Free When You Believe by Deborah Bedford Page A

there?”
    She crossed her arms over her bosom the same way the oars were crossed in the boat. “I was… looking around.” She cringed,
     having to lie to him. Here they were, talking about trust, and she didn’t want him to know she had found Shelby inside.
    He jerked the bungee cord as if he were yanking tight the cinch strap of a saddle horse.
    A cluster of pecans lay rotting on the grass. Lydia stepped on them one by one, liking the sharp crunches they made underfoot.
    Charlie angled out the two-stroke spark-ignition engine for travel; it poked from the stern like a stinger. “How long can
     it take to hand somebody a check, anyway?”
    Lydia uncrossed her arms. She’d forgotten about that altogether. She stuck her hand in her pocket and felt the check there,
     still crumpled. She pulled it out.
    Charlie stared at it. “You didn’t give it to them?”
    “No.”
    He must have backed up the truck while she was inside. Alone he had maneuvered it ball-hitch to fender. They were ready to
     go. “Lyddie, my next class starts in five minutes. What were you
doing?”
    She reacted like a cornered animal. She rounded on him. “I was in the church, okay? Maybe I wanted to pray. Maybe there are
     other things going on today that are more important than this secondhand scrap of a boat.”
    His hands stilled at that. He regarded her with sad, desperate eyes. He didn’t open the door. “You think she could be telling
     the truth, don’t you?”
    Of all the questions she’d thought he might ask, she had least expected this one. She came around the huge fender toward him.
     “Charlie, you have to try and understand this. It doesn’t matter what she’s telling me. I think I can do my job without having
     to be on one side or the other.”
    “You may think that, Lydia, but you’re wrong. Everybody’s going to come down on one side of the fence or the other with this.”
    “Charlie,” she whispered. “I’m on your side. That’s what side of the fence I’m on.”
    “She’s making you doubt me.”
    “No… no no no no. I don’t have any doubts. Not about you.”
    “It hasn’t been twenty-four hours. You’re going to Nibarger when we get back, aren’t you?”
    It hurt worse than hurt itself, like a sudden plunge into ice water, having to tell him this way. “Yes.” Her voice came so
     softly, it might have been the breeze mingling with the leaves. “I am.”
    They stood with the truck between them, her hand gritty with dust from the hood where she steadied herself, his hand on the
     handle as if he was ready to climb in.
    “I want you to do it,” he said, resolute. “If you are right about how important this is, then go ahead. There’s no sense you
     having to be a shield for me.”
    “I’m not doing that, Charlie. I—” These words opened something new, something she hadn’t yet seen in herself.
    She wanted to protect him.
    All this and she’d
wanted
to be a buffer for him. All this and, while she ached at the choice, she had been thinking she would be the one to choose.
    “It’s Shelby,” Lydia said. “If I turn away from this, I don’t know what will happen to her. Don’t you see?”
    And, suddenly, suddenly, after he’d been almost naïve about the situation earlier, it frightened her that he jumped to this
     next prediction with such ease. “It’s always the kids who come out ahead. It’s never the adults who win.”
    “If you’re innocent, you can prove it.”
    Oh Charlie, Charlie
, and in the sun she could see the nick to the left of his chin where he’d shaved wrong and the spike of his cowlick and the
     two pieces of hair that fell to the aft no matter how many times he combed them the other way.
    “It’s too late for that already, isn’t it?” he said. “In cases like this, the damage is done the moment a word is spoken.
     After that, parents have a niggling doubt. They never want their sons or daughters in your classes again.”
    “People
know
you here,