The Urn Carrier (9 page)

Once inside, she sages everything: herself, Murphy, every corner
of her home, her nest. Chuck had been inside, that’s how he got the shotgun.
She draws a thunderbird and sticks it up over the interior side of the door. It
gives her strength and something positive to focus on. Somehow she falls
asleep. Maybe it’s the monsoon thundering on the roof, but inside, a cozy and
dry place against the harsh pelting rain and winds that occasionally rock the
camper. She dreams about worms. Big, puffy, black, Cheetos-like ones and itchy
little black fleas. She dreams there’s a hundred-and-fifty feral cats in the
basement of her camper and everyone is lined up outside her door, willing to
help her out and take one home. Somewhere in the middle of the night, in
addition to the hard pounding rain, she hears a rumble of a camper pulling
right next to her.

Great, it’s probably him.

At nine a.m. no one is banging on her door. The rain, if any, has
stopped. The wind gusts now and then and kicks droplets out of the trees and
onto the roof, sounding staccato beats as if from a prehistoric, giant
woodpecker.

Tessa didn’t want to worry her mom, but she did call Forsythe when
she was at the fairgrounds, before the rain. She only got his voicemail last
night. She looks at her phone, no text. No call from him. She finally crawls
out of bed. She opens the front door. Stretching, she looks. And looks again.
Both ways. Murphy springs out and does his business. Tessa walks all around the
camper and cranes to see all the sites she can see.

No black Chevrolet. There is a huge truck and trailer next to her.
White, with slide outs. It’s opulent and dwarfs her camper by three sizes.
Tessa decides, for whatever reason, Chuck is no longer on her. Maybe he got
hung up at the Waffle House.

Her package. Suddenly Tessa remembers why she is in Ottine in the
first place.

She hears a whirr and in the middle of the road is a familiar
scooter. Chris Hooper. He bumps into her tennis shoe with a laugh.

“Well, hi there, young lady. Fancy meeting you here.”

“What are you doing in Ottine?”

“Why looking for you of course.” Chris grins.

She laughs.

“We have a general delivery.”

“So do I.”

“Well isn’t that something. Have you eaten breakfast yet?”

“No.”

“Well, good. C’mon in our rig and we’ll get some going.”

“This, is you?” she points to the three slide outs.

“You betcha. Wasn’t that storm last night something? We pulled
into the site with no big trees around it, just like you,” he says approvingly.

Cindy sees her through a window, waves, and runs out. They hug
immediately, like long lost sisters.

“Isn’t this a nice surprise?” Cindy says with a beautiful smile.

“It sure is,” Tessa agrees. “Where are you two headed from here?”

“Northern Arkansas. You?”

“New Mexico. Some place called Truth or Consequences.”

“Oh, that was named for a TV show.”

“Really?” Tessa scrunches her nose. “Why?”

“They wanted a little fame?” Chris shrugs.

She watches as Chris methodically twists from his chair and
athletically balances himself against the hand hold by the door so he can
manage the steps into the trailer.

“Ladies first!”

“I’ll put Murph in my trailer.”

“Any friend of yours is a friend of ours.”

After breakfast they all pile into the Hooper’s crew cab pickup
and Tessa directs them to the post office.

“Don’t tell anyone, but that post office isn’t accessible. Murph
and I will wait here.” Chris winks from the driver’s seat.

The older woman behind the counter looks up with a beaming smile.
Most of her white, wispy hair is in a bun and her wire glasses are fastened
with a turquoise loop behind her head.

“Miss Maybelle?”

“That I am.”

“Package for Tessa Williams?”

“That I have. ID?”

Tessa passes over her driver’s license.

“That’s you to a Tee.” The woman smiles. “A very large man came in
here a few days ago and tried to get that package. He related to you?”

“Not by much.”

“A most unpleasant fellow. He smelled ripe too. I didn’t like him
at all.”

“Neither do I.”

“Well, his name was not on the package and I wasn’t about to hand
it over. I told him to just fetch you first.”

“Thank you.”

“Oh, don’t thank me, just doing my job.”

“Well, I appreciate it.”

After Cindy secures their large package, she grins. “I just love
getting general delivery. It’s like Christmas on the road.”

“This is so cool. I can’t believe we had the
same mail stop.”

“What are the chances?” Cindy agrees. “But we do try to hit the
smaller out of the way towns. Were you having trouble with someone on the way
down? That large fellow Miss Maybelle mentioned?”

“No. No. It’s nothing.” Tessa stares down at her package.

After the post office, Chris and Cindy offer to help Tessa hook
the truck to her camper. Before she backs up the truck, Tessa drags the kayak
out from under the camper and stops.

There, inside it, is a brand new leather rifle sheath.

“See a ghost?” Chris jokes, wheeling his chair up to her.

“Whoa!”

She opens it up and pulls out Aunt Sadie’s shotgun. There’s no
note or anything.

“It’s not the way I look is it?” Chris is mockingly holding his
hands up in the air.

She smiles. “I don’t remember placing this here.”

“Well, place it somewhere I don’t have to see it, willya? Those
things give me the heebie jeebies.”

She smiles and carefully unlocks her camper, and looks around.
Still no sign of Chuck.

She returns and places the kayak in the bed of the truck. She
shuts the tailgate, but leaves the cover open so she can see the mark Paul had
installed on the inside of the tailgate. It lines up the hitch and the ball.
Tessa can’t quite get the distance between the two matched. Sometimes it takes
her three or four times of leaving the driver seat and checking just how close
she is to have the ball directly under the tongue of the trailer where it needs
to be.

Chris, his wheelchair spotted to the driver’s side so Tessa can
see him in the mirror, holds his fist up. “There it is! You’re dead on line.”
He then removes a tape measure and instructs her to place the dumb side at the
rear of the tire. “Now pull it back till you’re in line with where your ball
needs to be for the hitch. Got it?”

