s psychological. She wants to ease the separation. She loves you is all.”
“Whatever. She’s getting married, not moving away,” I said, and sighed, feeling my shoulders loosen a little. At least I wasn’t just imagining Nikki’s attitude toward me had changed. But something smaller, harder had lodged itself inside me—I really was afraid of losing her and the thought made my throat close up.
Momma clicked her tongue. “Sonny and his brother—now, I don’t know about that relationship.”
My great-aunt Jewel, who’d said she was “just resting her eyes” while she sat under the dryer, suddenly perked up. The woman loved a good bitch sesh. “I tell you what, it’s plain disrespectful,” she said. “Not that I minded doing the catering, I didn’t, but that boy wasted my dime last night. Whole plate of good food. Rude is what it is. Poor Sonny. That’s all I have to say to have a brother who treats him like that.”
My lips parted. They knew I’d gone searching for Clint last night, but not what else had happened. Despite my chosen profession I wasn’t a natural liar, especially when it came to my mother, my aunts, or Nikki.
Sherrilyn saw my lip twitch, had started to say something, but trailed off as her eyes drifted to the shop window. “Speak of the devil, there’s Dee now. I told her and the grandmother to come get ready with us girls. Lord knows Dee needs the help. I’ve been dying to fix her foundation, it’s like two shades off. She looks like a little ghost.”
Sherrilyn didn’t dislike Sonny and Clint’s mother, but she acted like it was us versus them when it came to the idea of Nikki having in-laws. Talk about armchair psychology. My family has always been loyal and clannish. Nikki and Sonny’s whirlwind engagement—I wasn’t the only one in my family who’d given her crap about it—didn’t seem to bother Sonny’s people, which struck us all as suspicious. Also, Nikki apparently had already starting calling Dee “Mom,” which really set Sherrilyn off.
“Hey there!” Dee said as the bell above the door tinkled, and Nikki hopped up to give her and Sonny and Clint’s grandma a big hug, pulling the women over to hang with the bridesmaids. But pale, ghostlike Dee lingered at the door. Tiny and round, her hair was a nest of springy curls cut chin-length, her highlights to cover up grays now taking up most of the real estate. Momma perched on the counter and offered the salon chair to her.
“Tina, Sherrilyn, good to see y’all,” Dee said.
Momma smiled. “Hey, hon, good to see you, too.”
Dee turned to me. “Annie, my gosh, with your hair done up like that you and your cousin could be twins,” she said with a little shrug of the shoulders. She wore a stretchy, baby-blue top and matching, floral-printed capri pants with tassels on the hems. Pink pudgy feet crammed into white kitten heels. She looked like an adult-sized Shirley Temple.
“Thanks,” I said. “Can’t believe it’s the big day.” Seeing Sonny and Clint’s mother right now felt like meeting the friend of a friend you’ve stalked on Instagram. Like having to pretend you’ve no idea what their dog’s name is or that they just came back from vacation. Despite knowing Clint was adopted, I could see something of him in her. Their smiles, maybe. How she tilted her chin and raised her eyebrows. Like how long-married couples seem to look alike, maybe the same was true of adoptive families. I wasn’t sure if Clint had told her about his birth family. Fairly certain it was no, given how adamant he was that I leave her out of my research.
“I know! I can’t believe these kids—no offense, Annie,” Dee said, laughing. “That these actual children are getting married, y’all! I certainly don’t feel that old.”
Aunt Jewel and Momma laughed, and Sherrilyn poured her a mimosa. “Girl, you’re telling me. Now, what do you want me to do with your hair and makeup? I’m almost done with Annie’s.”
“Oh, I’m already ready!”
Momma and Sherrilyn locked eyes in the mirror and smiled at the same time. “Oh, of course,” Sherrilyn said. “You look great. Very relaxed.”
