“Okay,” he says, nodding.
Will blinks a few times and says, “Is it lunch yet?”
“No.” Sandy collects his breakfast plate. “But I can bring more coffee.”
“Yeah, do that.” As she moves to comply, Will looks up at Luke. “Well don’t just stand there. Don’t you have shit to ask me?”
Luke falls into his chair, boneless. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
~*~
“The protester,” Luke says, yet again. “Come on, man. Just talk about it already.”
Will snorts. He’s recovered from his episode and working on a bowl of cashews Sandy brought him. “Little punk. Protester, my ass. He was a rioter, that’s what he was, that whole bunch of them. Spray paint cans and baseball bats. Hal and his boys were having to shove them back.” He mimes doing so with his hands. “One of ‘em pushed through, gunning for my Matt with his paint, screaming the most horrible things at him. Fucker had it coming. Back in my day, if you acted like that, you got popped.”
And sometimes, Luke thinks, that’s a practice they ought to continue. “What did he say?”
Will shrugs. It might be a twitch of some sort, but Luke sees it as a shrug.
“What?”
A head shake.
“Mr. Maddox,” he says, sighing, “we’ll go off the record, okay? At this point, I’m just personally curious. What did he say?”
Not looking at him, Will says, “All kinds of shit. Said Matt was evil, said he was ‘worse than Hitler and Satan combined.’ Those were his exact words. Crazy shit. Said he hoped Matt dropped dead. Said he hoped someone shot him. That he was a homophobe, and racist, and wanted to kill women.”
Luke takes a deep breath through his mouth and lets it out through his nose. “Well. That’s the sort of thing that gets thrown around in Washington.”
Will shakes his head. “But he was wrong. So wrong. Fuck him. So I popped him a good one, right in the mouth. I don’t like people telling lies about my kids.”
~*~
When says he needs a moment to take his medicine, and Sandy comes in with one of those awful day-of-the-week pill containers, Luke excuses himself to the back porch, where he proceeds to shake a Marlboro from the pack in his pocket and lights up.
He leans against the deck rail, lets his gaze wander across the roses planted just below him, and takes a deep, deep drag, his lungs sighing with relief.
When will Hal be back? he wonders. How the hell long can they run?
It’s not even eight in the morning, dew glitters on the grass, and he feels like an entire day has passed.
Perhaps the old man’s playing a joke on him, he thinks. Or the Maddox family. Or, unthinkably, Hal. But how could Hal be so cruel after…
No, there’s a story here. He can feel it, a low-level buzz like when the TV’s running silently to itself in the next room. Something weighs heavy on Will Maddox, something that’s tied up in a hatred of prejudice, an assault charge, and an old photo. His knee jerk response is to recoil; this could all be a waste of time. But he’s never written a single thing that mattered for money. And maybe this can matter. Maybe. Whatever it is.
He hears the door open behind him and turns, thinking it’s Sandy. But it isn’t.
A girl – late teens, early twenties, probably, if the smooth shape of her face can be believed – steps out onto the deck and gives him the sort of direct look that made him blush and squirm when he was in school.
“You’re that reporter?” she says.
“Writer.”
“There’s a difference?”
“Not according to your grandfather.”
Her mouth curves in a wry, unhappy grin and she steps forward to lean her arms on the rail beside him. “How’d you know?”
