Casual Wanderer © 2025 All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and specific other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.
"You Ain't Alone"
Morning pressed its face to the shop's windows like a curious child, pale and patient, laying a bright coin on Jackson's shoulder where the throw had slid. He surfaced slowly, the way you rise from a warm river, limbs heavy, lungs easy. Cash was behind him, one hand tucked under Jackson's ribs like he'd finally decided the world didn't get to drop this boy again without going through him first.
They lay a moment in the hush, cataloguing the thousand small proofs that the last forty-eight hours hadn't been a fever dream.
Sawdust glittered on their forearms.
The bench lamp angled low as a halo.
A scuff on the floor where somebody's heel had skated, followed by laughter that still hummed in Jackson's bones.
Cash breathed against the back of Jackson's neck and mumbled, "Mornin', rodeo boy," the vowels sanded soft by sleep.
"Hey, doorman," Jackson said, smiling into the throw. He lifted Cash's hand to his mouth and kissed its heel, just once, like a signature, and set it back where it had been keeping him.
They talked the easy nothing-talk you do when real talk is coming. Cash chuckled at every one of Jackson's comments, low, thumb drawing lazy circles at the lip of Jackson's hip.
The day might've let them be.
But a town will have its say.
Sound gathered where silence had been. Not the simple morning shuffle. Something layered and wrong, car doors too numerous, a truck idling where no one had business idling, a voice calling and then calling again like the second time could make the news change its mind. A dog barked with purpose. Another answered with grievance. Somewhere, a phone rang itself hoarse, then another, then three in chorus.
Cash stilled. Jackson felt the old heat climb his back, fists first, then breath, but he also felt the new thing Cash had taught himself: that pause a man puts between hearing and hurting. "That ain't weekday noise," Cash said, already awake in the shoulders, the rest of him catching up.
"It ain't," Jackson agreed. He rolled over, met Cash's mouth quick, and got up before the world could use their inertia against them.
They dressed in the rhythm of men who'd been poor in time before, fast without rush. Cash found his tank, shook it once, pulled it on wrong-side-out, then didn't fix it. Jackson gathered his jeans from under the bench lamp's gold, coin of light, warm to the touch, and thumbed the St. Christopher clipped to his belt loop. The metal had gone cool overnight. It took his heat and kept it. He kissed it out of habit older than sense.
At the window, Cash touched the slat like a hinge that needed feeling before it needed force. "Ready?"
Jackson nodded. The nod had a swallow in it. "No," he replied, a soft smirk on his lips. One that begged for the world to stop moving.
Cash tugged. The blinds breathed up.
Willow Creek was already on its feet, and unlike church, nobody knew the hymn. A white van with a dish on top squatted two doors down like a beetle, men in ties pointing their phones at nothing and everything. Miss Alma stood barefoot in her hydrangeas, hose in one hand, hairnet flashing like a crown, her mouth a circle that kept closing and opening. The barber had dragged his radio to the doorway and turned it up too loud, the announcer's steady voice strangling on words that didn't belong to morning: …formal charges filed this hour by Weston Poole… A piece of poster board had been taped to the stop sign: JUSTICE, the letters slanted like someone had written them running.
Down by the corner, a sedan with a state seal idled, unfamiliar and important. People flowed around it in the choreography small towns invent when something enormous walks into the room, stare without staring, speak without saying.
Jackson's phone, abandoned on the bench for two days, trembled itself into his hand like a bird that had finally found the right branch. Messages stacked stupidly fast.
Cassidy: WHERE ARE YOU? Also...bring me a sausage biscuit.
Carla: Baby, don't you dare open Facebook. Get to Daisy's.
Cash leaned close to the glass, listening. The radio fought to sound like it had practice. "...following what the State District Attorney's office describes as an anonymous video documenting the attack, three men named in the complaint, charges include sexual assault, aggravated assault and violation of civil rights..."
There it was.
"Three," Cash said, tasting the number like bark. "They said who?"
The radio had names, and the street had rumors, and both rolled past their window with the force of weather.
A boy pedaled by standing on one pedal, shouting to his friend on the pegs, "...Sheriff Calvin in cuffs, I'm tellin' you, Cade Whitlow too, an' a third one, Mama says she heard but she won't say..."
Miss Alma, hearing herself not be surprised, said, "Mm. Lord," and turned her hose on the street like maybe the dust could take a lesson.
Cash's jaw set just once, the old look, the one that could whittle a man down to his worst hour, but he closed his hand, unclenched it, let the new rule win.
Jackson put his palm on the workbench because the bench told the truth without spin. "We gotta get to Mama's," he said. "Now."
"Yeah," Cash echoed.
They moved.
The shop let them go with a soft sound, door swinging true on hinges Cash had mortised himself, the sign above rocking once in the wake of their urgency. Outside, the heat was the kind that climbed into your clothes first and your chest second. Mrs. Whitaker from the Spur passed with a Tupperware like a shield. Mr. Peabody sat on his bench with his guitar case closed and both hands folded, as if praying to the idea of strings.
