by Amber Foxx
Marty was pulling on a windbreaker, shoulders hunched against the chill, as he walked to the car, but stopped when Rhoda-Rae opened the door. She swung her legs out. High heels, dark stockings.
“I don’t mind you doing this,” Marty said in a tight, controlled voice, his normally slow and mellow speech clipped, “but you’d better know Mae’s up. She’s not feeling good, and I lied and said you had to work an extra night shift. You’d better not be coming in looking like that.”
Ignoring him, Rhoda-Rae got out of the car. She wore a fitted black dress, black rhinestone jewelry, and a black cardigan sweater with sequins on it. Her hair was piled up on her head, and her make-up suggested she had been trying even more than usual to look her best. “So you want me to go away for the night? I had the opportunity, I’ll have you know.”
“I don’t care where you spend the night, as long as our daughter doesn’t see you coming in at two a.m. like a—”
“Floo—zy?” Rhoda-Rae rolled her eyes. “Don’t you dare call me worse.”
“Lower your voice, damn it. I told you she’s up, she’s got a flu bug, and I need to get back in and take care of her.”
“I’m a nurse, Marty, in case you forgot. Let me—”
“In that outfit? I didn’t tell her you’d been at a bar.”
“How dare you? I’m her mother.”
She started for the steps, but Marty stood in her way. “And you’re working an all-night shift at the hospital. That’s why you’re not home tonight. I’m sick of lying about you, but it’s the best I can do for her.”
Rhoda-Rae squeezed her small black purse as if she meant to choke it. “If you’d had the slightest interest in me in the past ten years, maybe you wouldn’t have to lie. Have you thought about that?”
“I’m sorry about that.” Marty’s voice grew soft. “I really am.”
He walked up the steps and opened the door. As he went in, Rhoda-Rae got back in her car, slammed the door, and pulled out with a squeal of her tires.
Slipping halfway out of the vision, Mae remembered the night now. She’d been sick, feverish, and nauseous, and Daddy had brought her ginger ale and put a cold cloth on her head. She’d been nine or ten years old.
“I thought I heard Mama come home.”
“Wishful thinking, baby, that was the neighbors,” he’d said.
And she had said, “I wasn’t wishing.”
Going back deep into her altered state, she sought more, asked the question again. It hadn’t quite been answered. She hadn’t asked it right. The tunnel carried her back to the house in Boone and her parents, this time in their bedroom.
Marty was packing a suitcase and Rhoda-Rae pitching things into boxes, sealing them up with strapping tape and fury. He seemed dejected, while she seemed to be on fire, moving at opposite speeds, so her accomplishments doubled his. They worked in silence for a while, no sound but the roar of a window air conditioner.
“Hurry up.” Rhoda-Rae shoved a box with her foot, moving it toward the door, and folded the top down on another. “Mae gets home from Kayla’s house at five. I want you out of here by then, out of here. I don’t want a trace of your existence left, is that clear?”
“I’m packing. What do you want? Niall offered to help—”
“Niall. I will not have that man’s moral contamination in my house.”
“No worse than I am, I believe. Seems my moral filth hasn’t killed you yet.” His tone took a wry twist in response to her anger. “You know, I can explain it all to Mae on my own time, it’s not like making me gone before she gets back is gonna keep me—”
“Oh yes it is.” Rhoda-Rae yanked off her wedding ring and threw it into Marty’s suitcase. “If you dare get in touch with her, I’m telling her the worst possible things. I’m telling her that you ... that you did things ... that the boys on the track team...that—”
Marty’s jaw dropped, and he froze. “What in hell? Where did you ...? I never—”
“You did it with that man, didn’t you? You don’t deny that, do you?”
“Niall and I ... it’s the first—”
“So you tell me. But for all I know you’ve been perverted and—oh my God, coaching boys—”
“And girls. For God’s sake, if I’d been having an affair with a woman would you say I coached softball to get hold of little girls?”