Either oblivious or choosing to ignore the slight, Dee again did that little shoulder shrug, which I was beginning to think was a tic. “Well, I already apologized to Nikki, but I should apologize to you all, too. I’m sorry about Clint not coming last night. I still haven’t been able to reach him today. I did talk with him yesterday, though. He was upset because he’d been having problems with his girlfriend. Think he was going to rip the Band-Aid off and break up with her. They’d been together for over a year.”
Sherrilyn frowned. “We were only worried about him. Is that like him to not answer his phone? I mean, Nikki’s glued to hers.”
“Honestly, yes,” Dee said, and her face crumpled a bit. “It scares me when he does it, but he kind of goes silent when he hits a snag. Bless his heart, Clint’s struggled with depression and anxiety ever since he was a teenager.”
Momma and Sherrilyn made sympathetic noises, but Aunt Jewel pitched forward from under the dryer. “What? Depressed? What’s he got to be down about?” she said, and my face reddened. I couldn’t stand to look at Jewel when she acted this obtuse, which was fairly often.
“It’s a complicated disease, ma’am, and it got worse after my ex-husband passed,” Dee said stoically, glancing between the three of them, her hands folded in her lap. She looked like she was on trial. “I should’ve recognized that clearly, he’s been struggling. He told me last week he thought someone was following him. Just paranoid, you know.”
My stomach did a quick flip.
“He seemed to be feeling better, but then yesterday he tells me he’s breaking up with Amanda because he’s not wanting to be tied down. Said he’s trying to make moves with his music, that he might be going to Nashville. I was surprised about Amanda, such a nice girl, and I argued with him about it, not seeing this shakeup for what it is, which is a distress signal.”
“Oh, my,” said Momma, and placed her hand on Dee’s shoulder. “What can we do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Figure he’s embarrassed. He’ll rally for the wedding, though. He wouldn’t abandon Sonny.”
I was sweating bullets under the black cape. I could say something about his birth family search, about Cody even, but stopped—Dee only needed to know where Clint was and if he was okay. I didn’t see how hurting her feelings would help now. It occurred to me that Clint telling her he’d leave Texas wasn’t exactly the erratic behavior she seemed to think it was, given he’d told me as much on the day he’d hired me. It sounded like what Clint had done was what Momma had been trying to say about me and Nikki. You hurt people to make yourself hurt less, to get out with less remorse. All this talk of Clint’s depression made me wonder now if Cody had suffered, too. Depression ran in families—what if Lorena simply didn’t want to see that Cody had the disease? The spark in the back of my mind, the needling, livid voice telling me the suicide designation wasn’t right—was that a false flag?
“We understand, Dee,” said Sherrilyn, genuine sympathy in her voice this time. “No need to worry just yet, hon.”
She misted my head with hair spray. The beachy waves she’d created were now lacquered into place, and the baby hairs matted to my forehead pulled against my skin when I smiled at her in the mirror. Though flammable, my hair did look great. “Lots of volume,” I said. “Thank—”
“Hey, y’all, I just got this from Sonny,” Nikki interrupted, hurrying over to stand behind my chair. “Apparently Clint texted him a few minutes ago.”
“Thank you, Jesus,” Dee whispered.
Nikki’s raised her chin in Dee’s direction. “Yeah, well, apparently Mr. Big Time told Sonny he’s not going to make it. That he has a chance to write with some producer in Nashville this weekend and that he has to go. That’s all he said—not even that he’s sorry!”
“Is Sonny real upset?” Momma asked, squeezing Nikki’s shoulder.
“’Course he is. This is a real dick move,” Nikki said, and immediately put her hand to her mouth. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Marshall. I didn’t mean that—”
“It’s alright, honey. Lord, these boys. Y’all excuse me,” Dee said, looking at her feet as she scrambled down from the salon chair. “I’ll be out here, Momma, I need to make a call,” she hollered at Sonny’s grandma, who was still sitting toward the back.
“I didn’t mean to offend her, but come on,” Nikki said after the door shut.
“Clint’s not well,” Momma said. “Apparently he’s been struggling with his depression.”
“Sonny’s feelings matter, too!”
