“Really? You have to ask that? What have you spent your career doing? Asking questions, finding things out. You can’t do that for your cousin if you’re not getting paid for it?”
“That’s low,” I said.
“I don’t care! Marla’s family.”
“You want me to go around asking questions? What if I find out something that proves she really did this? What then?”
Mom pondered that for a second. “Then you’d find proof that she had a good reason.”
“Excuse me? For stabbing some woman to death?”
“I don’t mean it like that. I mean that she wasn’t in her right head. That she wasn’t responsible for what she did. If she did it, which I don’t think she did. Marla’s always been a good girl. Not quite like the rest of us, I know, but she’s not a mean girl. She’d never do anything like that. Not unless something had gone very wrong in her head.”
“Mom, honestly—”
“And besides, if it weren’t for her, you wouldn’t be sitting there right now.”
I went silent.
Dad said, “She’s got you there.”
I looked at him. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m not the only one with a bad memory,” Mom said. “You’ve forgotten what happened that summer at Agnes’s cabin?”
Marla had alluded to something when we were in the car.
“Wait a sec,” I said. “The raft. This is about the raft.” Back then, the Pickenses had built a wooden platform, about six by six, floated it on sealed oil drums, and anchored it a hundred feet from the shoreline. We’d go out there and dive off it.
“We’d told you not to go out there alone,” Mom said. “And especially we told you not to do flips off it. We kept telling you one day you’d hit your head on the edge.”
“Which, one day, I did,” I said, the incident now starting to come back to me.
“You knocked yourself out,” Dad said. “You did a flip, whacked your noggin on the edge of the raft, and went into the water unconscious.”
“Marla saw me,” I said.
“She was sitting on the dock, dangling her feet in the water, mooning after you—she had such a crush on you,” Mom said. “She saw you hit your head and go into the water facedown, and you didn’t move a muscle. She went running up to the cabin, screaming at the top of her lungs that something had happened. Agnes and I were sitting at the kitchen table playing cards. Agnes ran out of that cabin like she’d been shot out of a cannon. Jumped in the boat and went out there and got you.”
“I don’t really remember it,” I said. “I only remember being told about it, after.”
“You lost about a day,” Dad said. “Of memory. Agnes saved your life, but she’d never have had a chance if it wasn’t for Marla.”
“Think about that,” Mom said. “And you’ve got nothing else to do. You might as well be doing something useful.” She put her hand to her mouth, then reached out and touched my cheek. “I’m sorry. That was an awful thing to say.”
“And it’s not exactly true, anyway,” Dad said. “The boy got a job offer today.”
Forty years old, and still “the boy.” Still that boy who fell off that raft and nearly died.
“You did?” Mom said. “What is it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I have to think—”
“Randall Finley offered him a job as his right-hand man,” Dad said. “How about that?”
Mom looked nearly as horrified as when she’d taken the call from Marla’s father. “Finley? That horse’s ass? He’s offered David a job?”
“What’s wrong with Finley?” Dad shot back. “He’s a good man.”
“What’s he want David for?” she asked him.
“I’m right here,” I said.
“Gonna help him take another run at the mayor’s seat,” Dad said. “I bet, with David’s help, he could do it, too.”
Now she looked at me. “I forbid it.”
I sighed. “I haven’t given him an answer yet.”
“It pays a thousand dollars a week,” Dad said.
“I wouldn’t care if it paid a hundred thousand dollars a week,” she said. I had to admit, for that kind of money, right now I’d have done PR for the Taliban.
There was a knock at the door. Mom started to push herself away from the table, but Dad was already on the move. Once he was out of the kitchen, Mom said, “You can’t be serious.”
“It’d help until something better comes along,” I said. “I’m not a fan of the guy, but it’s a paycheck.”
She put her hand on mine a second time and closed her eyes. “Do what you have to do. I haven’t got the energy for this, not with everything else that’s going on. But I want you to help Marla. Will you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t know how. But . . . okay. I’ll . . . I don’t know . . . I’ll ask around. Maybe find something that helps.” I smiled sheepishly. “I don’t know how I could have forgotten about the raft.”