Run Away Baby

“I scared them away.”

“Now go get the lawn chairs, okay?”

“Which shed?” she asked.

“I don’t know. One or the other. They’ll be hanging on a nail on the wall.”

She went over to the nearer shed and pulled on the old metal doorknob. It opened out instead of in, and since the grass had grown tall in front of it, she could only open it a few inches. As she pulled on it, a spider fell down, swinging from its web into the opening. She jumped back. After she caught her breath, she knocked the spider out of the way with her wine bottle and gave the door another pull.

Inside, old terracotta pots were stacked and toppling on a wooden bench. Metal tomato cages were piled in a corner. An old, plastic laundry basket filled with baseballs and half-inflated basketballs rested in another corner. Hanging on nails to her right were rusty lawn chairs, the kind made of aluminum and woven nylon straps. She could reach the two closest to her from here, but to get all four she would have to go inside.

She carefully set her bottle of wine outside the shed and gave the door another pull. Another spider dropped down. She cringed, stepping back to avoid its swinging trajectory. At first it swung wildly by her head, but eventually it steadied itself, dropping lower and lower. When it was at the level of her hip she brought her foot up and smooshed it into the side of the doorframe with her running shoe.

Holding her breath, she ducked inside the shed and removed the lawn chairs from the nails. She tossed them out the open door onto the grass, one by one, hoping anything clinging to them would get knocked off. As she was on her way back out, her eyes caught a row of playing cards tacked to the wall. They were all queens of hearts, each slightly different, from seven different decks of cards. She paused, curious about them. They were old, faded, dusty. It looked like they’d been there a long time.

What was it about this place and cards, she wondered.

She shoved the door closed, took her wine and the lawn chairs, and went down to where Charlie was squatting, st

ill trying to get the fire going.

Chapter 43

“Do you have any gas around here?” Charlie said to Rake.

“Just in the tank of my truck.”

The four of them were sitting around the fire pit, still fireless. Mr. Bun-Rabbit and Meggie’s stories about working in a plastic factory were helping Abby forget about alligators. Her mind drifted from these stories, to Charlie’s struggle with the fire, to Randall. She liked that Papa Rottzy had no idea where she was and, by now, had to be freaking out about it. If these two clowns weren’t here with them she would have found some way to watch the news.

“This is fucking pissing me off,” said Charlie.

“Do you want me to try?” she asked. She’d gotten pretty good at starting a fire in her survival classes.

Everyone ignored her so she took another drink and worked on reclining her lawn chair to the perfect angle.

“Here. I knew I kept these for some reason. Hold my cigarette to those sticks and these old receipts,” said Meggie, unzipping her fanny pack and pulling out her little stack of receipts, “and you’ll get it going. Whatever you do, don’t use up all the matches.”

“That’s not going to work,” said Rake.

Meggie’s face fell. She wadded up the receipts and threw them in the fire pit. One of them wasn’t crumpled very much and the wind caught it, and it started blowing across the grass.

“Don’t be a fucking litterbug. Go get that,” Rake told her.

Abby was baffled that he cared about littering or even knew the expression litterbug. Meggie got up and caught the receipt, wadded it into a tiny ball, and dropped it into the fire pit. Rake got up and ground all the receipts down into the dirt. “Go look in my truck for a lighter,” he said to Meggie.

“I already did and there wasn’t one.”

“Go look again.”

She did as she was told, returning a few minutes later with a pink lighter. “I found this down in the seat. Why the fuck do you have a pink lighter?”

“Are you sure it’s not yours?”

“It’s not mine. Don’t try to act like it’s mine.”

“I don’t know where it came from.”

“I’m not giving it to you until you tell me where it came from.”