Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 150, Nos. 5 & 6. Whole Nos. 914 & 915, November/December 2017

Wendell and Joni and Dianne and Me by Tim L. Williams

In the decade or so since Tim L. Williams first started contributing to EQMM, he's earned two Thriller Awards, an Edgar nomination, and two Shamus nominations, all for work that appeared in our pages. Two of his stories have also been included in Best American Mystery Stories (2004 and 2012). The Kentucky author’s latest collection is Skull Fragments; he's a professor by day.

On the morning my wife’s ex-husband is supposed to plead guilty to misdemeanor assault and begin serving his plea-bargained one hundred and twenty days, he shows up at our house with two quarts of beer and a stuffed giraffe for his little girl. The plan was for me to swing by his place a couple of hours before his scheduled court appearance, but Wendell has always had a knack for fouling the best of plans. When I open the back door, bleary-eyed and shivering in the hazy light of dawn, I’m not happy to see him, but I’m not particularly surprised either.

“Did I wake you up?” he asks. “I did, didn’t I?”

“It’s all right,” I say. “Come in.”

He nods and grins, but instead of stepping across the threshold, he stands there as if his brain and legs have been disconnected. “It’s colder than a witch’s teat,” he says after a second. “We’re supposed to get a big snow. You remember when we were little and we used to take those inner tubes off of Five Spot Hill?” He runs his hands through his greasy, sand-colored hair. “We were always the first out there, weren’t we?” His breath is steaming, his face ruddy from the cold. I glance past him at a fresh dusting of snow. It’s been a hard winter so far, but I know it’s likely to get a lot harder before it’s over.

“Come on in, Wendell. I don’t really want to turn my kitchen into an ice rink.”

“Oh,” he says. “Right. Sorry.”

He stomps snow from his boots, steps inside, and closes the door. He stares around our kitchen as if it’s a place he’s never seen before and then sets the quarts of beer on the table and smiles. “The lawyers didn’t say anything in the plea deal about me showing up sober,” he says.

For a second, he looks as if he’s about to burst into a bout of wild laughter, but he just shrugs and stands by the table with the oversized giraffe tucked under his arm. “I brought it for Joni,” he says.

“Let me put on some coffee.”

While it’s making, he paces through the kitchen. Every few seconds, he stops at the table and touches the cap on one of the quarts of Falls City but doesn’t bother to open it. He’s jittery, on edge, and I figure he’s had more than a couple of hits of speed to go along with the booze that’s wafting from his skin.

“You get any sleep last night?” I ask.

He shakes his head, stands at the refrigerator, tracing the souvenir magnets Dianne picked up at the Smoky Mountains, Daytona Beach, the Magic Kingdom, places we visited before Peabody packed up its operation and I lost my job at the River Queen mines. We were living a good life back then — Dianne, Joni, and me. We had a three-bedroom ranch house on the north side of Greenview, a new car for Dianne in our drive, a savings account at First Kentucky Bank, money to take vacations a couple of times a year. The savings account was the first to go, then Dianne’s car, finally the house. Now we barely have enough money to keep our checking account open; Dianne drives a ’63 VW with a slipping transmission and rust-cancer on the doors, and we live in this cramped and shoddy rental house at the end of a gravel road that dead-ends at a strip mine. When the leaves are off the trees like they are now, I can stand on my rotting front porch and see the coal shovel I once operated rising over the skeletal branches of the hickories and poplars on the horizon. No matter what he thinks, Wendell isn’t the only one who has come to know hard times.

“Dianne was always on me to take her places,” he says now. “But I never had the money.”

Instead of pointing out that he never had the money because he threw it away on booze and pills and women, I say, “That was a long time ago, Wendell. That was another lifetime.”

He turns to face me. “Don’t tell me that,” he says. “You think I don’t know it? You’re not as smart as you believe you are, Jerry. You never were.”

“Sit down,” I say. “Have some coffee.”

“You think she loves you? That she fell head over heels?” he says, his voice quavering. “That’s what you think, isn’t it?”

“Leave it alone,” I say, not wanting this and not wanting him here in my kitchen and not wanting anything to go the way I know it will.

“Man, she picked you because you had money at the time. She thought your job at Peabody would keep you all rolling in it from now till death do us part. She thought she’d punched her ticket when she spread her legs.” He sweeps his arm to take in the paint-flecked cabinets and peeling wallpaper and the ripped linoleum on the floor. “Just look how that turned out.” His laugh is an ugly, shrill cackle that makes my stomach flutter. “I ain’t as stupid as everybody thinks I am,” he says. “I’ve got prospects when I get out. Who knows? Dianne might just crawl right back between my sheets before all of this is over.”

