Julie bet it was. “What does your husband do?”
“He’s an efficiency and productivity expert. He consults for companies all over the world.”
No children and her husband was gone a lot.
Angelina pointed to the stereo, from which Celine Dion’s voice continued to flow. “You’re working. I should go.”
Julie sat, folding her hands on the desk. “I’ll tell Rick about the foal.”
Although Angelina left the room, Julie couldn’t shake the feeling another woman was making herself at home in the stables.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Early Saturday morning, Rick lay awake by Julie.
They’d barely spoken the day before. She hadn’t called him, and he hadn’t called her until construction delays on I-65 meant he wouldn’t get home when anticipated. When he finally arrived, he found her asleep on the couch with the television volume on low. He nudged her along to bed. His head barely hit the pillow before sleep claimed his mind.
Now daylight was just peeking in past their bedroom curtains. Rick heard a knock at their door. He rose and crossed the room. The knock could only come from Ben.
He opened the door. “Hey, buddy.” The child greeted him with the cough of an eighty-year-old asthmatic.
Julie woke instantly. “That doesn’t sound good.”
In typical summer flu fashion, the little guy was too congested to breathe through his nose. Rick placed a hand on Ben’s forehead. “I think he’s got a low fever. You feel miserable, buddy?”
Ben nodded.
Wrapped in her robe, Julie bundled Ben back to his bed.
“I’ll feed the horses.” Rick went to the barn. Later he found Julie in the kitchen, drinking a smoothie, and cooking his breakfast.
“Pretty late when you got home last night.”
“Yeah. They’re redoing bridges from Montgomery down below Greenville. Complete stops with detours off then back on at the interchanges. Lots of upset truckers out there last night.”
“I suppose so. Guess I won’t be going with you to pick up Rachel at Amber’s this morning.” She paused. “I need a few things from the store. For Ben.”
Oh, he hated this. The look from her that said the explosion was simply delayed, not diffused. “Maybe it’s better to talk with her at home than in the truck.”
“You mean, so she can go in her room and pout?”
“No, I mean so I’m not driving and trying to—” Rick took a deep breath. “Never mind. Give me the list. I’ll get them after I get Rachel.”
Twenty minutes later, he picked up Rachel.
“Did you have fun at Amber’s?”
“I always have fun at Amber’s. We take over the family room, dancing and singing with a game on her Kinect. Her mom dances, too.” Rick glanced over, caught Rachel rolling her eyes, but smiling. “Amber’s mom is a riot. She teaches ballet, so she can stand on one leg and put her other foot behind her head. It’s a little freaky.”
“I imagine so.”
He shouldn’t be thinking what he was thinking. That a part of him wanted to keep driving and avoid what awaited him at home. He could always move into the barn for a while, and pretend that’s where he needed to be until Godiva dropped her foal.
“Ben’s running a fever. Gotta make a stop.”
The grocery store parking lot was a war zone, but at least the list was short: cans of chicken soup, a gallon of Gatorade, and two boxes of popsicles—but no “Family Repair Kit.”
He placed the bags in the back floorboard and climbed in behind the wheel. He exited the parking lot and reached across the front seat to wrap her hand in his.
“Daa-ddy.” She gave that half-blush, killer smile. “Are you missing Sean or something?”
“Or something,” Rick said. He purposely hadn’t brought up school or Mr. Larl. Rachel knew they’d been told about Britney’s bullying her, but she didn’t know they’d seen other parts of her journal.
“Me, too.”
They passed Angelina’s home on Plantation Road. “Back there’s where Mrs. Rousseau lives,” he said.
“It’s already cross-fenced. Why does she board with us?”
“Don’t know. I guess she’s only got the one horse.”
“She has really nice clothes.”
They passed cow pastures and fields. Rick pulled into the driveway and stopped beside Nathaniel Jordan, who appeared to be leaving in his doctor-beige Volvo. They each lowered their windows.
Rick motioned with his chin. “You been up to ride Trident?”
