Turn Left at the Cow by Lisa Bullard

Author:Lisa Bullard
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

CHAPTER 16

When I woke up, the wind was howling outside and rain was hammering onto the roof. I had all these questions popcorning around in my brain, heated up by my looking through the Father Box the night before. I started searching for some answers on my phone, but pretty quickly the smell of real bacon won out. The new health-conscious Ma tried to pass off some fried tofu crap called “fakon” on me, but, I mean, really? Really, Ma? So once again I threw the box back together and pushed it under my bed, stuffing the cut-and-paste note back into my pocket.

“Kenny called. He said you should come over if you want to play some kind of video game. He seemed fairly excited about it. I think it’s nice you’ve made a friend so quickly. Kenny’s a good boy.” Gram plopped some slices of bacon next to some eggs and set them in front of me at the table.

“Thanks.” I had lots of questions for Gram, too. I was determined to finally make her give me some answers, but I decided to test the waters first.

“Uh, Gram, that deputy guy who was here—he seemed to kind of feel at home.”

Gram gave me a surprised look, but then her eyes did that thing people’s eyes do when they go all vague and unfocused and you know they’re seeing something nobody else in the room can see. “He and your father grew up together. They were best friends, really, in high school. Kyle Anderson was over here more times than I can count when he was a teenager.”

She took a sip from her coffee mug. “The two of them were unlikely friends. You couldn’t overlook John, but people never took much notice of Kyle. Until John took him under his wing. I was proud of John for that, for going out of his way to befriend somebody who so clearly needed a friend. Kyle was so serious—I think things were hard for him at home, although he wouldn’t talk about it—and John got him to lighten up. I always hoped that it might work the other way too, that he might be a steadying influence for John.”

Gram pushed her plate away from her; she hadn’t eaten half of her breakfast. “That isn’t how it turned out, of course. It seems their friendship was another thing that got away from your father. After all, Kyle was on a path to becoming the town’s deputy, and John ended up becoming our most notorious law- breaker. That’s too much of a divide for any friendship to stand.”

It was only my first question, and it had already put this look onto Gram’s face that made her seem old.I mean, even older than usual.

Someday, maybe I would get up the courage to push past the sad in her face and just ask her my hardest questions. Maybe I’d even try asking Ma one more time—I mean, it wasn’t as if she’d robbed a sperm bank to

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