The air reeks of raw fish. A man and a woman descale and gut smallmouth bass on a picnic table in the grassy area alongside the docks. "Michael, Sarah, this is Daryl," Garland tells them. "He'll be working with you today."
The sheriff reaches into the inside pocket of his vest and pulls out a worn, brown leather sheath that Daryl recognizes well. "That one of my knives?"
"You'll need it for work," Garland says.
Daryl takes the sheath, clips it to his belt, and feels instantly better to be armed. When Garland leaves, Michael tosses him a bass, which slides from Daryl's hands when he tries to catch it and slithers into the grass. Sarah laughs.
"Toss the clean ones in that cooler when you're done," Michael says, pointing to a long blue ice chest.
Daryl recovers the fish, lays it on the table, and unsheaths his knife with a twirl.
"Show off," Sarah says with a smile.
"Can you not flirt with the new guy, please?" Michael asks. "I'm standing right here."
Daryl makes quick work of the fish, avoids looking at or talking to Sarah, tosses it in the cooler, and then reaches for another. He goes through the same process again two more times.
"Slow down, man," Michael tells him. "If we finish all these, we don't get off work early. We just have to do something else."
Daryl glances up at him. "So?" That just means more work gets done, as far as he's concerned. But he knew plenty of guys like Michael when he was roaming with Merle and working odd jobs. They'd spend a lot of time leaning on shovels, sitting on buckets, taking smoke breaks, bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, and shooting the breeze. Hell, so would Merle.
About fifteen minutes later, Michael says, "Seriously, slow down. You're going to make us look bad if we get twice as much done today with only one extra person."
Daryl relents and scales the next fish more gingerly, not that he saves any more flesh that way.
Bootsteps still on the dock not far from their table, and Daryl looks up. Carol's high school sweetheart, Harold Harrison, stands in his blue-and-gray camo Navy working uniform.
"Hello, Commander," Sarah says. "You're looking handsome as always."
"Seriously," Michael mutters. "I'm right here."
"Good afternoon, Sarah," Harold replies. "Hello…Derek?"
"Daryl," Daryl grunts.
"I guess you and Cary got a verdict of probationary admission?"
"Nah. Got release. Leavin' in a few days."
"Well, I'm happy for you. That's what you wanted. But it would be nice to see Cary's smile around here for longer than that." Harold taps the tip of his camo hat and walks on.
Daryl grunts and slides his knife roughly from the tail to the head of the fish, and the scales flip off. Underneath his breath, to Harold Harrison's retreating back, Daryl mutters, "Her name's Carol."
[*]
Shannon has to go to work in the gardens, and Carol feels awkward being left alone in the cabin with Shannon's mother and son. She ends up sitting on the couch and helping Gary to put together a wood puzzle under Grandma Bonnie's suspicious watch. The puzzle sports big pictures of farm animals.
"A cow goes moo," Carol says, and Gary says, "ooooo!"
Eventually, the grandmother takes the boy back to their shared bedroom for his nap, and, to Carol's relief, she must take a nap too, because she doesn't re-emerge. Carol explores the living room and notes the presence of the firearms above the mantle. She scans the spines of the books, which are sometimes stacked vertically to cram more onto the bookcase.
The top two shelves she's pretty sure are Garland's: a series of Gun Digests, missing every other year or so, a bunch of detective novels, Public Speaking for Dummies, a biography of Wyatt Earp and one of Teddy Roosevelt, several Faulkner and Cormac McCarthy novels, and a book containing the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. It's also clear enough that the bottom two shelves are meant to be Gary's books, littered as they are with Dr. Seuss, Roald Dahl, Shel Silverstein, and toddler's board books.
It's the middle two shelves that puzzle her: Plato's Republic next to three Harlequin romance novels; Gone with the Wind wedged between Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Kierkegaard's Either/Or; Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason beside two erotica novels; the Tropic of Cancer stacked in the middle of The Analects of Confucius andMachiavelli's The Prince; Gardening for Dummies alongside A History of Western Philosophy; How to Win Friends and Influence People on top of Descartes's Meditation on First Philosophy, which is on top of The Joy of Sex. Are those all Shannon's books?
Carol shakes her head, grabs Gone with the Wind, and settles in the armchair to read. Grandma and Gary emerge an hour later, and the woman leaves to take the boy to play with a friend while Carol continues to read. During that time Dr. Ahmad pays a house call to check her vitals, peek at the stitches, and warn her not to exert herself.
"But I can sew, right?" she asks him.
"Lightly," he insists.
Carol reads a bit more. Grandma returns and, apparently having decided Carol is not a threat after all, asks her to watch Gary until Shannon gets home so she can go see a friend. Shannon comes in just twenty minutes later, and Garland and Daryl are not long after her.
After watching Garland kiss his wife hello, Daryl awkwardly kisses Carol hello. He smells faintly of fish and strongly of lavender soap. He doesn't kiss her for long, probably because they have an audience.
