The sun always took its precious time to set on this place. In the longest days of summer, the sun might dip its yellow face behind the peaks at seven o’clock, an invisible glob of molten orange that dripped behind the mountain, until all that was left was red, as if a drop of blood had soaked back into the earth on the other side. That lolling sometimes lasted until nine thirty before the wick extinguished into darkness. Everything seemed to drag on forever, nothing in any sort of hurry. But it was finally dark.
April watched the taillights of Aiden’s Ranchero stare back at her as the car wound down the drive until they were swallowed completely by the laurels lining the road. She was uncertain of what Aiden and Thad might find at Wayne Bryson’s. It had been unlike her to make that type of suggestion, just as it was unlike her to say it was okay to keep the drugs in her house. There was a look of confusion on Aiden’s face when April asked what might have been left behind, but Thad seemed to think it was the only sense his mother had ever made. The answer was simple: money. If that bag was worth twenty-five hundred, then what if there were two bags? Three bags? What if there was a pile of money rolled up in his sock drawer? If Aiden and Thad wound up finding drugs or cash, they’d be that much closer to having what they needed to leave, and them leaving would mean one less thing for her to worry about when she sold the house. Though Thad would’ve never believed it, April did worry what would happen to him and where he’d go when the trailer was gone. She knew Aiden would be just fine, but there was no telling with Thad.
She could hardly remember Aiden McCall before he came to live there. She knew he’d been missing when Thad brought him out of the woods and put him up in the trailer. She knew he had run away and that the sheriff’s office was looking for him, and she knew what his father had done, because it was the gossip all through Little Canada. Even the gaggle of old women at church whispered back and forth in the pews on Sunday mornings about what had happened, saddest thing they’d ever heard. So when Thad brought Aiden home and George Trantham called the law and a convoy of patrol cars came to take Aiden into custody and hand him off to social services, April thought it was probably for the best until she watched it unfold.
When the deputies went onto the porch at the trailer, Thad met them at the door with a .410 shotgun he used to squirrel-hunt. He screamed that they’d have to drag Aiden out of that trailer, but he was just a twelve-year-old. The deputies barged inside and Aiden shot out of the front door and into the brush like a rabbit. After a few minutes, the deputies came out of the woods with muddied uniforms, dragging the boy by his arms.
That night, April convinced George Trantham that letting Aiden stay might keep Thad out of their hair. Maybe if Aiden was around to keep Thad busy, she wouldn’t have to relive the darkest hour of her life every time she looked at her son, and maybe George wouldn’t get so pissed at Thad that he drank till he couldn’t stand, then beat her till she couldn’t either. She signed the stack of paperwork and Aiden was back within a few days. From then on, the two boys raised themselves in the trailer, and she stayed cooped in the house until the good Lord finally answered one prayer and ate that drunk son of a bitch up with cancer, killed George Trantham before he could ever hit her again. But the boys were practically grown by then.
When Thad left for Fort Bragg and Aiden stayed behind, she watched him come and go for months before a word was ever spoken between them. She was lonely and he was there, and that’s how it started. He’d always been able to make her laugh, and she needed that. One evening, she walked down to the trailer with a plate of food and a bag of weed. They sat on the front steps and passed a joint back and forth while lightning bugs came out of the ground and gradually floated into the trees. After that, she gave him odd jobs and asked him in for supper. She enjoyed his company. She liked the way he made her feel. Aiden wasn’t like any man she had ever met. He was polite and timid and always waited for her to say the first word or make the first move, and so one night she did.
After he’d washed the dishes, he sat at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette, and she sidled up behind him and ran her hands down his chest. As he turned toward her, she kissed his ear and his neck, then led him to her bedroom. When it was just the two of them, she almost forgot about everything bad that had happened in that house, everything bad that had ever happened to her on that mountain: from the times in high school when her stomach started to show to the day her parents told her she was dead to them. There were so many things she carried, memories that lay heavy as stone. All of those things stayed bottled and building. All of those things had damn near broken her in two. She welcomed any chance to forget.