But when the small sign – Sunset Retirement Home - appeared on the right hand side of the road, she flicked the blinker, and turned into the parking lot, gravel crunching beneath her tires.
The front porch was empty now at four o’clock. She debated putting the car in reverse, backing out, and leaving as unnoticed as she had arrived. But something kept her hand from reaching for the gearshift. Sebbie whined and looked at the door as if to say, “Are we going in?”
“I don’t know,” Grier said. He whimpered again, and she turned off the ignition, rolling the key between both palms. Before she could decide against it, she reached for Sebbie and got out of the car. Her feet led her to the front porch as if they had a mind of their own, and then refused to go a step beyond the main entrance door.
A woman with very short, very bleached blonde hair appeared at the screen door, her smile wide and welcoming. “Hello there, can I help you?”
“I’m not sure,” Grier said.
“Are you here to see someone?” she asked patiently.
“Maxine McCallister.”
“Maxine?” The woman lit up. “Why, she’ll love having a visitor. Can I tell her who’s here?”
Grier swallowed hard. “Her daughter.”
The woman blinked once, as if surprised, and then said, “Well, sure, I’ll be right back.”
It was clear to Grier that the woman had no idea Maxine had a daughter. She felt like running, but her feet had turned to concrete blocks. She stood planted while two men ninety years old or better, and three humpback little women shuffled into the open room just inside the front door. One of the men looked up, smiled a gap toothed smile, and winked at her. Grier smiled back at him, and felt the hard knot in her chest loosen just a bit.
Two or three more minutes passed before the woman reappeared and said, “Your mama’s not feeling too great right now. Would you mind coming back to her room?”
It took every ounce of courage Grier possessed to force an answer from her mouth. “Yes, yes, sure.”
The woman waved a hand for her to follow, and then led the way down a long white hall, rooms laid out on either side in hospital fashion. Through the doorways, Grier could see that each was a mini-home to its occupants. Crocheted throws in rainbow colors lay at the foot of several beds, homey reminders maybe of things each individual had made over the years. Just the sight of them made Grier swallow back a thick lump in her throat.
The nurse in the Hawaiian-pattern shirt looked back as if to make sure Grier was still following, and said, “She’s just down here.” The woman turned into the last room to the left at the end of the hall, and Grier felt for a moment like she would be physically sick if she stepped over that threshold. But she tucked Sebbie up tighter under her arm, blinked, and stepped inside the doorway.
Her mother sat in a hospital style bed against three stacked pillows, an IV attached to her left arm. “Grier,” she said, her voice an instant reminder of the unfiltered cigarettes she had smoked when Grier was a little girl. Grier could almost smell them now, remembering the early morning car rides. Her mother would drop her off at school on her way to the factory, windows rolled down, even in December to let out the heavy smoke.
“Hello, Mama,” she said, hardly recognizing the two-word croak as her own voice.
Her mother stopped, and then said, “Oh. It’s so good to see you, Grier.”
“How are you?” Grier said, even though she heard the lameness of the question.
Her mother’s smile appeared forced when she said, “I’m good. How are you?”
“Okay,” she managed, beginning to feel that this was a very bad idea.
“Come in and sit down, please.”
Grier walked over and took the chair by the window. The room smelled of lemon-scented cleaner. And even though the building had clearly seen better years, there wasn’t a speck of dirt, dust, or grime anywhere to be seen.
“Who’s your friend?” her mother asked.
“This is Sebbie.”
Her mother reached out, and Sebbie licked her hand, wagging his tail. “Aren’t you a cute young man?”
Sebbie wagged harder, as if he liked the sound of her voice.
“I’m sorry for just showing up like that the other day,” she said then, looking up at Grier.
Grier shook her head and shrugged. “It caught me off guard, I guess.”
“I should’ve known better.”
“It’s okay,” Grier said.
“No, it really wasn’t. But, I’m glad you came today.”
Grier nodded, looked away, then glanced back and said, “What happened, Mama? Why are you here?”
Her mother glanced at the IV, shook her head, and said, “You know, the years just catch up with you eventually, honey.”
The endearment struck Grier like a slap, reminding her of her anger. She sat straighter in her chair. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’s not your fault. I earned ending up here, I guess.”
The admission surprised Grier to the point that she couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Memories of her mother’s drinking binges, the faces of men she had long ago forced herself to forget rose up like bannered reminders of the choices that surely had contributed to her mother’s current state of health. But those reminders came with no sense of satisfaction in knowing that there had eventually been a price to pay.
They sat for a few moments, simply looking at one another, words eluding Grier altogether.
“Is there anything you need?” she finally asked.
Her mother shook her head. “No, they’re…they’re really good to me here.”
A man appeared in the doorway just then. Tall, dark-skinned, slumped over at the shoulders. He looked at Grier and said, “Well, Maxine, it looks like you got a visitor.”
“I do,” her mother said. “Come on in, Hatcher, I’d like for you to meet my daughter Grier.”
Grier heard the note of pride in her mother’s voice. She realized this was the first time she ever remembered hearing that. Tears rolled up, and she blinked them back, standing and extending a hand to the man.