“Yeah. First time I haven’t had a Saturday morning call in almost a month. How’s Julie doing?”
“She’s okay. She’s good.” He shifted into park. “Got the cast off this week, but not the wires.”
“Broken jaw is a nasty injury. Can’t rush the recuperation there. Like after childbirth. Some patients push themselves too hard, do too much, return to work too soon. They always pay for it. Makes the recovery even longer.”
“I guess you’d know.”
Nathaniel laughed, scratching his receding hairline. “Seeing how I delivered half the kids in town, I guess so. Can’t believe Sean’s graduated and gone like that.”
“Knocks me back sometimes.”
“Saw the extra lock you put on Trident’s stall. Good call. Do I owe you?”
“Naw. You sure could stud him, though. That boy’s got one and only one thing on his mind.”
Nathaniel leaned back against the headrest. “I hadn’t considered that. Is there money in it?”
“Sometimes good money. Or, you could stud him with someone you know, have them train the offspring and sell them.” Rick caught himself, then cocked his head, thinking of the pretty mares he’d bought at the beginning of spring. “You interested? We could have our own horse factory going up there.”
“I just might be,” Nathaniel said. “Hey, I gotta run. First day off with the wife in a while. Working together all the time just ain’t the same as a date, you know?” He shifted his car back into gear. “FedEx truck delivered a while ago. Long, thin boxes. I had the guy stack ’em in the barn on the concrete rather than outside on the dirt.”
“Thanks. I appreciate it.”
“See ya.”
Rick nodded. “Later.” Nathaniel drove away. “Must be the stall mats. We’ve got our work cut out for us to change out all of those.”
Rachel moaned. “Daddy, do we have to?”
“Yes, we do.” And if that was the worst thing he had to look forward to for the next few days, he’d be a happy man.
He parked in the garage. Julie met him at the kitchen door, took the bags he carried as Rachel trailed behind.
“Ben started vomiting, so I won’t fix him any soup yet. I have him settled in front of the television. He’s half asleep. We should talk in our room.”
“Daddy?” His daughter asked with panic in her eyes.
“It’ll be okay, Rachel,” he squeezed out the words as they followed Julie down the hall.
“But I didn’t mean to get Britney in trouble. I wasn’t trying to get Britney in trouble. Everything I put in there was true; a few more weeks of class and I won’t have to see her anyway.”
Julie ushered them in—Rick couldn’t help thinking executioner-style—and closed the door behind them. “This is about much more than Britney.”
Rachel backed against the wall beside the door and folded her arms. “Mr. Larl made Britney apologize. She even got suspended for three days, and she’s not allowed to sit by me or talk to me. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
Julie seemed to soften. Her face relaxed, she walked to the bed, sat on the edge, and lowered her voice. “No, Rachel you didn’t do anything wrong as far as Britney was concerned, except not telling anyone she was bullying you. Why didn’t you tell us?”
Rachel looked at the floor, then again at Rick. “Daddy?”
“It’s a good question, Rachel.”
“I, Britney didn’t come to our school until right bef
ore Mom’s accident. I didn’t want to bother you.”
“Didn’t you know we’d help you?” Julie asked.
“I thought I could handle it myself.”
Julie turned to Rick. “Do you believe her?”
“Julie, please.”
“No, Rick,” she said through her clenched teeth. “I want to know if you believe that’s the reason she didn’t tell us what was going on.”
“We read the other parts of the journal, Rachel.”
His daughter’s mouth fell open and she looked at her mother then back to him. “Mr. Larl promised me!”
“I have the password to your computer, remember?”
Her eyes widened. “You couldn’t. You wouldn’t.” Tears bubbled in his daughter’s eyes. “Mrs. Tate promised me no one else would see it. She said everything I wrote in my journal was safe.” Her voice hitched. “And private.”
“We could. And we did.” Julie stood. “Now, Rachel—”
“Okay,” Rick said. “Your mother and I will talk about this further later.”