"Where's your mother?" Garland asks Shannon as he hangs his white Stetson on a hook on the back of the closed front door.
"Dinner with the manager again," she replies. "I think that's getting serious. Though Mamma feels like an adulteress, not knowing if Daddy is dead or alive."
"It's been over seven years."
"Well," Shannon replies, "would you date other women if I'd been missing and presumed dead for seven years?"
"Yes."
Carol catches Daryl eye, and they both resist the urge to laugh and end up smiling.
"Well that's not what I wanted to hear!" Shannon exclaims. "This is your problem, baby! You can't be politic."
Carol insists on helping Shannon to prepare dinner. While they cook, Carol tells her, "The doctor says I can do some light sewing. So if you have anything for me, please. I want to do something useful tomorrow."
"Healing from your wound is useful," Shannon tells her. "But there's always plenty of sewing. I'll leave you some."
Little Gary is fed first, with small bites and a sippy cup of cow's milk, and then left to play with his matchbox cars on the deer skin rug. It's a tight fit around the square, wooden table, an intimate and cozy meal of fried catfish, fresh salad with spinach, scallions, and radish, and the ever-present Jamestown cornbread. Garland eyes Daryl as he eats half the meal with his hands, but he doesn't say anything. Eventually, Carol leans over and whispers, "Fork," and Daryl picks it up.
There's strawberry pie for dessert and Carol asks how Shannon makes it.
"I don't. My mamma does, in a dutch oven. She won't give me the recipe, says I'm not ready for it. I keep telling her she better, because she could keel over and die any day now."
"How politic of you, my dear," says Garland, and Daryl chuckles, low, in that rumbling, almost closed-mouth way that Carol loves.
Carol helps with dishes by doing the drying, and then they all move to the living room afterward, where Shannon gives them hot tea. Daryl ends up in the armchair, Carol in the rocking chair, and Garland and Shannon on the couch, while Gary lies face down on the rug, half asleep, slowly rolling a car back and forth.
"How was your day, baby?" Shannon asks.
"Not bad," Garland answers. "I drew up the patrol and watch schedules for the next several days. Found a missing kid. He'd skipped school and gone swimming. And there was a domestic."
"Karen and Don?"
"She smacked him with a frying pan when she found him coming out of the whorehut," Garland replies. "Cast iron."
"Ouch," Shannon says.
"How was your day?" Garland returns.
"Same old same old. Gardening. The scallions were ready to harvest."
Daryl must be observing all this because when the room falls silent he looks across the way at Carol and asks, "'S yer day?" It makes her smile, this effort at social nicety, which he makes almost like a kid mimicking his parents as they go through the liturgy in church.
"I played with Gary, which was fun," Carol answers. "And I read half of Gone with the Wind. How was your day?"
"Stank," Daryl answers. "Cleaned fish."
"It was difficult work?" Shannon asks.
"Nah. Easy. Just stank."
"Do you like philosophy, Shannon?" Carol asks, still puzzling over the books.
"Oh, yeah, I got my bachelor's in philosophy. With a minor in political science."
Carol blinks. She looks across the rug at Daryl expecting him to share in her surprise, but he seems unaffected. "Did you know Shannon had a bachelor's in philosophy?"
"Yeah," Daryl says. "Paid for it workin' at a titty bar."
Garland rubs his eyes.
"See, Daryl doesn't judge," Shannon tells her husband.
"I've never judged," Garland insists. "I just think scholarships would have been preferable."
"Well they don't give scholarships to C students, baby. And don't tell me you've never been to a strip club."
"Only for work."
Gary says, "Vwooom…..vwooom….vw…" and the car he's pushing slows to a stop on the rug as he passes out.
Garland sets his tea cup down on the end table and scoops up the sleeping toddler.
[*]
Dressed in only a pair of sweat pants, Daryl crawls into their borrowed bed with Carol, who, he's happy to find, is wearing only a tank top and panties. She rolls to him, and slow kisses follow. Daryl slips a hand under her shirt and traces her stitches gently with his fingertip. They're thicker than he expected, stronger. She was badly cut. He's not sure how far they can go in her condition. "Ain't sposed to do nothin' vigorous yet, huh?"
"No, but as soon as these stitches come out, and we're on the road…that first night? Sunday night? I want us to have sex."
"Yeah?" he asks, his gruff voice deepening a note.
"I just want it to be special. The first time. Just us. Alone."
"What, no threesomes?"
She smacks his shoulder lightly. "You know what I mean. No one else in the place. And I want to find someplace nice…like the ski lodge was. Or that winery in the mountains. Or…I don't know, a fancy hotel. I've never stayed in a fancy hotel. Maybe a bed and breakfast. We're taking the shorter route back, so I don't know what we'll come across, but just…someplace special."
"A'ight. Find ya someplace special." Five nights from now, Daryl thinks, he's going to be having sex with Carol. He's going to be inside her. The idea has given him a full-on hard on, and when she shifts, her leg brushes it. "Sorry," he mutters.
