Sycamore Row - John Grisham

She summoned the other clerks to her desk where they read it too. A black lady from
Clanton said she’d never heard of Lettie Lang. No one seemed to know Seth Hubbard.
They chatted awhile, but it was now after 5:00 p.m. and everyone had places to go. The
file was put in its place, the lights were turned off, and the clerks quickly forgot things
related to work. They would resume their speculation the following day and get to the
bottom of the matter.
Had the petition and will been filed during the morning, the entire courthouse would
have been buzzing by noon; the entire town by late afternoon. Now, though, the gossip
would have to wait, but not for long.
Simeon Lang was drinking but he was not drunk, a distinction that was often blurred
but generally understood by his family. Drinking meant behavior that was somewhat
controlled and not threatening. It meant he was slowly sipping beer with glassy eyes
and a thick tongue. Being drunk meant harrowing times with people running from the
house and hiding in the trees. And, to his credit, he was often cold sober, the preferred
state, even for Simeon.
After three weeks on the road, hauling loads of scrap iron throughout the Deep South,
he had returned with a paycheck intact, tired and clear-eyed. He offered no explanation
of where he had been; he never did. He tried to appear content, even domesticated, but
after a few hours of bumping into other people, and of listening to Cypress, and of
deflecting the rejections of his wife, he ate a sandwich and moved outdoors with his
beer, to a spot under a tree beside the house where he could sit in peace and watch the
occasional car go by.
Returning was always a struggle. Out there, on the open road, he would dream for
hours of a new life somewhere, always a better life alone and unbothered. He’d been
tempted a thousand times to keep driving, to drop his freight at its destination and
never slow down. His father left them when he was a kid, left a pregnant wife and four
children and was never heard from. For days Simeon and his older brother sat on the
porch, hiding tears, waiting. As he grew, he hated his father, still did, but now he too
was feeling the urge to run away. His kids were much older; they would survive.
On the road he often asked himself why he felt the pull of home. He hated living in a
cramped rental house with his mother-in-law, two rotten grandkids he didn’t ask for,
and a wife who nagged him for more out of life. Lettie had threatened divorce a
hundred times in the past twenty years, and to him it was a miracle they were together.
You wanna split, then let’s have a split, he said as he took a sip. But he’d said that a
hundred times too.
It was almost dark when she stepped out of the house onto the rear patio and slowly
made her way across the grass to his tree. He sat in one of two mismatched lawn chairs,
his feet propped on an old milk crate, his beer cooler next to him. He offered her the
other chair but she declined.
“How long you home?” she asked softly as she stared at the road, like him.