Billy picked up the card and flowers at the hole-in-the-wall shop beside the Peavey Mart. The bundle came wrapped in a polka dot cellophane cone, the flowers as loud and bright as Rachel. The card was simple, a couple of pussy willows, painted blue, with the hand-drawn words, You’re in my thoughts today. On the inside, he wrote, Love Billy, with a pen he borrowed from the blushing cashier. For sure, he should have brought his backpack. He felt like a dweeb, riding one-handed with the bouquet in the crook of his arm. One lady honked and gave a thumbs-up as she drove by.
As he skidded to a stop in front of Rachel’s, he realized he’d come too late. A work truck was parked where her car should be. A dumpster nearly as big as the house had been dropped onto her patchy brown grass. No sign of bunnies. So, this was it then. She was gone.
A couple of beefy guys backed out of her propped-open door, struggling with a humongous sagging couch. They shuffled and scraped their way to the dumpster, counted loudly back from three, heaved the couch up to their shoulders, and tipped it in. The thing landed with an echoing crack. One yelled, “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Billy stood beside his bike on the sidewalk and watched as the men went back and forth from the house to the dumpster, trip after trip, hurling chairs and mattresses and tables and lamps and bookcases and mirrors and curtains and dishes and pots and pans. He couldn’t move, couldn’t look away, although it felt wrong, like he was seeing Rachel naked, her private life being chucked into the trash. Thuds and bangs, splintering and shattering, grunting and swearing. He wondered why there was nothing she wanted to keep.
The men finally wound down and sat heavily on the porch step, guzzling from giant water bottles. The shorter guy lit a cigarette and hunched over his phone.
The big one stood and sauntered towards him, wiping his sweaty brow with the back of his hand. Billy swallowed and stood his ground.
Big guy stopped inches from his face. “Are those for me?” he said, pointing to the flowers.
Billy looked down, embarrassed. “They’re for the owner. I came too late.”
He shrugged. “Maybe not. The lady’s coming back later today. She left some crap we’re not supposed to touch.”
“Oh,” Billy croaked.
“Seems like she could use flowers.” He smiled. He had surprisingly gleaming white teeth under his out-of-control moustache. “You might as well go inside and drop them off. Put them on top of the big box under the window. But you better do it now while we’re on break. If you get in Sid’s way, you’ll end up in the dumpster.”
Billy stood there brainlessly, not sure what to do.
Big guy squinted his eyes. “So are you coming?”
He followed him obediently past the dumpster to the porch. “It’s the box beside the pile of clothes,” big guy said, plunking down on the stair beside phone guy, who didn’t bother to look up. “Go on in then.”
Billy wove around them and stepped inside. He heard big guy yell behind him, “Don’t steal anything,” then smoky laughter. The house was mostly empty, the air heavy with Rachel’s hairspray colliding with mildew and mould and generations of dust bunnies and cobwebs and the grassy vapour of rabbit pellets in an open bag.
He panned the room, found the box beside the clothes pile under the window where big guy said it would be. The box lid was open. He peered down, curious to see what Rachel had chosen to keep. His stomach flipped, knowing in his gut a second or two before his brain kicked in. Violet’s doll, crammed on top of the rolled-up quilt. No mistaking it. The doll’s once-rosy cheeks faded to a ghostly hue, its missing eye, hair matted and tangled. He squeezed his eyes shut, breathing fast, the discovery pulsing through his veins like a shot of adrenalin. The rest would be stuffed into that box too. He didn’t dare look more. He dropped the flowers and ran.
Billy peddled furiously, careening down Main Street, over the tracks, past the skateboard park, past the last house in town and onto a gravel road that dipped and curved.
He rode and rode, until there was nothing but fields and cows and the blistering sky and the sound of crunching gravel and rattling handlebars and loud wheezing. Still he kept going, minutes, hours, lungs screaming, legs mush. He didn’t plan on stopping, ever, except a gopher popped out of a hole and darted in front of him. When he swerved to avoid it, he lost control, pitching forward into the ditch, his head bouncing inches from the barbed wire fence.
He threw his bike off of him and sprawled out like a dead man in the dirt, gulping to get air back in his lungs. The light was a dusty yellowed white, the air full of cow shit and decomposing earth smells. This was as far as his plan took him: to get on his bicycle, get away from her house, get to a place where he couldn’t be seen. But now here he was, God knows where and utterly alone. What was he supposed to do? It took him several minutes before he could think in full sentences. It was stupid to try to outrun this. He’d seen something that he couldn’t unsee, and for once what he did next was important. There was a label for this. A moral dilemma his social studies teacher called it—feed your family or your cattle—the crapshoot between two wrong choices. Shitty option one: He calls Rachel out as the thief and she gets punished, hauled off to jail, the good in her erased. Shitty option two: He keeps his mouth shut and Sarah is out of a job, blamed for something she didn’t do.
