Caleb
I would’ve waited half my life for that girl.
I would’ve stood on that porch ‘til my legs gave out just to see if she’d come back down that dusty driveway.
She could’ve hitched a ride to Charlottesville easy if she’d told Georgia the truth. Maybe she already had. She’d be stupid not to run as far away from me as common sense would take her.
She had millions of places to disappear to and no reason in the world to come back. But I needed her to. I guess you never really grow out of wantin’ certain things, even if it kills you when you can’t have ‘em.
Nothing good ever stays, not around me anyway and I didn’t have the right to pin my hopes on anything, especially her. But even so, I stood around for hours looking for her, staring out at nothing, just waiting to breathe.
If she hadn’t left, I would’ve spent the day lying in bed with her—or most of it, anyway. Up until last night, I’d never really figured out why Liam didn’t let girls come around the slaughterhouse. But after spending four days with one, I understood him a little more. Hailey’d somehow ended up in the center of everything.
Everything I thought about, everything I did, everything I didn’t do.
Sometimes going back on my promise seemed easier than following through. Having her around was starting to get comfortable, a little too comfortable, enough to make me rethink taking her home. But she didn’t have any kind of future with me.
Hell, she wouldn’t have a tomorrow if things went wrong today. But, hoping felt better than hurting over the truth, at least for a little while.
The mornin’ melted into the afternoon, and the mid-day heat died away around six o’clock. Once the sun disappeared behind the lonely barn on the edge of Georgia’s property, I thought about goin’ out to look for Hailey myself.
There wasn’t any reason in the world for either of them to be this late. If the cops were headed my way, I had a better shot at seeing em’ coming from the top of that old barn than from the front porch. So I popped a couple pills, grabbed a quilt, and stuck out the walk.
Shufflin’ all that way through the tall grass and shale, would’ve been a hell of a lot less scary if I hadn’t been alone. All kinds of rustles and clicks rattled out of the wheat patches, and I held my breath whenever the sounds got too close.
The long shadows from trees blocked out what little light was left for me to pay attention to where I put my feet. Copperheads loved fields like these. Cillian used to kill loads of em’ around our place, so the idea of running into one solo scared me half to death.
No girl, no BB gun, no bravery.
I’d wandered too far from the house to try going back, so I hugged the hell outta that quilt and prayed to God that I would make it to edge of Georgia’s property in one piece.
Up close, that barn looked at least a hundred and fifty years old, but I could pick out the places where Georgia and Dean’d put in a little love and whole a lot of work. They’d fixed up a couple of the rotten boards, but the outside walls still looked rough enough to spit splinters.
The hinges and handles looked younger than the civil war, but the rusty red paint had chipped off and faded a long time ago. The front door needed a little pushing but rumbled open in it’s own time.
Bits and pieces of light got in from the outside, but not enough to see too far into the barn. I tripped around in the almost dark ‘til I knocked into a propane lamp hanging from one of the rafters.
Even in the low light, the downstairs looked a little too much like home, not enough to cry about, but enough to sting.
Even the smells were familiar, from the musty stink of dead hay, to the reek of rotten wood hanging in the air. The ugliest years of my life happened between walls like these, the kind that were thin enough to suck in the summer heat, but too thick to breathe it back out.
All the memories I’d had in that goddamn slaughterhouse worked the same way.
Nothing ever left. Not even if I wanted it to.
Every bad thing that ever happened there buried itself in the doors, walls and floors deeper than the termites could. But the worst ones were still buried in me.
From the looks of things, Georgia’d left a couple of her memories here too. Everything from old pictures of her and Dean, to half-painted tables he probably never finished. The barn would’ve been better off empty, ‘cause the furniture kept his ghost alive in a place that died a long time ago.
I climbed up to the second floor before the first one got too far under my skin.
Georgia and Dean did justice to the upstairs. They’d built a little loft that overlooked the wheat field-spanning out towards the woods. I hadn’t seen a comfortable reclining chair like the one’s they’d left lying around the loft in years. Liam never spent any money on anything so I’d gotten used to being uncomfortable.
Georgia and Dean had the place stocked up like they’d planned to live here at one point. Maybe they had. Whatever the loft was for, they’d done a lot with a little bit, and I respected that. This was the kinda space I could start over in if I had the chance to. It wasn’t much, just a couple of wood barrel tables, an old stove and some makeshift cabinets, but I liked things simple.
