Show Me (Thomas Prescott 4), Nick Pirog [classic children's novels .TXT] 📗

one of her dimples winking. “Half the town camped out in their cars the night before it opened. They actually ran out of hamburgers, and people had to wait an hour for someone from the Sonic two towns over to bring more meat.”

“So you got your burger?”

“You kidding me?” she scoffed. “Chili dog all the way. Three of them.”

I smiled.

My kind of girl.

She tilted her beer, which was empty, and said, “You want another one?”

“Sure.”

I made to push myself up, but she said, “I got it.”

She sprang up and was back twenty seconds later with two cold ones.

I twisted the top off the beer then pointed the mouth of the bottle at her red ball cap. “You a big Cardinals fan?”

“You have to be around here.”

“You go to any games?”

“Usually a couple. Haven’t gotten out there yet, but it’s early in the season.”

“How they doing?”

“Couple games back of the Cubs,” she said. “You follow baseball?”

“Not really, but my grandpa loved the Cardinals.” I pointed to the rocking chairs on the porch and said, “He would tell stories about his entire family huddled around a little transistor radio listening to their games.”

For a moment, I felt myself travel back to the 1940s. The paint on the farmhouse a brilliant white. The rocking chairs pristine. Harold in one of the chairs with one of his little sisters on his lap. The sound of the announcer’s voice crackling over the radio.

“Thomas?”

I broke from my reverie “What?”

Wheeler said, “I asked if you and your grandpa were close.”

“We were, but I only knew him for a couple years.”

“How did you only know him a couple years?”

I’d only told a few people the story. I’m not sure if it was the 1.2 beers I drank, Wheeler’s beckoning glance, or the flashback I just had, but the story came spilling out of me.

“Two Thanksgivings ago, I moved back to Seattle. I hadn’t been back in eight years, but my parents still owned a house on the cliffs overlooking Puget Sound. One day, the phone rang and it was this old man. He asked for someone by name—I think he asked for someone named Bobby—and I told him he had the wrong number. I don’t know what would have happened if I hung up the phone that day, but thankfully, I didn’t. I ended up talking to him for twenty minutes, mostly just listening to him ramble on about the nursing home he was living in. Then he asked me to bring him some stuff.”

“What did he ask for?”

“Maxim, Sour Patch Kids, Red Bull, chocolate chip cookie dough, lotto tickets. Your run of the mill nursing home contraband.”

“Sour Patch Kids?”

“Yeah.” I laughed, then continued, “Anyhow, I didn’t have a whole lot going on in my life at that point, and I would go visit him a couple times a week. We ended up becoming friends.”

“What would you guys do?”

“Watch horse racing, play chess—well, Harold’s version of chess—eat at the cafeteria, play bingo. I took him for Slurpees at 7-11 once. Whenever it was nice out, he liked to go sit on this bench and toss bread to the ducks in the fake pond.”

“That’s adorable.”

“Yeah, he was pretty great.” I found myself smiling. “But the best part of each visit was listening to him tell the story about how he met his wife and how she gave birth to my mother. Only I didn’t know he was my grandpa at the time. I thought he was just telling a story.”

“He didn’t tell you he was your grandpa the first day you came?”

“No. Not for a few months.”

“And you kept going to see him even though he was just this random old man who accidentally called you?”

“I told you I didn’t have a whole lot going on at the time. Well, aside from investigating the murder of the governor of Washington.”

Her eyebrows arched.

“But that’s another story altogether.”

“Let’s circle back to that,” she said nodding.

I laughed. “Sure thing.”

“So how did you find out this guy was your grandpa?”

“Each time I would visit, he would tell me a bit of this story, little snippets at a time. Started when he was eighteen, living right here on this farm. He wanted to join the army—I think it was the second or third year of World War II—but his dad wouldn’t let him, said he needed him to help with the farm. But Harold had his mind set on fighting in the war and stole his dad’s—or as Harold called him, ‘his Pa’s’—truck and was headed to the train station when he saw a young girl playing on a lake.”

“Which lake?”

“You know that big house with the lake out front?”

She nodded. “The Crowly house.”

“Back then, a family named the Kings lived there.”

“That sounds familiar. Rich family, owned half the land in Tarrin, then just up and skipped town one day.”

“Yeah, they left because of my grandpa.”

Wheeler slid a couple inches closer to me and we were only separated by two beetles. Her knee grazed mine as she said, “What did he do?”

“I’m getting to that.” I took a swig of beer, then said, “Harold was driving to the train station when he saw a young girl out on the lake. Turns out she wasn’t playing. Her dog had fallen through the ice and she was running out to try to save it.”

“I don’t like where this is headed. Tell me right now, did the dog die?”

I nodded.

She hung her head down for a moment, sighed, then glanced back up. “Okay, keep going.”

“Well, the girl came to where the dog had fallen in, and the ice broke around her, and she fell in. Harold watched this all unfold from the road. There happened to be a long span of rope in the back of the truck. He grabbed it, tied it to a fence post, then tied it to his waist, then went after the girl.”

Wheeler was grinning from ear to ear. Both of her dimples were showing. She reminded me of myself when Harold