by Stacey Keith
Knowing this about Jake didn’t make it easier to get over him, of course. She never would. But it helped to know such men existed.
“You might’ve warned me,” Avery said, her gaze flitting over the pages of the magazine. “You know, before I had kids with Todd.”
Maggie stared at her, dumbfounded.
“Oh, and there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” Avery said. “Your sister. She’s a social worker, right? I was wondering. Do the kids have to be with me full time for me to get child support?”
“Are you serious?”
“You don’t have to be so judgy. I’m just asking.”
Maggie heard Sawyer and Abigail giggling in the next room. She thought about her sisters, her parents, the kind of family she wanted to build for herself. Then she looked at Avery, who was physically capable of having children but had no more maternal instinct than a bag full of rattlesnakes.
And the unfairness just crushed her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The sign said Mercy Hospice Care.
Jake parked his rental car in front of a flat, one-story building surrounded by leafless shrubs.
He cut the engine and then sat in the darkness. His body felt heavy, but his heart wouldn’t stop pounding. The power to walk away was his if he wanted it. At any time he could turn around, get back on that freeway, fly off in his jet—and pretend that he could be happy without Maggie.
He had to do this. He had to.
The car door sounded unnaturally loud when he shut it. So did his footsteps ricocheting across the parking lot.
He opened the front door to the hospice. There was an empty reception desk, a wilted plant and maybe half a dozen plastic chairs. The air smelled like cleaning products and something else he didn’t want to think about.
Instead of waiting for the night nurse, he went in search of Loretta’s room himself. He found it right away. Uncle Marty was inside talking about farm equipment.
Jake swallowed down a wave of nausea. He was terrified, like a child. What a disgrace.
His hand slid across the door as he pushed it all the way open. Three people looked up—Uncle Marty, Aunt Pearl and Dillon. He couldn’t get a read on them. His radar was just as broken as he was. Then he saw Loretta lying on the bed with her eyes closed.
Slowly, he moved closer. Everything around him was blurry except for the emaciated creature with the swollen belly who lay underneath a vivid blue blanket.
He never would have known her.
The Loretta he remembered had been coarse, vulgar, bigger than life. This Loretta was attached to a lot of blinking machines. Her hands were liver-spotted, almost translucent. She’d clearly had a stroke because one side of her face was twisted downward. Even her hair grew in untidy patches now, gray like the rest of her.
Loretta wasn’t even sixty years old and looked eighty.
There were a lot of questions he wanted to ask, but he couldn’t organize his thoughts. Uncle Marty and Aunt Pearl were talking to him. He saw their mouths moving and their kind, concerned faces. Then Dillon put one hand on his shoulder and Jake flinched from the shock of unexpected contact.
This was the woman who’d told him he was worthless and would never amount to anything. The one who beat him and smashed a liquor bottle over his head.
She would never be able to hurt him again.
A clear plastic bag hung on a hook near her bed. He saw the drip, drip, drip, of the liquid into her IV. There was a thickness in his throat he didn’t recognize. Hesitantly, he touched her leg where the blanket covered it.
“Can I get you something?” Dillon asked him. “Coffee? Water?”
When Jake looked up, he realized that Uncle Marty and Aunt Pearl had left the room and were talking in the hallway. He shook his head. “I’m not thirsty.”
“Do you mind watching Mom for a few minutes?” Dillon asked. “We sure could use the break.”
“Yeah, sure.” Jake dragged a chair closer to the bed and rubbed his damp palms on his jeans. It made him nervous being alone with Loretta. He didn’t know how lucid she was, but he needed to say a few things, starting with how she’d been a shitty, horrible mother. But as he sat there looking at her, the anger just drained away.
Look at the pain he’d caused Maggie and hell, he’d been stone-cold sober. Loretta may have been a drunk, but underneath it all, she’d probably loved him. It didn’t excuse anything, but maybe now he could start to let the pain go.
