Of course being the age I was now I figured I could ignore this voice.

Then Dad told me about the killer’s profile. Then he and Mom gave me looks that showed precisely how worried they were.

Then I gave into moving into Colt’s.

I didn’t like it, but I gave into it. And even though I didn’t like it, hearing the profile, there was no denying Colt’s place, with him on his couch, his gun close and him knowing how to use it, was the safest place for me.

I used Dad’s morning constitutional time to get my head together.

So shy, sweet, pretty Amy Harris, who was no less pretty after two decades, comes into J&J’s for the first time in her life, doesn’t order a drink (by the way), has a gab with Colt which makes him smile at her and then scurries off.

So what?

It was a long time ago. A long, long time ago.

I needed to get over it.

Exhibit A was the fact that I’d lost half of my life to this shit. Drifting from town to town to try to escape it but in the end, never letting it go and landing right back where I started. There were some good times in that drifting and there were some bad but there weren’t many great times. None, in fact, that I could remember. And if I wasn’t careful, the next half of my life wouldn’t be much better.

Exhibit B was some guy was running over dogs and hacking up people because he was hanging onto some wacko delusion that he was connected to and doing this stuff for me. He probably had a crush or something which he never let go and now, decades later, it came to this, dead people and dogs in two states.

Therefore, evidence was pointing to the fact that I needed to get over it.

It was a long time ago, people had moved on but I was stuck in the past.

I needed to pull myself into the present, get passed this latest nightmare and get a life.

So that’s what I was going to do.

* * * * *

Dad rolled up to Colt’s house and I examined it out my window as he executed the four attempts he needed before he successfully backed the RV into Colt’s side drive.

He did this into a drive that at the back end had a one car garage with a long, sturdy, sided overhang under which was a speedboat under a tarp.

I knew Colt had a speedboat, Morrie and the kids talked about it, I’d just never seen it. Sometimes Colt took Morrie and the kids (and, used to be, Dee) to the lake in the summers. Both kids loved when their Uncle Colt would take them to the lake, they never shut up about it when they got back. They both knew how to water ski and they told me Colt went fast.

Colt, Morrie and I used to go with Mom and Dad to the lake. Dad didn’t have a boat but he’d rent one. I’d never got up on skis even though I tried. Colt used to tease that I was lazy but really I preferred tubing. You were totally out of control when you were tubing. You just held on as hard as you could for as long as you could and enjoyed the thrill. I also liked just sitting in the boat and letting the wind whip my hair around my face and beat at my skin. No better feeling in the world than having the landscape slide by while the wind was in your hair, whether you were in a speedboat or on the back of a bike.

I looked away from the back of the RV and out the side window to Colt’s house.

Colt had a crackerbox house in a crackerbox neighborhood that was so much better than Morrie’s neighborhood it wasn’t funny.

It wasn’t because the houses were large and grand and beautiful. They weren’t. They were small and one-storied but they’d been built in a time when houses needed to be put up cheap and space was all important so the houses were small but the yards were huge.

The neighborhood was better than Morrie’s because these houses had been there awhile. There were no rules that said what color you could paint your house or where you could park your car or what you could put in your yard. People had built screened-in porches on the front and decks on the back. They’d built extensions. They’d put in flowerboxes on the front windows. They had playsets and round, above-ground pools in their backyards. They had custom-made wood plaques with flowers painted on them on the front of their houses that proudly announced the Jones’s lived there (or whoever).

They had American flags hanging from slanted poles beside their front doors. Some didn’t fly American flags but purple and white ones, with a bulldog emblazoned on it, the high school mascot. In those houses you knew they had a kid at school, probably an athlete or a cheerleader or the owners were alumni themselves or both. Others were gold and black Purdue flags or red and white IU flags. Others still were seasonal, orange, brown and gold leaf designs in fall, pastel flowers in spring, Easter eggs, Halloween witches, Christmas poinsettias or snowmen.

There were tons of trees planted willy-nilly, not in formation, not in a design some landscape architect sketched on a pad. And the trees were big and tall with wide trunks that grew so far out they’d cracked the sidewalks and full branches that, when they had leaves in a month or two, would throw so much shade during the hot, humid summer months, the entire neighborhood would feel like a cool breeze.

It was a great neighborhood and Colt’s house was the house he bought for Melanie.

Colt married Melanie Seivers about five years after I left. Their divorce was final three years ago but she’d been gone a year before that.

She’d been in the year behind me in school – pretty, dark hair, dark eyes, sweet, quiet, a lot like Amy except Melanie was tall. I knew her in school and I knew her after it. She’d come over with Colt when I was there for family occasions.

You had to hand it to Melanie, even with me being what I used to be to Colt, she was always nice to me. Never made me feel funny, never made me feel like she felt funny around me. She was just a nice gal.

She couldn’t get pregnant though, not Colt’s faulty equipment, hers. She took it hard. Although my parents, Morrie nor Delilah ever talked much about it to me, when Mom called and said Melanie left Colt and they were getting divorced she finally talked about it, though not much.

“Some women… don’t know, Feb… they just see no purpose in life without kids. Melanie was like that, just slipped through Colt’s fingers no matter how he tried to grab hold. She gave him no choice, he had to let go.”

I knew what she meant though not about the kids. He’d had another girl slip through his fingers who he’d tried to grab hold. I figured he knew when to stop trying.

Melanie had moved to another small town at the other side of the city. Not far, as the crow flies, but with the city in the way and having to navigate the highways and by-ways to get from here to there, she might as well have been in another state. I didn’t know what she was doing now without kids or Colt in her life. I did know I thought she was all kinds of crazy for leaving Colt. Colt was a man with all that entailed but even I wasn’t fool enough to think, when you got down to it, he wasn’t a good one.