“Perverts are different. You dare get in touch with Mae and I will tell her, and I will tell the families of the boys, and I will start a story that will ruin your life.”
“You’d start some witch hunt so Mae would think bad of me?”
Slamming Marty’s suitcase closed, Rhoda-Rae nodded, her face shut as tight as the luggage.
Marty looked like he’d been dropped through a sinkhole that had suddenly opened up under his feet, so startled and lost in disbelief. “You’d put those families through that when you know it’s not true—just to punish me?”
“Yes, I would. You’re a sinner, Marty Martin, and you deserve what you get. Nothing I could make up about you could hurt you worse than what you’ve really done to me. Now keep packing.”
The vision melted and reformed, showing the driveway and Marty’s big old white pick-up truck that he used to carry softball team equipment, now filled with everything he owned, slowly pulling out. Rhoda-Rae followed at the passenger door, pounding on it and sobbing, wailing like a child, “I hate you! I hate you!” until he sped up enough that she had to stop. Then she collapsed in the grass, beating the ground with her fists as the truck faded from view.
Chapter Nineteen
Hubert started to follow Mae back up the stairs to the attic. “I don’t like you being so secretive, Mae. What do you have to hide?”
“Nothing. I just need to be alone.” She felt shaken by what she had seen. In learning her father’s truth, she had learned far more than she wanted about her mother. “Please. If I sat in the living room or the kitchen you’d walk in and out and I couldn’t concentrate.”
“On what?”
“You want to know?” She opened the door. “I’m using the sight. I’m—”
“You’re what?”
“Hear me out. I came down to get my phone so I could call Daddy. And I wanted privacy to talk to him. Because I used my sight, my gift, to finally see what was wrong between him and Mama. I used it for something I felt like I had to know. To be sure I should call. And I’m gonna talk about that.”
“You’re telling me you used that power—What? Wait a second—you think you can pry out people’s secrets like that?”
She sat down on the steps eye to eye with Hubert. “It’s something Daddy’s been scared to tell me. So I searched it out once I guessed. I had to make sure.” She felt tears start to her eyes, in a sudden ragged fury at Rhoda-Rae for taking Marty away from her for all those years. “I saw how Mama threatened to tell all kinds of lies about him if he got in touch with me.”
“You say you saw that?”
“I’m not making this up, all right?” Mae fought to calm down. “I don’t just think I saw it. It’s something he even wants me to know. You read that remote viewing study, you know this is real.”
Hubert’s eyes grew hard and his jaw tightened. “Fine. It’s real. So what’d you see?”
“Daddy’s gay. That’s all that was ever wrong. I reckon back when they got married, with religion and all, he didn’t want to believe he was. Must have tried to change himself.” She described the fights with Rhoda-Rae, the threats she made, and Marty’s relationship with a man named Niall. “Cheating on her with a man was that ‘worst thing a man could do to a woman.’ It wasn’t anything criminal.”
“And you saw that. You heard every word, you even got your Daddy’s boyfriend’s name.”
“I did.”
“You call him. And if that’s all true, if you’re not dreaming—”
“I’m not.”
“Then you're every bit as bad as Joe says you are.”
“Hubert!”
“Kee
p your voice down.” He spoke in a harsh whisper. “If you have some kind of sight that lets you see people’s secrets, hear them fight, hear names, look right into their houses—Jesus, Mae. I can’t believe you’d do that.”
It was like Rhoda-Rae’s first objection, about spying and intruding, and it hurt to hear it from Hubert. She hadn't used the sight to be curious, but to heal her relationship with her father. “I did it for me and Daddy.”
“And what about your Mama? Did she want you to know what she said and what she did?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Then I sure as hell hope you were dreaming. You wouldn’t want the government tapping your phone, would you? How’s this any better? Even people like your mama have the right to be private. Your Daddy would have told you what you needed to know in his own good time.”
“If he’d dared. And I might not have believed it was only that—not with what Mama had been saying.”
