Page 16 of Kinsey

“You’re so beautiful.”She thanked him in a whisper.“Are we supposed to be quiet?I want to shout to the world that I’m in love with you.”She told him that his brothers were sleeping and that he should allow them to do that.“But why are they here.I’m sure that the cows need to be milked.”

“I’ve been having things taken care of at the farm.You just get better.”David spoke to him from the other side of his bed, and it took him a few minutes to get his body to turn that way.“You’ve been through a great deal in the last twenty-four hours.Just let me take care of the farm now, and you takecare of this little lady here.She’s been here since you came in.”

“She loves me.”David laughed, and he seemed surprised by it.“Are you all right, David?You do look a little pale.You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

“No, I’m fine now that I know you are.”He thanked him.“No need for that.I was just glad that I was there.Calling the police was one of the hardest things—I’ve never had any trouble being calmed down before.Usually, I’m the one who makes all the decisions when there is an accident.I could be counted on to make sure that everyone was all right.But seeing you all smashed up in that truck…well, it’s a sight that I never want repeated.The police said I did all right under the circumstances, but all I could do was stand there helplessly while you were hurting.”

“I didn’t hurt all that much.My wrist did, but not too bad.I kept thinking that Wylie needed me and I was going to be there for him.”David nodded and wiped at the tears streaming down his cheeks.“I’m sorry, David.Please don’t be upset.Everyone is fine.Wylie is just fine, and so am I.”

“I know.I know that.”He got up from his chair and moved toward the door.“You don’t do that again, do you hear me?I don’t know that—you’ve come to mean a great deal to me, Kinsey, you and your brothers.I never had any children, but in the last couple of months, you’ve come to mean a great deal to me.”

He left them then.Going out the door and to wherever he was headed.Meggie said that he’d end up in the cafeteria again and would be buying pie for anyone who wanted it.She’d said that he’d been doing that for the last few hours.

“I’d like some pie.But I guess he wants to buy it for strangers.”She laughed a little and put her hand on his shoulder.“How are you doing?For the last several hours, all you’ve been doing is waking up, grunting a few times, and going back to sleep.Oh, before I forget, Ara is writing for the newspaper about the accident.He’s making it an ongoing project so that people can keep up with your accident.Also, the prison called where your father is.He wants to get in touch with you for some reason.They said that they have your number from the accident.”

Bodi moved over to sit with him, too.“They said that they’d give him the wrong number if you didn’t want to speak to him.They don’t care if he does one way or the other, but he’d seen the accident write-up in the paper and remembered that he had some kids.He only knows yours and Wylie’s names from the article.”He asked him how he was doing before continuing.“I don’t care to talk to him, but it’ll be up to you since you’re the one that he’s fixated on.I remember that from being a kid, how he’d get a new word or something that he’d learned told to him and he’d talk about it endlessly.”

“He thinks there will be money from the accident.”Bodi said that’s what he figured, too.“Grandma said he’d remember us eventually.That he’d try his best to get us to come and see him or something like that.And that he’d want money.She also told us when we sell the farm, not to tell him or he’d be thinking that we should use it to try and get him out of prison too.”

“She told me once he remembered us, we would have to be smart in not telling him anything good about us or he’d use it against us.”Meggie asked him what that was supposed to mean.“Money.It all comes down to money to him.If he even thinks that we have some, he’ll try his best to take it from us or, worse yet, to use it on one of his schemes.He was always trying to figure out a way to spend money.Especially when it was someone else’s.”

“Sounds like a great guy.I know that he killed your mother, but I don’t think I ever heard how he’d done it.Was it so bad that it earned him no right to parole?”

“It was like his fifth strike against him.He did kill her in a horrific way, but since he’d been in and out of prison so much, they’d just put him there so he’d not hurt anyone else.Especially one of us for calling the police on him.”Kinsey closed his eyes when he thought about how his momma had looked when their father had gotten done with her.“He’d beaten her nearly to death, and when he didn’t kill her, he strangled her with her own belt.After that, he tried cutting her up with a chainsaw so that he could get rid of the evidence.He was making us help him.I don’t think that Ara slept for a month without nightmares after that for a long time.Bodi, he won’t to this day use a chainsaw without being sick.”

“We were all there, but I think the younger two of us had it the hardest.We’d been with Momma all day that day, canning strawberry jam.The blood and the jam…it still haunts me to this day about the similarities of the two.I still can’t make myself eat any strawberries or jam to this day.”Meggie told him she was sorry she’d brought it up.“It’s all right, honey.You have a right to know if you’re going to be hanging around with us.But I won’t go see him, Kinsey.Never.He can rot in there for all I care about him.I told you a long time ago that I’d only ever refer to him as Walton Pennington and nothing familial ever again.”