"Cash!" a kid called from a porch, tense and thrilled like a dog pointed at a rabbit. "Y'all hear?"
"We hear," Cash said without stopping. He lifted his hand in that square of air that meant I see you, which in Willow Creek was a binding contract.
They cut the alley where the tomato-red bike leaned. They slipped past hydrangeas showing out, past Miss Alma's blue hose looped like a sleeping snake, past the church where Cash's door caught steady for the hundredth palm this morning.
Cash fished the keys out as they walked, muscle memory beating the need for speech. Jackson, without thinking, hooked his fingers into the back pocket of Cash's jeans, just enough contact to say don't you drift. And Cash, without looking, reached back and caught that hand, squeezed once, gave it back. It was clumsy and perfect and necessary.
At the curb, Cash's truck blinked at them like a good dog you leave on the porch when company shows up. Cash patted the dash when he climbed in.
Jackson buckled. "You good?" he asked, eyes on Cash already, the gearshift still neutral.
"I want to kill and pray in the same breath." Cash said, bothering with honesty.
Jackson nodded like that made sense. "Well...we gon' do neither till Mama says which way's up."
"Deal," Cash said, and his mouth found a quick smile that was more backbone than joy.
Cash set the truck in gear and they headed for Daisy's.
As they arrived, Jackson saw the absence before the color, the gap along the curb where Blake's truck and the long trailer should've been. A long, clean space with a grease-shadow telling on it. Empty as a pulled tooth.
But they didn't stand there long enough to mourn the absence.
They went in.
Daisy's front door took a breath and swung true the way Cash had set it to months ago. The bowl of saints sat dead center on the table, a little crooked like worry had shifted the world a hair. Marla and Becky were braced at the island with coffee like it was railing on a ship. Carla worked the stove with one hand and steadied somebody else's heart with the other. Cassidy had planted herself in a chair with her phone under her thigh as if she did not trust herself to be a good citizen if it got loose.
"Baby," Daisy said, not moving from the oilcloth. The ladle in her fist made a quiet gavel on the rim of a pot. "Close my door."
They did. The room drew up like a choir hitting its breath together.
"You hear?" Becky asked, pearls bright as a conscience.
"We heard enough," Cash said, and his mouth already had a hard line pressed into it, the old one, the one that said point me and I'll end it.
Carla put a plate down that nobody reached for. "Calvin's in cuffs," she said, plain. "State boys walked him out in front'a God and the whole town. Cade too. That Mama of his tried to stand in their rich driveway. Didn't take."
"Third one's the wind right now," Marla added, tone sharp with pleasure she wasn't proud of. "Ever'body knows, ain't nobody sayin'...but Calvin and Cade went quiet when the bracelets came out."
"Colton?" Jackson asked, already bracing for the twist.
Cassidy nodded, eyes bright with a heat she hadn't decided the flavor of. "Police knocked on his auntie's shotgun on Cypress. Bastard slid out the back window. Ain't seen since."
Cash moved like a struck match. His hand found the counter, then the back of a chair, then nothing. He took two steps toward the door and old lightning crawled up under his skin so honest the hair on Jackson's arms stood up. "Mother fu...," he said, voice gone low as a ditch. "I'll take him down to the creek an'..." His hand made a circle in the air, fist closing around an absence that looked like a throat. "He gon' meet quiet water."
"Cash," Daisy warned, a ladle-thin edge in it, but her eyes flicked to Jackson.
Jackson caught Cash at the hinge of the door, the way you catch a door that's about to slam, palm flat, the shock of heat and muscle under his hand like voltage. "Hey," he said, not a scold, not a plea. "Look at me."
Cash looked at the hand first, as if it were someone else's, then at Jackson. His eyes were river-dark and flashing. The room fell out from the edges.
"Look...at...me," Jackson said, softer.
Cash did. The old rage was a boy behind his eyes, bone-thin and mean with fear, already halfway to a truck bed and a bat. Jackson put himself between that boy and the door, not with might, with knowing.
"You ain't him," Jackson said, and the words put a plank under Cash's boots. "You ain't the hand that taught you hurt." He slid his hand from the doorjamb to the meat of Cash's shoulder, thumb finding that notch along the clavicle that had been his landing all their lives. "Fix... don't fight."
Cash's jaw ticked once, twice. The old devil inside him spat and shook the cage. "He hurt Weston," he said, and the name came out like a choke. "He hurt..."
"I know," Jackson said, and the knowing was a steady heat, not a blaze. "But he ain't gon' stop hurtin' through you. Not while I stand here."
He stepped closer till their foreheads were near enough breath made a small weather. Cash's hands, those good hands, hovered at Jackson's ribs like they didn't trust themselves not to break what they loved. "You hear me?" Jackson whispered. "I'm right here. So...stay with me. You run, you leave me with your ghost, and I ain't buryin' you to make a point."
Cash's breath jacked, then dropped. The tendons in his neck let go a shade. "Hmm..." he murmured, and there wasn't any armor in it.
