I didn’t say, Right here, you’re looking at it. She knew.

  Ruby had started a grief group in her church. Mrs. Peggot was hanging in, with kids or grandkids going over there every day so she could fix them dinner. Maggot and Mariah were both still working at PetSmart and staying clean. I promised to go see him soon. The whole family knew about Maggot’s boyfriend now. Some of them prayed it was a stage he’d outgrow, most said hallelujah. June had met the young man himself. He actually was the store’s reptile expert, and kept a lot of snakes in glass boxes at his trailer home. I said that sounded about right.

  The apple in June’s eye was still Emmy. She’d moved into an apartment in Asheville with some other girls in recovery, somewhat like my situation. Probably minus the poker nights and porn. June said it was in an older building where Grace Kelly had lived at one time. I didn’t know who that was, but acted impressed. She got serious then, and asked if Emmy had hurt me.

  “How do you mean?”

  June did that thing of running both hands through her hair. “I don’t know. She’s such a charmer. You know what I mean. Guys are just moths to her flame. I’ve wondered if she was a little too dependent on all that.”

  I said I couldn’t speak for others, but I was never Emmy’s moth. “Well okay, maybe in the early days. She was my first love disaster. But I lived to fight another day.”

  June smiled. “You never were one to fall only halfway down the well, were you?”

  “No ma’am,” I said. “I fall all the way in.” Then I asked how was her love life, and she reached across the table and pinched my nose, like I was twelve.

  She told me Emmy loved Asheville to pieces. She had a job as a restaurant hostess and was in a sober and body-positive dance group, which believe it or not does exist. They put on shows. Emmy was thinking about going in the direction of theater, so. There’s Emmy, wagon hitched back up to the stars. I asked if she ever got homesick down there.

  June’s coffee cup froze halfway up to her mouth. “All the time. That’s what she says. But she can’t come back here. Not to live.” She said it with so much sadness. Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.

  June assumed I would be going to the program for Coach that night, and was relieved to hear I wasn’t. She still blamed him for my downfall. “The daughter, though, Angus. Are you two still friends? I ran into her yesterday at the health department.”

  In her emails, Angus had made her summer and short-term jobs here into dark comedies. The nursing home where people talked to the dead. The in-school aides that talked messed-up kids out of murdering their teachers. “An impressive young lady,” June called her, which I’m pretty sure was the first time in history those words were used on Angus. Or maybe not, what did I know anymore. My stomach did a thing every time Angus came up, because I really wanted to see her and really didn’t. Everything else had changed. So she would have changed. And I couldn’t take it.

  June hated to run off, as usual, but did. I got in the Beretta and sat with my hands on the wheel a good five minutes before it decided where to go. Murder Valley.

  My grandmother and Mr. Dick couldn’t get over it. Me! Showing up! Bygones definitely bygones, as far as failures to apply myself. Reaching the height of six foot four evidently gave me a pass on all previous sins. She kept saying she hadn’t thought I could look any more like my father, but look at me now. Mr. Dick for his part had the hots for my car. He wheeled himself all the way around it, looking it up one side and down the other, saying “It’s blue!” They invited me to dinner and asked if I was aiming to move in. I said just visiting, but thanks all the same.

  I whiled away the day looking at Mr. Dick’s newest kite and being handy. Got up on a ladder and cleaned their gutters. Unjammed a casement window that had been stuck open since August. Not the tight ship of its former days, that house. Miss Betsy told me Jane Ellen had graduated, and Mr. Dick winked at me, so I knew what that meant. By getting married. I wondered who did their driving. Dinner took forever because it was all on Miss Betsy and she was slowing down. The legs looking more than ever like bags of walnuts in stockings. A stool by the cookstove so she could stir sitting down. I know pain if I see it.

  At dinner they wanted to hear about the book I was writing. I was floored. How did they know about that? Angus. She’d told them all about the stories I put out on the computer, and my history book that was going to get published. Never at any time did the word “cartoons” come up, or “the adventures of Crash and Bernie, teenage addicts,” so Angus must have put a respectable spin on things, which I appreciated. I told them I would do a chapter in my book on the Melungeons, and was counting on Mr. Dick to help me with that. He looked tickled. At some later date I’d have to break it to them it was more pictures than words.

