The Almost Sisters(91)

“You’re so close right now to Muh-muh-mm . . . Atlanta and Muh—”

He was trying to say Macon. I knew it, but I waited. I wasn’t going to Rachel him. His nostrils flared, and he was blushing again, deeply. I put a hand on his arm, in spite of all the eyes, stopping us at the very edge of our yard and looking up at him.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Your stutter doesn’t bother me. If you really need to say something and it won’t come out? I kinda like you in that cowl.” I felt my own cheeks heat, because that was such an understatement. I really liked Sel Martin in that cowl. Add the long, swirling cloak and I’d start to wonder why people had ever invented underwear. Keeping them on could feel downright gratuitous.

“Sure,” he said. “Right here in Suh-Smallville’s town square.”

“Why not?” I said. “They’re used to Big Nerd Doings whenever I’m in town. I ran around here every summer in a Wonder Woman unitard and completely unbulletproof plastic bracelets.”

His ridiculous thick eyelashes dropped over his eyes. “Buh-but you were probably fuh-ffff-five.”

“Try fifteen,” I said. “I told you. Big. Nerd. Doings. I only stopped because I finally grew boobs. Birchie said it was a scandal, and she and Wattie wouldn’t make me a new one.”

He chuckled, at the same time sizing me up to see if I was serious. I was dead serious, and the set of his shoulders eased by a degree.

“Macon,” he said, clear as day, and then made ta-da hands at me. “I wuh-won’t always be this nerved up around you. I hope.”

We started walking again, slower than a creep, dawdling across the street to the line of parked cars around the square. This was how it was when the guy was new, and smelled right, and everything he said seemed so very interesting. It had been a while, but I remembered this. We were like kids playing no-you-hang-up-first, but with a whole town watching. He must have felt watched, too, city boy or not, because he hadn’t kissed me. And he wanted to kiss me. I could feel it.

“You make me nervous, too,” I told him. “But it’s a good nervous. You know?”

He flashed me the cocky smile I liked. He did know. “You have a lot going on here, but in a tuh-t-t . . . small place like this you must have slow days. Take one, soon. Come see my city. Muh-meet my folks.”

“I will. As soon as I can. I have to get Birchie back into her routine and stable before I take a day trip.”

Sel nodded his agreement. She was so far from stable she’d stabbed her dearest Wattie with a fork. Of course, this was assuming that Regina Tackrey would see reason and Birchie and Wattie wouldn’t be jerked out of their routine and into prison.

“It’s complicated. Birchie’s in kind of a mess right now. More than the illness. It’s long, and awful, and very hard to nutshell, but there’s stuff happening here that I need to be around for.”

“Yeah,” he said. “The buh-b-bones.”

I literally did a double take. “How did you . . . ?” But I had no need to finish the question. “Lavender,” we both said. He stuck briefly on the L, so he lagged a syllable behind me.

“Useful kid,” he said, and I waited, braced, but that was all.

I was relieved he wasn’t going to ask me avid, ugly questions. Not right this minute anyway. Also, I’d been a little worried he was going to man-pout or guilt me ever since Lavender had spilled that she was actually the one who’d contacted him. On the one hand, I was glad to be absolved of sending cutesy-tootsy hello! frog emojis. But now he knew that back at FanCon I’d woken up and thrown out the note with his phone number. I’d actually flushed it, right along with the one used condom where there damn well should have been two. He had to know that if there’d been two, there would be no baby and he never would have heard from me again. A guy like Jake Jacoby, say, would have felt that as an ego kick and needed smoothing and soothing. Batman let it go with two kind words—Useful kid—and I was getting the sense that Sel Martin was an easygoing kind of guy.

“The bones. Yeah,” I said. His not asking made it easier to say, “It seemed like a lot to explain over Words with Friends.”

“It’s nuh-not a second-date conversation,” he agreed, and stopped by a dark gray Outback. “This is me.”

“I didn’t think the Batmobile would be a Subaru,” I said, and he smiled. It occurred to me that if he was up to speed, he might know more than I did currently. He might know why Frank came by and sent Birchie into orbit.

“Did Tackrey get the court order for a DNA test?” I asked.

“Oh, yeah, you missed that. She did,” he said.

“Shit,” I said. “Just shit.” But I wasn’t surprised. I’d been expecting it.

Rachel was right. I was not an optimist. I hadn’t believed, not down deep, that my impromptu public-relations picnic in the Mack yard could halt the grinding of legal wheels already in motion.

“So . . . it’ll be positive?” Sel Martin asked, human and curious.

“I think so,” I admitted. “But at this point it’s ridiculous. I wish I’d thought to film Birchie this afternoon. This is not a woman who can be held responsible for something she saw or knew about or even . . . even did. It was sixty years ago, and now she can’t defend herself.” The Lewy bodies had returned her to her own initial innocence. They were stealing her memories and her intellect and her ability to choose, until I could almost see her rabbits gathering around her. At the same time, I doubted a film of Birchie remurdering her father with a fork would be all that helpful. That wild attack had been the opposite of sorry.