"Yeah," Jackson said. He set his palm flat over Cash's heart like you set a level on a sill. "That's right."
For a beat long enough to count a life in, Cash did the visible math of choosing. His gaze cut toward the door once, then came back and stayed. He took Jackson's wrist, not hard, not to move him, just to have the vein under his fingers say here. The room heard the click of something internal settling, hinge leaf to mortise, pin through knuckle.
When he finally spoke, his voice had sand in it and something clean. "Alright," he said. "Alright." A breath, shuddering but obedient.
Jackson leaned in and touched Cash's mouth once, a stamp, and stepped back because the kitchen had witnessed enough for free.
Daisy's breath left her like relief didn't like to be seen. Cassidy's eyes went bright and soft, jaw set proud, gaze sliding away because it was their holy. Marla and Becky performed the ancient Southern rite of studying the room's pattern intently, which is how you give boys privacy without leaving the room. Carla reached for another coffee cup and pretended it took two hands.
"And for those of y'all who been tellin' this like it was my scoop," Cassidy cut in, voice sharp with mischief and duty, "let's quit lyin' on me a minute." She planted a palm on the table like Daisy taught her. "I didn't pull that video out of thin air. Blake sent it to me."
The kitchen sucked a tooth in unison.
"Blake Buckley?" Becky blinked, reverent and scandalized in equal measure.
Cassidy's mouth went slant. "Text came in 'fore dawn. Said: Get this to somebody won't choke on it. Video attached. I ran it past every good ol' boy with a desk and a flag and took it straight to the state." She lifted a shoulder, proud and sad at the same time. "He did right and then he ran."
Jackson let that truth land and knock around his chest. It hurt and healed in the same square inch. He set it down beside the fact of Cash's palm still warm on his wrist. The ampersand in his life sat fat and friendly between their names and didn't apologize for existing.
Daisy's ladle set itself in the spoon rest like a weapon laid aside. "Levi's with Weston down by the station," she said, voice smoothing the quilt. "Paperwork and doctors he trusts. He ain't alone." She looked at Cash, then Jackson, then the room. "State's in there. Doors are open. The best thing we can do right now is stay put."
Jackson slipped out past the bowl of saints and the hush of the lemon oilcloth like a man sneaking on his own thoughts. The porch boards gave their small complaint, then let him go. He walked the fence line till the lawn quit and the corn began, rows standing shoulder to shoulder, tassels whispering like a choir that didn't want to be caught singing.
He set his hand on a stalk the way you touch a skittish colt, not to take anything, just to say I'm here. The field held the ghost of a night that had branded him: the cookout's smoke, the laughter falling off into crickets, the sky salted with a million bright witness eyes.
Blake was there.
Under that sky Jackson had learned what it meant to be wanted with a recklessness that made the world smaller and truer. Corn squeaked against skin, heat made holy by breath and yes and yes again. He could still feel the press of damp earth through his shirt, the way a man's hat had fallen forgotten into a furrow, the way the constellations had seemed to lean in and listen.
The fire.
The want.
This morning the same field looked back at him plain. He'd turned his back on Blake. And that decision sat in Jackson's chest like an unsanded edge. Blake had sent the proof. Blake had done the right thing and then run. Loving a man like that was like loving the weather, Jackson thought. It could bless you clean or leave you looking for your roof.
Gravel ticked softly behind him.
Daisy's steps found him without asking where he'd gone. She didn't crowd him. She came up beside him and stood with her hands hooked in her apron pockets, dish towel slung over one shoulder, a saint card peeking like a nosy cousin. The willow down by the creek lifted a hand and shushed the street.
"You out here lettin' the corn judge you?" she said, mild and merciless both.
Jackson pulled a smile that didn't quite fit. "Figure it knows every secret we ever told it."
"Mm-hmm." She looked out into the rows like she'd birthed them. "Corn's nosy, but it ain't cruel. Folks are. Sit with me on your feet a minute."
They didn't move. Standing counted.
"I turned my back on him," Jackson said, the confession small and careful as a match. "Blake pulled his hand back and I..." He shook his head at himself. "I walked."
"Sometimes walkin' away is the only thing that keeps you big enough to come back right," Daisy said. "Sometimes it's coward. You know the difference in your bones. Which one was it?"
He breathed through his nose, counted three cicada scrapes. "Both," he said, honest and hurt. "I wanted him to be the man he is when it's just us. And...I wanted out before I turned myself to smoke tryin' to make him."
Daisy swayed a little, the way a woman does when she's rocking a history nobody but her can see. "Baby, there's a tightrope between followin' your heart and stayin' true to who loved you...even if they loved you wrong. Folks bring us their crooked, because crooked's what they got. You honor the part that tried. You don't hand your throat to the part that didn't. That's the balance." She cut him a sideways look sharp as a paring knife. "Ain't no points for lettin' a man shrink you."