  They told me some about Coach, more about Angus. Things she’d not told me herself, such as being one of the smartest in her college class and winning awards. Her major was psychology, which I knew, and she planned to go back for even more school, which I didn’t. To be a counselor. I’d been around the block now, so was not like most guys I know, that would yell “headshrinker” and run for cover. Angus would be awesome at it. I told them I thought so.

  After supper Mr. Dick went to bed, Miss Betsy put her apron back on, and I washed all the dishes while she sat on her wooden stool and watched. I told her just sit, I’ve got this. Miss Betsy acted like she’d never seen a man clean up a kitchen before, which maybe she hadn’t.

  I wanted to keep her talking about Angus, so I asked questions. How often did she come down here, did she still have her Jeep Wrangler. Was she still working her badass angle, not that I used those words. What I really wanted to know was, is she still the same Angus. What kind of question is that? Obviously, if she was married or pregnant or anything along those lines, she’d have told me. But Miss Betsy had been hearing parts of her story that I hadn’t. I kept going at it sideways, like casting a line in the water and holding your mouth right. Getting no bites at all. Finally I asked Miss Betsy straight up: Does she have a boyfriend?

  I was scrubbing the glass dish she’d baked the bean casserole in. I didn’t look at her, just kept on digging with the steel wool. Finally she said, “I have my hunches about that.”

  I was careful not to drop the dish. I turned around. “What kind of hunches?”

  She’d taken her glasses off, and her face was like a snail without its shell. Slowly, slowly she cleaned the two-tone lenses with the corner of her apron. “I oughtn’t to say.”

  “Meaning what? She doesn’t like guys?”

  She seemed unshocked by the suggestion, which just slipped out. I’d wondered the same of Miss Betsy. But she said that was not her thinking.

  “O-kay,” I said, faking patience. I went back to the casserole dish and got that sucker clean as a whistle and nothing else was forthcoming from Miss Betsy. If she got up and left now, I’d probably shame myself by following her upstairs, wheedling.

  “I really don’t think she’d care if you told me,” I said. “She’s like my sister.”

  “But you’ve not asked her that question yourself.”

  “No,” I said. Busted.

  “Well, maybe you ought. I think she has set her cap for one fellow in particular.”

  With a statement like that, and Angus, you had to take it as cash on the barrelhead. She would set her damn hat. The guy would know. “Somebody she met in Nashville, then.”

  “I oughtn’t to say. She never told me outright. But you know me, I’m seldom wrong.”

  I was a good sport. Good for Angus. I hope they’ll be very happy.

  That night I stayed in the same bed as before, the ship with a wooden flagpole on each corner. I laid awake half the night running up every flag I could think of. Help. Surrender. Angus was my sister. I couldn’t want any more in the world than for her to be happy. So I would go to the wedding of her and Mr. Nashville. I would be her man-bridemaid, just like Dori in her sweet foggy brain had stood Angus up as my best girl-man in ours. Angus would have done that for me. My turn now, to throw popcorn at the happy couple. I let her go. It’s what I had to do, so I could get up in the morning and go see Coach.

  64

  The road from Murder Valley back to Lee County made me uneasy. Again, too many IEDs. This drive was where Angus and I had our only real fight, because she’d confessed to wanting to skip out on us all, to go to college, and I was counting up the hardships nailing me to the cross I’d dragged down this road: Here I got robbed by a truck-stop whore. Here I slept in a haystack. Shaking my mean little piggy bank of wrath. It set my teeth on edge, that memory, along with the sound of the wiper blades scraping a rime of hard frost on the windshield. The temperature had dropped overnight.

  I was so lucky, I realized then. That Angus put up with me as long as she did.

