Chapter 7: What Emmett Knew

"Let's do the nose," I said.

Emmett looked up from the thermos he was unscrewing.

"The what?"

"Everyone in town says you broke your father's nose in 2016. I've been told it three times. Pete has it as a fact."

"Who's Pete?"

"It's not important."

He poured black coffee into the thermos cap and held it out to me.

I took it, mostly because it was warm.

"Say it your way," I said. "I'm going to watch your hands."

"Why my hands?"

"Because everything else people say about you is a rumor."

He thought about that for a moment, then sat down on the edge of the workbench.

His hands went flat on his knees.

"Graduation night," he said. "Your class. Brock was eighteen and drunk, and he took one of our rental pontoons out with six classmates on it."

I knew this story, or I thought I did.

Everyone in my class knew a version of it, where a pontoon had hit a dock and nobody important got hurt.

"He hit the town pier," Emmett said. "A kid on our dock crew was standing on it. Nineteen. His collarbone broke in two places."

"And the town said it was an accident."

"Our father said it was my fault. I was the one who'd left the key in the boat."

His hands didn't move.

"I had left it. But I'd left it in the box where it always lived. Brock took it out of the box."

"So you told the sheriff."

"I told the truth." He shrugged one shoulder.

"My father told me to cover for my brother, or I could pack. I said no."

"He grabbed my shirt and swung at me, and I stepped back."

"And?"

"And he went into the boat winch face-first. Broke his own nose."

I put down the coffee.

"The town says you did that."

"The town heard it from Brock's mother, who heard it from my father."