Double Blast by Gretchen Archer

Author:Gretchen Archer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Live Lucky Publishing
Published: 2024-05-21T00:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

We slept all over my parents’ house.

Meredith had seven bedrooms in the antebellum our father was born in, but no one wanted to bother her. So we stayed put and made do. The children were in my old bedroom. No Hair was assigned to Meredith’s old room. Fantasy got the velvet settee in the dining room, just a buffet sideboard away from Whiskey’s den sofa, and the narrow settee wasn’t particularly suitable for sitting. Much less sleeping. Not to mention Fantasy had legs out to there. Bradley and I took my parents’ room, but when I tiptoed in, the bed was empty. I eased the door open to my old bedroom and found him asleep in my old twin bed, with Bex and Quinn in the other, and the baby softly sleeping in his Pack ’n Play. The light from the hall through the cracked door fell on my husband’s troubled face but didn’t wake him. I quietly closed the door and tiptoed back down the stairs to the kitchen in search of a cracker. Or a crumb of a cracker. Because had I been a food journal person, I’d have logged endless cups of coffee, two bites of Quinn’s Froot Loops, and half a bottle of Boone’s Farm Fuzzy Navel for the entire day. I was starving. I didn’t find a cracker, but I did find Fantasy.

I sat in my father’s chair, mostly because she was in mine. “Can’t sleep?”

“Could you sleep on a concrete slab a foot shorter than you that was ten feet from Whiskey?”

“I doubt it.”

“Trust me, you couldn’t. Because slab of concrete aside, Motormouth talks in his sleep.”

“Oh, really?” I noticed that most of her animosity aimed directly at me earlier in the evening was gone. She was still a little chilly, but I also noticed a warm red glow in the middle of the oven panel. I knew the red glow. It meant the oven was preheating. “What’s he saying?”

“Nothing decipherable. Lone odd words.”

The only light on in the kitchen was the nightlight above the stove. It shined a spotlight on a square Pyrex dish wrapped in a mile of foil sitting atop a cookie sheet. Fantasy had pulled something from the freezer.

“Like old crossword puzzle words,” she said. “I heard what sounded like pill garlic several times. Do you think that’s garlic in pill form?”

“I bet he was saying pilgarlic. It sounds the same but it’s one word. And I think it means bald,” I said. “He was probably sleep talking about No Hair. What’s in the dish?”

As if on cue, the oven dinged readiness.

She did the honors.

After trapping the Pyrex in the oven, she said, “King Ranch Chicken.”

“Which is delicious. How long?”

“Right now, it’s a frozen brick.” She sat back down. “What do you think? Forty-five minutes?”

“What do you want to do for the next forty-five minutes?”

“What do I want to do?” She tapped her chin and studied the ceiling. “Find a car. Sneak home to see Reggie and the boys before I turn myself in tomorrow.

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