  The apartment building in Norton where Coach lived was the nicest place around, to the extent it almost didn’t belong here. Fancy paint job, gray with white trim on the outside stairs and porches. New planted trees and mowed grass all around the parking areas. Sidewalks. I saw kids out there tipping skateboards, like pavement was a normal thing. No clue.

  I’d called ahead, so Coach wasn’t surprised. The shock was on my side. Out with the red cap and whistle, in with the leather slippers and sad old man smell. The bushy eyebrows were white. He clapped me on the back and sat me in his living room on furniture I recognized from the old house. But the apartment looked as new inside as out. Carpet with vacuum marks, never-used fireplace. Coach was a whole new man in a tidy room. That’s the deal of sober life: celebrate the fresh start, suck up your sadness for all that was left behind. In Coach’s case, a shit ton of random sports equipment. Angus had told me about her hasty bulldoze of the big house, shoving the crap into back rooms before turning it over to some NASCAR group for office space. It rented for twice what they paid for this apartment. So they got by, after he stepped down from his job to focus on pulling it together. He’d been here the whole time Angus was away, and still looked like a bird perched in the wrong tree. He told me they’d decided to sell the house. The renters had cleared out, and Angus was trying to get it fit to show. She was over there now.

  I told him I was sorry I didn’t get to his party last night. Oh, man. He lit up, naming names of who all was there. Generations of Generals. Father-and-son linebackers on the field. It was something, he kept saying, I should have been there. I didn’t tell him I would only have seen the missing teeth in that smile. QB1 Fast Forward. Cornerback Hammer Kelly. Big Bear, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot. My predecessor Collins. Cush Polk, a cruelty to make you tear your hair. He had OD’d on what must have been his very first step off the narrow path. That good family, that preacher father, facing a coffin in wonder at God’s failed mercy. But Coach seemed content to dwell on another plane. He didn’t bring up the new coach or the losing season.

  Nor did we talk about U-Haul. He’d faced embezzlement charges, but it got complicated and he wiggled out with fines and probation. I got this news from Annie and Mr. Armstrong, that had tolerated U-Haul and his skank mother sliming them on rinse-and-repeat for years on end. Nobody was sorry to see those two slither away through the grass with no forwarding address.

  I helped Coach drink a pot of coffee and make small talk around all the bigger things I wanted to say. That I was thankful for what he’d seen in me, sorry for the parts I screwed up. His mistakes were no more than the common failing to see the worth of boys like me, beyond what work can be wrung out of us by a week’s end. Farm field, battlefield, football field. I have no words for that mess. But Coach and I were twelve-step brothers, there’s a code. I’d showed up.

  I pulled up to the mansion with knots in my gut. Which made no sense, it was just Angus. Hello goodbye. The sight of her Wrangler settled me some. Old four-wheel friend, the worse for wear. She’d mentioned putting over two hundred thousand on it, back and forth from Nashville.

  I stuck my head in the door just as she walked into the living room carrying a box, which she almost dropped, doing a surprised little two-step. “Jee-sus on a Popsicle stick.”

  “Back at you,” I said. It was freezing in there, they must have already cut off the utilities. She had on a red turtleneck and fleece type boots that looked like they’d come from the sheep to her feet with minimal processing. One of those overly colorful knitted hats with the earflaps and yarn braids hanging down. “Your pipes could freeze,” I said. “Want me to build you a fire?”

  She set down the box and frowned at the castle-size fireplace. We’d tried roasting marshmallows in there as kids, and it never ended well. “Nah. Let’s not burn the place down till I’ve got the cash in hand.”

  She stood there sizing me up, as people did now. I looked taller than I would ever feel.

  “On the other hand,” she said, “I’d better get some free labor out of you. Before you sell your book and get too famous for me to talk to. How’s Annie, by the way?”

  “Oh crap.” I’d learned from Mr. Armstrong that it was not a false alarm, and I should stay tuned. A call had come in while I was driving, that rolled over to messages. I read it now, aloud: Woodie Guthrie Amato Armstrong. Seven pounds, one ounce, twenty-two inches.

