I was laying the sun the next morning. In my old life, I wasn't the type of girl who sunbathed, but now, after months of living outside, I'd turned that wonderfully golden brown color I'd always seen my father's skin turn…and I liked it. So I lay in the sun in the teeniest pair of shorts and tank top I could find, reading a V.C. Andrews book.
Okay, I'll admit, the skimpy clothes were just to get under my Dad's skin. I still wasn't talking to him and he hadn't said anything else to me either, but he had given me a hard look when I stepped out of Carol's tent.
Carl was sitting with me. He wasn't reading, just lying on his back, staring at the sky.
"Libby?" I looked up from my book, for a half a second hoping it was my Dad. It wasn't though, it was Rick and Shane.
"What's up?" I asked, sitting up.
"We kinda need a favor." Rick said. "You have an MP3 player, don't you? I've seen you listening to it from time to time."
"Yeah," I said. "I've been trying to save the charge until I can get another battery. Why?"
"We need to borrow it." Shane said. "We'll bring it back."
"And some batteries, too." Rick added. "Enough to last you for awhile."
"All right." I nodded and Carl helped me to my feet. "Let me get it."
They followed me back up across the field to my Dad's tent, where most of my stuff was. I dug around in my bag, but couldn't find it.
"Where's my MP3 player?" I demanded of my father, not even looking at him.
"How the hell should I know?" He asked. "I didn't touch the damn thing!"
"What'd you do with it?" I asked him.
"Dammit, Liberty, I didn't do nothing with it!" He paused. "Did you check the side pocket of your duffle? I thought I saw you put it in there."
I went back in the tent and check the side pocket, and sure enough, there it was. I went back out and handed it to Rick.
"Please be careful with it." I said to him. "It was a Christmas gift from my…it was a gift."
He smiled. "I'll guard it with my life. Thanks, Libby."
I nodded. "Yep, no problem."
"You gonna apologize?" My Dad asked after they were gone.
"Sorry." I said coldly, without even looking at him.
"Liberty Belle, when are you gonna forgive me?" He demanded.
"I will when you move back to the camp." I replied and began to walk away.
"You need to put some damn clothes on!" He hollered after me. "You look like a street walker!"
"What part of we're not talking do you not understand?!" I screamed back at him.
"The part where you keep talking to me!" He shot back loudly.
I stomped back up to the house. Carl was waiting for me on the steps.
"Uh, let's not go in there." He said, standing.
"Why not?" I asked.
"It's crazy in there." He said. "Beth wants to kill herself."
"What?" This drove all angry thoughts of my Dad from my mind. "Is she okay?"
"Yeah, she's fine." He said. "Mom and Andrea are fighting, though."
"Great." I sighed. "Well, where do you wanna go hang out?"
"Over by the tents." He said. "You can practice the guitar some more."
I was bound and determined I was going to learn. I'd picked up a few more chords that sounded right and Patricia had given me an old book of Otis's that taught you to play.
The songs in were old, like Bob Dylan and Neil Young songs, but that was okay. I was teaching myself to play Heart of Gold, a song I remembered Merle listening to from time to time.
"You're doing pretty good with learnin' that aren't you?"
I looked up to see Patricia coming across the yard. She was smiling at me.
"You think so?" I asked. "I'm trying."
"Yeah, you're doing good." She told me. She looked at Carl. "I need to dig out Otis's old harmonica; maybe you could learn to play it."
"That'd be cool." Carl said.
"Come on up to the house with me." She said. "We'll find it."
So we did.
I'd never been in Patricia's bedroom. It was like Otis still lived there though, I thought. Some of his clothes were still hanging on the back of the door. She knelt by an old, pine trunk at the foot of her bed and began to dig through it.
"Here we go." She handed Carl a dusty mouth organ. "Wash that up a bit before you use it."
"Thanks." He said. She smiled, a little sadly.
"You're welcome."
Lori and Andrea were still arguing in the kitchen, so Carl and I walked down to the water pump to clean the harmonica up.
"We can play duets now." I joked.
Carl sighed. "If only one of us could carry a tune." He said.
"Beth sings." I remembered. "She told me right after we first came here that she was in her high school choir."
"Hmm." Carl started working the pump. "Why am I picturing like, an episode of Glee or something?"
I giggled. "Did you watch Glee?" I asked. "I mean, before?"
"No, but my Mom did." He replied. "I miss TV. I miss SpongeBob and Family Guy."
"The Big Bang Theory." I added as I began to rinse the dust of the harmonica. "Two and a Half Men."
