Playing Dead by Julia Heaberlin

stomped off, abandoning Bobby to gut it out on the mound with no ride home. Bobby struck out the next three batters. Later, his dad took the credit for firing him up.
    But on the day Bobby talked about Tuck and those cards, the adults had exiled us to the orchards, ordering us to pick up at least seventy-five peaches apiece. If we threw even a single peach at each other, Granny warned we’d be forced into summer slavery making jam—hot, steamy work, and I never failed to burn myself on the sterilizing pan.
    Bobby, however, provided all the entertainment Sadie and I needed by immediately falling face-first into a trail of fresh cow patties. He was about ten at the time, too cool to cry and desperate to save face.
    “Hey, I heard a story about your brother the other day,” he said, as the three of us walked toward a cement pond where he could wash up.
    “Don’t talk about our brother.” Sadie gave him a small punch in the arm. “It’s disrespectful to the dead. It’s not your business. God, you
stink
.”
    “Don’t say ‘God’ like that,” I said automatically.
    “I swear, I think you’ll want to hear this. It’s spooky. My mom told me. Come on. It’s firsthand.”
    Sadie and I shrugged. Everything Bobby recounted was “firsthand.”But we yearned for any details about Tuck, whose face was dissolving like a photograph under water. He’d died when I was six and Sadie was two.
    Mama was at fault for that. She never spoke of our brother. She had erased all signs of his existence, removing every picture from the house with Tuck in it.
    We sat Bobby out to dry on a patch of dry ground a smell-proof distance from us.
    “Go ahead,” I commanded.
    “My mom says your Granny is a good Baptist, but she does a lot of battle with the spirits. They come to see her at night in her dreams. Even a psychic at the Texas State Fair told your Granny she was one of them, but even more powerful. Did you know your Granny could tell the future with cards? Mama said she can tell when a tornado is whippin’ up.”
    Bobby watched for shock on our faces, but Sadie and I already knew this part of the story. We were familiar with Granny’s “feelings,” because they sometimes prevented us from leaving the house. We both knew she could do a lot more than predict the weather.
    Because of that, we often begged her to read our fortunes, but Granny had to be in just the right mood. If she wasn’t, she’d usually shoo us away and say gently, “Life is meant to be a surprise.”
    Bobby caught a fly in his hand, generously set it free, and continued. “Well, the night that your brother, um, died, it was his eighteenth birthday. And your Granny was going to give him a special birthday reading. So your Granny laid the cards, and all these dark cards began to turn up.”
    Bobby was clearly enjoying himself, and he could tell he had us. His voice lowered an octave, and he crept closer. I still remember the stench of cow dung and rancid creek water that clung to both him and his words.
    “So your Granny snaps up those cards in a rubber band and refuses to read them. Tuck just laughs, kisses everybody goodbye, and heads out to ride around and do some celebratin’. Around midnight, he dropped off a friend and headed home. He took a shortcut on some back roads. They say he was goin’ fast. That big eighteen-wheeler was sittin’ with the lights off smack in the middle of a farm road, the driver drunk off his butt and asleep. Tuck was under it before he even knew it.”
    I could feel the warm rush of blood to my face and a pain in my gut as if Bobby had punched me with his pitching arm, hard. Sadie’s mouth was open in a perfect circle.
    We’d never been provided details of the crash. In the years since, I’ve thought dozens of times about looking up the story in the Fort Worth newspaper archive to see whether the facts matched Bobby’s story. I never did.
    “Shut up, Bobby,” I said furiously. “Just shut the hell up.”
    “I think