Chapter 5 - The Smell of Burnt Sugar
By four-thirty on Tuesday morning, the air behind Old Fence BBQ was seventy-two degrees and smelled of damp hickory shavings, cold grease, and the sour mash of yesterday’s mop sauce.
I had been at the pit since three.
The commercial smoker at Old Fence wasn't like the Tank. It was a twenty-foot brick pit built into the north wall of the smokehouse, with four cast-iron fire doors that took three cords of green hickory a week to keep the flue temperature steady at two hundred and twenty-five degrees. It was hard, filthy, unglamorous work. You spent your mornings shoveling glowing embers from the burn barrel into the fireboxes with an eight-pound iron scoop, your face black with soot and your forearms scarred from the heat radiating off the steel dampers.
I loved it.
I loved it because wood and fire didn't have a hidden motive. If you didn't give the fire enough air, it choked and went sour; if you gave it too much, it raged and burned the tallow before the collagen could melt. The meat didn't care about church gossip or court orders; it only answered to time and temperature.
The heavy wooden back door of the kitchen creaked open.
Lee stepped out onto the gravel loading dock, carrying two porcelain mugs of black coffee and a warm tin of buttermilk biscuits she had pulled from the commercial ovens inside. She wore her gray kitchen apron over her work shirt, her hair tucked neatly into a black bandanna.
She handed me a mug, her fingers lingering against mine.
"Jesse found him," she said.
I leaned my back against the brick wall of the pit, feeling the heat seep through my denim shirt into my shoulder blades. "Where?"
"A gravel pull-off near the Finley River bridge outside Ozark," Lee said, sipping her coffee. "He was asleep in the cab with three empty four-packs of malt liquor and that gift bag on the passenger seat. Christian County took him in at two-forty this morning. Jesse called the house before I left to come help you prep the shoulders."
"Did he have the recorder?"
"Jesse said it was in the center console. Turned on. The battery had died three hours before they found him, but the card was full."
I looked out across the empty parking lot toward Highway 160. The morning fog was rising off the limestone pastures, white and ghostly beneath the yellow vapor lights of the gas station across the road.
"What was on the card, Lee?"
"Jesse didn't listen to all of it," she said, her voice dropping into that quiet, steady tone that always kept my feet on the ground. "He said he didn't have to. The first twenty minutes was just Sandy sitting in her kitchen with Travis, telling him exactly what questions to ask Bo. She told him to ask the boy if Lee ever slept in his mama’s bed, and if he ever felt scared when the other children weren't around."
A cold shudder ran through my ribs, followed by the hard, dry click of an iron latch inside my chest.
"She wanted to brand Lee as a predator," I whispered.
"She wanted to brand us both," Lee said. "She wanted something ugly enough that the judge couldn't ignore it. She figured if she threw enough mud against the wall, some of it would stick to the custody agreement."
The gravel out front crunched beneath four heavy tires.
It was too early for the morning delivery truck from the meat packing plant in St. Joseph. They never arrived before six-thirty.
Lee set her mug down on the edge of the water trough and stepped toward the corner of the building. She peered around the brick corner, then stepped back, her jaw tightening.
"It’s her," Lee said.
The white Buick LeSabre was ten years older than my father’s truck, but it had four clean hubcaps and a golden fish emblem glued to the trunk lid. It pulled straight into the delivery bay, cutting across the yellow loading lines, and stopped with a sharp hiss of power brakes.
Sandy got out.
She was wearing her Tuesday morning clothes—a navy blue skirt that hit two inches below the knee, a pale blue cardigan buttoned to the throat, and her hair set in those tight, rigid curls that came from a Saturday appointment at the beauty shop in Republic. She carried her black patent-leather handbag tucked into the crook of her elbow like a shield.
Her face wasn't red anymore. It had gone pale, pinched around the nostrils, the skin beneath her eyes dark and loose from a night spent without sleep.
She walked straight toward the loading dock, her low heels clicking against the concrete.
"Dawn Marie," she said.
She didn't look at Lee. She looked at Lee the way she looked at the grease trap behind the kitchen—like something that was necessary for the plumbing to work, but wasn't fit to be acknowledged by decent people.