Jackson's fingers found his St. Christopher and worried it like a rosary. The metal was cool, then warm, then his. "Mama," he asked, voice low, "is it...possible to love two people in different ways? Not half-and-half. Whole-and-whole."
Daisy didn't flinch from the heat of it. Her mouth went soft at the edges. "Hearts choose, baby," she said, simple as bread. "That's the work God left for each of us...to make peace with what our heart chooses and with what it don't. You can carry a whole town in there, and you do, Lord knows. But a life won't be lived on every porch. One of 'em's gon' be your lamp in the window when your bones get loud. The other..." she exhaled, not unkind. "The other may always be the road you bless on your way past."
Jackson let that settle where it could do good. The corn kept its whisper. A red flick of bird arrowed from one fencepost to the next, cardinal quick, a little blaze that made the air look braver.
"I want to find him," Jackson said at last, the want clicking into place like a hinge pin. "I want to put my face in front of him and say the whole of it. I can't let him think all I got for him is my back."
"I agree," Daisy said, already nodding as if she'd started that answer for him in the kitchen. "And I think you oughta take Cash."
Jackson blinked. "Take? Cash'll never..." He laughed because the picture of Cash in a truck headed straight for a man who could still tilt Jackson's whole sky was a recipe you checked twice for dynamite. "He ain't fixin' to sign up for that field trip, Mama."
Daisy's smile turned private. "Boy might surprise you. He's been surprising me regular." She pulled the towel off her shoulder and folded it along its old crease. "Truth is, I'm scared to death of what'll happen if he sits here through that trial. Whitlow mouths gon' run. Calvin's kin gon' flex what muscle they got left. Rage will come knockin' with a casserole and call itself company. Cash has learned to set down that old fight," she said, pride threading her voice, "but there's words a man can't hear yet and keep his hands holy. Road might be the better church."
They let the quiet do a little work.
Then, Daisy spoke again without lifting her eyes from the field. "You're doin' the hard thing right now, and I see it. Not runnin' on the heat. Not lettin' pity write your letter. You're askin' what keeps you true." Her voice went softer still, which in Daisy meant something important had climbed onto her palm. "I'm proud of you, Jackson."
The name hit him like water after salt.
She turned to him, took his face in both her hands, work hands, grant-writing hands, biscuit hands, and made him meet the spark in her eyes that had taught him his own. "You're a Bell," she said, as if that were both a blessing and a job description. "Our hearts are big enough to hold the whole world, baby. We love hard, and we love many, saints and sinners, doors and fools, hydrangeas and hurricanes. Don't let anybody tell you that's a flaw. Just don't you ever use that big ol' heart as an excuse to be careless."
He nodded, and the nod had weight. She pulled him into her and he went, folding down like a tall boy who still knew the route. He could smell fresh coffee and the day's first onions on her skin.
And behind it, something older, the porch nights when she'd held him and sent him back to the fight with a sandwich and a rule.
Jackson hadn't cried in front of her since he was fifteen and thought he'd broken everything that could be broken. He didn't now. He just stood in that hold and felt himself get put back where he belonged.
"I love you," she said into his hair. "You are the best thing God ever trusted me with. Don't you forget it."
"I won't," he said, voice gone rough.
She let him go, smoothing the shoulder she'd wrinkled, thumb catching on a spot of sawdust like it was a star she intended to keep. "Go ask Cash. Give him the chance to surprise you."
Jackson looked at the rows, then back toward the house. The willow shushed a little louder, as if that could change anybody's mind. He breathed, found center, and managed a grin that showed a flash of the boy he'd been.
"Alright," he said.
They stood one more heartbeat with the corn talking and the day leaning forward to listen. Then Jackson turned toward the porch, and Daisy watched him a second longer like you do when you're letting your heart walk around outside your body on purpose.
Cash was on Daisy's back steps, forearms on his knees, looking like a man listening for a nail to set itself.
Jackson eased down beside him, thigh to thigh. "Mama says I oughta go find him. I...want to."
Cash's mouth made that small, private tilt that wasn't quite a smile. "Mm."
"She also says I shouldn't go alone."
"Mm." He let the second sound sit a beat, then added, plain as a pencil line: "She's right."
Jackson turned, surprised clean enough that it felt like cool water. "You'll...?"
Cash finally looked at him full. "Ain't lettin' you leave me again. Not like that. Not no more." He shrugged, as if it weighed him nothing to say. "You go, I go."
Heat rose in Jackson's throat that didn't have a thing to do with Mississippi. He swallowed it back into a grin before it spilled over. "You sure? I mean, last I checked, you never traveled past the Welcome to Willow Creek sign. Heard you get a nosebleed when the county line looks at you."
Cash cut him a side-eye, dry as a good biscuit. "Boy, I got gas receipts from Yazoo to Biloxi. Just 'cause I don't brag don't mean I don't go." The corner of his mouth moved, and that was his laugh. "Don't you worry 'bout me and roads. I'll make friends."
They chuckled, quick and quiet, the kind of laugh that pads the sharp places so truth can pass without drawing blood. Then the laughter died down of its own accord, like a sympathetic choir settling after an amen.