Except for the click and hiss of the machines, the room was silent. In a way, they were both on life support. The only difference was Loretta had a fast pass out of here while he was left to pick up the pieces.
“Goddamn, you made a mess of things,” he said.
All his life, anger was a strong cup of coffee he drank whenever he needed it. If he felt like giving up, he thought of her. Now she had managed to cheat him even of that. Without the anger, what was left? Nothing. He didn’t even know who he was anymore. It was like starting all over again.
With a feeling of hopelessness, he bent forward and laid his head on his crossed arms. His chest ached. Loretta had directed the course of his life without even meaning to. Just because he’d done everything the opposite of her hadn’t changed that.
Jake felt something move and looked up. Loretta was reaching for him.
He stared at her, speechless.
Her eyes were open and she looked at him. Spittle collected in the corners of her mouth. “Jake,” she rasped.
There was a keening sound that shocked him until he realized that he was the one making it.
Jake bowed his head and sobbed.
* * * *
Loretta Ann Sutton died the next morning at five-fifteen. On the Fourth of July. Jake had been dozing in his chair in her room, but when he woke up, he knew she was gone.
Aunt Pearl insisted on making the funeral arrangements, so Jake and Dillon wandered the farm. After all these years, it still smelled of pine needles, diesel fuel and the musk of animals. Being at the farm with cows grazing in the fields and chickens pecking in the dirt gave him a feeling of peace. It dredged up old memories, but they weren’t the kind of memories that turned his stomach.
The only thing missing was Maggie. He didn’t know how to fix that.
“Seeing anyone?” Dillon asked as they ducked under a split rail fence. Aunt Pearl’s kitchen garden, which lay just past it, was bursting with white-flowered potato vines, thick onion spears, the fleecy tops of carrots. When they were kids, he and Dillon used to play with their green plastic army men here, which Aunt Pearl was forever digging up.
Jake stood gazing out over the tended rows. “No, I’m not seeing anyone. You?”
“Her name is Aracelia,” Dillon said. “Her family’s from Mexico. They really want us to get married.”
“Do you want to get married?”
Dillon grinned. “Thinkin’ about it.”
Jake remembered waking up in Paris next to a warm, sleepy Maggie. The feeling of contentment he had, and the certainty that he finally had everything he’d been looking for. “I was seeing someone. Her name is Maggie. She wanted kids and I was a real fucking asshole about it.”
He heard the whump of a hay bale being tossed down from the barn. A hot July breeze sifted through the pines. Usually these things reminded him of Palestine. Now they reminded him of her.
“Do you love this woman?” Dillon asked him.
Jake glanced at his brother, all Mr. Folk Singer Café in his loose white shirt. Dillon really was a man now—a man who was thinking about settling down and maybe starting a family. How crazy was that?
“Yes, I love her,” Jake said. Why not? It was the truth. “But I don’t want kids.”
“Do they scare you?” Dillon asked.
“Do you want to reenact scenes from our childhood?” Jake reache
d down to pick up a rusty horseshoe that was warm from the sun. He turned it over a few times in his hand. “Look, I just don’t want to screw up another human being.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
Jake looked at him, puzzled. Zen Dillon wasn’t in the habit of making those kinds of sweeping pronouncements.
“You raised me,” Dillon said. “You were only a kid yourself, but you raised me. Dude, you were my brother, my mother and my father. And I don’t think anyone could say that I’m that screwed up. No more than average.”
“You turned out terrible. You’re wearing Birkenstocks.”
But Jake flashed back to the times when he drank entire glasses of Dillon’s milk for him, which they both hated, so Dillon wouldn’t have to. When Dillon got bullied, Jake waited after school to nail the kid who did it. When there weren’t any Christmas presents and no tree to put them under, Jake dragged home a big pine branch, stuck it in a bucket and decorated it with whatever they had around the house—cotton balls for snow, tinfoil for ornaments. A roll of Cherry Lifesavers, found at school, which Jake wrapped in newspaper, became Dillon’s only present.
