“My husband and I hired an attorney. We’re suing you, and your insurance company, to recover medical costs, of course, but also to make sure Jordy is punished. If the criminal-justice system lets him off with nothing more severe than a slap on the wrist, then we’ll get justice for Travis and Michelle through the civil system—along with the settlement money.”
Go fuck yourself. The retort was there, branding Sandy’s tongue with its bitter heat. She didn’t know what kept her from shouting it out, and to hell with what anyone thought of her—the wild woman, yelling her head off in the grocery-store parking lot.
She got into her truck, heaving herself into the seat. She was sick of defending herself, and Jordy, to her family, to folks all over town—and now to Patsy, whom she didn’t even know. She thought how uncertain she was of Jordy’s story, his conviction that Huck was setting him up. It had once seemed plausible, when she’d believed in Jordy’s claim that Huck had a motive. What motive? She’d asked Jordy repeatedly. So had Roger. Nothing. It was bogus, that was all. A way to buy time, maybe. Not smart. Not even close to smart. Now Roger was talking about Jordy taking a plea.
Patsy stepped around the open door. “You did hear me?”
“Yes,” Sandy said. “My attorney—or I should say, Jordy’s attorney, told me to expect this.” Roger had said not only was it likely the Meades would sue but that Jenna might as well. He had said in cases like this when the loss was uncountable, when emotions were raw and the nightmare never ending, blood did not run thicker than water.
Sandy looked at Patsy. “I’m sorry it’s come to this.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be.”
“Patsy?”
A man called her name. Sandy saw him standing several feet away, a grocery sack dangling from his hand. Mr. Meade, she assumed. She wondered what they were doing here in Wyatt. Their daughter was hospitalized in San Antonio, two hours away.
Patsy backed up.
“I really hope Michelle will be all right,” Sandy said, because it was the truth, the truest thing she knew in the moment.
Patsy’s snort was derisive. “We’ll see you in court,” she said.
She and Jordy had done the yard work together on Sunday, and she was cooking hamburger for taco salad when he came into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, staring inside it.
“Shut the door. You’re letting all the cold air out.” The admonition was mechanical, automatic.
He swigged milk out of the carton before returning it to the refrigerator shelf, making a face when she said, “Jordy, honestly.”
In the old normal days, he would have said, “Yep, I was raised in a barn,” answering the question that was implied, a family joke. But they didn’t share many of those lately, or any, in fact, and what he said was, “I got a job yesterday.” He set forks and napkins on the countertop.
She turned the browned meat into a colander. “Really? Where?”
“On 1620.” He named their rural route. “But on the other side of town.”
“Don’t classes at UT start next week?” Sandy glanced at him.
“Yeah, but I already said I’m not going back. What’s the point? We both know I’m going to jail. It’s where I belong, anyway.”
Sandy set the colander in the sink hard enough that bits of meat flew out of it. “I hate that attitude. It’s as if you’ve given up. I don’t understand you, in any case. You say you weren’t the driver, that Travis was, and Huck’s out to get you, and yet you’re willing to take the blame. Why?”
“I’ve driven wasted plenty of other times, Mom. Maybe if I go to jail, I won’t do it again.”
“What do you mean?” It shook her, hearing him talk this way. “You don’t have a problem. You don’t drink more than the rest of the kids.”
He seemed not to hear her. “If I go to jail, maybe you and Dad’ll get back together, and Aunt Jenna will get that closure everyone is always talking about.” His disdain for the concept was evident in his voice. “It’ll be better for the whole family if I’m gone. Might even be better for me.”
“You were just a passenger, Jordy. You had no control over how Travis was driving. It wasn’t even your idea to go out that night. You said Trav initiated—”
“I wasn’t just a passenger, Mom.” Jordan brought his hands down hard on the counter, making the silverware jump and clatter. “I participated. I didn’t do or say one damn thing to stop him, and I could have. I could have stopped him. I could have coldcocked him. Something—” His voice broke.
“You don’t know that, honey.” Sandy extended her hand toward him. He backed out of her reach. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll assume you’re right, but that still doesn’t make what happened your fault.”
“I’m working for Mrs. Hennessey.”
“What? You went there? When I expressly asked you not to?” Sandy couldn’t have been more astonished if Jordy had punched her. “She just lost her husband. What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know, Mom, but since I never had a chance to know the guy before he died, maybe she can tell me about him.”
He was accusing her. Sandy knew that, but she sensed his bewilderment, too, and his uncertainty. He needs Travis, Sandy thought. Travis would help him. He would make Jordy laugh about all this somehow. He’d make it easier for Jordy to live with it, the bombshell discovery that his father of record wasn’t his father of birth. If all else failed, Trav would drag Jordy out to the driveway to shoot hoops till they both dropped, then they would grab a pizza.
How had it helped, what Jenna had done, blurting out Sandy’s secret? In the wake of so much other loss, what had she accomplished dropping that bomb? The questions cut through Sandy’s mind. She thought if Jenna were here, she might kill her.
“We should eat dinner,” she said. At least she could do that; she could feed him.
He shrugged. Whatever.
She turned to the sink. He took the napkins and forks to the table in the breakfast nook, muttering something about prison, that if he was old enough to get tossed into a cell for murder, he should damn sure be able to go to work wherever he wanted to.
“Manslaughter, not murder,” she said, uselessly.
“So what?” He raised his voice. “I’m screwed either way.”