"Fore we light out, though..." Cash said, rubbing his thumb over a nick on the step as if cataloging it. "We oughta say somethin' to Weston. I ain't goin' to march nowhere without tellin' that boy I heard him brave."
Jackson nodded, the yes already in him. "You're right." He pushed up to stand, the step complaining exactly the way it always had, a comfort. "Suppose we can..." He paused, thought sparking like steel off flint. "Hold up. I got an idea."
He patted his pockets, found the phone he'd ignored for two days, and pulled it out. St. Christopher on his belt loop flashed and knocked once against the case like a little coin of approval. Jackson's thumbs hovered, then moved with purpose, his reflection faint in the black glass.
"What kinda idea?" Cash asked, not suspicious, just curious in his unhurried way.
"You'll see. Better get your tool out," Jackson said, looking up with that crooked, hopeful smile Daisy insisted he'd been born with.
*
(Later that day)
The hospital roof had been poured flat and practical, but morning made a cathedral of it anyway, sky for stained glass, the sun dropping a gold coin on the tar. From up there, Willow Creek arranged itself into a map they knew by scar and by softness.
Jackson and Cash climbed the last rung and ducked out into the heat like swimmers breaking surface. Cash held something in his hand. They didn't talk. They didn't have to. They crossed to the rail and sat with their legs through, boot toes hanging above the painted cinderblock, the town breathing under them. Cash passed the thermos Daisy had pressed into his hand, coffee dark as creek shade. They took turns without fuss, the lip of the cup still warm from the kitchen that had made them both, in different ways.
Silence settled like a smart quilt. Light where it should be, heavy where it had to be. Jackson's hand found the edge of the rail. The metal was heat-hot, and he held it anyway, because loving something sometimes meant taking its temperature. Cash's fingers drummed once against his thigh, rough nails and grit he would never quite shake.
"You ever think 'bout how the town looks from up here?" Jackson asked.
"Looks...honest," Cash said. "Ain't no porch paint can hide nothin' from height."
They didn't fill the quiet after that. Down at the light, a truck idled, then moved. A siren wailed once in the way that means coming through rather than the worst thing. A cardinal flashed from the hospital's satellite dish to the parking lot oak, red quickness like a dropped match that didn't catch. The breeze came uninvited and lifted the hair at the nape of Jackson's neck with a tenderness he elected to assign to God.
The door behind them opened. Cassidy came out into the light like she always did, full of it and unbothered by her own brightness. She squinted against the glare and padded over, sneakers silent, a bag of contraband vending-machine crackers crinkling in her fist.
"Well ain't y'all a postcard," she said, easing down between them, one leg through the rail, one crooked up beneath her. "Two Romeos and a balcony made outta government budget."
Jackson bumped her shoulder. "You bringin' snacks to a sermon?"
"I bringin' snacks to everything." She peeled a pack, offered them both, then bit gravity out of a square herself. "Figured if Weston got sprung from paperwork, he'd want air that ain't recycled." Her eyes went soft at the edges.
They got quiet in the remembrance of that softer dare, how it had felt to be someone's kid in a town that knew your name before you did. The air shifted. The roof door sighed again.
Weston stepped through, careful the way you are when your body still has a few deals in negotiation. The cardinal-headed cane tapped out his pulse. He had a hospital bracelet on like a cheap halo and his mouth was already making fun of himself so no one else would.
"Well lookit that," he said, finding their faces like handholds. "Committee done convened without me."
"Always late to your own legend," Cassidy said, scooting so he could have the good spot by the shadow of the AC unit. She used her calf to hook a folding chair toward him. He waved it off, stubborn, and made his slow way to the rail instead, lowering himself with the care of a man who had learned the hard way that dignity ain't a race.
Cash stood without making an event of it and put his palm, just once, at Weston's elbow. Weston didn't look at the hand. He accepted its honesty and used it. When he settled, legs through the rail, he let out a breath he didn't owe anybody and tipped his head back so the sun could get to the parts of him that had spent all morning under fluorescent.
"City looks different up here," he said, then chuckled. "Town. Sorry. I get country-club with my nouns when I'm stressed."
"Town looks little," Cassidy said.
"Town looks ours," Jackson answered.
They passed the thermos to Weston. He held it like an award, drank like a man rehearsing normal. When he handed it back, his eyes were glassy with the kind of wet that doesn't spill because it's busy doing other work.
"I did it," he said, and the sentence was a whole road. "Said their names. Signed my own. Heard a bailiff cough. Wanted to puke and kiss Levi both at once. Settled for not pukin' and noddin'."
Cash nodded at the horizon.
They fell into talking the way friends do when the hardest part's been said. In loops and circles, letting memory lay track as the train goes.
Then, for a while they only watched.
A truck eased into the parking lot. The church bell offered a single, testing note, as if to ask the air if it was ready. A nurse on a smoke break saw them and pretended she didn't. Up there, the town looked honest, with no porch paint, just lines and roofs and a river that remained a river no matter whose name was in handcuffs.