“For that, I don’t blame you.It would be hard for me to think of him as a father after doing that.And to bring you six in on it.”She laid her head gently on his chest.“I wish I could have known your mother, or grannie for that matter, but I’m glad that I never got to know your father.”She looked at him.“What are you going to do about him if he calls?”

“Nothing.I’m going to call the prison and tell them he can call if he wants, but it’s not going to do him a bit of good.When he was around, he couldn’t even remember our names, much less what order of birth we were.”Kinsey laughed a little.“He called us by numbers for a long time, one through six.After we started getting taller than him, he’d sit down whenever he could so that it wouldn’t look like he was smaller than any of us.And by smaller, I mean he was shorter and had no bulk at all.He was a short, skinny man without one brain cell in his head.I’ll take care of him when he calls, if he calls.He’ll get nothing from me about any of us either.”

“I’d like to talk to the bastard.”Raphael laughed as he stretched out in the chair.“He’d regret calling me, that’s for sure.The man killed our momma when she’d done nothing wrong but tell him that he couldn’t have a card party at the house as she’d been working all day making jam for the family.”

Gleason and Wylie agreed that they didn’t want to talk to him at all.It wasn’t until the nurse came in to take his blood pressure that he decided he might as well get it over with on calling the prison.Once Meggie had the number for him, he didn’t hesitate at all to call them and tell them that the only person he could call would be him.The others didn’t want anything to do with him.Raphael said he’d be fine with that so long as he didn’t hurt anyone.

“There’s nothing he can hurt me with from where he is.He’s already done the most damage to us that he could do by killing Momma.I’ll only give him information that I feel he needs, which isn’t going to be much.I’ll tell him that Grandma has passed on, and that’s about it on that score.I’ll make myself a list before Thursday of things I won’t talk to him about, so I don’t forget.But he’s not going to get any information about the sale or how we’re doing now that we’ve sold the farm.”

After his family left him, leaving behind Meggie, they talked about the list he was going to make up.With his right hand being cast up, she did help him in writing things down.It was starting to pain him a bit more, so they gave him something for it, and after that, he dozed for a bit.Having his family around these last few hours made him realize just how lucky he’d been in that accident.And he’d never forget how lucky he’d been.

Chapter 8

Walton waited for his turn to talk on the phone.There were ten of them, and all of a sudden, they were all being used.He didn’t know how that normally worked as he’d never had anyone to call before.But today he was going to call his oldest son, Kinsey.It still sounded like a girl’s name to him, but he wasn’t going to piss him off by having him change it to something more manly.It occurred to him that he didn’t have any kids named after himself, and that bothered him.He did wonder why his wife would do him dirty like that.

He had a list of things that he was going to ask his boy for.First and foremost, he wanted to know if any of them had taken after him and were any good at cards.He’d never been, but perhaps it skipped a family around, and he was the only one with the bad seed.Stepping up in line, he was the next one to go until it was his turn.

Money was first on the list.He needed someone to put him some cash in his allowance so that he could buy him a bag of chips once in a while.He’d seen others have some, and he wanted them bad enough to steal them.He wouldn’t; that would get him in confinement, and he didn’t want that.

When it was his turn, he had to ask how to get the number to work.He’d never made a call in all the time he’d been imprisoned, so he had some difficulties getting the phone operator to call someone for him.Kinsey said he’d take the call, and he nearly jumped around he was so happy that he’d be able to talk to someone besides himself.

“There are things that I’m not going to discuss with you, and one of them is money.”As soon as he was on the phone, his kid started spouting off the things he was going to do or not.Walton told him he was his father and he’d talk to him about what he wanted.“You go on ahead and talk about it, then I’ll hang up.And then change my number so that you can’t ever call me again.Not that I want you to, but today we’re going to see how things go.No money.”

“But I have me a need for just a few bucks in my pot.That way I can get me some chips like I want.”He didn’t say a word.“We’ll come back around to that then.I want to know how you guys are doing.Any of you coming up here to visit me?”

He realized then that he wanted to see his sons.All of them.And even if he had to be good for a month to get that, he knew he could do it just for the chance to see what he’d made.Six boys, men now.He’d made himself six kids and he was saddened by the fact that he didn’t know a single one of them.He wouldn’t even be able to pick them out of a lineup if his life depended on knowing one of them.

“We’re not.We told you when you were in the courthouse that you’re not to expect us to come see you, and I think that Grandma made it clear that we’d not be there either.What else did you want to know?”He asked about the others how they felt about coming to see him.“You’re lucky in that I’m telling you that no one wants to see you.I don’t believe that they’d be so nice about it.”

That had him rubbing the part of his chest that he thought long dead, to being hurt by someone.His heart really did ache.He asked him about his mom, knowing that she had to have died by now, she’d always been old, but the boy didn’t seem to want to tell him any details about her dying.

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