John Brandon - Citrus County

“I should say not.”

Toby spun the lit end of his clove into the floor. He slipped what was left of it behind his ear. He didn’t want to be sharing a mood with Uncle Neal, but it seemed he was.

“What do you smoke in this mood we’re in now?” Toby asked.

“Don’t know,” Uncle Neal said. “Something we ain’t got.”

A little girl’s body was found in a scrub habitat across from Buccaneer Bay, a small water park located in the next county south. The girl had gone missing years ago. She’d been left in a shallow grave and little more than bones were left of her. Her parents now lived in Jacksonville and had been flown over to identify her hat and fill out paperwork. She’d been buried in high-heeled shoes someone had put on her.

All this had happened in the course of a single day — the body being found in the wee hours by an old-timer training his terriers, and the parents, at about two in the afternoon, making a statement to the press. When Shelby had arrived home from school, she’d known nothing about it. She’d found her father in the kitchen, mumbling in front of the sink, leaning on the counter in a way that made him look crippled. He refused to sit. He gave Shelby a summary, his voice stiffening on the phrases he quoted from the news. He told Shelby that he considered this little girl’s family lucky. He was facing Shelby now, leaning on the counter with his forearm.

“Stand straight,” Shelby commanded.

He did so, sort of propped himself. Shelby noticed a garbage bag on the floor, full of pamphlets. She nodded toward it and her father said he’d made an error joining all those, whatever they were — clubs. They couldn’t help him. They were support groups, that’s all.

“Is that so bad?” Shelby asked. She didn’t know what to do about this other little girl, what to say or think about it. It had nothing to do with her and her father. That wasn’t true, though. It was an insult. Shelby felt disrespected.

“I think it is bad,” Shelby’s father said. “I think being in all those groups will keep me from—” He didn’t finish.

“Maybe you’re right,” Shelby said.

“You don’t keep getting mail about it, do you?”

“You’re leaning again,” said Shelby.

“Why did I bring us here?”

The simple answer was that a job had been waiting for him. There was a guy high up in mosquito control that he knew from his boxing days. Shelby knew what her father meant, though. In any other county, none of this would’ve happened. Kaley would still be with them.

Shelby bent so she could catch her father’s eyes and he aligned himself. He did something with his jaw and drew an enormous, wheezing breath. “Are you going somewhere?” he asked. “You’re always going somewhere.”

“I am, aren’t I?”

“Toby? Is that where you’re headed?”

“Not today. He’s always busy.”

“What’s his deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m not sure I know,” said Shelby’s father. “I don’t know what questions to ask anymore.”

“I don’t think Toby has a deal. I don’t think he wants one.”

“Is he okay, though? Is he okay for you to hang around with?”

“I’m not sure,” Shelby said. “I think that’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“You will then,” said Shelby’s father. “You’ll find it all out.”

Shelby held her arms out, but did not move any closer to her father. She made him stand free of the counter, made him lead in the hug, provide the firmness. Her and her father’s lives were a series of injuries and insults to those injuries. Shelby wanted to see that little girl’s bones. She wanted to know every single thing that had happened to her.

“Was that some kind of prayer you were saying?” she asked. Her father’s arms were clamped around her, pressing on her ribs. “That mumbling when I walked in — was that a prayer?”

Her father squeezed tighter, almost stopping her breath.

Shelby dumped the contents of her book bag and replaced them with the handjob flag, a pack of snack cakes, and a staple gun she’d dug out of the utility room. Since her sister’s disappearance, no one — with the exception of Mr. Hibma, from whom she’d drawn a couple detentions — would dare discipline her. She’d been given a free pass on skipping school. She’d been caught stealing a cookie in the cafeteria and nothing had happened. She’d thrown her PE coach’s whistle in the toilet.

She followed the path she and Toby had taken to the library, then cut to the right at the fire road and shuffled through a corridor of spaced myrtles. She neared Central Citrus Baptist and took a moment at the edge of the woods. A painting crew was packing gear into a van, three guys all wearing denim shorts. Shelby watched as they slid a ladder into an apparatus on the roof of the van, dug bottles of sports drink out of a cooler, then crept out of the lot.

Shelby advanced to the front steps of the church, which were cordoned off with tape. The painters had done the steps, the front porch, the shutters. Shelby ducked under the tape and stepped up to the door, the soles of her boots sticking with each step to the newly painted wood, leaving imprints of her treads. It felt to Shelby like she was taking sides. She wasn’t sitting on the fence. She was doing something Toby would appreciate, no matter how he’d acted when Shelby first mentioned it. Shelby was doing something her Aunt Dale would approve of. She was doing something, she believed, that she herself could get behind.

She hung the flag, three staples across the top and three across the bottom, then dug a marker out of one of her pockets. On an open space on the flag, she wrote:

I, Shelby Register, hung this flag. I did it in the early evening, April 4. The prints in the paint will match my boots. I purchased the flag at the shop in the Sunray Shopping Plaza. I do not have a receipt, but the owner liked me and will remember me.

The opening game of the season was a breeze. After the final buzzer, the other coach approached Mr. Hibma affably. He was encouraged by how good Mr. Hibma’s team was, optimistic that they could beat his rival, the coach at Springstead Middle.

“Hell,” Mr. Hibma said. “We’re going to whip Pasco.”

“I can’t beat him myself,” said the other coach. “I’m writing this year off. I’m starting a lawn service.”

“How does one go about starting a lawn service?”

“You need a big truck and an open trailer. Then you need the mowers and shit. You need a couple guys to work in the sun.”

“And this will enable you to quit teaching?”

“That’s the fantasy. Yesterday I picked up the magnet for the truck door: Sunrise Lawn Management.”

Mr. Hibma stepped over to his team’s cooler and filled two cups with iced tea. He handed one to the other coach. Mr. Hibma knew there were ways out of teaching, but he’d never pursue any of them. That was part of what he had to admit to himself, that he wasn’t the kind of person who started his own business or went to night school. He didn’t hustle.

“Let me ask you something,” Mr. Hibma said. “You don’t seem interested enough in girls’ middle school basketball to have a rival.”

The guy swished some tea around in his mouth. “Has nothing to do with basketball,” he said. “The coach at Springstead is an old friend of my wife’s, and he told her about some of us going to a strip club on teacher planning day.”

“What a dick,” Mr. Hibma said.

The guy nodded, downing the rest of his tea, getting slightly worked up. “He’s the one who invited me. You know? He invited me .”

“We’ll shut them out,” Mr. Hibma assured him. “We won’t let them score a point.”