“Hatcher Morris,” he said.
“Grier McAllister.”
“Awful nice to meet you ma’am,” he said. “Heard a lot of good things about you.”
Grier glanced at her mother, surprised by this.
“She’s kept up with you over the years, you know,” he said.
Grier had no idea what to say. She couldn’t imagine how her mother kept up with her. It wasn’t like she was famous and in the newspaper every day or anything.
As if sensing her questions, her mother said, “Amazing what you can find out at the county library. I just wanted to know you were all right.”
“Well, she sure is every bit as pretty as you said, Maxine,” Hatcher said.
“Isn’t she though?”
As if she had suddenly stepped into some kind of dream from which she would surely at any moment wake up, Grier felt dizzy and disoriented, her breathing short and shallow. “I think I have to go now,” she said quickly, picking up Sebbie and turning for the door.
“Grier!” her mother called out.
But Grier simply said, “I can’t. I can’t.”
She brushed past Hatcher, and started running down the hall. And it wasn’t until she was in her car, driving fast down the county road that she felt as if she could begin to breathe again.
But her heart still raced as if propelled by jet fuel.
In reality, Grier supposed the fuel was fury. Old. Buried. And still able to revive itself despite the deep hole she had spent so many years digging for it.
Grier could hardly reconcile the woman in that retirement home as the same woman who had brought home new man after new man, ever in search of the right one, the one that would last, be the kind of daddy she’d wanted for Grier.
And they never were. Not for more than a couple of weeks. A month, at best. A breakup was always followed by a new hairdo, a new dress and a
string of late nights making the rounds at local watering holes until the new Mr. Right had been lassoed and brought home to introduce to Grier.
By the time she was thirteen years old, Grier did her best to avoid those introductions. Eventually not bothering to get to know them in any capacity, since their shelf life barely outlasted the milk in their refrigerator.
Grier had just turned eighteen when one of those new catches came into her room one night after he and her mama had closed down The Tank, a bar with the watermark of serving its customers until they could no longer say, “Another round, please,” in intelligible English.
Grier had woken up to find his liquored breath choking her lungs like the thick black smoke of burning tires. It was like having a whale on top of her, and for a moment, she could do nothing but panic, unable to breathe or even to get out a scream.
He’d yanked up her nightgown and unzipped his pants when a sound erupted from her throat that she didn’t recognize at first as coming from her. Rage. Pure rage. She’d shoved him off her with the same kind of superhuman surge of strength that might allow a mother to save her child from the imminent jaws of death.
He’d rolled backwards and hit the carpet of her bedroom floor with a thud that brought her mama running down the short hallway between their rooms, her voice floating out ahead of her. “Walt, where are you, honey? I just went to the bathroom and you disappeared—”
Grier had never forgotten the way her mother stood swaying in the muted light of the doorway, the look on her face falling somewhere between disappointment and disbelief.
Her mouth hung slack, the red lipstick she’d left the house in earlier that night now smeared above and below in sickening evidence of what they’d been doing before the Whale had decided to pay Grier a visit during their intermission.
Grier had pulled her knees up under her nightgown, turned her head and squeezed her eyes shut, praying as hard as she knew how that when she opened them, they would both be gone. And they were.
The next morning, she packed what she could fit inside her suitcase and walked out of town with it in one hand and a grocery bag full of books she loved in the other.
The mother she’d left behind bore little resemblance to the mother she’d just seen. And yet, they were one and the same, weren’t they?
The question felt too big to answer.
And so she just drove.
“Find your own girlfriend, butt-face!”
Second-grader Darryl Lee to Third-grader Bobby Jack during lunch period when Cassidy Frampton couldn’t decide who she liked best
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It was nearly eight o’clock when Bobby Jack left the spec house at the lake. He’d stayed late to make sure the last bit of roof got completed, before the rain they were calling for set in tomorrow.
He was fiddling with the radio as he passed by the log house structure of one of the county’s most frequented beer joints. Bobby Jack nearly missed the BMW parked smack dab in front. Seeing it in the corner of his eye, he automatically hit the brake, even as common sense waved its caution flag.
He rolled on, but then just as quickly, swerved into the Babbett’s Hair Salon parking lot, threw it in reverse, backed up, and wheeled into the Beer Boot.
He could hear the crowd from his lowered window, and already it was pretty rocking. What was Grier McAllister doing here? He sat for a moment under the immediate realization that it was none of his business what she was doing here.
Still, he threw a glance around the parking lot for Darryl Lee’s truck. Relief washed through him when he didn’t see it. He could hear the band kick into a new set. Drums crashing and banging before a Jason Aldean wanna-be slammed into a country rocker. As if his boots had a mind of their own, Bobby Jack found himself getting out of the truck and heading inside, not giving in to doubts about the wisdom of it.
The place was jam-packed, and he stood for a moment, taking in the crowd. He recognized a few faces, and then spotted Grier on a barstool bestowing a flirtatious smile at a grinning bartender. He was clearly under her spell, despite the fact that he looked barely legal enough to be serving liquor, much less entertaining the notion of being seduced by Grier McAllister.