Jackson cleared his throat. He had the kind of face that told the truth a half-second before his mouth did. "Wes," he said, voice low. "We ain't gon' be here when they call y'all into court." He glanced once at Cash, felt the yes sitting there, and went on. "We leavin' tomorrow mornin'. We got a road to go down and a thing to say to somebody who needs to hear it. But..." He touched his pocket, as if to make sure hope was still there. "We didn't come empty."
Cash reached behind him, no flourish, just the steady motion of a man who trusts his hands, and brought up a long shape wrapped in butcher paper and twine. He set it across his knees a second, thumb rubbing once along a knot he'd tied himself, then passed it over.
"Made you somethin'," Cash said, almost an afterthought. "Well. We did."
Weston looked at the package like it might be a snake or a Bible. He worked the twine loose, peeled paper back from the top, and then the rest, slow and greedy all at once.
The cane inside found the light and the light said yes.
Hickory, butter-smooth along the shaft, the grain a quiet river running true from cap to ferrule. The handle was sculpted to a palm's honesty, shaped like it had always meant to fit him, no flourish, just a rightness that made his fingers close without instruction. A slim brass collar caught the sun like a laugh smothered and saved for later. Along the inside curve, where a hand would feel it more than see it, the wood had been cut shallow and precise: Still. Here.
Weston's mouth did that brave, foolish thing where it tries to smile and hold tears behind its teeth at the same time. He traced the letters with his thumb and felt them twice, once in the skin, once in the somewhere behind his breastbone that had gone tender since the world turned and chose to keep him. On the shaft near the collar, small and neat, three signatures marched like a promise: J. Bell, C. Dalton, C. Dalton, stacked with a tiny ampersand tying them together. Jackson had signed like he carved. Cash had carved like he signed. Cassidy had added a dot over the i that was a little heart only if you squinted mean.
"You gon' cry?" Cassidy said, all wicked sweetness, eyes wet enough to flood Vicksburg.
"Shut up," Weston breathed, and then he almost laughed, because there is relief even in telling your friend to hush when you love them. He blinked hard. The tears did whatever they wanted anyway, quiet and clean.
He took the new cane by the collar and lifted it shoulder-high like a standard in a small, necessary war. The old cardinal-headed one leaned against the rail beside him, a faithful comrade suddenly granted leave. He set the hickory tip down. The sound it made, wood to world, was soft and sure, a note with a future in it.
"Still here," he said, and this time it wasn't a prayer disguised as a joke. It was a report from the front.
Cassidy hooked her arm through his without asking. Jackson's knee found Cash's and stayed. The morning opened its hands wider.
"Listen," Jackson said, eyes on Weston but speaking to all of it. "We're goin'. Not gone. We'll be at the end of whatever line you need us to be at. Call, and we come. Doesn't matter if we got county under our feet or three state lines and a bad motel. We ain't disappearin' no more."
"Yeah," Cash said, and if a single syllable could be a covenant, that one was.
"Pack, not pact," Cassidy said, then rolled her eyes at herself. "Hell with it...pact. Y'all hear me. No matter where we go or where we are, we show up for each other. Loud, quiet, ugly, beautiful. We show up."
They stacked hands without planning, their forearms brown, pale, freckled, nicked, and bracelet-bright. Jackson's palm went down first, steady, warm. Cassidy's slapped on top, the slap more ceremony than sound. Weston laid his over theirs, the weight of it light and enormous. Cash covered the whole pile, his hand broad and scar-sketched, sawdust ground into the lines like history.
"Ampersand," Cassidy said softly.
"Ampersand," they answered, in unison that wasn't rehearsed, just right.
They didn't cheer.
They didn't need to.
The wind came up small and kind, lifted the hair at their temples.
Weston brought the cane up to eye level and studied the signatures again, the brass, the simple grace of a thing made to bear his weight and remind him he deserved to be borne. "This is..." His voice wasn't ready to finish the sentence. He didn't make it. He held the cane like a friend's hand and let the unfinished hang in the heat, good and true.
Jackson leaned his shoulder into Cash's, the older stealth of their bodies saying the part words couldn't. Cassidy tilted her head back and let the sun bless her mouth, dangerous as ever and newly tender. Weston tapped the ferrule twice against the roof, and the sound folded itself into the morning, a quiet bright stitch nobody would see from the street but everybody would feel somehow in their day.
For a long, good minute, nothing moved but the breeze and a small red bird alighting on the satellite dish before darting away. Then Cash's hand slipped down and squeezed once, and they let their hands fall apart and remain tied all the same.
The cane, new, honest, and signed, rested against Weston's knee.
*
(Two days later)
Daisy had the key between her teeth and a sack of oranges on her hip because she'd run out of hands, a morning arrangement that suited her fine. Willow House took the key like a kiss and sighed open. She nudged the door with her knee, flipped on the bank of switches one by one, the light coming alive like a row of congregants standing polite, and set the oranges on the pass-through where a hydrangea in a mason jar kept drinking itself lopsided.
