The Girl Who Stopped Swimming - By Joshilyn Jackson Page 0,104

out of scrap. She’d hung a tire swing, and beside it, she’d buried a length of rusty sewer ladder deep enough to stand upright. An old metal slide was soldered onto it.

In front of the left mobile home, Raydee Eaver and his brother, Louis, were messing around in the guts of an old truck. It had no hood, and they were bent over the exposed engine. Louis had a wrench and was jerking hard at something. Neither had a shirt on in the late-afternoon heat, and with their flossy blond hair, narrow torsos, and long sinewy arms, they looked like young male Thalias. They raised their heads and stared as the Volvo came even with them, their matched-set green gazes as flat as the dogs’ had been.

“Do you know them?” David asked as Thalia braked to a stop.

“Yes, but they don’t recognize this car,” Laurel said.

At Christmas, Daddy drove them in the Buick, and last week Laurel had picked up Bet in David’s SUV. An unknown car in DeLop was something between an event and an invasion. Strangers nearly always turned out to be either someone from the sheriff’s office still-hunting, or a parole officer, or some churchly good-doer, coming up to save them with tracts and blankets and canned peas. A while back they’d “caught a social worker,” as Enid had put it, making the poor woman sound like a rash. She’d wanted to track the children, the ones with Social Security numbers and school records, anyway, and try to get them back in a classroom. “Took her most of a damn year to peter out,” Enid had said.

The Eaver boys were walking toward the car. Raydee led from the hip with his center of gravity so low Laurel knew immediately that he was stoned to his gills. Louis swung the wrench lightly back and forth as he walked, as if it weighed nothing. The sunlight gleamed off its silver. There was something in the set of his muscles that seemed coiled, his body readying itself for violence.

Thalia scrolled down the window and leaned out, calling, “Hey, Raydee. Hey, Louis.”

Louis slowed a hair, and the springy, ready way he’d held the wrench changed in some subtle way, rendering it innocuous.

“That you, Thalia?” Raydee called.

“Who’s that with ya? Larl?” Louis asked.

That’s how everyone said Laurel’s name up here, one compressed, gargling syllable that had hardly a vowel in it.

“Yeah, and her husband,” Thalia called. “Her daughter’s up here, too. You seen her?”

Thalia didn’t bother to describe Shelby. There were maybe sixty mobile homes and trailers and another ten or twelve actual houses in DeLop. The remains of what had once been a company store stood near the middle, a cinder-block building that had been stripped of every detachable piece of itself, so it no longer had even wooden windowsills or doors. A place this small, everyone knew everyone else, and most of them were interrelated. Strange to think that when Mother was Shelby’s age, she had belonged here. She’d walked down these streets knowing no others, part of the landscape, but Shelby would stick out as brightly as a new penny. If Raydee or Louis had seen her, they would know.

“Naw,” said Louis.

Raydee said, “You brunged Bet home already?”

Thalia said, “Yeah. You seen Bet?”

She looked at Raydee as she asked, but he only knitted his brows, puzzled. Louis stepped in and answered, his tone cool. “Naw, but Sissi’s car come by a while back. Afore that, the sheriff’s deputy been driving through. Aunt Shirl said he got out at Sissi’s and banged her door. You know why’s that?”

“Nope,” Thalia said, but Louis’s gaze did not warm, and he cocked a skeptical eyebrow. Thalia went on. “Listen, you see Miss Shelby, can you bring her on to Sissi’s? We got to start the drive home.”

She was echoing his diction and his accent, structuring her sentences the way they all did here. Raydee had gone easy in his body as she talked, watching his brother have a conversation with Junie Eaver Gray’s girl. But Louis, sober, or at least less messed up, knew better. If Mother had been with them, he would have invited them in, maybe offered them a cold drink. Mother had been born here, and she was a part of this place in a way that her daughters, raised with television and indoor plumbing and fresh milk down in Pace, had never been.

“Sure thing,” Louis said.

Raydee added, “I’ll tell her she’s gon’ get her behiney paddled, she don’t get