Hard Rain by Samantha Jayne Allen

Author:Samantha Jayne Allen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

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Tyler Thompson’s family owned a feed store at the end of Second Avenue, the point where Garnett’s streets thinned to gravel then dirt, and the houses grew farther apart a few blocks from the high school football field. It used to be a thing—when football practice let out, the guys went down to Tyler’s family’s store to pilfer chips and candy from the register and hang out in the empty lot where customers backed up their trucks to load them with hay bales. More kids would show up, Tyler’s older sister and her boyfriend would buy beer, and then the roughhousing would start. People slowly peeled off as the night wore on, and always, a handful of girls stayed too late, hoping for a shot with Tyler. But he was already half gone by then. Too smart to get attached to someone in Garnett.

I walked inside the store and was affronted by the strong smell of alfalfa and birdseed. Tyler’s sister was behind the register. She wore her hair in a messy bun at the very top of her head, like she had as a teenager, but was now about fifty pounds heavier and had a baby on her hip. A second kid rolled Tonka trucks across the polished concrete floor. Her eyes brushed over me. “Help you?”

“Is Tyler around?”

She turned and looked at the clock on the pegboard wall behind her while the baby stared at me, a long string of drool hanging off his lip. “Uncle Ty! Uncle Ty!”

His sister smiled. “He’s probably around back. If you see him, tell him his break ended five minutes ago,” she said, and used her sleeve to wipe the baby’s face.

“Thanks,” I said, and went out the back door. There was a half-empty bottle of Gatorade on the step, but no Tyler. On a hunch, I started walking toward the rodeo fairgrounds where I’d recognized him a few nights before. Headed west down an unpaved alley and into a vacant lot behind the high school, the late-afternoon sun slanted into my eyes until I was under the shadow of the stadium scoreboard. I remembered Tyler’s speech at his graduation—he and Nikki and Wyatt were in the same class—which he’d given as valedictorian. A train had interrupted. The railroad tracks were just south of the field, and usually when a train passed the speaker would be caught off guard and continue reading even though no one could hear them. Tyler, though, had had stage presence. Gave the audience a knowing, exasperated smile. Deadpanned, “I’ll wait.”

I reached the big gravel parking lot for the rodeo fairgrounds, and could see in the daylight that the metal chutes and bleachers, once painted white, were chipped and rusted. Past the arena, near the pavilion Nikki and I had sat under, Tyler paced back and forth across the grass, hands on his hips and breathing hard like he’d come in from a run. Despite the heat, he wore Under Armour beneath his gym shorts and his Red Raiders T-shirt, and dark tube socks that went up over his thick calves.

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