"Nothing to be sorry for." Carol kisses him and shifts so that his hand lands on her breast. He fondles it gently while she slips her hand into his sweatpants. In that expert way of hers, she quickly relieves his distress.
Daryl pants against the crook of her neck after he cums. Carol makes a soft sound as if she's in pain, and he shifts his weight away. "Ya a'ight?"
"I'm fine. Just a little ache."
"Sorry. Shouldn't of – "
"I'm fine. I guess I jerked too hard." She laughs.
"Ya take them pain pills the doc gave you?"
"I don't want to rely on those. We don't have those in the Kingdom. I don't want to get soft."
Daryl sighs.
"We should wash up."
"Ya don't want nothin'?" he asks. "Want me to touch ya?"
"I think I probably shouldn't be swiveling my hips right now. I just want to cuddle, if that's okay."
"Mhmhm." He feels a little guilty that she took care of him and is getting nothing in return, but not so guilty that he isn't glad she took care of him.
They clean up with the washcloths left by the washbasin and crawl back into bed. Daryl rolls onto his back, and she snuggles in, lying on her non-stitched side. Her hand rests on his shoulder, and he can see the shadowed reflection of the cameo on the celling. "Umm…we engaged?" he asks.
Carol raises her head to look at him. "That was a marriage proposal, wasn't it? This morning?"
"Yeah."
"And I did take the ring, didn't I?"
"Yeah."
"So I think that means we're engaged," she says.
"Good."
"I thought maybe we'd have the wedding during the fair at the Kingdom," Carol says as she settles her head back down on his bare shoulder. "A lot of our mutual friends from Alexandria and Hilltop will already be there. Judith would make a cute flower girl, wouldn't she?"
"Weddin'?"
"That's usually what happens when people get married." She peers up at him. "You did want to get married, right?"
"Wanna be married. Don't wanna get married."
"It doesn't have to be big and fancy. And I don't want any other ring than this one. But I'd like some kind of ceremony. Just to mark the start of it, you know? Would that be okay with you?"
Girls like weddings, Daryl supposes. He'd be an ass to deny her one. "Ain't wearin' no monkey suit though."
"Maybe a nice button-down dress shirt?"
"Could do that." He wears button-down shirts all the time anyway. Sturdy work shirts, usually. And sometimes with the sleeves torn off. But a dress shirt can't be too different.
"And maybe a pair of khakis or something?"
Pants are pants. He can wear pants. "Guess that'd be a'ight."
She looks up at him again, with a twinkle in her pretty blue eyes. "And a blazer?"
"Don't push it."
Carol laughs. Daryl reaches over and turns off the oil lamp. Then he toys with the hair at the back of her neck for a while before he asks a question that's been on his mind. "Where we gonna live?"
"Well, I assumed we'd live in the Kingdom. You said you don't hate it. And I am the queen."
"Mhm. Yeah."
"You don't want to live there?"
"'S fine."
She pulls slightly away. "Daryl? It doesn't sound fine."
"Just…don't want live in that damn school. In a marble royal chamber."
"The classroom isn't made of marble."
"Don't like it. Wanna have a cabin or somethin'."
"The Kingdom doesn't have any cabins."
"Yeah," he mutters. "Never mind."
"No. Not never mind. What are you thinking here?"
"Could build one," he suggests. "In the Kingdom. Maybe. Wouldn't be good enough for ya, though, when ya can have lights and water 'n electric heat in the school."
"Daryl, I've lived in a lot of camps. You know I don't have any problem living anywhere."
"Yeah, but why do that when ya ain't got to?"
"Because it's clearly important to you, that's why."
"Just want our own place. Place 's just ours. Wanna…wanna build somethin'. For us."
"Then build something," she says. "For us. We'll find a bit of land somewhere within the gates."
Daryl wraps both arms around her. "A'ight."
"Will you miss the Hilltop too much?"
Daryl travels a lot, but the Hilltop has been his home base for almost three years now. "Make me one of yer trade reps." Ezekiel started the annual trade fair, but after he died, Carol found it insufficient to supply the Kingdom's needs. So she appointed a trade team that travels to Alexandria and then on to the Hilltop and back to the Kingdom on a regular trade schedule to exchange goods. Oceanside was too far away to be put in the loop, though they do come to the annual fair. If Daryl joins the trade team, he'll be able to see Hershel at the Hilltop and Judith in Alexandria on those trips.
"You'd be gone for five full days every four weeks, March through December." They avoid travel in January and February, due to the threat of snowstorms.
"So?"
Carol shrugs. "I'd miss you is all. But I know you'll feel pent-up in the Kingdom if you're there all the time. It's a good compromise. And I know I can rely on you to keep the trade team safe."
"So 'm hired?"
Carol's laugh leaves a cloud of warm breath on his bare shoulder. "Yeah. You're hired."
Daryl closes his eyes, and for the first time in nights, he sleeps soundly.