He smirks as if he’s got a secret, but he doesn’t. A week ago last Saturday, he showed up drunk and stoned, caught between strutting pride and weepy self-pity. We sat at the kitchen table and drank straight through until dawn. Before he passed out, he told me about the six thousand dollars he stole from Hugh Mitchell — a local real-estate developer, schoolboard member, and the former and most likely soon to be again county commissioner. Wendell told me more than I wanted to hear about how he’d come to be spending the night with Mitchell while the man’s family was out of town and why Mitchell, who he’d robbed and beaten, had used his influence to have the charges dropped to a misdemeanor and then get Wendell released on his own recognizance until his court date.

“I know,” I say now. “You’ve got a rainy-day fund tucked away. You told me that.”

On the night he told me all of that, he was one or two beers shy of comatose and doesn’t remember exactly what he said. It feels good to see the uncertainty in his face.

“But I didn’t give you details,” he says with more hope than certainty.

“Nah,” I say. “Just that you had some cash tucked away somewhere and weren’t proud of how you got it. I’ll tell you the truth. It didn’t make much sense.”

“That’s the story of my frigging life,” he says. “I might have been talking about anything.”

He takes out a cigaret, fumbles through his pocket until he finds a lighter. “Hey,” he says once he has it going. “You want to get out of here? Maybe pick up a case of beer, some sausage biscuits from the Pantry, spend the morning driving around and see what kind of trouble we can find. Like back in high school.”

“Wendell, I only went drinking with you once or twice back then. You were running with the Avery brothers full-time.”

He scratches the stubble on his cheeks. “Christ, I wish you hadn’t mentioned them. Three or four nights a week, I dream I was with them when they ran their old Merc into the river. When I wake up, I still hear them screaming.”

“Look,” I say. “I’ll fix you something here. I’ll scramble some eggs.”

He squints at me through a cloud of smoke. “You got any Tabasco?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “We’ve got ketchup.”

“It’s not the same,” he says. “I can’t stand eggs without hot sauce.”

“Dianne told me that.”

“She also tell you I’m a lot better in the sack than you?”

“The way I remember it, she said it was the other way around.”

He winks at me. “Well, that’s all right. I don’t reckon it hurts for her to lie to make you feel better.”

We stand there, grinning at each other across the kitchen, and for a second, I think I’m actually going to miss him. When we were kids we were best friends, a pair of white-trash boys from the hollows who spent their summers and weekends roaming the woods and playing pirate along the banks of the Green River. But by high school, we started drifting away. In our sophomore year, Wendell discovered the joys of Falls City beer and Kentucky Tavern whiskey while I stayed more or less sober and did my best to limp towards graduation. The month after I made it, Wendell went to prison for stealing a car, and thirteen months after that, I went to Vietnam. When I got out of the army, I wasted a year or so drifting, then nineteen months working the oil fields in Louisiana, and finally, nearly three years hauling cars out of Jacksonville, Florida, before I came home and lucked into a job at River Queen. On the night I first bumped into Dianne at Redheaded Ray’s Roadhouse, it had been years since I’d said as much as hello to Wendell, and she had already served him with divorce papers while he was serving ninety days on a possession charge. Back then Joni was just learning to talk. She insisted on calling Wendell “Daddy” and me “Da.” Everything about my relationship with Wendell and Joni and Dianne is complicated. Sometimes my life feels like an end-of-term exam for a class I’ve never attended.

Now, Wendell turns on the transistor radio Dianne keeps on the shelf over the sink. A nasal-voiced reporter drones on about the hostages in Iran and the challenge President Carter is facing from Ted Kennedy and the rising price of gasoline and heating oil. Wendell fiddles with the dial, and country music fades in and out before he settles on a weather report. Cold today with flurries, colder tonight with a winter storm set to kick in by sunset.

“You ever take Joni sledding?” he asks.

“A couple of times,” I say.

“But not at Five Spot Hill.”

“No,” I say. “Of course not.”

He turns off the radio, then sits at the kitchen table and picks up the giraffe. “I want to give this to her,” he says.

“She’s staying with Dianne’s mom up in Elizabethtown. You know that.”

He glares at me. “Christ,” he says, “I don’t even get to see my little girl before I go inside.”