Bobby Jack walked over and eased his way in between Grier and the soon to be too-drunk-to-sit-up-straight man next to her. “I’ll take a Bud Light,” Bobby Jack said to the bartender.
Grier swung an inebriated glance at him, her eyes going wide in recognition. “Bobby Jack Randall! What are you doing here?” He heard the slur in the words and wondered exactly where she might’ve ended up tonight if he hadn’t stopped. Maybe it was a place she wanted to end up. Something in the thought bothered him for reasons he didn’t really want to look at. He leaned one elbow on the bar, hung his gaze onto her, and said, “Just stopping in for a beer.”
She made a sound of disbelief. “Are you checking up on me?”
The words hit a little too close to the truth for him to voice a denial, so he simply rolled his eyes and took his beer from the obviously disappointed bartender.
“Don’t you have better things to do?” she asked, a little roll at the end of each of the words.
“The question is, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“You don’t think I like places like this?”
“It’s not the worst place I could picture you in,” he said on a note of reason.
“Would you like to dance?” she said, alcohol no doubt letting the question slip out.
He shook his head. “You are going to regret this in the morning.”
“It’s not morning yet. It’s still night, and I’m not done.” She waved her hand to the bartender and called out, “Can I have another, please?”
The bartender said, “Sure thing,” reached for a glass, poured a splash of gin, added some tonic and lime, and slid it across the bar top.
“You sure you oughta do that?” Bobby Jack said.
“Who are you, my daddy?”
“So not your daddy,” he said with immediate conviction.
She pulled back and gave him a long, assessing look. “You sure aren’t.”
This brought another smile to his lips, despite the realization that he was playing with fire. The question was, which one of them was going to get burned?
The band cranked up another beat thumper. Grier took his hand and said, “You never gave me an answer, but come on, anyway.”
What made him slide off that stool and follow her had nothing to do with common sense or anything remotely related.
She led him out to the dance floor, her hips already finding the song’s groove and simultaneously drawing his eyes to their center.
Grier slipped her arms around his neck, and he looked down at her, feeling suddenly more than a little drunk on the look in her eyes.
“Grier,” he said, her name half protest, half plea.
“Anybody ever call you uptight?”
“A time or two.”
“For now, let’s go prove them wrong.” She led the way then, and he was helpless but to follow. It had been a very long time since he’d felt this kind of pull to any woman. The song ended, and another started up.
The crowd immediately picked up the increased tempo, so that the floor felt like a living sea of rhythm-drunk bodies.
Bobby Jack realized then that he didn’t need alcohol to get drunk on Grier McCallister. He could lose all hold on reason by the simple sway of her hips and the way her hair felt against his fingertips.
In fact, just then, he wanted to get hammered on the woman in his arms. Stone cold oblivious to anything else but the way she was staring at his mouth.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Bobby Jack heard his brother’s voice and started to turn just as a fist slammed into his jaw. The impact sent stars whirling out in front of him.
He heard a scream, and then Grier screaming, “Darryl Lee! What are you doing?”
Darryl Lee gave Bobby Jack a two-palmed shove into a no longer
dancing couple, knocking him to the floor and scattering folks left and right while the band kept playing. “Get the hell up and fight back!” Darryl Lee snapped. “You two face son of a—”
Bobby Jack was up now and went at his brother, not giving himself a second to think about the consequences. He line-backed Darryl Lee straight across the dance floor to the main entrance where somebody held the door open, and they both staggered into the parking lot.
Darryl Lee started swinging like a kindergarten bully, and Bobby Jack put his right shoulder into his brother’s chest, flipping him once so that he landed on his back with a loud “umph!”.
Bobby Jack stood over him, breathing hard. “You had enough?”
“Hayyyle no!” he yelled, getting to his feet and aiming a tackle at Bobby Jack’s midsection.
“Have you two lost your minds?” Grier appeared in the parking lot, screaming for somebody to break them up. When there weren’t any takers, she ran at them, pole-vaulting herself in between them.
“Stop! Stop it right now!” The action served to separate them long enough so that they stood there breathing like two fighting bulls.
“And you call yourself a brother!” Darryl Lee threw out.
“Darryl Lee! He didn’t plan to meet me here! It was an accident.”
Darryl Lee croaked a laugh of disbelief. “Oh yeah, right. It was an accident that you two were cozied up out on that dance floor like he already had the key to the motel room in his pocket.”
Grier reached out and slapped Darryl Lee, a ringing smack that made his eyes go wide. He stood there staring at her, clearly shocked.
“What right do you think you have to even comment on who I might or might not be dancing with? Or anything else for that matter? You’re a married man! Does that mean nothing to you?”
He had the decency then to look a little ashamed, hanging his head the way Bobby Jack had seen him do at age thirteen when their mama had caught him about to steal her car and take it to town one night after everyone had gone to bed.
Jane Austen Girl - A Timbell Creek Contemporary Romance Page 13