For Good Read Free

through the narrow opening in the fence. Marydale followed, ducking under the locked chain.
    “Aldean?” she called. “You out here?”
    Marydale picked her way through the labyrinth of fenders and windshields. In the center of the yard, a shipping container stood rusted shut, its origins and its contents—if any—a mystery that Aldean and Marydale had spun into a thousand imaginary treasures when they were growing up.
    “In here,” Aldean called from a shack tucked between the container and an old VW bus with the words not for sale, don’t ask spray-painted on its side. Inside, a single bulb illuminated several small barrels propped on their sides on a worktable.
    “You’re off early,” Aldean said as she entered. “Try this.” He held out a red Solo cup.
    Marydale held it to her nose and inhaled deeply.
    “A bit of leather. Juniper reclamation fires.” She swirled and took a sip. Her mouth filled with smoky lighter fluid. “Oh God! Aldean, you’ve made it worse!”
    Marydale eyed the wooden barrels lined up on the workbench, each marked in Sharpie on a piece of scrap wood: THREE MONTHS (MARYDALE), NINE MONTHS (MARYDALE), TWELVE MONTHS (ALDEAN), TWENTY-FOUR MONTHS (ALDEAN).
    “No. That’s a good whiskey.” Aldean touched the brim of his battered Stetson. “You’re only jealous because it’s not yours.”
    She was jealous. Twenty-four months ago Aldean was pouring Poisonwood whiskey into a barrel he had bought at the Burnville Flea Market, hoping that somehow aging Poisonwood in questionably cured wood would improve the flavor. Twenty-four months ago Marydale was in solitary—protective segregation, they called it—because a woman named Dixie-Lynn had tried to stab her with a shank fashioned out of a melted toothbrush.
    She poured the dregs of the Solo cup onto the dirt floor and tried her own three-month infusion.
    “Smooth. Slightly floral,” Marydale said. “High desert up front with a kind of sweet lost-youth aftertaste.”
    Aldean took her cup from her, sipped, and handed it back.
    “That’s a girl’s whiskey.” He clucked his tongue. “And I do like a girl who drinks whiskey.”
    Aldean gestured for Marydale to follow him, and they headed out to the fire. He picked up a metal grate and set it over the pit. From a cooler nearby, he produced a package wrapped in white paper. Soon two steaks were sizzling on the fire. Marydale settled down in a lawn chair. Lilith circled around the fire, sniffing for the meat. Aldean pulled a cigarette from behind his ear, lit it, and inhaled. In the firelight, his face was all cheekbone and rugged stubble.
     “So. What about the new girl?” he asked.
    “There’s a girl in Tristess you don’t already know?”
     “New to me. New to you.” He kicked his boots out in front of him. “She’s from the city. You know how they are.”
    “No, I don’t, and neither do you.”
    “I know how to rope a calf. Don’t matter where she comes from.” Aldean talked around his cigarette the way his Pops did, but he managed to make it look sexy. “You like her?”
    “No.”
    “She’s got that repressed-librarian thing going. Just makes you want to squeeze her.”
    “No!” Marydale laughed. “It doesn’t.”
    But the lawyer did have that repressed-librarian thing …No, it wasn’t repressed. It was focused. Marydale could see her with her tortoiseshell glasses, her brownish-blond hair that wasn’t any color and that she clearly didn’t care about dying. She always wore gray: gray suits, gray pumps, silky blue-gray blouses the color of winter skies. She was pretty the way the high desert was pretty: in muted shades. Marydale liked the way the lawyer concentrated on her phone or her papers, the way she hadn’t noticed the trio of rangeland firefighters who had admired her from their perch at the counter. She must have felt their gaze like a hand on her back, but she hadn’t looked up until Marydale had come by with a carafe of coffee. Then she had