Goodbye Earl(77)

“Thanks for telling me your side, Trey. It’s hard on all of us. I mean, you know how close we are,” Kasey said, getting up to grab the laced bourbon bottle. She asked if he wanted some more, and when he said yes, she poured it in his glass.

Kasey had lit candles, and two were flickering on the table in front of them, others on the kitchen counter. She dimmed the overhead light and only had the lamps on in the living room. She wanted Trey to feel relaxed; she wanted the mood to be romantic enough to fool him. He didn’t need to know she’d puked twenty minutes earlier thinking about him coming over and what she was going to do.

“Yeah, I know. She loves y’all a whole lot,” Trey said.

“Well, she’s forever our sweet Caroline.”

“Sweet Caroline,” Trey repeated with a chuckle. “That’s her, all right. Ha!”

Kasey pictured Trey as a little boy, wondering if he’d ever been sweet. Caro said he had. She’d mentioned a handful of times when he said nice things or did nice things, and Kasey squinted her brain to try and see those things the same way she tried with Roy. Tried to force herself to see him as a person worth loving, as a person who could love.

“Sweet Kasey,” Trey said, leaning over to put his hand on her bare leg.

She let him.

She sat still.

“You’re truly beautiful, Kasey. Lord have mercy, that dress. That dress is a problem, you know that? I mean, I know how much you love Caroline and I love her too. You and I weren’t friends in high school or anything, but I remember thinking Silas was the man for bagging you. Honestly. But I mean, you’re way hotter now.”

“Oh…well…thank you, Trey,” she said, looking down at her legs.

“You’re welcome.”

“You hungry?” she asked, licking her bottom lip and biting it slowly. She stared into his blue eyes. She hoped Caroline’s baby had her warm eyes and not Trey’s cold ones. Kasey made sure her face wasn’t as loud as her thoughts. She softened it some more.

“I am,” he said.

“For what?”

“For whatever you want me to eat.”

They both let the tension thicken.

When she stood and turned, she heard Trey get up too. He put his arm around her waist.

She let him.

Maybe there was some other way to do this. Maybe they could…maybe she could—

He grabbed her ass, squeezing gently. Both different and the same way Roy had done it the time she pulled a knife on him. Everylivingthing inside of Kasey flashed to that moment. How scared she was. How alone she was. How she’d wanted to die. How she prayed for God to kill her so she wouldn’t have to live one more second like that. She wished she’d never been born. She wished she’d been in the car with her daddy when he died so she could’ve died too. How she went to her room and put that knife under her pillow and cried so hard she made herself sick.

She gasped and snatched Trey’s wrist away.

“Ah. Let’s eat first, right? Then dessert,” she said to him. She felt like a different person putting that voice on and that was good. She imagined herself as a smoldering actress, playing a part. It wasn’t her voice; it was the actress’s voice. Frangible, feigned. The voice that was going to get her through this.

“All right,” Trey said, smirking at her and leaning against the counter.

She got her salad and put his lasagna on a plate, telling him she wasn’t that hungry yet since she’d done all the cooking.

*



It was after Trey had drunk the rest of his bourbon and eaten one big slab of lasagna, half of another, and a huge piece of pecan pie that he’d gotten up and tried to sit on Kasey’s lap. She had dark ripples of worry earlier, thinking that they hadn’t put enough LSD in the bourbon or that they’d cooked the mushrooms too much, but Trey was giggling and completely spaced out now. Everything had worked properly.

“Trey, you’re a big boy. You need to sit in your own chair,” Kasey said, making herself giggle back at him.

“You’re so fucking good-looking, though. It’s been a hell of a few days. My wife is good-looking too, but she’s in the hospital,” he said.

She saw Caro’s disfigured face in her mind. Heard the doctor saying the words almost fractured an orbital bone. Pictured the surgeon putting a metal plate in Caro’s shoulder. Saw the deep cuts on her arms, the dark bruises, the violet swell of her eye.

No. Kasey couldn’t let fear in. Her focus had to be revenge and revenge only.

“Right. She’s in the hospital,” she said, pushing him gently, fighting the urge to stab him to death at the table. “Hang tight, I’m going to the bathroom.” Kasey got up. Trey was back in his chair now, completely zoned out to everything but the rest of his lasagna.

Behind the bathroom door, she texted Rosemarie and Ada in their group chat.

Go look at the moon.



It was the code for the girls to meet her outside in ten minutes. They knew to leave their phones at home so no one could place them at the farmhouse. Now it was time to get Trey near the water.



He was at the kitchen counter, sloshing more laced bourbon into his glass.

“It’s been a long time since I drank this much. I’m drunk off my ass. Sorry about that. Want some?” he said, slurring. He shoved the glass at her but she said no thank you. “This farmhouse is amaaazing. Your dad built this? Sorry, your black dad built this?” Trey said.