The Drifter(19)
There was no way Betsy could have known that on the opposite side of 34th Street just hours before she struggled to climb the hill, swerving down the slope that made her fight for air that morning, was a man in a stolen car, struggling to focus on the road through the tears streaming across his temples, blown by the air coming in through the window. Betsy would later read that man had cried tears of confusion, remorse for the girl he’d slaughtered in her room. The victim, his second in a week, had just returned from the gym with plans to shower and head to work, the graveyard shift manning the switchboard at the sheriff’s office, of all places. But he was waiting for her in a closet, having pried the sliding-glass door open with a screwdriver. When she didn’t show up to work by midnight, an hour after her shift started, or answer the phone at her house, a patrol car drove out to her apartment to see if she was OK. She was found on her bed, stabbed in the back five times with a foot-long blade, and wiped clean of her own blood. She was his second victim in the eight days since he’d rolled into town.
All Betsy knew was that there were a shitload of oranges to squeeze by 7:00 a.m., and that this was the year her life would change. Later, she thought, she’d smear veggie spread on a toasted sesame and try to swap it for a slice out back.
CHAPTER 5
GAVIN
August 25, 1990: Morning
Hey, do y’all have any fresh-squeezed juice?”
Betsy heard the smug, raspy giggle. Even with her back turned she knew it was the moron. It had been three solid months since she’d heard that drawl, the smoker’s cough, the relentless sarcasm she once mistook for humor. There was a time when she found that rebellious but still preppy Southern thing—the fraying Izod, the ball cap pulled low, the hard pack of Camels in the back pocket, the flattened Reef flip-flops, the easy smile, the giant Chevy Suburban with Georgia plates that smelled, eternally, of gasoline—irresistible. But she quickly realized that these guys came with a package deal, and the package included a habit of traveling for jam band shows and playing endless rounds of golf. As a bonus, they also came with frequent visits from a condescending, plastic-nosed mother and/or sister, regular lost magic-mushroom weekends, and a baffling number of out-of-town fishing trips (the latter two were often concurrent events).
“Hey, Mack, no freebies today,” she said without looking up. “Tom’s onto my ways and he’s started counting the cups.” The morning rush had vanished, along with her caffeine high, and she was in no mood for assholes.
“I’m a paying customer today. Semester’s just started and I’m flush.” He laughed. “So I guess we’ll take two.”
It was the “we” that got her attention. She turned around to see Mack, tan and lean from a summer caddying on Hilton Head, standing next to Gavin.
LAST SPRING AT the Dish, a gritty club downtown, American Music Club was in town to play to a packed house of about forty-three people. Betsy had pleaded with Ginny to go with her, even bartered joining her on a drive to Ocala to visit her grandmother, Nana Jean, the following day. By 11:00, the band still hadn’t made it onto the stage. Ginny, with her shiny brown hair and royal blue miniskirt, beamed like a distress signal.
“So this is where you go,” Ginny said, glancing around at the sparse groups of filthy T-shirt-clad guys, “when you’re not with us?”
“You mean when I’m not drinking three-dollar pitchers at a bar called Balls?” she said. “Honestly, Gin, is that the best they could do? Balls? At least at Hooters they’re going for a somewhat veiled innuendo with the owl thing. But a sports bar called Balls is just lazy and, frankly, a little gross.”
“Um, three-dollar pitchers?” Ginny leaned in to whisper in her ear, “They could call it Scrotum and I would still show up every Thursday.”
“And who is the ‘us’ you’re referring to, anyway? You and Caroline?” said Betsy.
“Well, yeah, me and Caroline. Plus every other person we know,” said Ginny.
A guy wearing giant black glasses and a faded Kool-Aid T-shirt walked by, nodded, and offered a barely audible “What’s up, Bets?”
“Or at least everyone I know,” Ginny said, pausing to see if that was a good moment to bring up what she’d been avoiding for weeks. “You know, you could tell Caroline you’re sorry and just move on. It would be so easy. You wouldn’t even have to mean it.”
“Sorry for what? What do I have to be sorry about?” Betsy barked at her.
At that point, to Betsy’s relief, the band took the stage, albeit with the bombast and dynamism of a slug. Sullen and exhausted, they were met with a single woot and some limp applause. After what seemed like endless tuning, Mark Eitzel, the lead singer, had a bit of a meltdown onstage, though calling it that lent it more drama than it deserved. He looked around at the sparse crowd, which must have seemed pathetic to someone who’d been somewhere else, anywhere else, but seemed perfectly fine to anyone who hadn’t, made a kind of condescending harrumphing sound into the mic and stormed off the stage. It was more like a minor tantrum than a breakdown. The band must have been used to his antics because after the drummer and bass player exchanged a weary glance, they shrugged and kept playing. Within a few minutes, when it was clear Eitzel would not return, a guy from the audience hopped on the stage, shook the guitarist’s hand, whispered something to him, and lumbered over to the mic stand.