Free Grist Mill Road by Christopher J. Yates Page A

Hannah’s lovemaking.
    One afternoon late in May, he snips all the collars from his work shirts, using a pair of kitchen shears he bought years ago to cut the backbones from chickens. The next day he tosses his ties in the trash chute, all of them except for the tie he wore on their wedding day.
    TribecaM has become an increasing presence on the pages of Red Moose Barn. She or he is always complimentary and Patrick wonders, with an embarrassed blush, whether he has a fan. A female fan, he hopes, his blush deepening.
    Perhaps the Times will include him in a list of top food blogs one day. He performs frequent web searches for Red Moose Barn to see if there are any new mentions. Soon this hopeful web searching becomes a biweekly habit. And then daily. But maybe his audience will simply reach a tipping point on its own. He looksout for any surge by keeping a close eye on his website analytics—the graph of daily hits, the audience pie chart with its red new visitors wedge. He becomes aware that he is staring at his phone and computer too often every day now, praying for new messages, statistical bumps, hoping that something transformative will simply arrive, that one day his life will forever be changed by a new arrangement of pixels on a screen.
    What else is there to do?
    June arrives. The sky is mostly blue. And Patrick’s number of failed interviews remains stranded on nine.

 
    PATCH
    I was unconscious until Wednesday ticked over to Thursday, so I don’t know exactly how everything played out, but I suppose that initially, as far as the police were concerned, all they had to go on was this—
    One 13yo girl, Hannah Jensen, brought to the hospital with a BB gun pellet lodged in her left eye, recovering from emergency surgery. One 12yo boy, Patrick McConnell, suffering from blood loss and head trauma. One witness after the event, Alice Welcher, 62, who stated that said boy, unknown to her, had cycled into her driveway with said girl, also unknown to her, on the back of his bike. Situation—the injured parties were seemingly the only two people who could explain what had happened and yet both said boy and said girl were, for the time being, unconscious.
    Meanwhile my father, Joe McConnell, Ulster County’s chief assistant district attorney, rising Democrat and would-be New York State assemblyman (the election was little more than two months away), did not hesitate for a moment before telling the police as much as he could. Yes, his son owned a BB gun, a Red Ryder. No, the gun could not be found at home. Following this my brother, Sean, having been swiftly hooked out of soccer camp, told the police that I was best buddies with Matthew Weaver andthat we often cycled up into the Swangums with the BB gun concealed in a fishing rod bag.
    So now, at least, I was not the only suspect.
    Next, I presume, someone was dispatched to find Matthew, only to discover that he wasn’t home. In fact, Matthew had ridden over to Mannaha State Park, concealed his bicycle in a large patch of ferns and begun living survivalist-style somewhere near Jakobskill Falls, hoping to stay alive on a diet of wild blueberries. Possibly, were it not for his close encounter with a large black bear four days later, an encounter that sent him running almost directly into the arms of a park ranger, he might still be there now, the Mowgli of Mannaha.
    Meanwhile, back to the hospital, approximately an hour after I awoke, an hour after my mom had soothed me and informed me of my fractured skull but explained that I was going to be fine, my father and two police detectives entered the room.
    If I told them I didn’t remember anything, touching my shamed and bandaged skull as I did so, it was not intended as any kind of deliberate tactic. And yet, as it turned out, my temporary amnesia was a masterstroke, because it quickly became clear that Hannah had regained consciousness a few hours before me and the police detectives had already