“We’ll talk about this now, because Mrs. Tate and Vice Principal Larl, and heaven only knows who else have read the horrible things you wrote about me. Rachel, why would you write those things?”
“Because it’s true! That’s how you make me feel.”
“I did not change into a monster after Ben was born.”
“I didn’t say you’re a monster, but you did change.”
“That’s ridiculous. I still loved you. I’ll always love you. Every family makes adjustments after the birth of a child—”
Rick stepped between them. “Julie, that’s enough.”
“See, you never listen to me. Before Ben came you tucked me into bed every night. You sang to me. You were teaching me to play the piano.”
“I would never hurt you on purpose. It wasn’t like I rejected you—”
“Hey!” Rick yelled. “I said that’s enough.”
He looked from his wife to his daughter, knowing reaching for either of them, holding either of them would only make the rift wider.
Rachel wiped her face with her hands. “Fine. She’s right, I’m wrong. I’m to blame. I’m always to blame.”
Rick slid his handkerchief out of his back pocket, handed it to Rachel. “You are not to blame. But I do need to talk to your mother alone.” He lifted her chin, looked directly into her eyes. “You’re not in trouble.”
“She’s not in trouble?” Julie asked. “Of course not. It’s two against one, and I’m the one.”
He silently opened the door, sent his daughter out and closed it quietly. Then he rested his forehead against the cool wood.
He turned and looked at his wife, his back against the door. Dear God, how did this happen to my family?
“If I changed after having Ben, it’s because I didn’t have a choice. I had to change to survive.”
Julie motioned between them. “We weren’t supposed to have any more children. But once he was born, what was I supposed to do? Give him away? Not care for him? Listen to the doctors who said he’d never have a normal life, put him in a special school somewhere and forget him? I did everything I was supposed to for him, because he was my baby. I love him. How could I not? I love all our children.”
Now his wife was crying, too. To think before Julie’s accident, Rick had thought all he and Julie needed was a little time alone, kind of a second honeymoon, to rekindle their love. Could he have been more wrong?
“I didn’t mean to stop doing things for Rachel. But I did mean to do more for Ben than some mothers would. And somehow she’s holding that against me?”
“Yes, you did do everything necessary for him and more.” Rick used the same gesture. “And it cost us. It cost you.”
“Don’t put my dream of singing in the same column with a cancelled vacation or postponing the purchase of a new vehicle.”
“I’m not. I said nothing of the kind. I know what singing meant to you then. I know what it means to you now. But we’ve got a problem here, and you starting a singing career won’t take care of it.”
“Rachel’s surreptitious behavior and her journals are the problem.”
“No, the problem is that I started defending you to myself.”
His wife’s eyebrows rose. “What?”
How could he even begin to explain that all three of them were right—probably—and all three of them were partially wrong, if he couldn’t figure out the intricacies himself?
He raised both hands as if holding back a flood, although he knew doing so wouldn’t hold off the disaster descending on his family.
“Think back, Julie. Think about the reason you wrote Sean the letter you did. The reason you wrote to your mother and the things you said to her in your letter. You want to know why Rachel didn’t stand up for herself against that bully Britney? Everything you say to her is exactly like the things your mother says to you. She practiced being a victim by living with you.”
And, God forgive him, Rachel might have learned to be a victim by watching his daily example.
Rick rubbed a hand over his face. Everything he’d done to keep peace, to be a buffer, had just come back and slugged him. Looking at his wife now, he knew he might have just broken her heart.
“I’ve got work to do.” He left the room, because facing the conflict and her pain was something he simply wasn’t strong enough to do.
He found Rachel sitting at the bar in the kitchen, eating dry cereal. She and Julie disliked milk.
“You’ll need more than that for what we’ve got ahead of us.”
Rachel’s eyes rounded. “Is Mom right behind you?”
Rick removed the iced tea from the fridge, poured himself a tall glass, and drank more than half of it. “I don’t know. How fast do you want to get out of here?”
She slid off the stool. “Pretty fast.”
“Then help me pack food to take with us to the barn. We’ll stick it in the fridge down there.”
