Daryl manages to bag another deer on Thursday for winter storage in the smokehouse and makes some progress on his bike after consulting Eugene. He stops by the study to make sure there will be a horse for hm to sign out this Sunday. "'Cause 'm takin' Judith, too. To see 'er friend. 'Livia."
Maggie tells him he can take Snowball and then goes back to the inventory papers spread out over her desk.
"Ya need a break," he tells her.
"I have to make sure we have adequate rations for the winter." She looks about at the papers and shakes her head. "I can't take a break and keep up with all this."
"Delegate some of this shit."
"You want to sit down and run the numbers?" she asks.
"Didn't mean me, but Aaron'd be great at that. Used to distribute supplies for some charity or some shit, 'fore all this."
"An NGO. In the Niger River Delta," she agrees. She looks at the papers scattered all over the desk. "And you're right. He probably would be good at this part. Maybe I should hand it over and take a nap with Glenn, Jr."
"'S why there's a Council."
She sighs and leans back in her chair. "I know there's a Council, but when things go wrong, it's me they blame. Not the Council. I don't know how Rick did it. He bore the weight of leadership in way worse conditions than this. And I think of all the decisions he made that I resented him for…" She shakes her head. "People are going to resent me if I don't make the right decisions."
"Yeah, Rick made some bad calls. Made some good calls, too. 'N we forgave 'em the bad ones."
"Did you?" Maggie asks. "Did you ever really forgive him for banishing Carol from the prison?"
Daryl's nostrils flare instinctively.
"And yet look at how that turned out. If she hadn't been banished...she'd have been right there with us at Terminus, instead of saving us. We'd all be dead. And the worst decision I ever thought Rick made – the one I resented him the most for – keeping Negan alive - it turned out to be the right one in the end. All these communities would be destroyed if not for Negan figuring out how to defeat the Whisperers. How could Rick have known all that would happen?"
"He didn't know."
Maggie leans forward on her desk. "What don't I know? What am I doing that might have consequences in the future, way beyond what I know?"
Daryl pulls out the chair across from her and sits down. "Ya take too much on yerself. Yer doin' the best ya can, and ya done a damn good job. Just keep consultin' people. Delegate more."
She laughs wearily. "There are so many people here, Daryl. So many who depends on us."
"Yeah. On us. Not just you. Ya ain't in this alone. Take a goddamn break, woman! Maybe get yerself laid. Spend more time with yer boy, and 'member what all this is for."
Maggie shuffles all her scattered papers together. "Thanks, Dr. Phil."
"Who the fuck is Dr. Phil?"
[*]
Daryl finds Aaron playing chess with Sharon at one of the picnic tables. It's seems their "date" has continued past the picnic. Sharon smiles at Aaron mischievously when he lets go of his hand on the piece he's just moved.
Aaron looks at the smile. "I sense I just did something inadvisable."
She picks up a piece, moves it, and says, "Check," and Aaron sighs.
Daryl drops a folder full of papers beside the chess board. "Maggie wants ya to figure out how to make the vegetables stretch over the next four months," he says. "Run the numbers 'n present yer plan at the next Council meeting."
Aaron glances at the manila folder. "Uh…okay."
"Yer gonna do the same think with the meat in December, when we know how much we got in the smokehouse. Stretch it through March."
Aaron flips open the folder, looks at the papers inside, and flips it shut again. "I'll start in on it later tonight."
[*]
At dinner, the Bowman brothers, who are twelve and fourteen, keep chuckling and saying, "We're eating beaver," because that's what Andy and Lisa brought back. Daryl's deer is smoking for the winter.
"Shut up," one of the Howell twin girls tells them. "It wasn't even funny the first time."
"What's funny about eating beaver?" Judith asks Daryl.
"Nothin'," he tells her, and of course his mind goes straight to Carol again, to the way she pushed his head away because she couldn't take the sensation anymore, and to how he'd like to make her do that again.
"I packed my toothbrush!" Judith says excitedly.
"What?" Daryl asks her.
"I packed my toothbrush! For my sleepover with Olivia."
"Don't ya think maybe yer gonna need that 'fore Sunday?"
Judith shrugs.
[*]
That night on watch, Rosita demands to be entertained. When Daryl doesn't assist her with a joke or a riddle, instead of walking to the other end of the platform on the fence, she says, "Khalid's cocky."
"Mhm. Yeah. So're ya."
"What?" Rosita puts a hand on her hip and gives him her trademark head bob.
He just looks at her like she ought to know what he means, and she drops the topic. She paces to the edge of the fence and then paces back. "He's decent with that sword, don't you think?"
"Got the silver medal," Daryl agrees.
"I didn't work with him in the war, but I hear he was pretty bad ass. From what others say."
"Mhmhm."
"And he's disciplined. Very reliable about pulling out."
"Don't need to know these details." Daryl begins to walk away along the platform.
"What are you and Carol doing to make sure she doesn't get pregnant?" Rosita calls after him.
Daryl pauses. He turns and walks back quickly, looking around to see who's near the fence, because she's loud. "Shh!" he says.
"Like everyone doesn't already know you're doing it."
He looks left at the camp, then back it her. "She can't. She's fifty. Or fifty-one. Somethin' like that."
"Oh yeah. I always forget how old you two are."
"Ain't old!" he says.
"You're going to be over-the-hill, Daryl, in less than five years. Things are going to start to decline." She raises a finger and then makes it droop.