I watched Dee through the window. She hid under the awning of the laundromat next door, pressed the phone to her ear, and I felt a surge of gratitude on Clint’s behalf. I shouldn’t pretend to know the deal with Lorena, but I did know Clint was likely lucky to have gained a parent in Dee. What made Clint’s and Cody’s paths so different at the end of the day, if not partly for the difference between their mothers? Of the world they came up in? I got out of the chair and went outside. The call either ended quickly, or he—Clint or Sonny, I assumed—didn’t answer.
“I’m sorry,” I said, sidling up to her. “This has to be extra stressful for you being in the middle.”
“I heard what you do,” she said. Her face looked drawn, tired in the off-color light of the yellow awning. “Sonny told us. Now, Clint would see me coming a mile away and get mad if I were to go after him, but maybe you could do it quietly for me. I know he’ll call once he gets back from his trip, but Lord help me, what if he doesn’t?”
Not coming clean now was actually making me sick—my mouth tasted sour, the mimosa rising in my throat—and I swallowed hard.
“I can pay you for your time. I’m just a mom, you know, I’ll always be a little worried about him, no matter how big he gets,” she said, and her eyes turned glassy with tears. But there was also a steeliness to her gaze, the way she held mine. She loved Clint, no matter how badly he’d messed up, hurt her feelings, or embarrassed her, and I wondered if he knew that. Really knew that.
“Don’t worry about money,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”
“Between you and me, Annie, I understand Clint’s decision and would do the same. Big opportunities don’t come around twice. You have to take what’s yours. I always told him, no one’s going to help you if you don’t help yourself.”
I opened my mouth, caught off guard by her comment. Bit my tongue to stop myself from saying anything tacky, or that I thought it sounded selfish. If I’d have done what Clint did, my mother would’ve lit into me. Thinking so made me feel like a scold. Kind of like Aunt Jewel any time we ate out. She’d get worked up over kids at other tables ripping the menus without recrimination, or coloring on the walls, then point out the parents exhibiting a variety of dipshit behaviors, like being rude to the waiter. She liked to say it’s a hard thing to escape your raising, and I couldn’t help but agree with her.
Chapter Thirteen
A front blew in right as we were leaving the salon, a stroke of good luck. Not too humid, only the memory of the earlier, wilting heat left lingering in the stillness, in the crunch of dead grass under high heels. Time had gone so slowly until that moment, when everything seemed to speed up, when the ceremony was really happening and there was no going back. The wedding went too quickly for how long we’d been waiting it seemed, and when it was over, a moonless night shrouding the pavilion, I felt stunned. I tried to forget all that was happening in time and space outside my universe of friends, family, and the twinkly-lit rodeo fairgrounds wrapped in pretty paper streamers. But the lines had blurred. Cody and his death weren’t so removed from the flushed cheeks, the laughter, a night so full of life. It wasn’t only his connection to Clint—whose absence felt like a presence in itself—but the ways the past kept overlapping.
The robbery twenty-six years ago was another presence in the room. At the reception, Dee clocked Leroy, recognizing him as the sheriff who’d saved her life that fateful day. I saw them talking at the buffet, and idled in front of tinfoil trays of brisket and vats of cole slaw to eavesdrop. Notes of admiration and thanks from her, bashful platitudes from him. No mention of the outlaw Ronnie Mott or of Clint’s blood relation. Dee sat alone at her table after their brief conversation, her mind clearly elsewhere. She sat with her lips pursed through the speeches, until it was time to dance with Sonny, and even then, she seemed self-conscious, hyperaware of how people were watching.
For the past year—being home, working this job—I’d been trying to hold the love and the grief I felt over people and ghosts equally and at once, not pretending that one cancels out the other. It was hard. Drink-induced or not, for a moment I was able to get down to the layer underneath the love and the grief, to the place that’s simply being. The place that’s sitting under the pavilion waiting for the fan to complete its rotation, tasting a brown sugar scrim left on my lips after the last bite of cake, to Leroy sitting at the table telling me and Wyatt a story about how the river used to freeze over thick enough that he could walk across water. Listening so intently I felt the fragile blue wonder under my own feet, could picture the faintest crack in its mirrorlike surface.
