The Worst Best Friend: A Small Town Romance

“All right, you win. Just ease off the charm. Saturday it is.”

6

Going Hog Wild (Weston)

It’s been one long-ass week.

The garage has been popping, siphoning away my daylight hours, and touching base with two dozen people to help get everything ready for the car show has taken over my nights. Still, it’s the early morning hours—the quietest—that kill me the most.

Because that’s when Shelly sneaks over and drops off food for Hercules.

She doesn’t think I see her out there, bent over his pen with a giddy smile while the pig stuffs his wrinkled snout in the bowl she holds out to him like an offering for a prize dog, but I do.

I see the way she lights up with joy as Herc stares up gratefully with his beady little eyes.

I hear how she laughs when he rips the bowl out of her hands in his greedy feeding frenzy. Sometimes they fall into this playful tug-of-war.

I dredge up every ounce of willpower in my bones so I don’t go stomping out there, flay my heart open, and apologize for being such a swinging dick to her.

I can’t.

I did the right thing years ago, freezing her out, when I decided not to send her my deranged, tortured scribblings.

Believe me, I kept my promise to write in this fucked up, twisted way. I just never let her see my writing.

A fat stack of letters accumulated at the bottom of my sack every few months during my years in combat, never being tossed into military mail to find their way home.

Never sent home to show her how sick and broken I’d become.

She was only a teenager. Far too young, too innocent, too bright for the smoldering realities of war.

Like the family in this nowhere village where we were stationed who started inviting us around a fire for tea in the cooler months. That went on a few times a week, till one fine day we found the bodies.

Hamid, his wife, and so many of their grandkids riddled with bullets, mutilated, and unceremoniously dumped in the bone-drying sun just outside town. You could barely tell them apart from at least five other families in the village who made the mistake of showing a foreign army any hospitality.

How the fuck could I ever tell her about my life? How could I stoke her dreams when my own bled out one dark day at a time?

How could I let her become my hope, my fixation, that last scrap of innocence and safety I held on to thousands of miles away?

Even when I knew she turned eighteen and set off for college, I still thought about her too much.

The daily death and frustration warped my fucking mind.

I started thinking of her in a different way some long, anxious nights. A way that didn’t fit with what she was—my best friend’s kid sister—and I damn sure couldn’t encourage that insanity.

No, I don’t regret ghosting her.

I made sure Marty made her follow through with her promise to get the hell out of Dallas, too.

She had.

I should be happier about that, not waiting until she leaves my property before grumping out of my house with water for the pig.

“Don’t get too attached,” I tell him. “She’s going home before winter.”

Herc grunts back with an obstinate glare, as if to say, we’ll just see about that, my dude.

“She’s got bigger ambitions than stuffing your face. She’s found her calling, and it sure as hell isn’t here with us,” I say, inspecting his water trough. “What? Don’t give me that look. It’s not like I’m the one chasing her off.”