All of that had been for Dillon. Jake would have done anything for his little brother. Taken a beating, a bullet. Did it matter?
Was that what it was like to have a kid? That same feeling of do anything, take any risk, make any sacrifice?
“You were an amazing big brother,” Dillon told him. “The best brother I could ask for. I don’t want there to be bad blood between us, Jake. You’re the only real family I’ve got left now.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Last night after “visiting” with her kids for less than an hour, Avery left with her new boyfriend, Cash, who had a white space on his finger where a wedding ring used to be. To Maggie, he looked like a cheesier Todd—less tall, less handsome and with less hair. Avery didn’t ask to take the kids with her and Maggie didn’t offer.
That was before she’d texted and called Todd about a dozen times but he never answered.
Sitting alone in her living room, she waited for Todd to arrive. He’d have to show up at some point. The kids were asleep in her bedroom. All night she’d tossed and turned on the couch.
Twice, her thumb had hovered over Jake’s number on her smartphone, but she couldn’t go through with it. Chasing Jake wasn’t the answer. It wouldn’t bring him back or change his mind. She just had to accept the fact that he was gone.
A door slammed outside. Maggie rushed to the window and saw Todd nonchalantly climbing the stairs. He needed to hear what a deadbeat he was. He needed to hear a lot of things.
She swung open the door before he could knock. It was her marriage all over again, only without the self-doubt. This time she knew exactly what was going on.
“Have a good time last night?” she asked drily. “Did you spring for a cheap motel or just go for it in the back of your truck?”
Todd gaped at her. “You ain’t got no leave to judge, Maggie. A man gets lonely all by himself.”
“You’re not lonely, Todd. You just can’t help yourself.”
“C’mon now. You’re not really mad at me. Tell me you didn’t have a great time with those kids. Hell, I did you a favor.”
“A favor?”
“You can’t have any kids,” he said, and she realized that he actually pitied her. Not because he was so crazy about children, but because in Todd’s pathetic worldview, kids and cooking were pretty much the only things a woman was good for.
“I don’t want any favors from you, Todd,” Maggie said. “But I do want you to know that Avery was here with her new boyfriend. And I have a funny feeling she’s going to ask for custody soon. You’re going to have a real fight on your hands.”
Todd blanched. She could tell what he was thinking: like hell Avery’s getting her hands on my kids.
“So here’s how this is going to go,” she said. “You’re both going to need a character witness.” Maggie knew that because of the things April had told her, and now she was glad she’d paid attention. “If you don’t act right by those kids, Todd, so help me, I’m going to march into that courtroom and tell them everything I know about you—including the part where you dumped your children here and then took off all night.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” Todd said, but he looked worried.
“Try me,” she said. “If you screw up in any way—if I so much as hear that you kid dumped or even yelled at them too loud—I’ll make you wish you had never been born.”
“Jesus,” Todd said. His Adam’s apple slid up and down his throat as he gave a hard swallow.
Maggie put her hands on her hips and glared up at him to show she meant business.
Wounded or not, Jake was worth a hundred Todds. At least Jake had made an effort to change. Todd was incapable of it. The only way Todd would change was if you held a gun to his head.
“I’ll be watching you, Todd,” she said. “Everywhere you go, I’ll be watching.”
* * * *
By noon, most of Cuervo heard the news: Jake Sutton had broken it off with Maggie and left town. Maggie didn’t actually have to tell anybody because whoever had heard them yelling at each other on the stairs did it for her. Everyone came through the bakery—her sister, April. Mrs. Honeycutt from across the street. Luann Parker, Pastor Jim’s wife.
Luann actually brought a loaf of her famous banana nut bread, wrapped in tinfoil. “Eye of the needle,” she told her darkly. “You remember what the Bible says about rich men and camels.”
