Free The Fates Will Find Their Way by Hannah Pittard Page A

couldn’t help but give him money. Twenty here, a hundred there. Maybe each of us thought we were the only one he was asking. But eventually we married, had babies, acquired bills. The twenty here and hundred there got annoying. But that wasn’t till later.
    I t was Danny who, a week after Thanksgiving, hit a dog the year we got our driver’s licenses. (This was almost exactly one year after Mrs. Hatchet committed suicide, though nobody really talked about it like that.) And so leave it to him to be the downer, the precautionary tale we told each other on long, slow drives home from the movie theater or trips to the mall. “Slow down already,” we might say, nearing the hairpin curve on Sycamore. “You’re going to Hatchet something if you don’t slow down.” We were sophomores, newly sixteen, a year shy of missing Nora Lindell terribly. We were creeps, jerks, idiots. We were boys; we couldn’t help ourselves.
    Trey Stephens was in the passenger seat the night Danny hit the dog. They were going to a party or coming from one. Who can remember? What we remember is that Danny Hatchet hit a dog. It was late, dark. Trey said to keep driving. “Book it, man,” would have been the way he said it. “Flee the scene.” But already Danny was leaning towards vulnerability as his signature trait in life, towards skittishness and sensitivity. He’d only recently learned of Sarah Jeffreys’ rape, though it had happened years earlier. Probably he was already feeling guilty about insisting he put his fingers where another man had violently and disrespectfully put himself.
    And then, that night, there was a glint, a thud, a howl. In the headlights, to the right of the car, knocked into the grass, there was a dog, panicked, hyperventilating, not unlike Danny.
    Maybe, if we’d been there, we too would have preferred to flee the scene, happy to be told what to do, to have someone else make the decision. Who knows? And maybe Danny also wanted to drive away, leave the dog, but even in the dull yellow light of the Nissan’s headlights, he could see the dog wasn’t dead. He could see the thing flopping around, trying to get up. Trying, but falling, whimpering. It was pathetic. The whole thing was just too pathetic. And this, more than anything, is why Danny got out of the car.
    He’d seen it in a movie, probably, that you should cover an injured animal’s head so it can’t bite you while you’re trying to save it. Because how else would Danny have known to take off his shirt and toss it on the dog’s head?
    “It was crazy,” Trey told us the next night, while we sat or stood or crouched around Trey’s basement pool table. “You should have seen it. I didn’t know what the fuck he was doing.” Trey told the story, of course, but Danny was there, his back to us. He stood at the sliding glass door, waiting, like any minute he might make a break for it, leave us, leave this neighborhood behind. But he stayed through the entire story, interrupting only occasionally to disagree or shake his head and say something quietly, not even defensively, like, “No, that’s not how it happened.”
    What did happen, though, was Danny eventually got the dog in the backseat of his dad’s car. Trey hadn’t moved from the passenger seat, except to roll down the window and yell at him. “You’re fucking crazy,” he said, half laughing, half shivering in the cold. “This is fucking crazy. Ah, man, there’s blood.”
    The dog was whimpering. Trey gave us a great impression. “Mmmm,” he said, pulling up his hands in front of his chest and letting his fingers fall limp. “Mmm. Errrrr. Mmmmmm. Bambi eyes,” he said, opening his eyes wide and innocent. “Fucking Bambi eyes this dog had.” We laughed because it was funny—Trey moaning like a sick animal. But a glance at Danny’s back and we couldn’t help, one at a time, a singular private thought, to wince at Trey’s delivery. We couldn’t help but be thankful we weren’t there,