Page 84 of The River We Remember
“Thanks for coming,” he said, shaking Brody’s hand. “I meant to tell you the other day after Bluestone’s arraignment that I appreciate what you’ve done.”
“I haven’t done anything but my job, Terry.”
“Well, you just keep on doing it.”
He looked from Brody toward the opened grave, where the expensive coffin lay in shadow at the bottom. He stared as if he wanted to say something final to his father. If that was so, Brody thought it might be the first and only time Jimmy Quinn’s son had ever been able to get in the last word.
Then Brody asked a question, one that clearly caught Terence Quinn by surprise. “You raise hogs, don’t you?”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
DEL WOLFE’S COUSIN was from Minneapolis and was city-girl pretty. She was fifteen, with long chestnut hair and violet eyes. She wore makeup and nail polish, a little gold ring on a gold chain around her throat, and on her wrist a gold charm bracelet. To Scott Madison, she was the most sophisticated girl he’d ever met. Her name was Holly Coleridge.
She’d brought a friend with her on this visit to Jewel. Nicole Blake wore dark eye shadow and a black beret and spoke in beatnik phrases like “I’m hip,” and “Cool,” and “You’re one crazy cat.” As smitten as Scott was with Holly Coleridge, around Nicole Blake, Del was like a kite that had finally found the wind.
All the mothers had agreed to the plan for that Friday afternoon, a float trip on inner tubes down the Alabaster from the Stoughton Bridge north of town to the spillway in Jewel. The kids would disembark there and picnic in Veteran’s Park. Angie would supply the food. Del got the tubes from the garage run by Creasy’s family in the hollow, and Tyler Creasy hauled them—kids and tubes—in the back of his pickup to the bridge. The boys wore shorts and T-shirts. The girls wore bathing suits. Nicole’s suit was black and Holly’s a scarlet that lit a fire deep in Scott. In the shade under the bridge, he waded into the water and held Holly’s tube while she positioned herself in it. Del did the same for Nicole, and then the boys got into their tubes, and the current carried them away.
Their day together had begun with a lie. Del had told Holly that Scott was fifteen, the same age as she, and would be a sophomore in high school in the fall. A small lie, but Scott felt uncomfortable with it. Del also told her that Scott played the guitar and was thinking about starting his own band someday, which was not exactly a lie, but far enough from the truth of his current musical ability that it felt like a lie to Scott. Del had told her something else, too.
“Del says you have a hole in your heart,” Holly said as they floated together, only a foot or so separating their tubes. “Is that true?”
This wasn’t something Scott particularly wanted to talk about, and he wasn’t happy at all that Del had revealed this terrible physical flaw. “Yeah,” he admitted.
“So, do you notice it? I mean, can you actually feel it?”
He shook his head. “It’s just there.”
“How do they know?”
Scott looked up at the sky, which was mottled with clouds that were partly gray, like dirty cotton balls. “I was kind of blue when I was little. It’s one of the signs.”
“Is it…?”
He glanced at her in the tube beside him. Her face was pinched as if it pained her to be asking these questions. “Is it what?”
“Is it big?”
“It’s just kind of a leak.”
Del and Nicole had drifted ahead, and Scott could hear Del talking about Peyton Place.
“Can they fix it?” Holly asked.
“Maybe. I see this specialist in the Twin Cities sometimes.”
“Could I…?” She looked at him shyly, her eyes peeking from beneath strands of chestnut hair fallen across her face.
“Could you what?”
“Touch your heart?”
“You can’t feel anything.”
“My mother says I’m psychic. You know what that means?”
“Sure.”
“My father—my real father, not my stepfather—had a heart attack just after Christmas. I told him he would because, when we hugged goodbye on Christmas Eve and my heart touched his heart, I felt it. I really did. And I told him, but he didn’t believe me.”
