Mockingbird Songs by R.J. Ellory

next Tuesday. I’ll have to check my social calendar.”
    “Well, perhaps I have other girls to kiss next Tuesday, so you should let me know.”
    “Are there other girls you wanna kiss more than me, Evan Riggs?”
    “I don’t even really wanna kiss you, Rebecca Wyatt,” Evan replied, which was a lie, and he had a tough time keeping a straight face.
    “So, are you gonna kiss me or what?”
    “Should we stand up?” he asked.
    “I guess we should,” Rebecca said. “My lips aren’t big enough to reach yours from here.”
    They stood up. They looked at each other and started laughing. It wasn’t awkward. It was just kind of dumb, and they both knew it.
    Rebecca reached out and took Evan’s hand. He took a step or two closer until their noses were no more than four or five inches apart. He closed his eyes and puckered.
    “You look like a fish,” she said.
    Evan frowned. “You want me to kiss you or what?”
    “I’m sorry … This is kinda stupid.”
    “Stoopid is as stoopid does,” Evan said. “If you think this is that stoopid, why’d you ask me to do it?”
    She leaned forward suddenly and kissed him. Later he would think of it, and though there was no real way to describe the sensation he experienced in that moment, he did see how such a thing might become addictive, how it might prompt people to write songs and poems and suchlike. It was an external action that provoked an internal reaction, and he liked it so much, he kissed her back.
    This time she parted her lips a fraction, and when her tongue flickered against his, it was as if he’d been given an electric shock by a butterfly. Most of the sensation he felt, however, was in his stomach.
    “How was it?” Rebecca asked him.
    “Real nice,” Evan said.
    She smiled and touched his face. “I liked it, too,” she said.
    They didn’t kiss again, at least not that day, and when Evan headed home, it was already close enough to suppertime for him to go at a run.
    When he arrived, his mother, father, and brother were already washed up and hungry.
    “Where have you been?” Carson asked.
    “Over at the Wyatt place,” Evan said, and he smiled a smile that Grace Riggs had not seen before.
    She saw something in him, something new, something quite real, that told her that her younger one was closer to a man than her older one might ever be.

TEN
    Knox Honeycutt was elbows and knees and little else. The man was a head taller than six feet, and the cuffs of his pants and the sleeves of his shirt were too short by a good deal.
    He was friendly enough, though. Said that Sheriff Riggs had just called him, explained someone was coming over who needed a room for the night.
    “And you’d be that someone, I guess?”
    “Yes, sir. I would be.”
    “We own the boardinghouse at the end of the street,” Honeycutt said. “You go on down there. Can’t miss it—white, three-story, flower boxes off the veranda railing. My wife’s name is Alice. Tell her I sent you down. You’ll be okay for dinner, and she’ll make you up a room for the night.”
    “It’s really very kind of you on such short notice.”
    “Oh, think nothing of it, son. Any friend of Carson Riggs an’ all that.”
    Leaving the mercantile, Henry Quinn was again struck with a sense of something unspecific. He was not a friend of Carson Riggs. Why had Honeycutt said that, if not because Riggs had told him such a thing? And why would Riggs tell Honeycutt that they were friends? Because of Henry’s friendship with Evan? Unlikely, if only because there appeared to be no love lost between the brothers. Maybe it was nothing more nor less than Southern hospitality, famous everywhere but the South, for the South was very selective about its friendships and allegiances.
    Nevertheless, it was a choice between the Honeycutt boardinghouse and the pickup, and no matter the means by which it was obtained, a bed was better than a bedroll and blanket in the back of a Studebaker.
    Henry found the place without