Daryl, who was walking at the back of the pick-up next to Carol, beckoned to Sophia. "Sofie, girl, toss me a beer. None of that Light shit."
Sophia crawled back a foot and dug around in a box until she found a can that didn't say Light on it. She came back and sat on the open tailgate again, her legs bent and dangling off it, and began to extend him a can of Heineken. She yanked it back as he reached for it. "My name is not Sofie. It's Sophia."
"Carl calls ya that."
"He calls me Soph. Soph is fine. Just not Sofie. I'm not a little kid."
"Pfft." Daryl scoffed. "Whatever you say, kid. Just toss me the damn beer."
Sophia tossed it, and he caught it as he walked after the truck. He popped the can open and took a swig as it foamed out. "Ugh. Warm beer's awful. But it's better than no beer."
Andrea glanced back at him. "Heineken, huh? So they do have at least one German beer in the Kingdom of Prussia. Everything else was Budweiser and Coors and Miller."
"Heineken's Dutch," Daryl told her. "Guess they don't teach that in college neither."
Andrea flicked him off and turned forward again.
Carol smiled. "What's that, your third beer of the day now?"
"Hell you naggin' for? There's plenty."
Carol shrugged. "I just know if you get really drunk, you sometimes end up in the wrong room."
Daryl flushed an angry red. He hissed, "Told you I was sorry 'bout that!" His eyes flitted to Sophia, but she was distracted by looking at the British colonial swinging ship ride they were passing.
"I'm just teasing," Carol assured him. "You're cute when you're flustered."
Had she just said that? You're cute when you're flustered? What was she thinking? It was as if she'd suddenly slid back into her pre-Ed days, when she was still comfortable harmlessly flirting with men and not afraid of a jealous explosion from anyone.
Flirting had been fun back then. It had given her a little boost of self-confidence and rush of power, but she was badly out of practice now, and Daryl was probably not the best object to judge her abilities against. But Glenn was too young for her to flirt with. And she could probably get T-Dog to flirt back in less than ten seconds. That was no challenge. And she wasn't going to flirt with a married man, or with Andrea's maybe-boyfriend either. So that just left Daryl. Daryl would be an excellent sharpening stone for her practice. It would be an almost insurmountable challenge to get him to flirt back. Right now, he was looking at her through narrowed eyes as if trying to decide if she was serious.
The kids yelled for the truck to stop. They were at a tall play structure called The Tower of London, with rickety wooden jumping bridges, tunnels, climbing nets, slides, and more. The group agreed the kids could take a short play break and made their way over, but Lori didn't want to let the kids go through the thing until every tunnel was cleared by Rick, so the poor man had to crawl and climb through the entire structure, despite the sign that read Maximum Height: 5'4".
The other men snickered as they watched him from below. "Why are you makin' him do this?" Daryl asked Lori. "Walkers can't climb."
"But someone might have died in there and turned or something," Lori insisted.
"Who? Why?" Glenn asked. "The park was closed."
"Well, there was a walker in the house!"
"Yeah, but I just don't see anyone who was working in the park climbing up a net into a tunnel and then dying in it," Glenn said.
Rick got his foot stuck in one of the small open squares of a climbing net for a while and struggled to free it. The men snickered again.
"At least it's amusing all of you," Lori said.
Rick made his way up the net and disappeared into a tunnel. When he came out the other side, he tossed a dead squirrel over the platform and moved on.
"See!" Lori said.
"Oh, yeah, little Rocky's vicious," Daryl replied. "Would of ate them kids alive."
After going through the whole thing, Rick waved to them from the platform at the top of the giant, yellow, covered curly slide. He grabbed the rim and appeared to swing himself inside to slide down.
They all looked at the bottom of the slide, which had an open, uncovered lip for the last four feet or so, but no Rick emerged. "What's taking so long?" Lori asked.
"Probably got his ass stuck," Daryl said, and T-Dog guffawed.
Sure enough, Rick came out slowly. They saw the soles of his shoes first, emerging from where the tunnel ended. But there was a squeak, and the shoes froze in place.
"Stuck again!" T-Dog yelled and all the men laughed. Carol smiled at their amusement.