I remind him he said his goodbye last Monday when he came to dinner. Joni is getting old enough to ask questions — which is why Dianne had him over and fixed a baked lasagna as a special treat, why we’d told Joni that he’d found work up in Chicago and wouldn’t be back until summer.

Now he says, “I know, man, I know, okay. The booze makes me cloudy.” He picks up the giraffe and then sets it back down. “You’ll give it to her, though, right? Tell her it’s from me.” He drops his half-smoked cigaret into an empty RC can and sighs. “Hell, a hundred and twenty days isn’t that long,” he says. “I’ll be back before the fishing gets goods.”

“Sure,” I say. “But you don’t fish.”

He smiles and trails his thumbnail along the rim of the can. “Maybe I’ll start. Get off the booze and the drugs, get my head together so I can keep a regular job. I’ve got to do something. I mean, I tell myself that everything’s fine, that I’m maintaining. But look at me now, man.” He sighs, hides his face in his hands. “Jesus, I wish I’d never met Hugh Mitchell.”

I don’t point out that meeting him didn’t mean he had to beat him up, steal his money, and threaten to expose his secret unless Mitchell intervened to get him a better deal. I don’t remind him that he’s said this same thing about fresh starts and fishing at least a half-dozen times. He looks low enough this morning, so I keep my thoughts to myself.

“Listen to me,” he says. “There are worse places than jail, aren’t there?”

“Yeah,” I say. “There are.”

He runs his tongue over his bottom lip. “You never talk about Vietnam. I bet you saw some things. Probably killed some people.”

“That was a long time ago.”

He studies my face for a second, grins. “What’s the worst thing you’ve done?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t think you can say that until your life’s over.”

“That’s frigging cheerful,” he says. “If you ever think about volunteering for one of those suicide hotlines, don’t do it. Trust me. It’s a bad idea.”

I close my eyes for a second and fight the temptation to throw him out of my house and put an end to all of this forever. But I know I can’t do that, so I tell myself it will be over soon and then tell Wendell what he wants to hear.

“You’re right,” I say. “We ought to get out of here. Hell, I’ve almost forgotten what it’s like to drink a few early-morning beers.”

He stares at me, a grin playing at the corner of his mouth. “Really? You’re actually going to call in sick, lose a day’s pay to get buzzed with your old buddy Wendell. Somebody better call Ripley’s because I’m not sure I believe this crap.”

I don’t say that I’m not scheduled for work until Monday morning or that three lousy days a week for minimum wage is all the Greenview IGA will give me for stocking shelves and carrying out groceries alongside a bunch of school kids. He wouldn’t hear me and probably wouldn’t care if he did.

“What about Dianne?” he asks.

“I’ll leave a note.”

He looks at me as if he’s trying to figure out whether or not I’m joking. “I was asking if you care if I talk to her a minute, say my goodbyes.”

I tell him that’s fine, and I mean it. He and Dianne had a life together years before I came along. Now I pour myself a cup of coffee, lean against the kitchen sink, and listen to the creaky hinges on my bedroom door. A minute later, I can hear the murmur of their voices, but I can’t make out what they’re saying. It doesn’t matter to me anyway.

Wind as sharp and unforgiving as barbed wire slashes my face and neck when I step out the back door. Wendell’s Jeep is parked behind my truck, and the sight of it is an annoyance. There’s a good chance he’ll want to drive. Typical Wendell, I think. The only real talent he’s ever had is for making things harder than they need to be.

I unlock my truck, open the glove box, and take out my .38 revolver from under a stack of receipts and registration slips and unopened bills. I’ve owned it since my truck-driving days, but it’s never been used for anything other than busting bottles and plinking cans. Still, the world is a dangerous place, and I’ve always felt better having it with me. Now I drop it in my coat pocket, stare out at snow blowing in swirling strings across a dead cornfield, and then go back inside.

They’re still talking, so I give in to temptation and smoke one of the Marlboros I’ve been trying to quit. I pick up the stuffed giraffe and run my hand over its felt and listen to the muffled sound of Wendell sobbing. It occurs to me that for Wendell, self-pity is as much of an addiction as booze or pills.

