Page 19 of Butter You Up
It’s a dive, and not a place made for dinner. It serves the kind of food that keeps you from getting too drunk. I move Trixie’s bed from the back seat to the truck bed, and she leaps over the tailgate to get in. She’ll be snoring before we hit the front door.
At the bar, we order from Franklin Tiddy, the owner. Kit and I order tots and nachos, but Kit adds on an order of the wing burger—a charbroiled-from-frozen patty smothered in wing sauce.
We also order beers. There’s baseball on the lone TV, and a few of the locals, who nodded at me when we walked in, are engrossed in the game.
The tots come out hot and greasy, and Kit pops one in his mouth before it can cool enough and plays an internal version of hot potato, sucking wind and fanning his mouth. I hold a tot up and blow on it until I’m out of breath. Then, inhale and blow again. And again.
By the time Kit can swallow and talk, I’ve popped my tot in my mouth and it’s perfectly cool enough to eat. “Every time,” I say.
He takes a big gulp of his beer to cool off. “So, we gonna talk about your family?”
“Nope.”
“Come on. I know it’s been hard since your grandpa died. I bet you’re worried about Ethel. Don’t you want to see her?”
When I shrug, Kit kicks me under the table. “Fine. I barely saw Grandad the last few years, even though we were practically neighbors. And now, being around my family…it just brings up bad memories.”
Kit nods. “Like your grandpa telling you to get lost.”
I focus on swirling a tot through the ketchup. “Yeah.”
“Look, I know what your grandpa did was shit. The man didn’t have a lot of tact, especially when it came to raising a bunch of kids. The method wasn’t good, but the message was. You’re a successful farm manager, you run everything by yourself, and that never would have happened if he hadn’t, uh,suggested, you go elsewhere.”
I snort. Suggested is putting it nicely. Grandad reached the end of his rope when I was fifteen and Ethan and I were fighting about farm work again. Teenage boys have a way of getting physical when they need to figure things out, but this fight wasn’t that kind. It got nasty. Ethan and I lost our tempers, and Grandad snapped. There was a lot of yelling about how it was his farm, and his word was the law and who did I think I was to argue with him and Ethan? That was the day it became me against the two of them.
The next day, Grandad came to talk to me alone and told me I needed to think about what I was going to do when I left the farm. I hadn’t even considered it. This was my family’s farm. Where else did I belong?
To pull a line from the English aristocracy, Ethan was the heir, and I was the spare. There were too many chefs in the kitchen.
Kit’s pretty good at looking at the bright side, though. “Yeah. True.”
This time, when his foot hits my leg, it’s an affectionate nudge, not the physical equivalent of calling me an idiot.
“Did you call your brother back?”
I roll my eyes. God, Kit is nosy.
“No.”
I move my leg before Kit can kick me again, and then I deftly change the subject. “What about you? Sick of farm life yet?”
He grins like a pig in shit. “Hell no.”
“Not that I’m kicking you out?—”
“Of course not. You love me.”
“—but any ideas about what you want to do?”
Kit’s wing burger arrives, and he takes a huge bite before answering. “I’ve been talking to my friends back home in Here.”
I nod. Kit has some high school buddies that still live back in the small town of Here, which is about an hour west of here. Any time I go to Here with Kit, we spend time with them.
“I have a job offer from Booker to help him with the construction work he does. I enjoy keeping my hands busy. When you kick me out, I might go do that.”
“I’m not gonna kick you out,” I grunt.
He ignores me. “But I enjoyed talking to customers in the farm shop. So, I wish there was something I could do with people too.”
