Summer Sons(81)

Five minutes later he was in the passenger seat of the WRX eating his second piece of chicken, air on full blast, speakers blaring a hideously distorted EDM track. Sam stole a wing from the container on his lap and ate it in two motions, one tearing gnash of teeth for the thickest chunk of meat and a complex suction maneuver that pulled the rest off the bone. A straggling bit of sinew was all that remained when he popped the bone free and tossed the scraps out his cracked window. Effortless and practiced. He waggled his fingers, and Andrew lifted the container to let him steal another.

There was no need to speak. Pressure receded from behind Andrew’s eyes, the tension he carried from his blackout easing a fraction. Sam drove while he finished the leftovers. Whenever he let himself slow down, the monumental weight of his unanswered questions started to crush him to dust, so the drive and his company for it were both a relief and a torture. After an hour on the interstate, Sam punched in an address on his GPS.

The same highway led to the park with the oak tree, but this time, the route took them off an exit and through a cluster of trailers by a gas station. The red line on the GPS wound deeper into sparsely forested nothingness, a rural road spitting out the occasional unmarked driveway to either side, some paved and some dirt. The McCormick mailbox whipped past them around a blind curve, and Sam had to slam on the brakes and put the car in reverse.

The double-wide at the end of the drive had a painted tan deck and yellow window trimmings, with box planters full of flowers on the stoop. A mid-nineties Chevy pickup sat out front. One big tree shaded the whole house.

Andrew said, “All I told them is I was a friend of Eddie’s, that he’d died, and that I still wanted to come talk to them about shit. These people were supposed to be his next interview, but he put them off for some reason—found something else, I guess.”

“I hear you,” Sam said as they mounted the steps.

The doorbell pinged, audible from the porch, and a woman’s voice hollered, “Just a minute!”

Andrew stuck his hands in his pockets, Sam loitering behind him with his best good ol’ boy smile buttered onto his lips. The door opened, leaving the storm glass pane between them and a lady in her seventies at minimum, white hair in tight gramma curls around a plump tanned face. Appliqué flamingos dotted the breast pocket of her pink shirt.

“Hi, ma’am,” Sam said.

“I called this afternoon,” Andrew clarified, as if she couldn’t guess.

With a nod she opened the storm door and gestured them inside, smiling. “You boys are here to get the good gossip, huh?”

The den had a big television and a small couch, barely more than a loveseat, with a handful of homemade throw pillows on it. Andrew and Sam perched there with equally delicate discomfort, broad shoulders and unruly knees all wrong in the cozy space. Lisa McCormick planted one hand on her hip to look them up and down.

“Y’all want something to drink?”

“I’m good,” Andrew said.

“Yeah, please,” Sam said.

“All right, let me get Rob too.” She went farther into the house. “Hey hon, those boys who called are here!”

Andrew wasn’t too accustomed to dealing with the elderly. He hadn’t visited his surviving grandfather in months. Last time he had, it was with Eddie in tow to take the old man from his condo to a Hooters for his birthday. Riley said Sam had been raised up by their grandmother, though, which didn’t explain his tense seat on the edge of the couch. Maybe he was bad with strangers. It was odd to see him polite and almost demure. The sound of a sliding door opening and shutting came from the other room.

An older man who must’ve been Rob entered the den in the midst of wiping his hands on his jean shorts. “Hey there. Was out picking tomatoes, we got too many growing this summer to keep up with.”

His wife popped her head around the corner and said, “Come sit at the table where we can all see each other.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Sam said.

He stood first. The low ceiling of the double-wide made him appear taller. Andrew wracked his brain for his segue, his conversation points, and realized he had none. Other than that they’d known the Fultons, and their land backed up to the estate, he didn’t know what the hell Eddie would’ve asked them about.

Sun streaming in through the glass doors to the yard lit the kitchen-slash-dining room brightly. The garden out back was full of tomato bushes and cabbages and zucchini. Sam and Andrew sat across the table from the McCormicks. Lisa handed Sam a tall glass of tea and kept another for herself.

“What relation are you to that young man from before, again?” Lisa said.

“Eddie and I grew up together, he was my best friend,” Andrew said. “There was an accident and I’m following up on some things he meant to do, before he passed.”

Sam nudged him, boot-tip to ankle, under the table. The McCormicks made sympathetic noises with twin frowns, the way couples do who’ve been together for decades, separate faces with the same expression.

“I’m damn sorry to hear that, with as young as y’all are. You in school too?” Rob asked.

“Yeah,” Andrew said.

“And what about you, son?” he said to Sam.

“I’m a mechanic, sir,” he said. “Also a friend of Ed’s.”

“My name’s Andrew,” he added. “And this is Sam.”