April flashed a lighter to the end of her one-hitter and took a toke. Mittens sat like a statue on the kitchen table in front of her, the cat’s posture like those concrete lions people with gates on their driveways set on brick pillars by the road. She set the pipe on the table, watched it roll a radius across the wood, and stared blankly as Mittens strolled over and casually slapped the pipe onto the floor. She didn’t even bother to pick it up. April was just glad to finally stop thinking for a minute or two.
Ever since Tom Rice called she’d been at the table running figures through her mind, ciphering numbers on a notepad, and trying to imagine how long the money would hold out. She wondered what kind of life she might have if she took the offer and left. April was still too young to collect survivors insurance from Social Security as a widow, but there was a thousand-dollar check that came on the fifteenth each month from an insurance policy George Trantham had for years. That check would keep coming until the policy ran out, but that wasn’t near enough to live on. The seven hundred fifty she’d taken in each month as a lease on the land for the radio tower is what made her lifestyle viable after George died. Between those two checks, she took in $21,000 a year, which might not sound like much, but when the farm’s bought and paid for and all you have to do is sit on your ass and collect, there are worse ways to make a living. If she sold the property, that lease check was gone, and that meant she’d drop to $12,000 a year. The question became how long the money Trantham had in the bank and the money from selling the property would last. She figured she could make it years if she was smart. Worst case, she could get a bartending job or wait tables. She didn’t have the body she’d had at twenty years old, but she’d held up better than most and could still turn heads. Flirting with old men for tip money might just be worth it to leave.
She took a sip of coffee, lit a cigarette, and walked into the living room to get on the computer. She thought she might look into some places on Tybee Island, see how much it would cost to rent an apartment. That was one of the few places she’d ever been, and she’d fallen in love with that town when George took her and Thad there not long after she married him. There’d been some sort of pirate festival going on that weekend and there were all these ships built onto trailers being pulled through the streets. There were men dressed up with tricornes on their heads and buckles on their shoes and one with a peg leg and one with an eye patch and even a midget waving a curved saber that was longer than he was tall. There were women in blouses with ruffled sleeves and corsets pressing their breasts up to their necks, and some wore their hair braided and some wore bandannas as skullcaps and one turned up a bottle of booze and blew a mouthful of liquor into a ball of fire. April wondered if she could do that—not the fire breathing, but riding on one of those ships in the parade and playing dress-up and throwing candy and beads down to kids in the street. She guessed most everybody who lived there played a part in the parade. She guessed all she’d have to do was move down there and make friends. She wouldn’t have to tell them where she was from. She could make up a name if she really wanted. Start from scratch.
The front door flew open and April almost came out of her skin. The rain was still pouring outside and Aiden walked into the house with water dripping from him, his pants and shirt and face covered in blood. She gasped when she saw him standing there like he’d been in a car crash, and maybe he had.
“Jesus, Aiden. What happened?”
He didn’t say anything at first. He just stood there as if he were about to collapse.
“What happened, Aiden?” April walked toward him.
“I got robbed,” he said. “That son of a bitch Leland Bumgarner sent me to meet . . . they beat the shit out of me. Robbed me fucking blind.”
“Where’s Thad?”
“I’m going to kill them,” Aiden screamed. “I’m going to kill those motherfuckers and I’m going to kill Leland Bumgarner for setting me up.”
“Where is Thad, Aiden?”
“I don’t know where he is,” Aiden said.
“He didn’t go with you?”
“No, April. For fuck’s sake, I told you.” He walked to where April had been sitting at the computer, grabbed her pack of Dorals from the desktop, and lit a cigarette.
“Your head’s bleeding.” She moved around to the back of him to get a better look at the cut on the crown of his head.
“Don’t you think I know that?”
“You need to get to the hospital.”
“I ain’t going to the hospital. They’ll ask all sorts of questions. They’ll have the law in there before you can bat an eye. I ain’t going to no hospital. Period.” He plopped onto the office chair and bent forward with his face in his hands. The cigarette between his fingers trailed smoke against his face, and April watched as a drop of blood ran through his hair, slid along his jaw, and dripped from his chin to the floor.
“We got to get you cleaned up,” April said. “We need to see how bad it is.”
