Page 74 of This is Why We Lied

“Hell yeah they did. Papa used a fucking chain on me when she wound up pregnant. Kicked me off the mountain. Her, too.” Dave’s raspy chuckle turned into a cough. “I took care of Mercy, though. Made sure she was clean when Jon was born. Helped Delilah get him settled in. Gave her whatever money I could spare to help.”

Will knew for a fact that he was lying. “You didn’t want to raise him yourself?”

“Shit. What do I know about taking care of no baby?”

Will figured if you were man enough to make a baby, you should be man enough to figure out how to take care of one.

Dave asked, “You got kids?”

“No.” Sara wasn’t capable, and Will knew too many terrible things that could happen to a child. “Seems like there’s still a lot of bad blood between Mercy and her family.”

“You think?” Dave knocked back the rest of his beer. He crushed the can, then dropped it with the others. “It’s hard this far up the mountain. You’re isolated. Not much to do. You got rich, stuck-up bitches expecting you to wipe their skinny, tight asses. Papa pushing you around. Taking you to the barn to beat the fire outta your ass cause you didn’t put the towels in the right place.”

Will knew Dave wasn’t just venting. He was looking for a gold medal in the Abused Kids Olympics. “Sounds pretty bad.”

“It sure as hell was,” Dave said. “You and me learned the hard way you just gotta count the minutes until it’s over, right? They’ll get tired eventually.”

Will looked into the fire. He was cutting a little too close.

“This is why we lie,” Dave said. “You tell this shit to a normal person, they can’t take it.”

Will kept his eyes on the flames. He couldn’t find the words to change the subject.

“You tell your wife all that shit you been through?”

Will shook his head, but that wasn’t completely true. He had told Sara some things, but he would never tell her all the things.

“What’s it like?” Dave waited for Will to look up. “Your wife, she’s normal, right? What’s that like?”

Will could not bring Sara into this moment.

“Don’t think I could be with a normal woman,” Dave admitted. “Mercy, she came to me damaged. I knew what to do with that. But fuck, a Camp Fire Girl? And a schoolteacher? How the hell do you even make that work?”

Will shook his head again, but in truth, things had been hard with Sara at first. He’d kept waiting for the games, the emotional manipulation. He couldn’t accept that she would listen to him and try to understand instead of collecting his secrets like razor blades she could use to slice him open later on.

“She’s smokin’ hot. I’ll give you that. But hell, I couldn’t be with somebody that perfect. Does she even fart?”

Will couldn’t stop himself from laughing, but he didn’t answer.

“Gotta be a gentleman, huh?” Dave reached for his pack of cigarettes. “That’s the other part I couldn’t swing. I need a gal knows how to scream when I grab her by the hair.”

Will pretended to drink from his can of beer. His words had put Will back at the lake shore by the bachelor cottages. The way Mercy’s hair had spread out in the water. Blood had swirled around her body like dye. She had clutched Will’s shirt collar, keeping him beside her instead of letting him find help.

Jon.

Will put both his hands back on the ground, anchoring himself. “Why’d you come find me on the trail yesterday?”

Dave shrugged as he dug around for another lighter in his pocket. “I don’t know, man. I do shit and I look back at it and I can’t tell you why.”

“You asked me if I was still carrying around a grudge against you.”

“And?”

“I honestly never thought about you after you ran away.”

“That’s good, Trash, cause I never thought about you, neither.”

“To be honest, I would’ve totally forgotten about you again.” Will tested the waters. “Except for what you did to Mercy.”