“We’re terrible. And embarrassing,” Wyatt agrees.
“Maybe we should just wing it,” Boone says.
“Wing the most important moment of our lives?”
“Do we have a choice?”
“Shit’s about to get real,” Wyatt mutters.
“Shit’s been real,” I correct. “It’s about to get honest.”
Three days until the festival. Three days to figure out how to prove to Callie Thompson that three McCoy boys are worth the trouble, the scandal, and the complete destruction of Cedar Ridge’s social order.
Three days to prepare for either the best or worst day of our lives.
I look at my brothers. “We’re really doing this?”
“We’re really doing this.”
“Even though it might destroy everything?”
“Especially because it might destroy everything.”
“And we’re apologizing to the goat first?”
“The goat gets a formal apology with treats,” Boone insists.
We shake on it, because we’re brothers and we’re idiots and we’re about to do something that will either be remembered as the greatest love story in Cedar Ridge history or the incident that escalated the biggest feud in the town’s history.
The bottle cap ring sits on the table between us, ugly and perfect and impossible.
Just our speed.
17
Callie
I’ve gotthree days to dismantle thirty years of bullshit, and I’m starting with the witnesses. The problem with Cedar Ridge is everyone knows everything but nobody admits to anything. It’s a town built on open secrets and closed mouths. Time to pry those mouths open.
First stop is the local judge, now retired from both the bench and competitive chili judging. He lives in a house that screams “I gave up caring in 1987,” the front yard complete with a headless garden gnome and a dry birdbath that Rita would eat if she were with me.
He answers the door in a bathrobe at 2 p.m., holding a beer and squinting at me through the screen door. Sounds about right.
“Callie Thompson. Here to arrest me for something?”
“Here to offer you redemption, actually.”
“I’m 78. Little late for redemption. Also, not interested.Redemption requires effort. And admitting you made a mistake. I learned something from all my years on the bench and that was to never admit guilt.”
“It’s about the chili competition. 1994.”
His face goes through several expressions including confusion, recognition, panic, and resignation before landing on defeat. “Oh hell. You found out.”
“Yeah, I found out. I found out judges aren’t that good at math.”
He sighs and lets me in. “That’s why I went to law school instead of becoming an engineer. Never could do math.”
His living room is a shrine to his judicial past, full of certificates, gavels, and a strange number of ceramic cats. The coffee table is covered inTV Guidemagazines from the last decade and plastic houseplants.