Rick flipped on his stomach and crawled out of the tube backward the last few feet before feeling for the ground. Shane and T-Dog clapped when he stood up, and Daryl put two fingers in his mouth and whistled.
Rick walked over to them breathing a little hard and shaking his head. "All clear, kids. But I deserve a beer after that."
Sophia and Carl ran for the play structure.
"You've already had two beers," Lori informed Rick. "And I don't get to drink any."
Daryl dug out a bottle of Coors Light from the bed of the pick-up and handed it to Rick. "Here you go, man, well earned." He leveled a look at Lori as though defying her to say no. She didn't, but she frowned, first at Daryl, and then at Rick when he accepted the drink.
Daryl handed Rick his multi-tool knife so he could use the bottle opener.
The kids were already a fifth of a way up the structure now.
The bottle cap popped and skidded on the asphalt. Rick took a swig of the beer and then wandered over to sit down on a nearby bench. Lori joined him. The others began sitting down on benches, too, but Daryl wandered off several yards away to sit on a low rectangular stone border encasing a dead flower garden and a small tree. He lit up a cigarette.
Carol gravitated toward him, leaving the others to supervise the kids. She sat down beside him, about two feet to his left, and tried think of something flirtatious to say. She lamely settled on, "Can I have one?"
"Pfft. You don't smoke."
"I used to, before I met Ed. He said it was a filthy habit."
"Ed smoked."
"For women. A filthy habit for women. Unladylike."
"Sounds like an ass."
"Well, he was. He beat me," she admitted bluntly. She wasn't sure why she had admitted it. It wasn't something she'd ever said aloud to any of them before, though they all knew it.
"Yeah, figured that out," Daryl grunted as he plucked his lit cigarette from his lips and handed it to her. He reached into the front pocket of his shirt to fish out his pack. After sliding the last cigarette out, he crumpled the pack and tossed it into a nearby trashcan. "Why'd you put up with it?"
She toyed with the burning cigarette she now held between her fingers. "Because I was weak," she said. "And I was scared." She took a puff, coughed, and concluded, "I was poor and dependent. And I had no one to turn to."
"Makes sense when you're a kid. Not so much when you're a grown ass adult. Just turn to yourself." He slid the cigarette between his lips, cupped his hands around it and lit up with his silver butane lighter. The lighter had the initials D.B.D. engraved on it.
"Is that what you did at sixteen? Turned to yourself?" He'd told her he dropped out of school and left home at that age. "Because your father beat you?"
Daryl's hand froze momentarily above the shirt pocket into which he was dropping his closed lighter. He let the lighter go and turned his head to her as he sucked in on the cigarette. The tip glowed an angry orange-red, but he said nothing.
"Or lashed you, maybe," she said softly. "I saw the scars on your back."
Daryl's eyes narrowed. "When?"
"At the lake. In the quarry camp. I'd come to do laundry. You'd been washing up. I didn't expect anyone to be there, so I retreated. I wasn't trying to spy. And I didn't see anything. Except your back. You were in water up to your waist."
Daryl took a long drag and sighed the smoke out. He seemed to be considering whether to answer her question, whether she deserved an answer, maybe, or whether he could trust her with one. "Yeah," he said at length. "He beat me. And yeah, that's why I left home. He beat Merle, too. 'S probably why Merle left for the Army when I was eight and never looked back."
"Merle just left you there? Alone with your abusive father?" Carol took another puff of the cigarette and coughed again.
"Merle probably thought he wasn't doin' it to me. 'Cause he wasn't, long as Merle was there. Started right after Merle left. Stopped when I left."
"So where did you go?" she asked. "Where did you live?"
"Camped in the woods for about three months. But then Merle came back to Georgia, got honorably discharged, or so he said, had some money saved up from his stint in the Army, put a down payment on a trailer. He let me move in with him."
The cigarette was about to go out, so Carol took another puff and coughed again, harder this time. "It's been fifteen years since I smoked," she admitted. "Maybe I shouldn't restart an old, bad habit." She stubbed it out on the stone.
"Waste of a cigarette!" Daryl cried.
