Free Listening to Dust by Brandon Shire

“’Cept when it comes to Mac’s cooking.” He giggled and took a bite.  
    Stephen glanced at him and looked back at her with a slight nod. “Miss Emily.”  
    “Something in your eyes says you know me,” she told Stephen. “Or think you do.” It sounded like a challenge from a woman that was not used to being challenged in her own element.  
    “Dustin spoke about you a bit.”  
    “Seems you’re one up on me then,” she replied. “I didn’t know anything about you until a few months ago, when Stewart put a hole through through his chest.”  
    “Miss Emily!” Robbie stammered, as his fork clattered into his plate.  
    She looked at him sharply, her silence an indication that he should mind his manners and his elders.  
    “He just found out about it now. Old Buster or Reamy must’ve told him down at the station. He didn’t know nothing. That ain’t fair, ain’t fair at all,” Robbie scolded her.  
    “Is that true?” she asked Stephen as she turned back to him.  
    Stephen nodded, a little shocked at her attack on him, but also acutely aware how much this old spinster had cared for Dustin. He had always wondered about the depth of her feelings when Dustin spoke of her, but now he was witness to the emotion contorting what he surmised would be a normally sedate and calculating face.  
    She softened, put her hands around her glass, and looked out the window of the diner, almost as if she could no longer bear the sight of him. “I owe you an apology then,” she sighed. “Dusty was a special boy. This town and all its petty bigotries killed him. And, to be fair, I haven’t taken to that too well. I hope you can understand,” she said as she glanced back at him.  
    “I...yes,” Stephen answered simply. “Yes, I can understand that.”  
    “Can you?” she asked her eyebrows rising slightly. “I spent more than two decades showing that boy what life was about, and this town spent that same two decades beating it out of him. And in the end, they killed him.”  
    “Miss Emily, these folks didn’t have nothing to do with what Pa done,” Robbie said.  
    “Didn’t they?” she asked, her voice rising. “I’ve been in this town for fifty years and taught every smart-mouthed little brat alive today. One bright, beautiful boy comes along and they make it their mission to make his life hell. That wasn’t just Stewart that pulled that trigger, Robbie; that was this whole damned town that did that,” she said and slammed her slight fist on the table.  
    Robbie looked shocked. He had likely never heard her curse, and from the look on his face, it seemed he believed that he never would. When Stephen glanced around the diner he noted the open mouth stares and the cinched hostility in the faces of those at the surrounding tables. It seemed her indictment had hit home in more than a few places and he had no doubt that in addition to the stress of the loss of Dustin, she was also worrying over her attempts to keep Robbie from prison, or the chair, as Robbie had alluded to.  
    Her hand slipped up to the pearls around her neck as she flushed for a moment. “Forgive my manners, but I am too old for this, Stephen, too old. That boy cried in my lap more times than I can count because of this town and I am just too old to have watched him be put in the ground.”  
    “He spoke very fondly of you, Miss Emily,” Stephen said.  
    She glanced at him and gave him a hollow nod as her face lost a little more of its composure. “He used to sit in my back picture window as a boy with his nose in a book and his dirty socks smudging up the window panes,” she said as she managed a weak smile. “He would just read and read. He wouldn’t go on the porch, always the window. Never wanted to go home once he got his nose in a book.” She smiled a bit more at the memory; remembering the sandwiches she’d placed next to him and how his hand would reach out absently without his eyes ever missing a word.