Rachel quickly dumped her cereal in the garbage and filled plastic containers with what they’d need—roasted turkey, lettuce leaves, slices of tomato. Rick grabbed two grocery bags, and stuffed one with a package of whole wheat sandwich buns, an unopened jar of salad dressing from the pantry, plastic utensils, and a roll of paper towels. The other he filled with Rachel’s sandwich fixings, four garnet apples, and a family size bag of Cheetos, his and Rachel’s favorite. They were messy, but who cared?
As he and his daughter strode to the barn, an atypically cool summer drizzle laced the air. With the overcast skies and clouds just heavy enough to keep the mist coming, working all day in the barn would not only be peaceful, it could be downright pleasant. Even though he’d lost part of the morning, they’d probably get at least a dozen stalls cleaned and scraped, and new mats laid before sundown.
They stowed their food in the tack room. Rick sat the Cheetos on the counter, opened them and helped himself. With a timid grin, Rachel slid her hand into the bag. They each popped the top on a root beer and chugged.
The sprinkle outside kicked up to a spattering rain, heavy drops plopped on the barn’s tin roof, creating a soft roar of background noise. He turned on the radio, just as Blake Shelton’s “Don’t Make Me” begged the woman he loved to reconsider her way of thinking. If Rick remembered correctly, the song’s music video showed rain pouring both outside and inside the couple’s home.
“We’ll start at the far end, work our way down.” He licked orange powder from his thumb. On impulse he turned off his cell and sat it on the counter. If anyone needed him at the barn, well, he was already here.
Steady footsteps drew his attention to the doorway. Angelina Rousseau leaned against the frame. “Hi, Rachel. Daddy got you working out here on a rainy Saturday?”
“Sort of.”
“Hey, Rick. I don’t see Ben.”
Rick wiped orange fingers on his jeans. “Ben’s a little under the weather. Summer flu.”
“How’d your trip go?”
> Her subtle yet unique vanilla scent mixed with a fresh rain breeze, wafted past his daughter and right to him. “My trip?”
“The horse you sold. Tuscaloosa?”
Had that been only yesterday? Rick felt he’d aged a year in the past twenty-four hours. “Right. It was fine.”
“I should’ve warned you, the interstate’s a mess. Nicholas gripes about it every time he drives north of Montgomery. Which is pretty often.”
Rick lifted his root beer. “Can I get you something? You know you can help yourself when you’re here, right?”
“Oh, thanks. Good news about Godvia, huh? I came to give her another massage.”
Rachel’s ears perked. “You’re certified?”
Angelina laughed, a long, husky roll. “No. But I learned from a certified therapist who often visited where I used to board her. I watched, asked questions, and I learned.”
Rick caught Angelina’s eye. “Sure you don’t want anything?”
“No, thanks.”
“What’s the news on Godiva?”
“Dr. Bohannon said two weeks tops. He said I shouldn’t worry unless she goes past the end of the month. I saw Julie yesterday, didn’t she tell you?”
Rick shook his head. “No. She didn’t.”
Rachel donned her boots and gloves. “Are you going to do the massage now? Can I watch?”
“Sure.”
Rick folded his arms. “Rachel, I need your hands today.”
“Right.” His daughter sighed so dramatically, he almost laughed.
Angelina bit her bottom lip. “Well, if I helped you two, maybe your dad would give you a break later and you can watch me massage Godiva.”
Rick gestured at her clothing. Yet another silk blouse, perfectly tailored jeans, and boots priced about the same as a compact car. “You can’t work in those. They’ll be ruined.”
She stepped into the tack room. “The boots are durable. You can’t hurt alligator.” She plucked at her blouse. “I have two dozen of these.”
“Wait.” Rachel dug in the cabinet behind Julie’s desk, then held up a baby blue T-shirt that read Matthews Stables.
“Remember these, Daddy? From the parade we rode the horses in last year. Mrs. Rousseau can wear this.”
Sticks and Stones (The Barn Church Series) Page 17