"Don't worry. There's the King James Tobacco Shop by the designated smoking zone just a little farther that way." She waved past him. "I'm sure you'll find plenty of cigarettes there."
"King James? Didn't he call tobacco the devil's weed?"
"I think maybe that's the joke. How did you know that?" She only knew because she'd read the sign on the tobacco shop when Ed went in to get a pack of cigarettes. They'd had to wait for him to smoke two in the designated smoking zone before they could move on.
"Watched a documentary once." He took a drag and then blew out a stream of smoke.
She smiled. "Just once, huh?"
"We got four channels when I was a kid. One was PBS."
"We had five channels. But my best friend in high school had cable. It felt sinful, going over to her house and watching music videos on VH1." She nodded to the pocket where he'd dropped his lighter. "Did you loot it for the initials? The lighter? Same first and last initial as yours?"
"Didn't loot it. 'S mine. My initials."
"You have an engraved lighter?" she asked. "Seems a little fancy for you."
"Best man's gift."
She laughed, but she stopped, because he wasn't smirking. "Are you serious? You were the best man at someone's wedding?" She couldn't envision him in a suit.
"Merle's."
Carol blinked. "Merle was married?"
"Had the weddin' at the biker bar where he met 'er. She was a waitress."
"Merle was married?" Carol repeated.
"Once. For 'bout seven months. Didn't take."
"He left her?" Carol asked.
"Hell no. She left him."
"Because he cheated?" Carol speculated.
"Didn't cheat. Not on her. Not once."
"Then why?"
Daryl shrugged. "Just took off one mornin' while he was passed out after a night of hard drinking. I'd gone out huntin'. I was eighteen at the time, livin' with 'em. Like I said, Merle took me in. He had this two-bedroom trailer back then. She took his cash and his shotgun and his pick-up truck. Didn't leave a forwardin' address."
"Sounds like a country music song."
Daryl chuffed. "Yeah, it does, don't it?"
"Did you like her? Your sister-in-law?" It sounded strange to say sister-in-law in connection with Daryl.
"She was hot," he answered. "And young. Closer to my age than Merle's. Barely twenty-one. And fiery. Gave Merle a run for his money. Redhead, of course."
"I used to have reddish brown hair."
Daryl pulled back and peered at her. "Nah."
She nodded. "I went prematurely gray by the time I was thirty."
Daryl looked her over. He seemed to be thinking something, but all he said was, "It's gotten longer. Since the quarry camp. Your hair."
"Yeah, well, I haven't cut it in weeks. It grows fast. If I don't cut it again, it'll be down to my waist in just two years."
"Mine'll probably be at my shoulders."
"Oh, well, don't do that. Keep cutting it. I like it short. You look good with it short." That was another practice serve over the net. She waited to see if he'd return it.
"Yours looks better a bit longer like this." That might have felt like a compliment if he hadn't stated it as though he were merely observing a fact. "Looks nice, the way it waves a little. Better than that dumb ass buzz cut you used to have. Hell you have that for?"
Well, so much for a return serve. "It was my one act of defiance," Carol told him. "When it was long, Ed would pull it and drag me back by it if I tried to get away when he was angry. So, I thought…I'll make it as short as possible without shaving myself completely bald." She fluffed a few strands of her hair on one side with a hand. "But I like this, I think. This compromise. Not long, but not super short either. I'll grow it just a little bit more." She waited to see if he'd agree.
"Mhm," was all he said.
"What does the B stand for?" she asked.
"What?"
"The B," she said. "On your lighter. What's your middle name?"
"Ain't tellin'. Always hated it."
"Bob?" Carol guessed.
"Ain't nothin' wrong with Bob."
"Billy?" she ventured.
"Nah. My daddy was a William though. Went by Will, not Billy."
"Boone?" she guessed. "I had a crush on a boy named Boone my last year in high school."
"Ain't Boone."
"Bubba?" Carol asked. "Because I'd be embarrassed by that name."
"No. Bubba's southern for big brother, not little brother."
"Benji?"
"Like I said, ain't tellin'." He stubbed out what little was left of his cigarette and then flicked the butt into the weeds of the dead flower bed. He stood. "Bet them kids'll be playing a while. Gonna go check out that smoke shop."