Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin

Author:Tom Franklin
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: #genre
ISBN: 9780060594664
Publisher: WILLIAM MORROW & CO
Published: 2010-10-04T07:00:00+00:00

eight

SILAS JUST BEAT the lunch rush and got a corner booth. He put his hat off to the side and waited, gazing out the window at the high crumbling courthouse across the street, its arched windows and columns, at the white lawyers in suits walking down one side of the long concrete steps and the families of the black folks they would convict or acquit walking down the other. The diner door opened and a group of white ladies came in, all taking at once. Silas usually avoided this place—his mother had waited these tables for more than twenty years, bringing his supper from here so often he’d grown to hate the food. But today the diner held a comfort. Maybe it was the closest he could get to Alice Jones, dead so long with her secrets. And his.

A young waitress with enormous breasts and blue eyeliner arrived with pitchers of iced tea in each hand. “What’s up, 32 Jones? Sweet or un?”

“Sweet, please, ma’am,” he said, turning one of the glasses on the table upright so she could fill it, trying to remember her name.

“I seen you was in the paper,” she said. “That article about M&M.”

“You did, huh?” He’d forgotten the Beacon Light came out today. No mention of the rattlesnake in the mailbox, then. With dead bodies and missing girls, must not be news enough. Because it was a weekly paper, the news about Larry being shot wouldn’t be printed for a while.

“Um hm,” she said. “You ready to order yet?”

He said he was waiting for Angie and, still trying to remember the waitress’s name, afraid to stare at her chest, where her name tag was, he opened his phone. The girl was gone by then, her next table. Nobody had called. Silas shut the phone and sipped at his tea until the door opened and Angie came in. Even in her light blue uniform shirt and navy pants she looked good, her mouth to the side, her hair braided. He liked that she never wore makeup or did her nails. He got up and they kissed briefly, then slid into the booth, facing each other.

“You been busy?”

“Not long as you don’t call,” she said, taking one of the giant plastic menus from its rack. “What you hungry for?”

“Just this tea.”

She looked at him over the menu. “You ain’t still green from yesterday, are you?”

“Naw,” he said. “I eat two of Marla’s hot dogs earlier.”

“Lord, 32. You want me to call Tab and get him to bring our defibrillator?”

The waitress came and topped off his glass.

“Hey, Shaniqua,” Angie said.

“Hey, girl. How you manage to finally get this man come eat in here?”

“You know he do everything I tell him.”

Silas, who’d been staring out the window, glanced at them and smiled. “Thanks, Shaniqua.”

Angie ordered a hamburger with everything. Oh, and fries—mustard on the side—and a Diet Coke.

“What you so glum for?” she asked when the waitress left. “Paper ain’t call you 31 again did it?”

“Naw.”

“Then what?”

“Just thinking about Larry Ott.

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