Sycamore Row - John Grisham

Portia said. “It’s a lot easier than ‘guten Tag’ or ‘bonjour.’ ”
“I know some words in German,” Hanna said. “My mother taught me.”
“We’ll practice later,” Carla said.
Jake found an old corkscrew and managed to wrestle the bottle open. “We once had
real wineglasses,” Carla said as she pulled out three cheap water goblets. “Like
everything else, they went up in the fire.” Jake poured; they clinked glasses, said
“Cheers,” and sat at the kitchen table. Hanna left them and went to her room.
“Do you talk about the fire?” Portia asked.
“Not much,” Jake said. Carla shook her head slightly and looked away. “However, if
you’ve seen the paper, you know that one of the thugs is now back on the streets, or
somewhere around here.”
“I saw that,” Portia said. “Twenty-seven months.”
“Yep. Granted, he didn’t light the match, but he was in on the planning.”
“Does it worry you, now that he’s out?”
“Of course it does,” Carla said. “We sleep with guns around here.”
“Dennis Yawkey doesn’t bother me that much,” Jake said. “He’s just a stupid little
punk who was trying to impress some other guys. Plus, Ozzie is watching him like a
hawk. One bad move, and Yawkey goes back to Parchman. I’m more concerned with the
bad boys out there who’ve never been nailed. There were a lot of men, some local, some
not, who were involved. Only four have been prosecuted.”
“Five if you count Blunt,” Carla said.
“He hasn’t been prosecuted. Blunt was the Klucker who tried to blow up the house a
week before they burned it. He currently resides at the state mental hospital where he’s
doing a good job of acting crazy.”
Carla stood and went to the stove where she stirred the sauce and turned on the
burner to boil the water.
“I’m sorry,” Portia said softly. “Didn’t mean to bring up an unpleasant subject.”
“It’s okay,” Jake said. “Tell us about Italy. We’ve never been there.”
Over dinner, she talked about her travels throughout Italy, Germany, France, and the
rest of Europe. As a high school student, she had made the decision to see the world, and
to get as far away from Mississippi as possible. The Army gave her the chance, and she
took full advantage of it. After boot camp, her top three choices were Germany,
Australia, and Japan. While stationed at Ansbach, she spent her money on railway
passes and student hostels, often traveling alone as she saw every country from Sweden
to Greece. She was stationed on Guam for a year, but missed the history and culture,
and especially the food and wines, of Europe, and managed a transfer.
Jake had been to Mexico and Carla had been to London. For their fifth anniversary,
they saved and scraped together enough money for a low-budget trip to Paris, one they
still talked about. Beyond those trips, they had been homebound. If they were lucky,
they sprang for a week at the beach at Destin in the summer. Listening to Portia trot the
globe made them envious. Hanna was mesmerized. “You’ve seen the pyramids?” she
asked at one point.
Indeed she had; in fact, it seemed as though Portia had seen everything. The bottle