She nods.

He throws her a two by four from his
wheelchair’s front basket. “Now, when you’re by yourself, measure that same
distance, eyeball where your rear tire is going to back up, and place that two
by four where it needs to be to stop the truck.

“He’s handy that way.” Cindy beams, hugging him.

“Got a tape measure?”

Tessa shakes her head.

“Take that one, I’ve got two more.”

“I can buy one.”

“Don’t be silly. To tell the truth, he has four of them,” Cindy
says.

“A little souvenir to remember us by.”

Just as Tessa shuts the cover over the truck bed, they all hear a
rumble.

“Uh-oh,” Chris says. “If that storm coming in has wind anything
like last night, Cindy and I better get the awning down and this chair inside.
If I were you, I’d wait out the big part of the storm. Take off when it
dissipates. Don’t leave without saying goodbye. If you’re here tonight, we’ll
have dinner.” He grins.

THE RAIN POUNDS on. Cindy is right: receiving the package is like
Christmas. Letters and cards from Billy, Dina, and Paul are on top. Eli wrote
too. Her mom’s envelope is really thick, it must be a really long letter; she
puts all those aside because she smells her mom’s homemade chocolate chip
cookies. Two zip lock bags full. “Put in freezer” note says. There’s a long
official-looking letter from Mr. Forsythe. In little old man chicken scratch
scrawl on the front is written “no rush.” She sets it on top of the other
letters. These she can open at her leisure since the hard rain is still not
letting up.

Her mom included some tea, some books, chocolate, nuts, and real
black licorice from England. She even packed a gift bag for Murphy with his
name on it and a big bow. Murphy immediately takes notice of this and smells
it. Her mom has splurged. The books though, Mom must not have remembered all
the stuff under the cushions that Tessa has yet to look at.

Tessa gleefully opens the chocolate chip
cookies and throws Murphy a homemade doggie cookie from his treat bag.

She starts sifting through her letters. Dina’s first. She had
written a long letter with a little poem attached, “Tessa’s Motorhome Cantata.”
Dina’s graceful, cursive handwriting, an art form lost among their peers, flows
over special woven, beige paper. Expensive. Dina had taken her time, instilling
thought into everything about this letter, right down to a soft, aromatic
scent. Tessa can almost hear Dina’s lyrical voice singing or chanting the
verses she’d dovetailed with Tessa’s current journey and their relationship.

Dina is highly intelligent and clever that way. She’s a scientist
and a psychology major, but neither of those had stopped her from entering the
same art contest as Tessa.

Tessa’s wood cut print showed her mother sitting, her hair then in
a long braid, arms casually over her knees as she watched two children playing
in a schoolyard. She’d taken a black-and-white photograph of her mom, using an
old-fashioned film camera. Tessa had been about twelve and her mom agreed to
pose for her. The wood cut print received honorable mention, not bad for a
freshman.

Dina’s charcoal drawing of a nude man frontal reaching for a nude
woman, her back to the artist, received first place. Dina just had a natural
knack for things like that.

One time they both entered a poetry slam.

As difficult as it was for Tessa to write a poem about losing her
twin for an unknown amount of time, it was even more difficult to speak it.
People politely clapped.

When Dina got up, she rocked the house.

She pulled her long blond hair up into a twist and she rocked back
and forth from one leg to another with her voice loud and insisting they listen
and when she ended with, “Yer balls of blood . . .” the room was standing and
whistling and she won the slam, hands down.

Afterward, as they shared a beer outside at one of the quiet
tables, Tessa said, “I don’t know how you do it. You can do anything.”

Dina laughed.” I just give them what they want. It’s a no
brainer.”

“So, you don’t live this stuff?”

Dina shrugged. “A little. No. Not that much really. People are
predictable. The slam is run by guys who want to think women want to suck them
off so a poem like that rocks their world. It’s stupid really. Let’s get outta
here before one of them makes a pass at us, okay?”

“But like the Art Contest . . .” Tessa asked as they walked.

Dina waved her hand. “It’s a game. I go online, see who the judges
are, their likes and dislikes and fill the void. If it’s poetry I write like
them. If it’s art, I draw like them. I like to see if they’ll take the bait.
And so far they do, every time. Poetry, if it gives the guys a hard on, you’ve
won.”

Tessa never had a man’s cock in her mouth and she isn’t so sure
she ever wants that. The very idea . . . but, according to Dina, that’s all men
want and they will follow you anywhere.

Tessa just wants Dina following her everywhere, and so far, that
hasn’t been a problem.

The poem is lengthy and whimsical; Dina has married their actual
lives together with a mystical one and it ends with them someday living
together. Tessa falls back on the bed with the letter on her chest, in bliss.
She is sure she will treasure this one letter alone for the rest of her life.

Next she opens Eli’s letter. He’s in great spirits. The new lawyer
went to court after hiring a highly respected private investigator, a former
state police detective the judge knows, and the judge has agreed to review the
private investigator’s findings. Huge news. Tessa is elated.

She opens Paul’s letter next. It’s written on garage notepad
paper. Paul’s Automotive. Wow. She didn’t know he owned the garage, she thought
he just worked at it.

I take very
seriously all you’ve chosen to share with me. I know I reacted poorly at first.
I apologize. I asked you to be honest and you were. You’re the type to wear
your heart on your sleeve and I do care about you a lot. I can’t pin it on any
one thing. You just mean a lot to me. Maybe we’re not meant for each other, but
I’d like it if you would still consider me a friend.

Wow. She thought she’d never hear from him again after she told
him everything. She had to be honest with him. As cute as he was, she couldn’t
sleep with him.