told me you weren’t her boyfriend, and, come on! Anybody can see you are.”
Dante cleared his throat. “Well, if you ask Tanyalee directly, you might be surprised by her answer. Why don’t you give her a chance?”
Fern shrugged, noncommittally.
“If you should remember anything, please let me know.”
“Sure.” She stuck out her hand to shake Dante’s. “See ya ’round, and hey, thanks for being on my team.”
* * *
“Ya’ll want sprinkles on those?”
Fern nodded even as Tanyalee politely shook her head no. The ice-cream guy grinned and poured a scoopful of brightly colored candy confetti over Fern’s order. He leaned out to hand it to her.
“Take care now. Those triple dips are a handful, missy.”
Fern glared. “My name ain’t ‘Missy.’”
Tanyalee touched her shoulder and did that thing where she smiled and ran her words together when something wasn’t quite right.
“Thankyousoverymuch!”
Tanyalee hustled Fern out of the ice-cream shop, and all it took was one big lick of Rocky Road and sprinkles and she’d decided to forgive the man for calling her “missy.”
Tanyalee started chatting away about how it was warm for an October evening in Bigler, and how the old corner ice-cream parlor would start selling hot chocolate by Halloween, and how it would be the best chocolate Fern had ever tasted—she guaranteed it. “All the kids come here on Halloween night after trick-or-treating for free hot chocolate and a costume contest. We’ll have to do that. And then, on the first official snow day of the school year, they do another giveaway. Everybody shows up after going sledding. We’ll have to do that, too.”
Fern looked at Tanyalee out of the corner of her eye. Halloween? Snow days? She was making future plans with Fern, which was great. But Fern was so tired of people making promises they didn’t keep. Of people who lie. Or leave her.
They walked side by side and Tanyalee veered off up some steps to an old rickety iron gate leading into a churchyard. Fern had been a little nervous around churches ever since her daddy took her to a revival where she was told she was possessed by devils. Fern told the lady preacher she had a screw loose, which the preacher said only proved her point. Fern hadn’t been to a church since.
“We gonna get our demons cast out or something?” Fern took another lick and discovered her lips were coated with sprinkles. She noticed that Tanyalee was staring at her, all confusedlike. “You know, the way they do in church.”
“Lord have mercy,” Tanyalee said, opening the gate for her. “No. We’re gonna do something a lot more fun than that.”
They walked through a courtyard that was planted with all kinds of pretty mums and bushes and then on around back, where there was a little playground. Right in the middle was a big old metal swing set—the good kind—with real long chains and wide rubbery seats. Tanyalee sat in one and Fern sat in the other, and they moved back and forth as they ate their ice cream.
This little ice-cream trip was supposed to be about Tanyalee’s criminal past, but so far it had only been about sprinkles and hot chocolate and sledding. She was beginning to think Tanyalee had chickened out. Fern decided to push things along.
“Why does Viv call you ‘Taffy’?”
She shook her head. “It’s a silly nickname she came up with when I was in kindergarten and it just seemed to stick.”
“What’s it mean, though?”
“You’d have to ask Viv.”
“And now you’re a grown lady and you’re stuck with it?”
She laughed. “It certainly appears that way.”
Suddenly, Tanyalee looked up from her waffle cone, her eyes real determined. “The lady in the bowling alley was right, Fern. I was arrested and convicted of stealing and I was sentenced to probation.”
Fern’s jaw dropped. She couldn’t believe it! “But, convicted?” She’d watched enough reruns of Law & Order to know how much trouble Tanyalee had gotten herself in. “Even my daddy never got convicted!”
Fern must have hurt her feelings, because Tanyalee got real sad, and for the next few minutes Tanyalee told Fern about what she’d done. She tried to take a whole bunch of money from Granddaddy Garland and then got caught shoplifting and how she used to buy clothes when she was sad and how she would only be with boyfriends and fiancés who could buy her stuff. Then she said that she’d been real mean to her sister, Cheri, and stole her boyfriend just because she was jealous.
It was all kind of complicated,