He laughs and leans in the doorway. He’s wearing jeans, a t-shirt with a flannel shirt over it, and a pair of cowboy boots.
“You look handsome,” I tell him.
He looks everywhere but at me. “Thanks. Are you ready to go?” He taps the wall like he’s anxious to get me out of his house.
“Sure.” I walk past him and down the hallway. “You have a beautiful home, Grady,” I say. “You should be very proud.”
He nods. “I am.” He grins at me. “When are you going to settle down, Clifford?”
I roll my eyes. “I’d have to find something worth settling down for, Grady,” I say quietly.
“You ever think about getting married?”
I shake my head. “Not really.”
“Why not?” He stares at me intently, like my answer is important.
“Nobody has ever asked me,” I reply with a shrug. “Well, nobody that I wanted to marry,” I clarify. There was one man…
I walk past him and out the front door, and straight to his Jeep. He gets in and starts the engine, but he waits a beat. “If the right person asked you, would you consider it?”
“Consider what?” I’ve already forgotten what we were talking about.
“Getting married.”
I shrug. “If the right person asked, and I loved him, and he loved me, I’d definitely say yes.”
I desperately want to ask him why he kept the letters and notes I wrote to him when we were kids, but I don’t want to mess up this friendship that’s building between us, so I keep my question to myself.
13
Grady
Evie’s a better shot than I am, and I’m not going to lie, that stings a little bit. She has three coupons for turkeys in her back pocket. Apparently, they didn’t want to give out actual frozen turkeys at the turkey shoot, so they gave out coupons so you can pick up a frozen turkey from the Piggly Wiggly for free. She gets to pick up three of them. The people who are running the event had to cut her off after three so somebody else could win a turkey. She’s been pouting ever since.
“Are you about ready to go, Grady?” she asks from where she’s leaning next to me on the banister where shooters line up. Right now, we’ve been told to lower our weapons and set them to the side, so the volunteers can run out and change the little paper turkeys out. Well, they don’t need to change mine out, since I can’t hit the broad side of a barn.
“I still haven’t hit one,” I say.
She rolls her eyes. “You did. But somebody else got closer.”
I got a fucking feather. On the turkey’s tail. You have to hit the head, the neck, or the chest to win. I hit not a one. “I think there’s something wrong with your sight.” I look through the scope to line up a shot. “You might need to recalibrate it.”
She rolls her eyes again, and I have to admit, it’s getting on my nerves. “It doesn’t need recalibrating, doofus. I just used it to win three turkeys,” she says. “Three.” Then she follows with “Duh.” That part makes me grin. One thing I could always count on was Evie shooting straight with me. When she thinks I’m being a jackass, she tells me. When she thinks I’m being an idiot, she tells me, and she even told me this afternoon she was proud of me after she saw my house.
I love that little house. I bought it because I had to get out of my little apartment, and I figured I might as well pay myself as pay a landlord, so I bit the bullet and bought my little cottage. I did it with the knowledge that it’s not big enough for a family. It’s barely big enough for me. But since I’m almost forty and live alone, I think that ship has pretty much sailed.
“So can we go now?” she asks.
I raise my brows at her. “So you don’t want to give me a fair shot at winning.” I frown. “I see how you are.” I hand her shotgun to her, and she zips it into its protective sleeve and hangs it over her shoulder.
“If you’re going to be a baby about it,” she says, “you can just take me home.”
We walk toward the sign-in table so I can leave a donation in the little fishbowl they have there before we leave, but I stop in my tracks when I see her. Sarah-Beth Ramsey. The last woman I dated. The one I almost married. The one that lives one town over.
She must see me at the same time because she freezes too, and then she spins away and whispers to the friend that’s with her. It just happens to be the friend who hates my guts. She always did. And when Sarah-Beth and I split up, it was her friend who brought me the box with my things in it, but she’d taken the liberty of shredding my clothes with pinking shears and writing dickhead in permanent marker on my favorite coffee mug.
Evie bumps into my back. “What are you doing?” she asks.