She hurried down the hall into the bathroom, shoved the rubber stopper into the drain at the bottom of the tub, and cranked the water. The bathtub started to fill and she headed back into the hall to the linen closet for more towels and washcloths, old ratty ones she wouldn’t mind throwing away. Under the sink, April rummaged through the cabinet for medical supplies. There was a bottle of iodine she’d had since Thad was little, a bottle of alcohol, and a half tube of Neosporin pinched flat. She slapped the cover down on the toilet seat and piled everything on the lid. There were some large square gauze pads, a small tin of Band-Aids with only the sizes and shapes that no one ever used, and a roll of brown elastic bandage with little silver clips that had started to rust. That was everything she had. She didn’t know the first thing about stitching him up.
In the living room, Aiden was still hunched over in the desk chair and the cigarette had burned out between his fingers. He’d thrown up on the floor between his boots and he looked like he was asleep, and those two things worried April to death because, while she knew little about bandaging someone up, she knew a lot about concussions. She’d had three that she knew of, one that kept her throwing up for two days after George Trantham came home staggering drunk off white liquor and damn near beat her to death. The few times it had been bad enough that she had to go to the hospital, the doctor told her not to go to sleep because a lot of times people wouldn’t wake up after going to sleep with a head injury, after having fallen down the stairs. She rushed over and shook Aiden by the shoulder and he raised his head slowly toward her.
“Let’s get you back there in the tub,” April said. “We need to get you cleaned up.”
Aiden didn’t move, just kind of blinked his eyes in a daze.
“Come on.” She prodded. “Get up, Aiden.”
She led him down the hall slowly. He hobbled on heavy steps, and when she got him into the bathroom, she had him stand there while she undressed him and eased him into the tub. He slid down into the water, the cuts and blood on his stomach immediately spreading a cloud of red into the bath like drops of dye. Those marks and that gash on the back of his head seemed to be the only places he was bleeding, but from the looks of his clothes, he’d been bleeding awhile. There were marks all over him, places that were red and blue. A bruise that looked like a birthmark as big as a quart jar was stamped across his ribs.
April dipped one of the washcloths into the water, and as she dabbed at the cuts along his stomach, he sighed a bit. But when she squeezed a washcloth full of water over the cut at the back of his head, he winced.
“Goddamn,” he yelled. “That hurts like hell!”
“I know it does, but I can’t see it till it’s cleaned up,” she said. “You need stitches.”
“No, it don’t.”
“Trust me, it needs stitches.” April took another washcloth full and this time pressed it directly on top of his head to let the water run down through his hair and wash the blood away. “Now, who did this?”
“A bunch of spics,” Aiden said. He was deep in the bathtub with water lapping at his chest. His feet were up against the tile by the tap handles, with his legs bent out of the water.
“And you don’t know who they were?”
“I ain’t see them.”
“What do you mean you didn’t see them?” April asked.
“They put something over my head.”
“Who did?”
“That spic,” Aiden said, opening his eyes for a second or two this time as April rinsed more water over the cut. “Some spic named Eberto, or at least that’s what Leland said his name was.”
“But you don’t know him?”
“For God’s sake, April, are you not fucking listening!” he screamed. He’d never raised his voice like that to her in all those years.
“Don’t talk to me like that.” April was shaking. “I’m just trying to help.”
“Well, can’t you fucking listen,” Aiden said. “I told you I don’t know who they were. If I knew, I’d tell you.”
“I don’t need this,” April said. She stood up and dropped the washcloth onto his chest. “I’ve got enough already. I don’t need this anymore.”
Aiden mumbled like he was talking in his sleep, and April couldn’t make out what he said, but it didn’t really matter what he said. She didn’t care to listen. She was tired of always worrying about someone else’s problems.
The more she thought about it, the more it didn’t matter how little those assholes from Atlanta wanted to offer her for the land. She’d take it. She’d take the check out of their hands with a smile on her face if it meant getting the hell off this mountain. She didn’t care if she had to get a job and survive off tip money like those first few years with Thad, those years before she married George Trantham just so she wouldn’t have to struggle. She didn’t care about having to leave Aiden behind, because she’d done everything she could to try and help him. No matter what she said, he still did the same things over and over again. Her out was here and she had to take it, or live with the fact that it might never come again. That made the decision easy. April was done with regret.