"Morning, house," she said, because she believed in greeting anything that held people for a living.
Her circuit was muscle memory: freezer hum checked with two fingers, pantry labels straightened, grant files stacked, board settled under the first cough of the AC. In the workshop, the roll-up stayed down, the pegboard neat, every chisel asleep in its outlined bed, the stenciled promise TOOLS RETURN HOME squared up like a rule you teach boys before they can lift a hammer.
A flicker of silence.
And that's when she heard it, soft and human in the far corner by the bulletin board, where the old church bench had taken root. Not the building settling, not a rat. She didn't allow rats. A sleep-noise, wet at the edges, the sound a body makes when it's given up on being dignified.
Daisy didn't startle.
She set down her ledger, pulled two paper cups, rattled the good ice, and turned the faucet until the water ran cold. Then she walked the long way around, past the paper cutter, a carton of crayons, and a stack of T-shirts, so whatever fear was curled there could see her coming and decide against bolting.
Colton lay on the bench like hunger had found a pew. Shoes off, knees up, cheek pressed to wood. A bruise had settled along his jaw, yellow and purple like a bad fruit. His shirt was inside-out. His wrists had the burny red of rope that hadn't loved him back. He looked so young it hurt.
"Child," Daisy said, not loud, not soft, just true.
He flinched awake mean before he woke scared. His eyes went sharp before he grabbed for shoes that weren't there, then for the door with the reflex of a boy who speaks flee better than he speaks stay.
"Now hold it," Daisy said, putting the water where he could choose it, not where it could corner him. "Ain't nobody waitin' to eat you in the parkin' lot. I got oranges and a mop and no patience for a footrace. Drink this. If you still want to run after, I'll open the door and watch you go."
He stared like he hadn't been offered choice in a while. His throat worked. He took the cup and drank like the water was an apology. When the last clink of ice slid down, his shoulders dropped half an inch.
"Thank you," he said to the floorboards, as if the wood had fetched it.
"You're welcome," Daisy said. "You smell like outside and bad luck. Sit back down 'fore your knees fold under you."
He did because his body trusted her before his pride did. She split a biscuit, last night's mercy, in foil, spread a spoon of pear preserves, and set it by his hand. He ate wrong, quick, like the food might unhappen, and then licked his thumb and looked ashamed for half a second at having let himself be human in front of her.
"Why here?" she asked.
He pushed breath through his nose hard, like a tire giving. "Mama put me out," he said, aiming for careless and hitting twelve. "Said she ain't 'harborin' no headlines."
"Mhmm," Daisy said, filing the meanness away because it would keep.
He squalled up defensiveness like a blanket he didn't even like. "I ain't lookin' for your pity."
"I ain't handin' any," she said, mild as a whetstone. "I'm offerin' a chair. There's a difference." A beat. "You hidin' from the law, or from what you did?"
He snapped his eyes to hers. "I didn't hit him." The words rushed out too fast, tripping over one another to get away from the bigger ones behind them.
"No," Daisy said, steady. "You recorded."
He flinched like truth had good aim. The smirk tried to climb up his face and died halfway. "So that make me a reporter?" he spit, wincing at his own mouth.
"Baby," Daisy said, and the word went straight through every defense like sun through a kitchen window. "Filmin' a fire ain't the same as callin' it in." She let that sit between them and do its quiet work. "Tell me the story you been tellin' yourself."
Colton stared at his hands. They were chewed up at the nails, nicked along the knuckles, the hands of a boy who had never once been trusted with anything breakable and had therefore never learned how to hold. When he spoke, it came up raw.
"I knew," he said, voice tinny. "When I lifted the phone. I knew it was wrong. I felt it in my belly like bad milk. But they..." His face twisted. "Calvin talkin' smooth, Cade laughin', sayin', 'Hold him still, we gon' teach him a word,' and I..." He shook his head till his hair went wild. "It got outta control. I told myself I was makin' proof. I told myself if I had it, then...then maybe I could stop it later or...God, I don't know...keep him someway." His breath snagged. "Truth is...I wanted to be in the middle of somethin'. Truth is I wanted Weston to look at me like I mattered."
Daisy didn't blink. She nodded once, not encouraging the sin, acknowledging the size of it. "You got feelings for him."
He swallowed like the word had bones. "I...We'd been talkin'," he whispered. "Late. 'Bout nothing and everything. I ain't had nobody ask me about my day since my Papa ran off to Baton Rouge. He did. I liked it. I liked him." His mouth went stubborn now, like he'd finally decided to say the one thing he could be proud of even covered in shame. "I'm..." The word stuck and then slid through. "I'm gay, Miss Daisy," he said, and the ceiling did not crack.
The floor did not swallow him.
The hydrangea did not faint.
Willow House received it like any other truth that needed a chair.
"Wantin' love ain't wicked," Daisy said, voice low. "What you did with your want...that's where the wrong lived."