He lay there a long time, breathing in dust, eyes clapped tight against the glaring sun. He wished he could tell his grandma what he knew. She would ask, What does your heart tell you, Billy? Nothing, his heart was as heavy as mud. He’d looked up to Rachel, her bright colours and “grab what you want” attitude. He thought she saw him as a human being, not just a dumb kid in the wrong town. What a sick joke. He didn’t care why she did what she did. There could be no excuse big enough. Her stolen life was a big fat fake. The squeaky toys in her car. The crap in her house. Probably his helmet too. He was the chump with his head stuck in a lie.
His thoughts swirled round and round like flies on a carcass until finally the voices faded and a floating feeling came over him and all he could hear was his angry body. It needed to pee and drink and eat. His stinging right arm had taken the worst of the fall, and when he raised it to his face, the angry road rash from elbow to wrist made him queasy. He stayed in that wind-whipped ditch, too defeated to crawl his way out, until a blankness washed through him. He dreamed he was in the ocean, its heavy swell lapping at his side.
He came to with a start, a brown spotted head bent in front of him.
“You okay, son? I almost didn’t see you down here in the ditch.” The old man was small and wiry with skin like oiled leather. He looked ready for a fight, but his eyes were kind. “Seems like you’ve taken a tumble. Can you sit?”
Billy sat and wiped the drool off the side of his mouth.
“Can you stand?”
Billy stood, flicking away the burrs riding on his shoulder. The man smiled like he was a dog doing a trick. Nothing much hurt except for his shredded oozing arm.
“Where you headed?”
“Rigsbee.” He had a sudden and inexplicable need to get back to Nick.
“Looks like you were going the wrong way,” the man said. “I’ll give you a lift.” He manhandled the bike into the back of his pickup before Billy could offer to help.
They didn’t talk on the way into town, the local radio blaring country music between weather and crop reports. He’d ridden his bike an impressive distance, the ride back bumpy and depressing. The guy passed him an old canteen like from a western movie, and he glugged and gulped until the last drop, warm water sloshing in his empty stomach.
He got dropped off without fanfare at the end of his block and cycled wearily into the driveway, testing the brakes and steering. Nothing shook or squealed. When he walked through the door, Nick came from the kitchen, wearing an apron.
“Jesus. What the hell happened to you?”
Billy thought he might cry. He had a sudden memory of standing in his grandma’s doorway, his grandma gone, stolen, carted off to the hospital, his world teetering like a three-legged chair.
Nick led him to the couch and hovered over him like a mother hen, helping him take off his helmet and dirt-caked runners.
“You’ve got a bad case of helmet head. And you’re fried to a crisp.” He brought out wetted cloths and tweezers and rolls of gauze and crinkled tubes of antibiotic ointments. Nick worked methodically, as he dabbed and cleaned and dressed his shredded arm. Billy stared at his sturdy face, eyebrows pinched in concentration, his own heart pounding uncomfortably. Nick was as gentle as if Billy were a toddler, which made it seem worse. He couldn’t trust what he was feeling. This good man his father, a man kind and right in his head, not the loser he’d labelled him for all those absent years. But what did he know, really. He’d thought Rachel was good too.
When he was done, Nick inspected his bandaged arm and said, “You’ll live,” as he headed into the kitchen. He came back with a glass of water and an aspirin bottle, popped off the lid, and passed him two.
“So you gonna tell me what happened?”
“An accident.” Billy drank obediently, wiping his mouth with his good wrist. “The bike’s okay. It landed on top of me.”
Nick took back the glass and stood over him on the couch. “Musta been scary. Anybody else involved?”
“Just a gopher, and he got away.”
Nick stared into him like he had X-ray vision, like he was challenging him to spill every little thing he ever knew. “I feel like there’s more to this story. Would I be right?”
They faced off there in the living room until Billy’s ears burned.
“You done talking?” Nick finally said.
Billy nodded and then stopped, because he was still close to crying. He had to sort through the wormhole that was Rachel before spilling her crimes. It was surprisingly easy to stay quiet for once, his decision made, without knowing how he got there.
“Then let’s get you fed.” Nick pulled him off the couch by his good arm and kept his arm around his shoulder as he walked him to the table.
After three bowls of spaghetti and two bowls of ice cream and time spent crammed together at the kitchen sink doing dishes, Nick said, “I was thinking of driving out to the campground tonight. You don’t want to come, do you?” He looked as if the answer might hurt him.
“Yeah. I’ll come,” Billy said, not wanting to leave his father’s side.