"Ain't nothin' declinin' in that department!"
She laughs. "You know, my mother was the baby of the family. The surprise child. My grandmother was fifty when she got pregnant with my mother. It can still happen."
"Well, Carol said it can't. For 'er."
"I guess she should know."
Horse hooves thunder toward the Hilltop, and Daryl's heart thuds in his chest in instinctive anticipation of an enemy. In an instant, his bow flies off his shoulder and into his hands. Rosita raises her binoculars and says, "Pony express."
Daryl relaxes. The rider comes into view, a woman from Oceanside, who used to run a horse-riding camp for girls in the old world. She's delivering mail from Oceanside, but will have passed through the Kingdom on the way and picked up any messages there. She'll stay the night, feed and rest her horse, and then make the journey home, passing once again through the Kingdom.
[*]
An hour later, when Daryl is off watch and returns to his tent, and sets his oil lamp down on his little table, he finds an envelope on his cot. He snatches it up, unties the flaps of his tent, and lets them fall free to close himself in. Then he plops down in his red canvas camp chair.
The address portion of the envelope reads To: Daryl Dixon, Hilltop, Platform Tent 2.
The return address portion reads: From: Carol Flanagan, Kingdom, Trailer 6.
Flanagan? He thought it was Peletier. Daryl grits his teeth when he realizes that, of course, Peletier was Ed's name. Flanagan must be her father's name - the handsome father who died of a heart attack when she was nineteen and left no life insurance. If you'd just paid up your plan, you cheap bastard, Daryl thinks, she'd of stayed in college and never met Ed.
Not that his mama had life insurance when she burned up and Daryl was only eleven. Neither did his father, who kicked the bucket of alcohol poisoning when Daryl was twenty-three. He and Merle found out about their father's death six months after the fact, when they ran into someone from their hometown on a job. They came back to see what was left to inherit and found their cousin Daisy Mae living in the trailer, claiming not to know where any of Will Dixon's guns were. Merle accused her of selling them all and pocketing the money, and then demanded that Daisy Mae pay them rent if she was going to stay in the trailer.
Daisy Mae said, "Fuck you, assholes! Where were you when I buried my mama alone last year? And then buried her brother - your daddy – alone six months later? Where you been the last four years? Trailer's mine."
"Yeah, really?" Merle asked. "'Cause unless there was a will leavin' it to ya, we're next of kin!"
"Don't need no damn will!" she cried. "Possession's nine tenths of the law."
"Now that's bullshit!" Merle shouted back.
Daryl could tell Merle wanted to throw her against that trailer wall, but he couldn't, because she was a girl, and a scrawny one at that, about a third his size and younger even than Daryl. Twenty in fact. Twenty and with no living parents. "Jesus, Merle," he muttered. "Just let her have it. We don't want to stick 'round here anyhow."
"She can mail us the rent checks!"
"Let's sell it to 'er." Daryl turned to his cousin. "Give us a hundred dollars, 'n it's yers."
"A hundred dollars?" Merle roared. "For a whole fuckin' goddamn trailer? She owes us at least eighteen hundred for the guns she pawned! And where's my daddy's bike! You sell that too, you dumb bitch?"
"It's 'round back," she replied. "But it's the only transport I got!"
Daryl put a hand on his brother's arm and led him down the trailer steps, where with bent head he hissed, "She's an orphan, man! Ain't got shit. 'N she can't pick up jobs easy like us. Only one kind of job she can pick up easy, and ya don't want 'er doin' that. Ya know what I'm sayin'."
Merle growled and shook his head, but in the end he agreed to let her pay four hundred dollars for the trailer and the motorcycle and the guns she'd already pawned, which Daisy Mae hemmed and hawed about paying, so Daryl had to draw her aside too. "Look, Merle's gonna fight ya for all of it if ya don't agree to this. Take the deal while ya still can."
She did. The brothers moved on again. Merle gave Daryl one hundred of the four hundred and kept the other three, "Because you're a shit negotiator, little brother."
Shaking off the memory, Daryl flicks open his pocket knife and cuts the envelope along the flap.
Dear Daryl,
I found your note. Thank you for leaving it. I guess maybe it's easier for you to write some things than to say them, and that's fine by me. I think I already knew, or at least I should have, because you've shown me. Again and again, you've shown me, but especially on Sunday, when you were as understanding as you were about…all that. I can't tell you how much that meant to me.
Henry got in a big fight yesterday with Cayden. Apparently Cayden said something about Elizabeth that Henry found offensive, and Henry got angry and hit him. They both ended up with a broken nose. Ezekiel says since they can't get along, they can't live together anymore. Cayden's been moved out of the barracks and into the school. It's just Matt and Jake and Henry now, and they all get along just fine.
I'm glad Henry stood up for Elizabeth, and that he stands up for what he believes is right, but I'm trying to teach him not to be so hotheaded, so physical. He needs to learn to turn the other cheek sometimes and use his words instead of his fists or his staff. He's going to get himself in real trouble one of these days.
I love you and miss you and I'm really looking forward to you being in the Kingdom on Sunday. Who knows, you might make friends here besides just me. Ezekiel says he's going to try to talk you into playing Trivial Pursuit this time. Olivia won't stop talking about Judith coming to see her. She's got big plans for them.
You don't have to write back, but I'd like it if you did. It doesn't have to be a long letter. A few lines is all I ask. It's just nice knowing you're alive and well and thinking of me, too.
Love,
Carol