"You have twenty minutes before the prep crew arrives, Mom," I said, leaning on my iron ash shovel. "Say what you came to say."
"You have to drop it," Sandy said.
She didn't ask how I was. She didn't ask about Bo or Mabel. She stood four feet from the edge of the dock, her gloved fingers clutching her handbag so tight the faux leather buckled.
"Drop what, Mom?"
"The complaint with the sheriff," she said, her voice trembling with that terrible, brittle authority that was all she had left. "Jesse Miller came to my house at four o'clock this morning with two cars from the township. Woke up the whole street. Mrs. Arndt was looking out her bathroom window with the light on. They served a summons on me, Dawn. In my own house. At four in the morning."
"You were an accessory to a Class A protective order violation," I said. "Jesse was doing his job."
"I am your mother!" she hissed, taking a step closer, her face thrusting forward. "I carried you for nine months! I gave you this family! I gave you your father’s name! And you’re going to let some deputy whose daddy I went to school with drag me into the municipal court like a common shoplifter?"
"You sold Bo for five hundred dollars, Sandy."
The name hit her like a bucket of cold ditch water.
Her mouth opened, then snapped shut. A sudden, ugly spasm crossed her face—the realization that the secret she thought was buried in her kitchen had already been laid out on my kitchen table.
"Your father told you," she whispered, the venom in her voice turning toward the road. "That weak, spineless old fool. He couldn't keep his mouth shut for twelve hours."
"Dad didn't have to tell me much," I said. "Hayden took the picture. The phone call had Travis’s voice on it. And Christian County has the recorder with your voice telling him how to coach my son to lie to a circuit judge."
Sandy took a step back, her heels catching on the rough edge of the concrete apron.
"I was trying to save them," she cried, her voice finally breaking into the shrill, hysterical pitch that had terrorized my childhood. "Those children are being raised in an ungodly house! You’re living in sin with a woman, Dawn! You’re parading her in front of the cousins like it’s something to be proud of! What am I supposed to tell the circle at church? What am I supposed to say to Pastor Hembree when he asks why my grandbabies aren't in the second pew on Sunday morning?"
Lee stepped forward.
She didn't raise her voice. She didn't cross her arms. She stood right beside me on the dock, her eyes meeting Sandy’s with the cold, absolute clarity of an open ledger.
"Mrs. Vance," Lee said, "you can tell Pastor Hembree that your grandchildren are safe. You can tell him they ate three pounds of beef that wasn't bought with bribe money. And you can tell him that the woman raising them knows how to keep them from being hit by a man who smells like liquor."
Sandy looked at Lee then. Really looked at her.
For five years, Sandy had treated Lee like a ghost—an inconvenient shadow that would disappear if she just prayed hard enough and ignored her long enough. But Lee wasn't a shadow. She was six feet of Ozark bone and muscle, standing on her own feet, holding the keys to the house where my children slept.
"You stay out of this," Sandy hissed, her finger pointing like an iron nail. "You’re an outsider. You have no blood in this family."
"No," Lee said quietly. "I don't have your blood, Sandy. And thank God every day my children don't either."
Sandy turned back to me, her chest heaving beneath her blue cardigan, her eyes wet with the wild, desperate fury of a woman who has realized she has no more cards to play.
"If you do this, Dawn," she said, her voice dropping into a harsh, vibrating whisper, "you are dead to me. Do you hear me? You don't have a mother. You don't have a home in Republic. When I die, that land goes to your cousins. You won't get a teaspoon of your grandmother’s silver. You won't get your daddy’s tools. You will be cut out of the book like you never drew breath."
I looked down at the iron shovel in my hands.
I thought about the sixteen-pound brisket. I thought about the propane tank smoker my father and I had built when I was seventeen, back before Sandy decided that every room had to be measured by her church circle. I thought about Frankie sitting at my kitchen table with her cardboard sign, painting purple letters for a grandmother who had never once held her hand without looking around to see who was watching.
"Mom," I said, "the only thing in that house that ever belonged to me was my father’s peace. And you took that forty years ago."
May you like
I pointed the shovel toward the highway.
"Now get in the LeSabre and get off the lot. The delivery truck is coming, and I have fifty shoulders to put in the pit before the sun clears the timber."