“Thank you,” Maggie said. “The bread will come in handy. I don’t much feel like cooking dinner for myself right now.”
That one offhand remark was all it took. Between Coralee and Luann, it seemed as though everyone in Cuervo had heard she didn’t want to cook dinner and they came bearing food. They brought so many potato chip casseroles, home-cooked lasagnas, plates of fried chicken and racks of barbecue ribs, Maggie had to put most of them in the freezer. She regretted not owning the truth, which was that she couldn’t eat at all right now. Her stomach, like her heart, was an aching void that nothing could fill.
Later that afternoon, she put a leash on Gus and took him for a walk. Anything not to go back to her apartment. She felt so disconnected from everything and everyone around her. Despite the kindness of her friends and neighbors, people went on with their lives. She was nothing more than a relationship casualty in a world that was full of them.
Then Maggie found herself in front of the Regal.
So far, she’d done a good job of avoiding the place. It was her last link to Jake. They’d spent hours here, happy and in love. She walked inside. The geometric Art Deco floor tile, salvaged from another movie theater, was something she’d helped him find. The wall sconces, too, which a workman on a ladder was attaching to the wall.
A feeling of indefinable sadness came over her. She blinked to stop the tears.
Maybe she wasn’t ready for this. It was too soon. Even Gus gazed up at her with a look of concern on his smushed, wrinkled face. She turned to leave.
“Oh, hey,” Pete said, coming through the front entrance. “Didn’t know we had visitors.” He smiled down at Gus, who wagged his tail.
Pete came into the bakery every day for coffee and doughnuts. She liked Pete a lot, but she wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. And if Pete hadn’t heard about the breakup, she didn’t want to be the one to tell him.
“I’m surprised to see you here,” he said.
“Thought I’d come see how things were progressing.”
“No, it’s just that I figured you’d be at the funeral with Jake. It’s tomorrow, right? I tried booking a flight, but Jake wouldn’t hear of it. He told me to just stay here and keep working.”
Her heart rate picked up speed. “What funeral?”
“His mom,” Pete said. “My mom passed a few years ago
. You never get used to it really.”
Maggie bit her lip. Jake’s mother was dead? Did that mean Jake was hurting and alone? A chill swept over her. She knew how awful that woman had been to Jake and his brother, but family was family. Or was it? Maybe she was wrong. Maybe when you had a mother like Jake’s, it didn’t matter anymore.
Maggie remembered Sawyer’s expression when he saw Avery—and look what a pitiful mother Avery had been. What if even a crappy mother was loved and longed for? Jake was a strong adult, a man, but he’d been Sawyer’s age once. Even if Jake was rightly angry with his mother, surely it was painful to lose the only parent you’d ever known.
He could be drowning right now with no one to turn to. No one to hold him and say it was all going to be okay.
Blindly, she stared at Pete. Then she reached down, scooped up Gus and ran home.
* * * *
Funerals were pointless, Jake thought testily.
Second Calvary Pentecostal looked just the way it had when he was growing up. Same polished wooden pews. Same shelves holding the same tattered song books. Same unadorned, no-nonsense lectern with a massive leather-bound Bible on it.
Loretta had never set foot in the place. But Aunt Pearl wanted to hold the funeral here and Jake didn’t mind. Nobody was coming anyway. So far it was just him, Dillon, their aunt and uncle, and a handful of folks from the trailer park. It made him sad to think Loretta mattered so little. She’d spent most of her life pushing people away. Just like he did.
Jake tried to listen to Aunt Pearl’s favorite pastor talk about Jesus, heaven, and all the rest, but none of it was really connecting. The blue-haired organist shuffled toward her instrument, which meant they were going to sing again. Neither he nor Dillon could carry a tune in a bucket.
Before Dillon could start croaking, Jake leaned over and said, “Be right back.”
He made his way past the people sitting in the last pews and then stepped outside, relieved to be away from all that earnestness. He lit a cigarette and sat on the warm steps.