Kiss Me Hard Before You Go (25 page)

Katie entered the kitchen and inhaled with a smile. “Smells good,” she said to them.

Finch turned in her direction and nodded. “Katie, this is Doris, Friedrich, and Mouse.”

“Nice to meet y’all,” she said to them.

They shook her hand, Friedrich a little too vigorously. Katie tried not to stare at him, but the tattoos caught her eye.

“Is Evie up?” Finch asked, plating the sausage and then scrambling the eggs in the frying pan.

“She is, but she didn’t want to get out of bed,” Katie answered with a frown.

“She’s gotta eat,” he said with concern. “Friedrich.” He gestured to the spatula, and he took it from Finch’s hands. Finch left the room and made his way up the stairs to Evie’s room.

The door was slightly ajar, and he knocked before he entered. “Evie,” he whispered and walked in.

She lay on her side, facing her bedroom window, the same window that had to be replaced a couple of weeks before. Finch moved around her bed and stooped down in front of her. Her face was red, and her eyes were puffy. “Evie,” he said.

She blinked in recognition.

“You gotta eat something,” he said. “We’ve made breakfast.”

“I don’t want it,” she said.

He stroked the top of her head. “You gotta keep up your strength.”

She rolled over on her other side. “I’m tired, Finch.”

“We’ll save you a plate,” he said before he left. He stood at the threshold and looked at her. “Try to eat soon.” He closed the door and walked down the steps. He knew she was strong, but everybody had their point, the imaginary line where they can’t take it anymore and then they lose everything in them.

“She won’t eat,” he told them with a pained expression.

“Give her time. She’ll come around. She has to,” Katie said.

“What about all them cows?” Doris asked. “Ain’t they got to be fed?”

“Yeah, I would think so. Guess we’ll eat breakfast and try our hand at feeding them,” he said with an edge of worry. “Katie, do you know anything about feeding cattle?”

“Not really. My dad has people work for him. I’ve never had much to do with them,” she answered.

“We can figure it out. How difficult can it be to feed a cow?” Doris said, and Finch knew that those would be famous last words.

Chapter 24

Finch asked Katie to stay inside in case Evie needed her. He didn’t want the risk of someone seeing her when it was so close to her leaving for Florida.

He stood inside the barn, next to Friedrich, Doris and Mouse, staring at the two ATVs. “I think we gotta get on these and scare the cattle into the barn.” He scratched at his head.

“That’s a lot of ground to cover,” Doris said, and Mouse checked his watch.

“We have a show in three hours,” he said to them. “I think we can get them fed by then.”

Finch took a deep breath. “Guess Friedrich and me should get them in there, and you guys should get the food ready.”

“What do they eat?” Doris asked.

Finch shrugged. “Grain I suppose. There’s gotta be bags of it in the barn.”

“Makes sense,” she said. “How much do we put out?”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head. “Guess.” Even he could hear the ridiculousness of it. That was like telling someone to fix one of the rides and guess to see if it would work. It’d be playing with fire, and that’s exactly what they were doing with those damn cattle.

A flicker of worry crossed her face. “Okay, Honey Lamb. We’ll take a shot at it,” Doris said.

She and Mouse headed toward the feeding barn. Finch hopped on the ATV and motioned for Friedrich to follow his lead. They started up the engines and shot out of the barn. Finch reached the gate, and he unlatched it for them, remembering the importance of closing it behind him. They drove near the cattle, who seemed unfazed by the racket. Several obstinate heifers refused to budge and continued grazing.

Finch shouted to Friedrich, “We have to yell at them!”

Friedrich nodded and yelled, “Bewegung! Bewegung!”

The heifers continued grazing. “They aren’t bilingual!” Finch shouted to him, and then he remembered the word that Evie had used that seemed to make the heifers bust tail. “Sug! Sug!” he yelled, waving his arm in the air. The heifers instantly moved, and Finch saw that that word, whatever it meant, was the secret weapon.