“Call him.” Hubert’s voice was cold. “You let me know if it was true.”
He walked back down the stairs and out the front door. His willingness to finally believe in her gift felt worse than when he had doubted it. Not only because of his anger, but because a part of her knew he was halfway right.
There was no point in going up in the attic other than to turn off the light, get the card and pictures, and come back downstairs. The lights were off in the twins’ room, and the house felt peaceful right near their door, tense and empty everywhere else.
Walking into the living room, Mae looked at the card again, and sank into one of the arm chairs. Its familiar faded brocade with the threadbare spots and the old braided rug on the floor seemed like things she’d remember someday as part of this room. The place where she’d played with the girls, their little cars’ wheels getting stuck in the rug until she’d roll it up for them. What was she thinking? As if she were leaving. She wasn’t leaving.
She looked at the number at the corner of the card and called.
“Hello?” A man’s voice answered.
She knew that sound. The way he stretched it out almost added a y into it so it sounded like h-yello. Soft, friendly, like he wanted to talk to you even if you were a stranger.
“Daddy.” It was all she could get out.
“Mae? Is this really my baby girl?”
He always called her that, said he couldn’t help it, even when she got to an age when it embarrassed her. It sounded good now. “Yeah.” She felt herself thaw. “I got your card.”
A long silence. “I don’t know where to start, baby. I ... I know I said I’d explain what came between me and your mama. It’s hard. You mean so much to me. I don’t want to drive you off.”
“It’s okay. I can help you. I already know.”
His voice grew tight and anxious. “It’s not from your mama, is it?”
“No. She never would say. Only that it was something so awful she couldn’t stand to think about it.”
He sighed. “To her way of thinking, it is.”
“Not to my way of thinking. And I’m no friend to Mama now, to tell you the truth.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Is she doing all right?”
He actually cared? But she shouldn’t be surprised. Daddy didn’t have much of a grudge in him. Never did. “She’s fine. Remarried real quick and been treating him like a dog ever since. He’s a nice guy. Took me a while to like him, though, with her marrying him so fast.”
“Well, baby, she needs a man in her life. That’s how she is ... I let her down.” A pause. “How’d you know about me, if it wasn’t her?”
“I’m like Granma Jackson.” She paused, waiting for an objection. None came. Maybe none would. Daddy thought it was okay to be different. He hoped Mae was her own person, and didn’t think like her Mama. She took the plunge. “I have the sight.”
“My God.” He breathed out, long and slow, almost a whistle. “My God.”
“I know what Mama said to make you leave me alone.”
“It was harsh ... Reckon she thought she was protecting you. Punishing me. Maybe both. To her way of thinking—”
“Everything’s a sin unless she does it.”
Through the window, Mae could see Ronnie’s porch light on and Ronnie, talking on his cell phone, sitting in a rocker, holding a cat. Other cats perched along the railing, alert to moths they could hunt around the light.
“Let’s leave your mama be. Past is past.” Marty’s voice wrapped around Mae like a warm hug she couldn’t quite touch. “What matters is you and me, getting to know each other again. So much to catch up on. How’d you like my house?”
Mae saw Hubert, returning from wherever he’d walked, passing Ronnie’s house. Ronnie waved and put his phone away in his shirt pocket and they began to talk. He’d be out there a while, then. Ronnie was almost as bad a gossip as Joe.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s different. Red and purple? You couldn’t have a house like that around here, folks’d think you were crazy.”
Marty chuckled. “If you’re not crazy in T or C, something’s wrong with you. Niall’s a sculptor, he did all that art and painting. My ... my partner, Niall.”
“Same man you were with when Mama kicked you out.”
“You do have the sight. My goodness. We have to talk about your Granma sometime, baby. I admired that woman no end. But yes, me and Niall been together all this time. You have to come see us. Bring Hubert and the young’uns. I can’t wait to meet your family.”