While I wait for them to finish, I stare at the shifting tendrils of smoke caught in the light sifting through the kitchen window and think how Wendell’s too dumb to realize he’s the one who has it easy. Dianne and I are down to ninety-three dollars in our checking account. I’ve given up on worrying about unpaid bills, but in less than a week we’ll be two months behind on our rent, and the retired electrician who owns the house is already talking eviction. We’re nearly out of options, and the ones that are left aren’t good. Dianne claims she can’t stay at her parents’ house, that none of the things that led her to marry Wendell two weeks after she met him have changed and that when she left home for Harps County she swore she’d never go back. But what does that leave us? Sleeping in a car or taking shelter in a deserted shed or barn? There’s a part of me that wants to slap Wendell and let him know that there are worse things to face than a hundred and twenty days of hot meals and a rent-free bed.

When I hear the sound of his footsteps, I turn and force a smile, say, “I’ve got most of a case of Old Milwaukee in the fridge.”

“Look at you,” he says. “And I was beginning to think you didn’t love me anymore.”

The word love makes me uneasy, so I blow it off as quickly as I can. “What are you doing, Wendell? Practicing your pillow talk for your first night back in jail?”

A twinge of anger or shame flashes in his expression, and I wish I’d made some other joke, but then he gives me a wide, toothy grin. “Hey, man, don’t knock it till you try it.” He blows me a kiss, then sighs. “We used to be friends, didn’t we? Good friends, I mean, almost like brothers when we were little kids?”

“Sure,” I say. “Sure we did.”

“And now?”

I think about lying just to get him out of the door, but I figure I owe him at least a little truth this morning. “And now it’s complicated,” I say.

An hour later, we’re parked on a small rise that looks down upon a black-water coal pit deep in the River Queen mines and surrounded on three sides by weed fields, slag heaps, and trash-strewn ravines. There are half a dozen empty beer cans on the Jeep’s floorboard, but only one of them is mine. My head throbs, and my stomach is aching and sour, but I listen to his half-true stories about things he did back in high school while I sweat inside my parka and gloves. I crack the window, take a deep breath, then watch a dark figure move through weeds on the far side of the water. I want to believe that it’s a large fox or even a wolf, but I know it’s really nothing more than a half-starved, unwanted dog that won’t make it through the winter.

“Jesus,” Wendell says. “You didn’t hear a frigging word I said, did you?”

“No,” I admit. “Sorry.”

“Look at me, Jerry.”

When I do I see he’s holding a gun. It’s a little .25 automatic, ivory handled and dainty, the kind of a gun you’d expect to find in an elderly lady’s purse. Still, it looks plenty lethal now that it’s pointed at my face. I’m an ex-truck driver and an unemployed coal miner, not a gunslinger. If he means to shoot me, the revolver in my coat pocket will be every bit as useful as a pack of gum, and I feel stupid for not believing it could go this way.

“Give me three reasons why I shouldn’t shoot you,” he says.

“Wendell,” I say. “What are you doing?”

“I’m giving you a chance. Surely you can come up with three frigging reasons why you should go on sucking air.”

His eyes are wide and threaded with red, the skin on his face sheened with sweat. He looks crazy, drugged out, serious. And for one horrible moment, I seize on the idea that this is what he and Dianne were talking about — that all of this was a ruse to get me out here. But I know that thought’s ridiculous. Wendell has never needed help coming up with stupid and dangerous ideas.

“Don’t do this, man,” I say. “This isn’t going to accomplish anything.”

“Sorry. That’s not a good enough reason.”

“Damn it, Wendell,” I say, blinking sweat from my eyes. “I know things look bleak right now. But it’s a hundred and twenty days, for Christ’s sake. You kill me, they’ll know who did it, and you’ll never get out again.”

“That’s not what I want to hear. I want to hear why you should go on living, Jerry. That’s what I’m frigging trying to get to here.”

“This is crazy,” I say.

He gives me a weary sigh. “You can’t do it, can you? Hey, that’s all right. I tried to think of a couple for you, and I couldn’t come up with a single one either.”

My breath hitches in the middle of my chest, and I feel dizzy and lightheaded. I don’t want to see the moment his finger tightens on the trigger, so I shut my eyes and wait for it to happen. An eternity later, Wendell shouts, “Bang!”

When I open my eyes, he’s grinning. He flips the gun to show me the clip is missing, and I clutch the door handle to stop myself from either fainting or beating him silly.

“You should have seen the look on your face, man. Priceless, brother. It was priceless.” He giggles and shakes his head. “I’m sorry, man. I just couldn’t resist.”