“Say ‘Sug,’” he yelled to Friedrich, and they shouted the word at the heifers. The heifers responded with a quick step, moving toward the barn. Once a few fell into line, the rest followed, with only a couple left, either too dumb or too lazy to follow.

Finch drove the ATV, circling around the stubborn heifers and yelled with a growl “Sug!”

Friedrich did the same, and the loner heifers finally relented and moved toward the barn.

Finch breathed hard and heavy, taking just a moment to catch his breath. Friedrich’s chest rose and then fell flat; sweat trickled down his forehead. They let the ATVs idle just long enough to get their wind back and then flew down the hill to the feeding barn.

The heifers were crammed in to the barn, lined up against the trough. Doris dragged the bag of grain, grunting from the effort. Friedrich grabbed the bag from her hands and lifted it over his shoulder, pouring the contents into the empty trough.

“Thanks, hon,” she shouted over the mooing, hungry heifers.

Finch grabbed another bag and emptied it into the trough. The barn smelled like manure, and Finch felt a squish against his shoes. He looked down and saw he was standing in a pile of cow dung. He grimaced and then moved forward. He’d have to worry about his shoes later. There was work to do and if those heifers weren’t fed soon, they were going to have major problems.

***

The last of the heifers left the barn, and they bottle fed the calves. Mouse checked his watch. “We got less than an hour,” he said to Doris and Friedrich. The bottom of his dress trousers was covered in cow dung, and his white shirt was coated in dirt.

Finch squeezed the back of his sore neck and cracked his back. His muscles ached, and it hurt to move. “I don’t know how she does this every day,” he said with a new admiration for Evie. She was tough and had guts, he knew that about her, but she had stamina too. If she could stand that job day after day, she was stronger than he thought.

They hopped on their ATVs and Mouse sat in front of Finch, while Doris tried to ride on the ATV with Friedrich. “This ain’t gonna work, Honey Lamb,” she told him. “Mouse you ride with me, and Friedrich will ride with you, Finch.”

“Can you drive it?” Finch asked. He remembered his disastrous first time on the three wheeler.

“Sure,” she said.

She straddled the machine, and Mouse sat in front of her. She moved forward several feet and then slammed on the brakes. Mouse gripped onto the handles and shot a nervous look. “Just scared is all,” she shouted to Friedrich and Finch.

“Go slow!” Finch barked

She barely tapped her foot against the accelerator and moved at a snail’s pace. Finch slowed to a near stop so he could stay beside her. “I said slow down, not stop, Granny!” he shouted at her.

She glared at him. “Piss-ant!” She pressed her foot against the accelerator and flew down the hill.

Finch and Friedrich lost sight of them and heard “Yeehaw!” and “Whee!”

After they made their way down hill, they met Doris and Mouse inside of the barn. Their ATV was turned off, and Doris made a face at Finch. “Guess I proved you wrong, didn’t I?”

Finch turned his ATV off and decided not to respond.

“I ain’t been this sore in a long time. Sure hate to walk back to the carnival,” she said.

“I can’t believe Kip is opening it today after what happened,” Finch said.

“Money is money, Honey Lamb. All he cares about is making it,” she said.

“Still. It seems disrespectful if you ask me,” he said.

“Kip ain’t one to worry about social etiquette,” Doris said. “We better head back. You coming with us, or are you gonna stick around here for a while?”

“I’ll catch up to you,” he said.

Friedrich patted himself on the shoulders. “I think we did good today.”

“Not bad for a bunch of carnies, huh?” Doris said.

“It’s like those cows were taking pity on us,” Mouse said. “Like they knew we didn’t know our ass from our heads when it came to them.”

“Animals can smell fear. I’m sure they can smell stupidity,” Finch said. “Anyway, I think we did a decent job for a bunch of rubes.” He smiled at his family.

“Rubes with talent,” Doris said.

***

“She’s still laying in bed, Finch,” Katie said with a wrinkled brow. “I can’t get her to come down and eat.”

“She can’t stay up there forever,” he said. “I have to go to work, but I’ll be back later.”

“Okay,” she answered. “Finch,” she said to him on his way out the door. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and there’s just no way I can get on that bus now. I can’t leave her. We’re all we have.”