Not too sure whose fault it was, but somebody’d left a half-empty crate of moonshine stashed under a pile of moving boxes. I picked out a jar of the stuff, kicked back in a Lazy-Boy, and fell in love with the view.
The old shadows of the Blue Ridge Mountains stuck out against the skyline while the sun dimmed away under the trees. But as pretty as it was, I didn’t have the peace of mind to pay much attention to anything else but that empty road.
I thought about drinking to pass the time, there wasn’t anything else to do anyway. If Georgia caught me sloshing around in her barn, she’d slap me silly, but after sitting alone for a while losing my mind to sound of crickets, I figured a little bit of moonshine was worth gettin’ hit over.
Funny thing was, every time I got myself into something I didn’t want Georgia to catch me doing, she’d show up. Two sips in, I relaxed a little. The road stayed quiet.
Four sips in, I figured I’d be spending the night like this, alone and slowly going outta my mind.
By the time I got through a third of that Mason jar, headlights flickered at the far end of the road. I’d had enough moonshine in my life to know how to hold my liquor, but seeing that truck speeding up towards the house had me doubting the Irish in me.
Just when I thought Georgia’d leave her truck in the driveway, she veered right and headed straight for the barn, revving the engine like an off-road lunatic. Being as old as she was, I don’t know how she saw my lamplight from so far way. I figured Hailey was the reason behind that miracle.
Georgia drove over that field in half the time it took me to walk it, which depressed the hell out me. That and the fact that it was still too damn dark to see whether or not the girl I’d been waiting for all day was sitting safely in the passenger’s seat. Georgia parked right in front of the barn, and popped out of the truck just to start shouting at me as soon as her feet hit the dirt.
“Boy, what in the hell are you doin’ in my barn?”
Took me a minute or two to answer her question, not cause I didn’t want too, just ‘cause I didn’t care.
“Waitin’, where’s Hailey?”
“She’s right here. Did I give you permission to climb up there?”
“Is she okay?”
“I asked you a question, Caleb.”
“So did I."
“Young man, if you want me to answer anything you better answer me first.”
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t come close to losin’ it from all her stalling, but I held it together.
“No, you didn’t give me permission. Yes, I’m sorry. But where’s—“
The passenger’s side door clicked open and my heart stopped.
Hailey stepped in front of the headlights, and looked up at me from under an old mechanic’s cap. She’d been crying. I didn’t have to see another minute of that to know that I needed to be down there with her instead wasting my time yelling at Georgia.
Hailey waited for me in the doorway downstairs, wearing a new pair of shorts and a SPCA t-shirt Georgia must’ve picked out for her. She didn’t say a word to me, just held down the edge of her cap, and cried quietly enough for me know what she was hiding under it.
“How’d you do that?”
“Do what?” She said.
“Come back prettier than when you left?”
I didn’t mean to make her cry any more than she already was, but I really meant that. Even with that old hat covering her hair, I thought she looked like the tough girl I’d gotten to know over the last few days instead of the princess she used to be.
The best part was how much more of her face I could see like this. She used to never really look at me or hide behind all that long brown hair, like she didn’t believe she was pretty. I guess she didn’t see herself as clearly I did.
I pulled her to me and let her cry as much she needed to. But as much as I wanted to comfort her, it was tough trying to swallow the feeling that I was the reason behind her sadness.
“Come up stairs with me for a little bit, I wanna show you somethin’,” I said.
Georgia hobbled through the front door and barked at me before Hailey could get a word in.
“Young man, you better be extra careful about how you treat this girl from now on. She got us through two checkpoints today with that pretty new haircut she has, all ‘cause she wanted to see ya’.”
Georgia didn’t have say much more than that for me to know that she’d heard our whole story. I figured she’d find out sooner or later, but I didn’t want it to happen how it did. Hailey should’ve been able to tell her in her own time, not because of the goddamn cops and their goddamn checkpoints.
The sons of bitches worked fast.
If I’d known Hailey had to go through all that trouble, I wouldn’t have let her leave. She looked worn to pieces, like the light in her eyes had dulled away the second she realized how close the cops were to us. We didn’t have any more time to waste hanging around Georgia’s after tonight. I needed to get her home. I needed to get out of Georgia’s life before she got caught up in all our bullshit.
