Boys Life

questions when the door opened again and Miss Grace came out, this time wearing a floppy white sweater over her blue gown. She had on sneakers, her ankles and calves thick as young trees. She had a box of Lorna Doone cookies in one hand and the burning cigarette in the other, and she walked to the milk truck and smiled at me. “Hey there,” she said. “You’re Cory.”
    “Yes’m,” I answered.
    Miss Grace didn’t have much of a smile. Her lips were thin and her nose was broad and flat and her brows were black-penciled streaks above deep-set blue eyes. She thrust the Lorna Doones at me. “Want a cookie?”
    I wasn’t hungry, but my folks had always taught me never to refuse a gift. I took one.
    “Have two,” Miss Grace offered, and I took a second cookie. She ate a cookie herself and then sucked on the cigarette and blew smoke through her nostrils. “Your daddy’s our milkman,” she said. “I believe you’ve got us on your list. Six quarts of milk, two buttermilks, two chocolates, and three pints of cream.”
    I checked the list. There was her name-Grace Stafford-and the order, just as she’d said. I told her I’d get everything for her, and I started putting the order together. “How old are you?” Miss Grace asked as I worked. “Twelve?”
    “No, ma’am. Not until July.”
    “I’ve got a son.” Miss Grace knocked ashes from her cigarette. She chewed on another cookie. “Turned twenty in December. He lives in San Antonio. Know where that is?”
    “Yes ma’am. Texas. Where the Alamo is.”
    “That’s right. Turned twenty, which makes me thirty-eight. I’m an old fossil, ain’t I?”
    This was a trick question, I thought. “No ma’am,” I decided to say.
    “Well, you’re a little diplomat, ain’t you?” She smiled again, and this time the smile was in her eyes. “Have another cookie.” She left me the box and walked to the door, and she hollered into the house: “Lainie! Lainie, get your butt up and come out here!”
    My dad emerged first. He looked old in the hard light of morning, and there were dark circles under his eyes. “Called the sheriff’s office,” he told me as he sat in his wet seat and squeezed his feet into his shoes. “Somebody’s gonna meet us where the car went in.”
    “Who the hell was it?” Miss Grace asked.
    “I couldn’t tell. His face was…” He glanced quickly at me, then back to the woman. “He was beat up pretty bad.”
    “Must’ve been drunk. Moonshinin’, most likely.”
    “I don’t think so.” Dad hadn’t said anything over the phone about the car’s driver being naked, strangled with a piano wire, and handcuffed to the wheel. That was for the sheriff and not for Miss Grace’s or anybody else’s ears. “You ever see a fella with a tattoo on his left shoulder? Looked like a skull with wings growin’ out of its head?”
    “I’ve seen more tattoos than the Navy,” Miss Grace said, “but I can’t recall anything like that around here. Why? Fella have his shirt off or somethin’?”
    “Yeah, he did. Had that skull with wings tattooed right about here.” He touched his left shoulder. Dad shivered again, and rubbed his hands together. “They’ll never bring that car up. Never. Saxon’s Lake is three hundred feet deep if it’s an inch.”
    The chimes sounded. I looked toward the door with the tray of milk quarts in my arms.
    A girl with sleep-swollen eyes stumbled out. She was wearing a long plaid bathrobe and her feet were bare. Her hair was the color of cornsilk and hung around her shoulders, and as she neared the milk truck she blinked in the light and said, “I’m all fucked up.”
    I think I must’ve almost fallen down, because never in my life had I heard a female use a word that dirty before. Oh, I knew what the word meant and all, but its casual use from a pretty mouth shocked the fool out of me.
    “There’s a young man on the premises, Lainie,” Miss Grace said in a voice that could curl an iron nail. “Watch your language, please.”
    Lainie looked at me, and her cool stare made me recall the time I’d put a fork in an electric socket. Lainie’s eyes were chocolate brown and her lips seemed to wear a half smile, half sneer. Something about her face looked tough and wary, as if she’d run out of trust. There was a small red mark in the hollow of her throat. “Who’s the kid?” she asked.
    “Mr. Mackenson’s son. Show some class, hear?”
    I swallowed hard and averted my eyes from Lainie’s. Her