Break the Skin by Lee Martin Page A

Tweet.”
    “Laney-Girl!” Tweet said. “Tell me something good.”
    “What can you tell me about Lester Stipp?”
    Tweet glanced over at Delilah. “They’re sweeties,” she said.
    “Now, Laney-Girl, you want to be careful with him. He’s not to be trusted.”
    I shrugged my shoulders. “He seems all right to me.”
    “That dude.” Tweet shook his head. “He’s got bad juju following him. He was in the war, you know. Iraq.” He said it “Eye-Rack.”
    “So?”
    “He won’t talk about it, but something bad went on. I felt sorry for him at first. Then he started to give me the willies. I told him to quit sniffing around the band.”
    “Was he really stealing?”
    “Nah, that’s just the reason I came up with.”
    “That was mean.”
    “Meaner than saying ‘I don’t want you around anymore’?”
    Rose took her chance to slip inside the trailer, avoiding Delilah’s questions. Delilah, though, hadn’t forgotten them. “What did you tell Rose?” she asked Tweet when it was just the three of us standing there. “Was it something about me?”
    “Jesus, Delilah.” He slammed the door of the van. “Leave it alone, okay?”
    “I most certainly will not leave it alone.” She slapped him across the back. She tried to let on that she was playing, but I could tell she was serious. “You act like you’re hiding something.”
    He spun around. “All right, you really want to know?” He gave her a chance to say no, and when she didn’t, he went on. “Rose and I were talking about your wind chimes.”
    Delilah swiveled around to look at the wind chimes hanging from the latticework around the deck. “What’s so funny about my chimes?”
    “Look at them,” Tweet said. “You must have a dozen of those things. I’m surprised the neighbors haven’t complained.” He gave a little laugh, trying to turn this into the joke he must have told Rose as they were pulling up in the van. “I told Rose we’re going to have to start calling you Tinkle Bell. You know, like the fairy in Peter Pan, only instead of Tinker, we’d call you—”
    Delilah stopped him. “You don’t have to explain. I’m not stupid.”
    “I didn’t say you were stupid. Who said anything about that? I was just having a little fun, that’s all. No harm in a little fun, is there? I’m sorry if you took it wrong.”
    “Oh, I didn’t take it wrong.” She reached up and gave his cheek a little pat. “Like I said, I got it. Baby, I got it just the way you meant it.”
    She turned and walked back to the trailer, taking her time, putting more of a swish to her hips than normal. She climbed the steps, that short denim skirt inching a little higher as she went.
    Tweet looked at me. He raised his eyebrows, curious about what had just gone on.
    “Yes, she’s mad,” I told him, “and yes, you better make it up to her. She doesn’t forget.”
    “It was just a joke,” he said.
    I owed him the truth. “You should have told it to her when she first asked you. That’s when it was a joke. Now it’s something else, something that hurts.”
    INSIDE THE TRAILER , he told Delilah he had to run a Mustang GT up to Terre Haute in the morning.
    “You want to come along?” he asked. “I could take you to the mall, and then we could get lunch somewhere nice.”
    She was wiping the stove top with a dish rag. “You going early?”
    “First thing.”
    “I work till seven.”
    “If you want to sleep …”
    “I can sleep when I’m dead.” She threw the rag in the sink and put her arms around him. “What kind of ride will we have coming back?”
    “SUV.”
    “Oooh,” Delilah said, with a flirty tone. “Sounds good. Roomy in the back? Seats fold down? Maybe we’ll get lost somewhere and have a little you-know. Right, Tweet?”
    He glanced at me, and this time I was the one who raised her eyebrows, telling him to say yes.
    “Right, baby,” he said, and that, for the time, was that.
    So the next day, they went to Terre Haute and back,