Mel shrugs. Jared blinks as if he didn’t hear me.
“Sharon’s never brought anyone home, has she?” Mel looks at me. “You’ve never brought any guys home. Have you?”
“I just figgered she was a dyke,” Jared says.
Mel caws and slaps her knees.
“Jared,” I yelp.
“What? That’s what happens in college, iddint it?”
“That’s exactly what happens in college,” Mel chortles.
“It is not,” I say.
Jared holds out his hands. “Settle down. You don’t wanna get Mom and them out here.”
“You’re right. I never brought anyone home,” I tell Mel. “Guess why.”
“Hey now. Your brother here, he’s all right. He knows what’s up.”
Jared tips the bill of his hat to me.
“So,” Mel says. “Sharon said something about Shauna’s house down there being new? Like some weirdo lived there before and something happened, and they tore the house down?”
I didn’t tell Mel any of this. She got it all from hours of Googling Faulkner, Kentucky. Looking up pictures of the property, now over ten years old. Honus Caudill, she pointed out to me, was the second search result after the Chamber of Commerce. She did as much research as she could, stopping when she came upon the same censored photographs of the girls, naked, with their eyes blotted out; she clapped the MacBook shut, put her hands in the air, and said, “That’s it. Done. I’m gonna need to drink for years to get that out of my head.”
I roll my eyes. “Honus Caudill,” I say to Jared.
Jared grunts, “Sick fuck.” Ashes with a backward snap of his wrist.
“So that’s Shauna’s house now, right?” Mel says.
Jared turns, peers in that direction. “Yeah, they knocked the old place down and rebuilt. She wanted to be close to Mom.”
“To count the number of times Kent’s car comes up the drive,” I mutter.
Jared snorts. “Probably.”
“Why’d they knock it down?” Mel asks.
Jared clears his throat. Says low, “Heard some of the stuff happened there.”
“Really?”
Jared nods.
“Shit.” Mel turns to me. “You were there, dude.”
Jared snaps to attention. “What?”
“Sharon used to play over there. When she was a kid.”
“No you didn’t,” Jared says to me. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“I used to play with Teddy Caudill,” I tell him. “We were the same age.”
His eyes are wide under the shadow of his hat brim. It’s the first time all night I’ve seen the color of his eyes, that milky cornflower blue. “Fuck. Are you okay?”
“Nothing happened to me,” I tell him. “I’m fine. We didn’t see his dad that much.” I snap my fingers at Mel’s cigarette, glaring at her: Shut up. She hands it over.
Jared stares at me, shaken. I think of him fathering three kids, of him having a teenage daughter. Melinda with her long legs and smartass reflexes. Him not yet forty, but close. I have never considered my brother a worrier.
The screen door slams shut on the hill and Shauna hustles out, purse over her shoulder. “Girls, I’m a-goin to Walmart. Who’s in?”
“I am.” Mel stubs her smoke out on her shoe. “I wanna see Faulkner. Sharon didn’t let us drive through on the way here.”
“Sharon’s ashamed of us,” Shauna sings, sashaying down. “Wanna go, Red?”
“Nah.”
Shauna pauses near us. “You still not drinking?”
“Sixty days.”
I look at Jared. He tugs at the bill of his hat.
“Good for you, babe.” She flicks her cell on. The light shines. She begins to toe carefully down the driveway in the dark. I see a large turtle plodding in the shadows. “I’m taking the good Chrysler cause I’m pissed at Brandon, so we gotta walk down. I can’t believe you all were screwing around by that old Chevy. Rattlesnakes just love to nest in those engines. Bites ain’t fun. Jaeden’ll tell you.”
We follow Shauna into the dark, whipping out our own cellphones and squinting at the ground. Halfway down, Mel whispers, “I got weed.”
I turn to her. “What?”
Shauna yells, “Hot damn. Let’s go,” and leans over to swat my butt before running ahead of us.
NIGHT RIDE
For maximum weed configuration, Mel takes shotgun. I’m in the backseat, where I glare at her and Shauna’s heads while we go the long way around Faulkner. Wind into the county’s upper kingdom in a chain of high hills, homes tucked so deeply out of sight the only marker is a wispy gravel driveway the width of one car. There is a fingernail moon in the sky.
Still there: the abandoned water treatment facility, a dingy blue glass building, side spray-painted: MENIFEE COUNTY EATS IT HARD. Saplings break through the concrete parking lot. Not there: the house where the lady we called Old Moses once maintained an actual burning bush in her front yard. The population sign that, when I was a kid, was perpetually pocked with bullet holes; a sign reading HOME OF THE 1968 KY STATE CLASS AA STATE BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS.
I lean toward Mel. “I thought you quit smoking.”
“I never said that.”
“I thought you meant to.”
“I said cut down. I never said quit. Besides, I think you’re in the clear now. Relax.”