High Noon

her, he leaned in first, laid his lips on hers. “Got a zing going there.”
    Oh, God, yeah. “Zings are easy.”
    “Have to start somewhere. I like here. Sexy redhead, beautiful night, bubbles in the wine. Hungry?”
    “More than I like.”
    He smiled. “Why don’t you sit down? There’s supposed to be some sort of cold lobster deal in the cold box inside. I’ll go get it. You can tell me some more long stories while we eat.”
    She wasn’t going to tell him anything else about her life, her family. Keep it light, she decided. All on the surface. But he had a way, and somehow between the lobster salad and the medallions of beef, she let him in.
    “I wonder how a girl from Savannah aims for the FBI and trains to talk people off ledges, for instance, then circles back to the local police. Did you play cops with your Barbies?”
    “I didn’t much like Barbies, really. All that blond hair, those big breasts.”
    “Which is why I loved them.” He laughed when she only blinked at him. “What? You figure Malibu Barbie isn’t going to start a ten-year-old boy thinking?”
    “I do now. Unfortunately.”
    “So if it wasn’t Barbies, what started you on the road? G.I. Joe?”
    “Joe’s a soldier. It was Dave Mc Vee.”
    “Dave Mc Vee? I must’ve missed him during my action-figure stage.”
    “He’s a person and, though he’s a hero, has never been a toy—that I’m aware of.”
    “Ah.” He refilled their glasses and enjoyed the way the lights played over that porcelain skin, those clever cat’s eyes. “High-school crush? First love?”
    “Neither. Hero, first and last. He saved us.”
    When she said nothing more, Duncan shook his head. “You know you can’t leave it there.”
    “No, I suppose I can’t. My father was killed when my mother was pregnant with Carter. My younger brother.”
    “That’s rough.” He laid his hand over hers. “Seriously rough. How old were you?”
    “Four, nearly five. I remember him, a little. But I remember more it broke something in Mama that took a long time to heal, and it never healed all the way. I know now, being a trained observer who’s educated in psychology, that his death likely laid the groundwork for her agoraphobia. She had to go out to work, had to haul us around. No choice at all. But for years she kept mostly to herself.”
    “She had a choice,” Duncan disagreed. “She chose to do what needed to be done to take care of her family.”
    “Yes, you’re right. And she did take care. Then she met this man. She met Reuben. He’d come by, fix things for her. Little household things. I could see, being a girl of almost twelve, the flirt was on between them. It was odd, but my father’d been gone a long time, and it was nice, too, to see her get all flushed and foolish.”
    “You wanted her to be happy.”
    “I did. He was nice to us, at first Reuben was awful nice to us. Playing catch with Carter out in the yard, bringing us candy, taking Mama out to the movies and such.”
    “But he didn’t stay nice. I can hear it,” Duncan said when she looked at him. “I can hear it in your voice.”
    “No, he didn’t stay nice. They’d slept together. I’m not sure how I knew it, even then. But she opened herself up enough, after all those years, to be with him that way.”
    “And that’s when it changed?”
    “Yeah. He got possessive, proprietary, critical. He’d pick on us, all three of us really, but make it like a joke. Carter, especially Carter got the digs. Boy couldn’t find his ass with both hands, ha ha ha. A man never grew balls reading books. And so on. He started coming over every night, expecting Mama to have dinner hot on the table, shoo us off so he could grope her. She wouldn’t, and he’d get pissy. Started drinking a lot. I expect he always did, but he drank more at the house than he had at first.
    “And this is terrible dinner conversation.”
    “I’d like to hear the rest. My father drank more than his share, so I know what it’s like. Finish it off.”
    “All right. One day he came by when Mama was still at work. It was just Carter and me. He’d been drinking, and he popped open another beer, then a second one and pushed it at Carter. Told him it was time he learned to drink like a man. Carter didn’t want it. God, he was only seven. Carter told him to go away, leave him alone, and Reuben smacked him, right in the face, for sass. Well, I sassed him then, you can believe it.”
    The old rage bubbled straight