Free Way Past Legal by Norman Green

course," she said, looking over at me, smiling at Nicky. "That trailah's gone empty too long. Nice to have someone use it once in a while. But you'll stay with us tonight. I'll just go make up the bed." She held her hand out to Nicky. "Would you like to come help me?" He was still hanging on to me, doubtful. "After, I'll take you out to see the animals. If your father says it's okay."
     
     
"Animals?" He looked up at me with his mouth open, relaxed his grip on my leg.
     
     
"You wanna go see the animals?" He let go of me then, went over to her with that look of wonder on his face.
     
     
"Why don't you put some coffee on first, Eleanor?" Louis asked.
     
     
"I think you can handle that," she said, steel in her voice. "And go turn on the water to the back bathroom."
     
     
"Yes, ma'am," Louis said, winking at me. "Right away, ma'am."
     
     
"Don't get smaht with me," she said, glaring at him. I couldn't tell if she was serious or not.
     
     
Louis winked at me again. "If I'da shot her thirty yeahs ago," he said, "they'da let me back out by now."
     
     
Nicky was so excited when they got back that he couldn't stand still. "A hoss!" He started telling me about it at the top of his lungs. "They got a hoss! A great big one! You gotta come see it!"
     
     
"No yelling in the house," I told him.
     
     
He tried whispering. "They got a hoss, and they got chickens, too, and some cats. Come and see 'em! You gotta come see!"
     
     
"How do you know it's a hoss?" I asked him, mimicking his pronunciation. "How do you know it ain't a moose?"
     
     
He pointed at Eleanor. "She says it's a hoss. And mooses have horns, silly. Like Bullwinkle."
     
     
There was no holding him back. We went through the back door of the kitchen into the shed, and out of the back door of that into the Averys' barn. I am not going to admit to being afraid of horses, okay, but they are way bigger than I am and there's no way of telling what the hell they're thinking. I watched from a safe distance while Eleanor, Nicky, and the horse made friends. It didn't matter anyway, Nicky was so entranced and his enthusiasm was so infectious that neither he nor Eleanor paid any attention to me at all. Louis was right, this was going to be good for Nicky. I was almost glad the damned van had broken down.
     
     
And there was something about Eleanor Avery's cooking, too. At least I thought so. Maybe it's just me, but institutional food is institutional food, you know what I mean? It fills the hole, and it'll keep you alive, but it tends to make eating into another chore you have to do before you can go to bed. When I am out on my own, I mostly eat in restaurants or delivery, like Chinese or pizza. Eleanor made a deer-meat stew. I sat there and watched her do it. She took things out of glass jars and mixed them up in a pot, she didn't once look at any kind of recipe, she shook and dusted different spices without seeming to pay any attention to what she was doing, there's no way she could know what this was going to taste like. That's what I thought. I was wrong, though. Like I said, maybe it was me, but that had to be the most amazing meal I had ever eaten.
     
     
I washed the dishes, after. She didn't want me to, then she said I could dry, but I didn't know where anything went so I won the argument. Louis told Nicky he thought one of the cats had just had kittens, and that if he could refrain from shouting and stomping around like Jim Kelly's ox they might be able to see them. After the two of them left, Eleanor looked at the tattoos on my forearms. You gotta roll up your sleeves to wash dishes, after all. Tactical mistake.
     
     
"He seems like a wonderful child," she told me. "Does he take after his father?"
     
     
Smooth, I thought. Nice way to do it. "No, he doesn't. He is a special kid, though."
     
     
"His mother, then? Where is his mother?"
     
     
"She died when Nicky was two. She had a bad reaction to some medicine she was taking."
     
     
"Oh," she