"Criminal Minds." Carl said. He took it from me and dried it on his shirt. "Me and my Dad watched that together."
"Ohh, that's a good one."
He gave the mouth organ an experimental blow. "What do you think?"
"I think we should go practice some more if you want it to sound right."
And that's how we spent the rest of the morning, up until about mid-afternoon when Rick and Shane came back. I sat the guitar aside and Carl put down the harmonica.
"Libby," Rick called to me. "Can you run and see if your Daddy is at his tent? We need his help with something." And then they opened the back hatch of the SUV and I saw that the guy was still in there.
"Sure." I said. I jogged across the field to my Dad's little campsite. "Dad, you here?"
He was gutting some squirrels. "Right here." He said.
"Rick sent me to get you." I said, looking at the ground. "He says they need your help."
Dad sighed. "Course they do. Whenever anyone needs anything, they run to ol' Daryl. Well, I'm gettin' kinda tired of it."
"They still got that guy with them." I told him. "The one they were supposed to be takin' care of. He's still with them."
This time my Dad looked at me and I looked right back. "You sure?"
I nodded. "Yeah, I saw him myself. He has a bag over his face."
"All right." He wiped his buck knife on his pant leg. "Let's go."
We walked back across the field together and my Dad dropped his arm over my shoulders. I let him keep it there.
They wanted my Dad to torture information out of this guy. Oh, Rick didn't come right out and say it like that, but that was the gist of it.
"Why him?" I asked the next morning. I knew, as a child, I was supposed to keep my mouth shut and do as I was told, but I felt like I had a right to know. "Why my Dad, why not Shane…or…or…"
Rick knelt in front of me. "You want the truth?"
I nodded. "Of course."
"Because, to a stranger, hell even to those of us who know him, your Daddy is one scary fucker." He said and I couldn't help but smile. I looked up at my Dad, whose lips twitched.
"You'll be careful?" I asked. He nodded.
"Thought you was mad at me?"
"I am. Doesn't mean I want anything to happen to you." I hugged him fleetingly. "But I'm still pissed."
He sighed. "We're gonna have a talk about your new vocabulary later." He said. I sighed.
"Fine."
"So what are you gonna do?" Lori asked as we all sat around the campfire a little later. "I think we'd all feel a little better if we knew the plan."
"Is there a plan?" Andrea asked.
"Are we gonna keep him here?" Glenn added.
"We'll know soon enough." He nodded and we all turned to see my Daddy coming back towards us. His knuckles were bloody and it made my stomach turn over.
"Boy there's got a gang." He said. "Thirty men. They got heavy artillery and they ain't lookin' to make friends. They roll through here, our boys are dead. And our women…they're gonna wish they were." His eyes settled on me.
I'd gone from the skimpy shorts and tank top to a pair of capri's and a t-shirt. I was trying to hang on to my mad, but it was slipping away. I went to him and hugged him again.
"What did you do?" Carol asked him. He looked down. His eyes were on me, I could feel them.
"Had a little chat." He said. He started to walk back towards his camp sight and I followed him.
"Are you hungry?" I asked him. "Want me to fix you a little something?"
He nodded. "I could eat." He glanced at me. "This mean we're talkin' again?"
"Yeah." I said, giving in. "We're talkin' again."
I fried some of the squirrel meat for him, like I'd been taught. Carol had been showing me how to cook and I was apparently a quick study at it, because he cleared his plate and asked for more.
"Is it good?" I asked and he nodded.
"Real good." He said. "Where'd you learn to do this?"
"Carol taught me." I said. "She said I needed to know how, you know, in case…" I trailed off and he nodded.
"She's right."
We didn't talk about our fight or about our feelings or anything like that. We weren't that kind of a family.
"I think I'm gonna keep staying with Carol." I told him while he ate his second plate of food. "If that's okay? She needs me more than you do right now."
"Libby, you can't replace her daughter, you know that don't you?" He asked. I nodded.
"I know, but I like being around her." I said. "She's the kind of Mom I wish I'd had."
He looked at me over the tin cup of water he was drinking. "Don't be gettin' no ideas."
I held up my hands. "I'm not!"
He gave me another Look. "You better not be."
Authors Note's: I think, with Daryl having a young, cute, teenage daughter, that what Randall told him about his group raping those girls may have hit home even more. Just a thought. Now, here's a question, something that came to me and I'm thinking on. What would you all think of a Daryl/Beth story? She'd be a little older, or course, but I'm just curious. Would you guys read something like that? Let me know!