  “Seriously.” Her mouth shifted completely to one side, my favorite of all her smirks. I’d borrowed it for my character Bernie. If Angus noticed, she never said. “Are they too old to know what that’s going to be like, a little boy going to school with the name Woodie?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said. “By age five he’ll be going by something else.”

  “Like Hard-On.”

  “Exactly.”

  Another pause. We were a cold engine, not perfectly hitting.

  “Nice hat.”

  She pulled it off and looked at it. “Right? I bought it off a guy on the street in Nashville.” Set free, her hair sprang into action, somehow girlier than it used to be. We were standing in the exact places where we’d first met. I felt reckless, like setting something on fire for real.

  “Remember the first day I came here? And thought you were a boy?”

  The smirk shifted. “Angus, ‘like the cattle.’ ”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why did you let me go on like that, the whole day? You could have just said.”

  She stopped smiling. “Late in the day to start asking now.”

  I sensed myself picking a fight. The kind that helps you break up with somebody, evidently. “Right. I forget these things. How you always have to be queen of all the bees.”

  The gray eyes went through several changes of weather before they settled. “Can you not think at all about how that was for me? I had no say in the matter. Some kid I’ve never met is moving in with us. Coach is finally getting his boy.”

  “So you’re going to roll out the idiot carpet.”

  She shrugged. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened. I remember thinking, maybe this is my chance. Like we’d get along better as brothers or something.” She stared, waiting for me to catch up. “Being a girl in this house never got me anyplace great, you know?”

  And I’d missed it all. The evil red eyes of U-Haul on her little girl body, her dad’s neglect, one root cause. And then came me, regaling her with my conquests. “Damn,” I said. “I’m sorry for all that. You were the brother of all brothers. Or sister, you pick. A-team.”

  She smiled, but it was empty. “We missed you at the hootenanny last night.”

  “You didn’t even know I was in town.”

  “I did actually. June Peggot told me. And then you didn’t show up. I figured you’d blow in and out of town without saying hello.” She bent over to pick up her box. But I caught the thing in her eyes she was trying to hide.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” I almost had.

  I asked her if I could take a last look around the house. Really just to calm down. I went upstairs to the beanbag lounge, now a blank space with a stained ceiling. Came back downstairs and found her in Coach’s old office, sitting on the floor with paper piles spread in a complete circle around her, trying to figure out once and for all what needed to be saved. I asked about her job and she told me some about it, in-school services for kids that were wound too tight.

  “Miss Betsy said you’re lighting out again for more school. For doctor or something.”

  “Social worker. I’ve already lit out, technically. It’s a nonresidency thing, you do a lot of the coursework online. I’ll only have to be there in person a few months at a time.”

  “In Nashville?”

  “Kentucky.”

  I thought with a full heart of Viking and Gizmo. I took files she handed me and put them in a trash box. Getting up my nerve. “So. Miss Betsy tells me you’ve set your cap for some guy.”

  She gave me the longest, strangest look. So I changed the subject, trying to think of respectful questions to ask her about social work. Would it be in mental hospitals or what. She said her main interest was kids. Abusive situations, incarcerated parents. I said no shortage in the supply around here, and she said that’s what she was thinking. Job security.

  “You mean you’re planning on staying. Here.”

  She nodded. “And it sounds like you’re not. You could be a famous cartoonist from anyplace, you know. We got us some real broadband in these parts now.”

  “That’s all I’ve been thinking about for the last day and a half. It’s all I want, but I can’t picture it. Staying here as, you know. Who I am now. How do you even do it?”

  “I don’t know. Day at a time? You just do what needs to be done.”

  “But you’re god material, Angus. Not like the rest of us. You know that, right?”

  Those manga eyes. Was it really possible she didn’t?

  Back in the day, we never touched each other. Ever. The rule was hard and fast. But something made me reach over and open her right hand. I drew a heart on it, closed it up, and handed the fist back to her. “I’m sorry, god-dess material. There was never any confusion in my mind, after that first snafu. Just so you know.”