To disappoint him about the state of her marriage in their first conversation felt unkind, unfair somehow. “I want to. But I just started my new job—it’s gonna be a while before I get vacation. But I will come, for sure, I promise. You got my number now, and I’ll give you my e-mail address, and we can stay in touch. I’m so happy to talk to you.”
“Same here, baby. We’ll have to talk about your Granma Jackson.”
“I’d like that.” She could see Hubert leaving his conversation with Ronnie at a brisk pace, hands jammed down in his pockets. It wasn’t a typical Hubert walk. Unless he was exercising, he strolled. Something was wrong, more wrong even than when he’d left. “Sorry, I gotta go now. I love you.”
“Love you too. I’ll e-mail you a ton more pictures.”
As she ended her call, she heard the front door open and close, and Hubert walked directly into the living room.
“Right about your daddy, weren’t you?” His eyes flashed.
“Yeah, I was. What’s the matter?”
“You tell Joe something you know about him, that no one else knows? He didn’t tell Ronnie what. Just something he says he doesn’t tell anyone, and you knew.”
About the charms. She had. In the tumult of dealing with the snake, she hadn’t even thought to guard her tongue around Joe. “I did. But no worse than what Joe says about me.”
“There’s a big difference. Joe may be making things up. But he’s not spying on you. You actually had the nerve to use this ... this psychic thing on Joe because he talks about you? Where’s this gonna stop? Anyone makes you mad you’re gonna go look at their secrets? What kind of woman are you?”
She had to explain about the contest with Maloo. “I saw that stuff about Joe by accident. I was—”
“Ronnie had something else to tell me, too.” Hubert sat in the chair opposite her, hands in his pockets again, then took them out and ground one fist into his other hand’s palm. He took a breath. “He said he saw you talking with Mack. Like y’all were hiding, out back of the church.”
“Talk about spying—”
“Ronnie’s using his eyes, Mae, he’s out plowing his fields, not using some weird power. And he knows Mack goes out there a lot. Saw you cut across the field like you were trying to hide something, and then you’re over there with Mack. For quite some time.”
“I was taking a walk. Getting rid of that snake.”
“Didn’t need Mack for that. And next thing I know you hate this town, and—I don’t know what to think. You st
ill got feelings for Mack?”
“Regrets. That’s all.”
“That you left him?”
“No—that he’s such a waste. I can’t believe you think I’d be having some—assignation—with my ex-husband in a graveyard.”
Hubert rose, folded his arms across his chest, and walked to the doorway of their workout room. He stared into it. “I don’t know what to think. I want to be wrong about you, I really do. But there’s this power you weren’t gonna use, and you’re using it—what’s next? I don’t know what to believe about you anymore. I can’t trust you. I don’t know you.” He turned to face her, his hands dropping to his sides. “You’re someone else.”
To keep herself from shouting and waking the children, Mae strode through the living room and the workout room, into her and Hubert’s bedroom. He followed her and closed the door.
“You believe gossip instead of me,” she said, glaring at him, but keeping her voice low.
“It’s not gossip. Turns out you’re ... I don’t know what.” He sank onto the bed. “I didn’t marry someone who had ... powers. I married,” he opened his hand, fingers outstretched, and looked into it as if the past were there in all its lost and painful goodness, “a smart, loving, normal, down-to-earth woman who I thought would be a good mother to my girls.” He closed his hand in a fist and dropped it to his side on the bed and closed his eyes. “You’re not her.”
“I am her. I am a good mother. You can’t say I’m not.”
She waited for a response, but got none. He had shut her off. His voice finally came out, small and squeezed. “I can’t sleep with you tonight. One of us is on the couch.”
“I’ll do it. I have to get up at five.” She opened a dresser drawer, and once she had gotten out her nightgown, she knew what she had to do. Hubert said nothing as she walked to the closet and pulled out her gym bag, stuffing socks and underwear, workout clothes and work clothes into it.
“Where are you gonna stay?” he asked finally, his voice gentle again, more like himself.