Strange thing was, Georgia wasn’t acting any different towards us. I couldn’t figure why she hadn’t come back with the cops. She should’ve kicked us out or turned us in by now but she seemed like the same old Georgia.
Maybe she was out of her mind or was too old to care about the kind of trouble we’d gotten ourselves into. Whatever her reasons were, I didn’t ask questions. She brought Hailey back and for that I was grateful—enough to kiss her. Well, maybe not that, but I owed her one.
I walked Hailey over to a ladder leading upstairs and told her to wait for me in the loft. Georgia had her eyes on my back from the barn door, and I knew if I didn’t talk to her about everything soon, she’d start carrying on in front of Hailey.
It didn’t take long for Georgia to start in on me, but she looked at me different this time around, like whatever she and Hailey had seen today had scared the edge out of her.
“What did you do, young man? What in the world did you get that girl into?”
It took a whole lot of restraint just to keep from talking back to her.
She was right to ask that, she was right to question me more than anybody else, but I hated having to live with those questions. I hated having to live with the truth about this situation, which boiled down to me being the bad guy on the wanted poster and Hailey being the victim.
Nobody knew our story.
Nobody knew how different we were from what the pigs and press wanted us to be. I wanted Georgia to understand us more than anything, but no matter how forgiving she was, the suspicion swimming in her eyes hurt like hell. She couldn’t look at me the way she used to, but I guess I deserved that.
“I love her, Georgia, that’s what I got her into and I’m sorry. I know she doesn’t deserve what I’ve done to her, but I’m gonna get her home, okay? I’ll get her home. Things are too goddamn messed up for me to fix everything, but I’ll fix what I can. I promise you that.”
She hugged me. Without saying another word, or shouting at me the way she should’ve, she held onto me like I was more than a stranger to her. Maybe for a little while I had been. But I knew a goodbye when I felt it.
“We’ll be outta here first thing tomorrow mornin’, so don’t break off your beauty sleep to come looking for us,” I said.
“You better stop by the house and eat somethin’ before you go, you hear?”
“Yes ma’am. You’ll be alright out here on your own won’t you?”
“Honey, I’ve been alright for ten years. It’s ya’ll I’m worried about. If anything goes wrong you know where to find me. So come on back when you can.”
“Will do, Georgia, will do.”
Coulda been the dust, but I swear Georgia was cryin’ as she left. I would’ve said goodnight to her, but sometimes it’s best to leave people alone when they need to be. Hailey’d been alone too long.
I found her sitting by the upstairs window looking up at the moon with a mason jar in her hand. She tapped the rim against her lips, just tempting the white whiskey into almost kissing her, but she’d always stop just short of sippin’ and drink in the sky instead.
I could’ve watched her like that all night, my heart pounding itself to pieces while she soaked up the stars. But she caught me starin’ like always, and I smiled at her like all her beautiful sadness wasn’t eating away at me.
“I’d never take you for a moonshine girl,” I said.
“I’m not, but I might be tonight.”
“Try a little bit, it burns at first but it gets better.”
She tipped the glass back and swallowed down a mouthful only to choke on the sting. Her face turned redder than a stovetop just trying to catch her breath. Might’ve been the cutest thing she ever did, but I kept that a secret.
“Take it slow, that’s strong stuff.”
“Strong’s good as long as it works,” she said.
She leaned over to me, slow and cautious at first, till she found a spot on my shoulder she could sink into. I bit my tongue just to keep myself from thinking about anything I shouldn’t have been. Like how warm she was, or how soft, or how she still smelled like roses and yesterday’s rain.
I tried not thinking about the sweat slicking down the inside of my hand while she held it, or how badly I wanted to kiss the moonshine off her lips.
“We can head home, if you want—to Georgia’s I mean.”
She turned towards me, enough for me to feel her breathing against my skin so softly it hurt.
“Here’s good.”
She kissed me on the cheek but this time she didn’t shy away like she usually did. Maybe it was the moonshine, but her eyes looked different—like quiet storms, filled with a little bit of longing and whole a lot of loneliness. I wouldn’t have let her go back Georgia’s even if she wanted to at this point.
“You sure about that, Hailey? If you stick around, you might not get any sleep tonight.”
I didn’t plan on saying the second part out loud, but it happened too fast for me to stop. She laughed a little, enough for me to know that maybe she didn’t mind the stupid things spilling out of my mouth.
“Who said I wanted to sleep?”
“Who said I was gonna let you?”