I wipe my mouth on the back of my wrist, take a second for my heartbeat to settle. “You’re an ass,” I say. “One of the biggest jerks I’ve ever met. You’re a frigging idiot, Wendell.”

“I know it,” he says, struggling to keep from laughing. “But I can’t help it. I was born that way.” He punches my shoulder. “I was just playing, man. You’re not really mad, are you?”

I reach over, turn off the engine, and yank the keys from the ignition. “You frigging jerk,” I say.

“What are you doing? Give me my keys.”

“No way,” I tell him. “If you’re drunk and high enough for this crap, you’re not driving me anywhere.”

“Oh, come on. You used to have a sense of humor.”

“I’m not mad,” I say, figuring one more lie won’t hurt anything. “But this way you can drink yourself stupid before I drop you at the courthouse door, and I don’t have to worry about you running us into a tree or off an embankment.”

He puffs his cheeks with air like a kid considering a troubling math problem and then nods. “Yeah,” he says. “Okay.”

“And give me the damn gun.”

“It’s not loaded. I lost the clip like six months ago.”

I speak to him like a patient father explaining cause and effect to a thick-headed kid. “Let’s say you forget about it and walk into the courthouse with a gun in your pocket. Do you think any of those deputies are going to ask you about whether or not it’s loaded before one of them puts a bullet in you? I swear to God, Wendell. You never use your head.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right,” he says. “Thanks for looking out.”

When he hands me the pistol, I lock it in his glove compartment and then tell him we need to change places. His eyes grow wide and panicked. For a moment, it looks as if he means to jump out and make a run for it.

“It’s not time yet, is it?” he says. “I’ve still got awhile.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” I say. “But I don’t want to have to drag your butt from underneath the wheel if you pass out.”

He runs his hand over the stubble on his jaw and chin. “Last time I was in there, they locked up this eighteen-or nineteen-year-old kid in the cell next to mine. He bawled all night, man. I mean wept. Guys were shouting for him to shut up. The jailer came in and warned him to quieten down, but he kept at it. Then, real deep in the night, he just stopped crying and didn’t make another sound.”

“Christ,” I said. “He killed himself.”

“Nah. He didn’t kill himself. He just wore out and went to sleep, I guess.”

“Okay.”

“Hold on. The next morning, we were in the rec room after breakfast, playing cards and watching television, the way you do in jail. Anyway, I guess they didn’t do much of a search on him the night before — maybe because he was just a kid locked up for public intoxication or maybe because, hell, those numb nuts at the jail are just lazy. Whatever the reason, he managed to smuggle in a pocketknife, and he pulled it out in the rec room. Walked right up to Rex Payton, who was in the cell next to mine, and cut his throat. Just like that, man. One second Rex is watching Password and the next he’s bleeding out on the floor.”

“Why?” I ask, trying not to remember some of the guys I saw buy it in Vietnam.

He shrugs. “I don’t know. He never said a word, just dropped the pocket-knife, sat down beside Rex, and went back to weeping. That’s when I swore I was never going back to jail. But hey, so much for good intentions.” He drains the rest of his beer and belches. “What the hell. You want to change sides, let’s do it. I need to take a whizz anyway.”

He reaches into the floorboard for a fresh beer, then opens his door. A gust of cold air hits me, and I want to change my mind and stay right where I am. But I know I can’t put this off any longer, so I pull the .38 from my pocket and step outside. He’s standing in front of the Jeep, shoulders hunched against the wind, when I point the gun at his stomach.

“Christ, Jerry. You’re even stealing my jokes now.”

“Sorry, Wendell,” I say. “I’m not playing.”

“Hey, man, what the hell are you doing?” he asks.

But he figures it out on his own just before I pull the trigger.

By the time I make it home, my face and my lips are numb, and the cold has worked its way through my parka and lodged deep in the marrow of my bones. Walking a direct path down the haul roads to the state highway would have been bad enough on a day like this, but I couldn’t even allow myself that luxury. Instead I looped through the mines, hiking fields, and woods, descending into deep, briar-choked ravines and climbing slag heaps and sandstone hills until I came out at Bern Eason’s abandoned farm a quarter of a mile from our house. Now, I’m half frozen and covered in cuts and scratches and so tired I can barely stumble forward.

I stop at the rusted oil drum at the edge of our yard and look down at the smoldering embers. I pick up a broken branch, rake the ashes, hoping that I’m wrong, but I’m not. All that’s left of the giraffe is its shiny, button eyes.

