The bell over the front door interrupted our discussion. We all turned to watch Sheriff David Newman enter the store. My stomach clenched at the sight of his uniform, the shiny badge glittering under the store lights.
Shortly after Wyatt had come to live with us, a social worker arrived from the county with a guardian ad litem in tow. As the judge who released him had ordered, they were to monitor his behavior and report back on his transgressions. They were a nuisance sometimes, but we grew to accept their involvement. They seemed to have Wyatt’s best interests at heart even if we didn’t always agree with them. And whatever they put in their reports seemed to convince the judge that Wyatt was where he needed to be.
The sheriff, however, was different. One of his deputies had pulled Wyatt over in my car less than a week after he arrived. It was two in the morning, and he was over the speed limit. The deputy quickly figured out Wyatt didn’t have a license and wasn’t old enough to be driving. We got called down to the station. The police asked if I had given him permission to use my car or if he had stolen it. “Sorry, deputies,” I said. “I told him to keep it on our gravel road out here. He’s learning, and I didn’t see any harm in that since we don’t have traffic. It’s the way my papa taught me to drive when I was a kid.”
Wyatt’s eyes grew wide in appreciation as I covered his misdeed. Without my help, the police couldn’t charge him with a stolen car, so they wrote him tickets and released him into our custody.
The next day, the sheriff showed up at the house. He told me he called over to Knoxville and got all the details of Wyatt’s crimes. He warned us he would be watching him like a hawk. If he crossed the line, the sheriff would see to it that the judge would know it. As the sheriff settled into his car to leave, his last words were that he didn’t like trouble coming into his county uninvited.
Watch him, they did. Deputies would pull him over and search the car. They searched his book bag at school. They stopped him once when he was skateboarding in the park. Fortunately, they’d never found anything, but they sure tried. I’ve never forgiven the sheriff for that.
Now it was an election year, and Newman had a strong opponent, someone who might be able to beat him. Our good sheriff was making himself quite visible, and that included dropping by Abe’s Market most mornings to greet people and shake hands. He was, after all, an elected official fighting to keep his job.
Once he made it back to the deli counter, he accepted the large to-go cup of steaming coffee from Danny’s outstretched hand. “Can I get one of your sausage biscuits too?” He patted his stomach. “Just a small piece of cheese. Got to cut back a little, you know?”
Danny smiled his best salesman’s grin. “Didn’t you hear, Sheriff? All our food is calorie free.”
“Your mom told me that about her apple pie for years.”
“It’s true.” Danny leaned forward conspiratorially and pretended to whisper, “Don’t tell Ma, but mine’s better than hers. Come back at lunch, and I’ll cut you a slice.”
“Nothing wrong with my hearing, young man, or my baking. You certainly never griped about it growing up.” Martha did her best to appear fierce as she stood among her plants, but the smile in her twinkling eyes belied the stern look on her face.
While wearing a sly grin, Danny spun his wheelchair and tossed a sausage patty onto the sizzling grill. I never would have thought to tell his mother, but as good a cook as she was, Danny had upped the quality of the food in the deli since he took over from her.
The sheriff blew the steam off his coffee and cautiously took a sip. He glanced at us as if he hadn’t noticed we were there. He approached casually, as if he didn’t do the same thing every day. “Good morning, gentlemen.”
Levi looked around in mock surprise before bantering a response. “Ain’t no gentlemen here, Sheriff. Just us old farts.”
The sheriff tsked. “Well, you got me there. Maybe I should refer to you retired gents as men of leisure.”
We laughed—well, they did. I mostly just sat there—despite having heard the line a dozen times before. No rule against retelling jokes, but none required me to laugh either.
C.J. slapped a meaty hand on the thigh of his blue denim overalls—the clean pair he wore for going to town. His ample belly jiggled under the denim as he guffawed, more than I thought was necessary. A mop of gray chest hair curled out of the top of his black T-shirt, a contrast with the closely cropped hair on his head. “Now, see, I like the sound of that. Sounds all sophisticated. Better than what Abe labels us.” He gestured to the small engraved plaque screwed into the wall at the end of the table. The bronze had tarnished, but the lettering remained easy to read—The Liars’ Table.
Abe installed it as a joke on a group of retired factory workers twenty years earlier. The first thing they did was typical—they argued whether it was Liar’s or Liars’. The debate still spiked up now and then, mostly when some flatlander wandered in and made some comment about it. To me, it had always been clear. It wasn’t just one liar sitting around the table then, and that still wasn’t true now.
Back then, while we were still working our jobs, we saw them as a bunch of puttering old men with nothing better to do than passing the last years of their lives spreading town gossip and telling tall tales of their glory days, most of the stories too ridiculous to believe. Now we were the ones swapping tales. Not gossip, of course. Women gossiped, not us. We just shared news.
The sheriff tilted his head toward the handheld radio scanner propped up against the wall. If anyone asked, we kept it turned on in case the volunteer fire department put out an all-hands call, not that any of us had done more than direct a little traffic for the Christmas parade or sit around the station house talking about the big fires of years ago. Smoke eating was for the young men in town. On the rare occasions when the alarm sounded, we listened with interest to the response and speculated about the event.
The radio also broadcast the sheriff’s department’s dispatch. We could’ve turned that channel off, but no harm in listening. Like most days in Miller County, the little box was mostly quiet with only routine chatter.
Newman said, “Nothing much happening, is there?”
Abe’s eyes twinkled. “Hasn’t been broadcast yet, Sheriff, but we have us a major crime wave.”
“Is that so?” Newman cocked his head. “I’ll bite. What’s up?”
“Purvis here had his car stolen.”
A puzzled look crossed the sheriff’s face. “Who would steal that old…?” He waited until the chuckling around the table subsided and focused his attention on me.
I slumped down in my chair and waited on the inquisition, answering the same tired questions. Yes, my car was missing. No, I didn’t know who took it. No, I didn’t hear a thing.
And then he asked, “And Wyatt?”
My body tensed. I sat rigid in my chair. Here it came. The eyes of the law were targeting Wyatt again. “He had nothing to do with it.”
The sheriff held up his hands. “I wasn’t accusing him. I meant did he hear or see anything?”
I picked at some dirt under my fingernail and willed myself to calm down. “Nothing.”
The sheriff nodded and straightened. “I’ll put the word out. Deputies on patrol will keep an open eye. Want me to have a deputy swing by here and take a report? Or do you want to stop by the station this morning and handle it with the front desk?”
“What do you need a report for? Can’t you just look for it?”
“We will, but that just covers Miller County. You’ll want the Highway Patrol and the deputies in neighboring counties looking. We need to get it into the computer system to alert everybody.”
C.J. piped up for me. “I’ll bring him down right after breakfast. Rather have that deputy out looking than sitting here doing paperwork.” We all understood the math. A big rural county with only a handful of deputies working at any moment meant long response times. No reason to compound that for something simple.
“Perfect.” The sheriff turned back to me. “I know filling out a bunch of forms may not seem like much, but you’ll need it for your insurance if we don’t find it.”
Levi chuckled. “With the insurance payment, maybe you’ll be able to buy us breakfast one morning.”
“Fat chance.” I shrugged and flopped back in my chair. “All I got is liability insurance. The premiums were too expensive for the other stuff.”
The sheriff took his to-go order from Danny. “Well, then, let’s hope we find it, and it’s not wrecked.”
“Wrecked?” I slumped down in my seat. “I don’t want to think about them wrecking it.”
Ronnie grinned. “The good news is that as old and decrepit as that thing is, you won’t be able to tell if they did.”