His eyes went wet then, sudden and furious at themselves. "I didn't want to hurt him," he said, meeting her square for the first time. "Maybe that don't matter now, but it's true. I didn't. I ain't brave like he is. I wanted to be. I wanted to be him. And when I couldn't, I wanted..." He gagged on the confession like it scarred him coming out. "...I wanted to have somethin' of his that no one else had. The worst thing. So I could…I don't know…trade it for lookin' at me or keep it like proof I was in his life." Tears ran thin down his face, hot and helpless. "I laughed when they did. I hear it in my head, Miss Daisy. I hear me. I...I hate it."
The room shrank kindly around him.
"Buckley found me," he went on, words tumbling now. "Took the phone. Called me the 'third kind.' Sent it to hisself. Tied me up and then cut me loose and told me enjoy my freedom while it lasts. It lasted six hours 'cause my Mama saw the news and said, 'We don't keep snakes,' and I ain't got anywhere else I can be where I ain't a headline." He scrubbed his face with his wrist. "I can't go home and I cain't go to jail. I ain't hard. I only play it. In there..." His mouth trembled. "In there they gon' eat me whole."
Daisy reached then.
Not dramatic.
Not theatrical.
She slid down the bench till her hip touched his and put her arm around his bird-hollow shoulders. He went rigid on reflex, then collapsed into it with the full weight of a child whose body remembers being held even if his mind doesn't. His cheek hit the spot on her blouse that had caught a thousand tears from a dozen boys who weren't hers and all of them were. His hands clutched the fabric like a rope.
"There you go," she murmured, rocking him the smallest bit, biscuit-slow. "Let it wash."
"I'm sorry," he gasped into lemon oil and starch. "I'm so sorry. I knew when I raised it, I knew..."
"I know you knew," she said, and somehow it came out as comfort and not condemnation. "That's why you can't keep livin' like you didn't."
"I don't want to be this no more," he said, the sentence breaking in the middle and finding its own feet again. "I want...I just want somebody to look at me like I'm not a bad idea."
"You're not a bad idea," Daisy said, and the words hit bone. "You're a boy who made a string of terrible choices tryin' to feel like he existed. That don't erase the harm. It does mean you ain't beyond the reach of daylight."
He shook in her arms, the flood switching banks. "They gon' put me away."
"Maybe," she said, because she would not lie where truth should go. "You gon' have to face the consequences of what you did. Paper and oath. Every name. Every minute. You gon' have to say out loud that you wanted to be loved and you tried to earn it with the worst kind of proof." Her fingers went up into his hair and pressed the crown of his head with a mother's benediction. "But hear me: you ain't walkin' into that alone."
He lifted his head half an inch, desperate, disbelieving. "Why would you...after what I did...why?"
"Because Weston deserves the sight of the ones who failed him standin' up and sayin' so," Daisy said. "Because a town don't change if the only people tellin' the truth are the ones who got hurt. Because you are a child of God even if you've been an unholy mess. And because broken homes make boys who think they gotta be mean to be seen. I am not lettin' this place chew you up and spit you out more crooked than you walked in."
And that's when Colton finally let go.
He cried for real then, the full, graceless, body-tired weeping of somebody who'd been holding a dam with his back. He didn't make pretty about it. He didn't perform. He soaked her shoulder and shook and tried to say sorry between hiccups until the word meant everything and nothing.
Daisy held him the way you hold a feverish thing, steady and sure, like you can't speed it but you can sit it out. She whispered the little nonsense comforts that are really sacraments: "I got you," and "Breathe, baby," and "You ain't alone," and "We gon' do the next right thing."
She did not absolve him.
She did not indict him anew.
She just kept him from floating off the bench.
When the worst of it passed and the aftershocks took over, she tipped his chin with two fingers so she could see his eyes, red-rimmed and finally naked. "We're goin' to call the folks we need to call," she said. "We're goin' to tell the whole of it. We gon' let the law and the Lord sort it. I ain't promisin' you easy, Colton. Easy ain't on the menu. But when it's time to walk in that room, I'll be beside you. When it's time to come back out, I'll still be here."
He nodded, small, ragged, holy. The first honest nod of his grown life.
Colton's breath hitched and steadied. He sagged. Daisy shifted so she could gather more of him, one hand at the back of his head, one splayed broad between his shoulder blades, and let him weep into the good dress she'd ruin for any boy who needed ruining to be forgiven. He was light as a secret and heavy as consequence. She bore it.
"I'm scared, Miss Daisy," he whispered, so soft it hardly rippled the air.
"I know," she answered, and kept on holding him like he was hers, because in this house, for this minute, he was. She rocked him while the morning rearranged itself around their breathing, and if the saints in the bowl could've crossed themselves, they would've.
The door stayed shut.
The light stayed kind.
And that morning, Daisy Bell sat with another strayed child in the crook of her arm, speaking truth into the open, cradling him while he cried his way toward the first day he'd ever really be seen.
(To be continued...)
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