He breathed and peered down and looked up at her with an understanding expression. “I get it, Katie. I get it.”

***

Business at the carnival was slow. Most townies felt it would be rude if they enjoyed themselves on Gray’s property right after he had passed, and the only people who did come were those from other towns who didn’t have a connection to Gray. Kip didn’t understand that in the south, manners were as important as the good Lord’s word, and frolicking on the man’s land a day after he died was as bad as spitting on him in his coffin.

Word had gotten out quickly, and Cooper was one of the first people to arrive at Gray’s house just as Finch had left that morning. Gray was his best friend, and after a major breakdown with Evie, he pulled himself together and resolved to help her get through it all. He knew that’s what Gray would have wanted.

Katie begged Cooper to keep her presence there a secret. “Promise me you won’t say a word,” she said. She heard the rumors. Cooper’s yap wasn’t known for being Ft. Knox. He often spewed out more than he should.

He promised, swearing to God himself that he wouldn’t tell a living soul. “Your daddy doesn’t deserve you. Don’t you worry, I won’t tell anyone,” he said. If anything, a small part of him wanted Nate McDaniels to suffer, to sweat it out, pondering where Katie could have gone. On top of that, Cooper just didn’t think that he should have the right to tell his daughter what to do with her baby. It was hers, and looking into her desperate hazel eyes, he felt nothing but sympathy for her.

As people from Gray’s church and old friends of his made their way to Evie’s, intent on paying their respects, Katie hid herself up in the guest room, hating that she couldn’t hold her best friend’s hand while people expressed their sympathies.

“They can’t know you’re here, Katie,” Evie said.

Evie managed to get out of bed. Katie combed her tangled hair and helped her get dressed. A shower helped but only temporarily. She crawled right back into bed as soon as her company left.

All of the visitors brought food, as was custom in a town like Haines. If someone passed away, especially someone like Gray Barnes whose family had lived there for generations, bringing food was a sign of respect. Casseroles and pies filled Evie’s refrigerator. Cooper did most of the talking for her, seeing that she was struggling to sit through the painstaking process of hearing every single person say they were sorry for her loss.

She just wasn’t cut out for that role, the new title she had inherited. She didn’t want to be fatherless. She didn’t want to farm the land by herself. She didn’t want to be the lone survivor in the Barnes family, but she was all of those things. What she really wanted was to lay in her bed and forget it ever happened and then wake up, hearing her dad clatter around in the kitchen, causing a bunch of racket and burning toast and making nasty coffee. She wanted to hear him call her by her nickname: Punkin.

Finch knocked on the front door, and Cooper answered it, appraising him skeptically. “You the boy from the carnival?” He looked at him with a stern face, and Finch had to peer up to stare him square in the eye.

“Yes sir,” Finch said.

“Gray told me you were sweet on Evie.” He held an empty glass Coke bottle in his hand and spit chew into it.

“Can I come in?” he asked, and Cooper motioned for him to come inside. Finch wiped his feet against the welcome mat before entering.

“She’s asleep.” He moved his head up toward the ceiling. “Cooper Dobbins.” He extended his hand, and Finch shook it.

“Finch Mills,” he said.

“Gray said you had an odd name,” Cooper said with twisted lips and then lowered his head reflectively for a moment. “He was my best friend,” he said almost in a whisper.

“I’m sorry,” Finch said.

“Ain’t your fault, but thanks anyhow,” he said and spit into the bottle again. “Katie said you tried saving him but he had already gone to Heaven.”

Finch nodded with a frown, thinking back to that moment, and even though it was only the day before, it felt like years ago. “Mind if I go upstairs to check on her?” Finch asked.

“See if you can get her down here to eat. Miss Mable made her favorite: Coke cake. Tell her that and maybe she’ll spring out of that bed of hers.”

“I’ll tell her,” Finch said, before he climbed up the steps.

The door was cracked, and Finch pushed it open. The moonlight cast light into the dark room. Evie was curled up into a ball, hugging her pillow.