The Narrows(28)

The look that swam briefly across her mother’s face made Brandy uncomfortable.

Wendy Crawly looked over her shoulder and back out into the yard. She said, “I guess it could’ve fallen from the clothes line without anyone noticing.”

Brandy followed her mother’s gaze to the length of rubber cord that ran from the porch to the side of the garage, about four and a half feet off the ground. It drooped slightly in the middle. Then she turned back to her mother, who was fingering a series of holes in the T-shirt. “That kid,” Wendy muttered then stomped past her daughter back into the house.

Brandy turned back toward the yard. Something flapping against the low chain-link fence caught her eye. She stepped into a pair of her mother’s sandals that had been left on the porch and crossed down into the yard and over to the fence. Bending down, she saw a dollar bill caught in the diamond-shaped lattice of the fence.

Back in the kitchen, with the dollar bill tucked securely in the waistband of her lacrosse shorts, Brandy dumped the remainder of her breakfast into the trash then washed off the plate at the sink. She could hear her mother in the living room, searching for her purse and cursing quietly to herself.

“Your purse is in the laundry room, Mom.”

Looking distraught and glancing at the slender gold wristwatch she wore, Wendy hurried across the kitchen and into the laundry room. She began to say she didn’t see it but cut herself off midsentence. She reappeared in the kitchen, peering down into the opened compartment of her handbag.

“Okay,” Wendy said, zipping the bag closed and winding the strap over one shoulder. “What time do you have to be at the Olsons’ tonight?”

“Six.”

“Then I’ll stay late and pick up some extra tables at the diner.”

“You sure I can’t drive you?”

“No. You can take your bike or walk. And you can throw in a load of laundry for me, too.” Wendy snatched the pickup’s keys off the pegboard on the wall. “If you see your brother, tell him I want him home before dark. There are leftovers in the fridge.”

Her mother went out the door, careful not to let the screen door slam, and a moment later Brandy could hear the stubborn growl of the pickup’s engine rumbling to life. From the kitchen windows, she watched as the truck pulled around the dirt turnabout then pulled out into the street.

After she straightened up the kitchen (and took a sip from the open bottle of Budweiser that stood on the bottom shelf of the fridge), Brandy went upstairs and took a long shower then pulled on some fresh clothes. Grumbling to herself about her brother, she went into his room and collected his dirty clothes off the floor—they were filthy and they stank—and kicked his muddy shoes under the bed. She gathered up her clothes from the bathroom, along with some blouses that were strewn about in her mother’s room, then she carried the whole bundle in a laundry basket downstairs. There was already a load in the washing machine and another jumble of colored garments in the dryer. She pulled a shirt and a pair of slacks out of the dryer, found them terribly wrinkled—they must have been sitting in the dryer for too long—then dropped them back in, along with a damp bandana, and restarted the cycle. She exchanged the unwashed clothes in the laundry basket for the damp ones in the washer and was about to carry them outside to the clothesline when she saw Matthew’s T-shirt—the one her mother had found outside in the yard—balled up on a shelf next to a tub of detergent and a box of fabric softener sheets.

She took the shirt down, held it out, and looked it over. It was speckled with mud and smelled of her little brother’s perspiration. The armpits were yellowed and the cuffs of the sleeves were frayed.

She turned the shirt around and examined the line of small holes running vertically down the back. Frowning, she poked a finger through one of the holes.

Outside, she was halfway across the lawn with the laundry basket in tow when she stopped. Matthew’s bike was leaning against the side of the garage. The pickup had been parked in front of it, so neither Brandy nor her mother had seen it. The bike—a red-and-black contraption their father had gotten him from a yard sale a few years ago—had grown too small for Matthew but he still rode it, cherished it. The chrome gleamed in the sun and there were waterproof stickers on the handlebars. The handgrips looked worn and the plastic seat was cracked.

She didn’t like the way the bike sat there. The single reflector at the front of the handlebars was a single eye staring at her.

Weekends, Matthew spent the entire day on his bike, usually with his dumb friend Dwight Dandridge. She didn’t like seeing it here now, with Matthew gone, having left it behind.

Brandy hung the laundry on the line quickly, her mind only half on the task. Sunlight glinting off the bicycle’s chrome and the single reflector kept catching her in the periphery of her vision.

It bothered her.



3



After she finished with the laundry, Brandy laced up a pair of sneakers, took another swig from her mother’s beer bottle in the fridge, then went back outside. The Dandridge house was just a few blocks up the road. With the air still cool and breezy from the previous night’s storm, the walk was pleasant enough despite her urgency.

The Dandridge house appeared over the next hill. It was a Cape Cod in the style of the Crawly home, but that was where the similarities stopped. Splintered, sun-bleached siding, crumbling porch steps, a roof that sloughed mossy green shingles like a reptile shedding old skin, the Dandridge house looked like the residence of a family of hillbilly cannibals in a horror movie. She had gone to the house only a handful of times in her life—typically to fetch her brother when he had forgotten to return home by curfew—though she had never been inside. Two of Dwight’s older brothers were in Brandy’s grade, Kyler and Fulton, and even though they weren’t twins she could never tell them apart. Equally long-haired and grimy, the Dandridge boys always smelled of cigarettes and spouted vulgarities with the unpremeditated casualness of sailors. There had been sisters, too, even older than Kyler and Fulton, but they no longer lived in Stillwater and Brandy could not recall their names. Mrs. Dandridge, whom Brandy had spied only a handful of times despite having lived a few blocks from the Dandridges her whole life, surfaced in Brandy’s head as a waiflike chain-smoker with sunken jowls, jaundiced skin, and the wide, gaping eyes of a curious owl.