* * *
Early Sunday morning, our doorbell rang. I woke from an open-mouthed, flatline sleep and stared at my phone—it wasn’t even nine yet. Peeking through the curtains, I saw a Garnett County Sheriff’s Department vehicle parked in the driveway and my heartbeat kicked up. Hands skating over the carpet, I grabbed my bridesmaid dress from where I’d flung it off last night and pulled it over my head. Shook Wyatt’s arm to wake him, but he groaned and rolled onto his stomach. The doorbell rang again, and I hurried into the hall.
I opened the door wide, blinking in the bright sun. Sheriff Garcia looked like he’d been pulled out of Mass, wearing dress pants instead of his usual jeans, no cowboy hat. Standing slightly to the side of him was a second, younger man wearing a black windbreaker. I guessed he was also a cop by his neutral but tense facial expressions, eyes roving side to side. Sheriff Garcia and my family went far back, him being Leroy’s successor, and we’d worked together on two recent cases. I knew him to be loud and blustery, prone to good-old-boy asides, and worried why his face was this somber. He must’ve come to deliver bad news—an accident, I worried—and tears rose quickly in my eyes. But Garcia shook his head. “Oh, no, hon, everyone’s okay. We’re coming by on account of you. Mr. Howland here’s an agent with the DEA.”
I’d been so scared I hadn’t noticed that the man’s jacket said as much, that his ball cap also had the agency’s logo above the bill.
“Trent Howland,” the man said, extending his hand. His grip was flimsy, the kind Dad would’ve corrected me on as a kid. He didn’t seem to want to be on my doorstep this early, either.
I led them inside. Garcia looked toward the couch and I nodded, motioning them to sit. Manners and such, I figured I should offer them something to drink, but all we had in the fridge was milk and a single beer. I looked toward the kitchen. “Water?”
They declined, and I sank into the recliner opposite them. Given our relationship, Garcia should’ve called me before showing up like this. This felt weirdly confrontational. And I felt uneasy with them seeing me un-showered, in last night’s wrinkled dress and no bra, with mascara and black liner smudged under my eyes. I looked—and probably smelled—like a racoon who’d rolled in a puddle of vodka.
Garcia frowned. “Name Eli Wallace ring a bell?”
I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. The wave of nausea I’d been fighting since they got here rose in my throat. “I saw him the other day. Not sure he saw me.”
“I meant to come warn you he’s back in town,” Garcia said, and I stopped myself from making a snarky comment about a handy new invention called the cell phone. Hell, there’s even text. My head throbbed. I hated myself when I drank too much—not so dissimilar from the self-loathing I felt when I let myself feel scared. When I let myself into the back room in my mind where such thoughts might paralyze me. Last spring, Eli Wallace had escaped prosecution despite a major raid on his place that turned up weapons and counterfeit opioids. Hearing rumors that I was responsible for the tip-off, he’d threatened to teach me a lesson, bragging about it to his cellmate while he was in county lockup. And yet, he’d left town not long after he was released. I honestly wasn’t sure what to think after I’d seen him at the pool hall. Maybe I’d let myself relax too much these past two weeks when I hadn’t seen more signs of him.
“Where was this sighting?” the agent asked me.
“Cowboys, out near the county line.”
“Here’s the deal,” he said, his eyes darting over my shoulder. Wyatt had started making noises from the back of the house, and he lowered his voice a notch. “My unit is building up a case against Wallace. He’s been on my radar for a while now, but recently we traced back lethal doses of fentanyl to pills he distributed. One of the deceased was fifteen, another, thirteen. It’s my understanding from the sheriff here that you witnessed his counterfeit opioid production?”
“Yes,” I said, looking at Garcia. “Like I told the sheriff, I saw what I believed to be a pill press on the property. I saw cash, drugs, handguns stored in an old woodstove. I also witnessed a violent assault on another man that day.”