When I open the kitchen door, the heat is a fist that staggers me. I unzip my parka, shrug it from my shoulders, and hang it on the back of a kitchen chair. Later, I’ll need to burn my coat and gloves for caution’s sake, but I figure that can wait at least a little while. I tug my flannel shirt from my jeans and pull the oversized manila envelope from where I wedged it between my stomach and belt, pitch it on the table. Then I grab a stray can of Old Milwaukee from the fridge, sit down in a kitchen chair, and hold the envelope in my hand. Six thousand dollars minus a few hundred he threw away on drugs and women and beer.

The money makes it better, makes it easier to not think about what I had to do to Wendell between the first shot in his stomach and the final one to his head. Instead I focus on what came afterwards — the moment I rolled his corpse into the pit’s cold, black water, the drive to his place to retrieve the manila envelope from the toolbox he’d wedged in the crawlspace beneath his house, the drive back to the River Queen mines where I ran his Jeep off an embankment a mile or so from where I’d killed him. I go through it once and then replay it again, looking for any detail I might have missed, any trap I might have left for myself.

I know I’m being foolish. Tonight’s snowfall will cover whatever mistake I might have made. Besides, this isn’t New York or Chicago or San Francisco. In this part of Kentucky, no one asks many questions when a parttime criminal and a full-time loser like Wendell turns up dead.

I leave my empty beer can on the table and head for the bedroom, so tired and sore I can barely manage more than an old man’s shuffle. It’s nearly noon, but the shades are drawn and Dianne’s huddled beneath the covers.

“You’re freezing,” she says when I touch my foot to her warm leg.

“You burned the giraffe?”

“I didn’t want it here,” she says. “I figured every time I looked at it I’d remember. Who needs that?”

I kiss her shoulder blade. “He just really wanted Joni to have it.”

“He always wanted,” she says. “That was his problem.”

“Yeah,” I say. “But a stuffed giraffe for six thousand dollars seems like a pretty good deal.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out in an exasperated sigh. “It wasn’t just the money. You know that, Jerry. We could have stolen it from him if it was the money I was most worried about. This was for Joni. No matter how good his intentions or how much he believed he loved her he would have hurt her. No one deserves to have a father like that. Trust me on that.”

“I do,” I say. “But I did get the money. In case you’re wondering.” She’s quiet for a few seconds and then says, “Was it hard to get him to give it up?”

I don’t want to tell her the truth about what I had to do, about how he hadn’t listened to reason, hadn’t cared that the money was the only thing that was going to keep Joni from sleeping in abandoned cars and scrounging garbage bins for food. At one time Wendell was my friend, and I don’t want to admit what I did or that it was only his fear of pain that finally caused him to tell me his hiding place. The way I see it, one more lie is the least I can do for the boys we once were.

“It wasn’t hard, not after I explained the situation,” I say. “Not after I made him see it was one last thing he could do for Joni.”

She lets out a harsh, raspy breath. “He wasn’t your friend, Jerry. Maybe you want to think he was, but he wasn’t. I could tell you things.”

“Don’t,” I say. “It doesn’t matter now.”

She scooches close and presses her hip against me. “It’s all right,” she says. “We did what we needed to do and now it’s over. You know that, don’t you? I love you and you love me and this is how we find our happily ever after. You know that.”

“Sure,” I say. “I know that.”

But the truth is I don’t know anything at all. The world and everyone in it seems too complicated for me to understand. At one point Dianne must have loved Wendell, but now, she’s relieved that he’s dead. When we were kids, Wendell was my best friend, but it’s been a long, long time since I was a kid, and those old memories didn’t stop me from putting a bullet in his head. And what about Joni? Will she really be better off without her father? I know he loved her, but Dianne’s right. Love hadn’t stopped him from drinking and drugging himself stupid or stealing from his neighbor or robbing, beating, and then, somehow worst of all, blackmailing a middle-aged man who was terrified his family might find out about his inclinations. But were Dianne and I any better? She says we didn’t kill him for the money, and even if she’s right, that won’t stop us from catching up on our rent and stocking our fridge.

Jerry and Dianne and Wendell and Joni. It’s always been complicated. The only thing that’s for certain is that whether he deserved it or not, Wendell’s dead. But as hard as I try, I can’t find any comfort in that, so I press closer to Dianne, feel the heat rising from her skin and breathe in the scent of shampoo in her hair. Those are good, simple things, and I hold onto them as tightly as I can.

© 2017 by Tim L. Williams