She turned to him. “I know you’re scared, honey—”
“Look”—he interrupted her, throwing up his palms—“don’t take this the wrong way, okay? But you don’t know jack shit.” And wheeling, he grabbed the keys to her truck from the hook by the back door, pushed through the screen, and went out, letting it slam behind him.
“Jordy, come back here!” She followed him through the door, several steps down the drive. She had slipped off her sandals, and the pavement burned the soles of her bare feet, but she was heedless of that. “You aren’t supposed to drive,” she shouted.
“I need to clear my head,” he yelled over his shoulder.
There was nothing she could do but watch him get into her truck. He keyed the ignition and then he was gone.
Sandy didn’t know how long she stayed outside, looking at the empty space where her truck had been, where Jordy had been. Where now the only thing to see was the heat shimmering off the pavement. She felt it firing the bottoms of her bare feet, needling her calves, and when she turned and walked back to the house, she wanted her mother. Or Emmett.
But when she picked up her phone, she called Roger. It wasn’t that she couldn’t have a conversation with either her mother or her husband. Or her dad, for that matter. Or even Troy. They were still on speaking terms, unlike a lot of folks who flat-out refused to talk to her, who crossed the street in town to avoid her. But the only one of those she cared about was Jenna.
Go figure.
Sandy wanted to kill her sister, and she missed Jenna like crazy. If Jenna died the way Travis had, she wouldn’t know how to cope. But if she thought in that vein for too long, she would cry for Jordy’s grief, for worry over how he was coping. For herself.
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She thought how as sisters, she and Jenna had squabbled endlessly over silly things like whose turn it was to vacuum or take out the trash. But they’d seldom gone a day without speaking. And if one of them was facing something horrible, like Jenna’s breast cancer, the other one was there to enfold her, to carry her, however figuratively.
In the past weeks since Jordy’s arrest, Sandy had parked in front of Jenna’s house in town several times and stared at the windows. She didn’t know what she expected. That Jenna might come to the door and beckon her in? That she would have the courage to take herself up the front steps, knock on the door, and ask to come in? Nothing like that ever happened. She only felt worse. She felt Jenna’s absence, her censure, in her core. It cut her from the inside in places she couldn’t see or touch.
There was one thing about it, though—Jenna’s shunning of her—it was honest. Sandy had no doubt in her mind where she stood with Jenna, and on that level, it was preferable to the false sense of concern she was treated to by some people, including her parents. It pissed her mother off when Sandy wondered out loud whether her parents cared about her, or that Jordy might lose his freedom.
After all, that was nothing by comparison. Travis had lost his life. Death trumped every other circumstance life could foist on you. That was how her family saw it. How everyone did. How could they not?
And where was her mom most of the time nowadays? Where was her dad if not at Jenna’s, or on their way to or from Jenna’s? Her mother had said they were going home to Georgetown more often now, that they needed to sleep in their own bed. And she assumed her dad was minding the business while Emmett holed up with his mother.
Sandy suspected Emmett talked to her dad on a regular basis, confiding in him while he had almost nothing to say to her. But there again, no one felt they owed her anything. She was the liar, the keeper of the secret that had shattered their lives.
Roger came on the line.
“Jordy’s taken my truck,” she said.
“Uh-oh. That’s not good. What happened?”
“I can’t say anything anymore that doesn’t set him off. He’s so angry with me. This whole thing about his dad—”
“It’s a lot to take in.” Roger was cautious.
Or wary of her. Sandy couldn’t decide. She had burdened him with her confidences, her confessions, telling her son’s lawyer of her affair with Beck, how it had resulted in Jordy’s birth and that Emmett hadn’t known, not until Jenna opened her mouth. She’d talked and talked, as if her tongue were hinged in the middle and flapped at both ends. But she was as isolated as Jordy, and she understood more than he knew about how you reach in your mind for your people, the ones you have loved and trusted and relied on. But they’re gone. And they aren’t coming back. And now there was no one. Only the cold, hollow place they left behind in your heart. That Jordy, at twenty, was experiencing this, too, made her ache. She would take on his pain, if she could.
“He’s gone to see Libby Hennessey.”
“Beck’s wife?”
“The very same. He’s working for her. Beck’s widow, of all people.”
“Is that where he is now, do you think?”
“I don’t know. I feel like I should call the police before something terrible happens. He’s upset. Who knows what he’ll do?” A new worry came. “What if he buys beer and gets caught?” She thought of all the stories she’d heard about kids who were rootless, how they fell in with bad company, drifting into a life of crime, drug abuse, homelessness. She saw, vividly now, how it could happen, and it terrified her.
“Let’s back up.” Roger said this forcefully.
Sandy bit her lip.
“First, let’s not involve the cops just yet, okay? I really think Jordy’s just out to clear his head, like he told you. He’s under a lot of pressure, you know? What he’s facing—it’s a lot to handle for a kid, and he is still pretty much a kid. But I keep telling you, he’s doing it, he’s handling it pretty well, from what I see. He’s holding up.”
“You really think so?” Maybe Jordy was talking to Roger more than she thought. She didn’t ask. Roger would only say it was privileged.
“Why don’t I take you to dinner? I bet he’ll be home by the time we get back.”
Sandy started to say no, but then overriding her better judgment, she invited him over. “I’ve got makings for taco salad, if you’re hungry. If Jordy comes home, I want to be here,” she added, and when Roger said he’d bring the beer if it was all right, Sandy said she had some, opening the refrigerator to make sure. She’d bought it for Emmett. She wondered if she should let Roger drink Emmett’s beer.
Ending the call, she wondered if it was smart, having Roger over.
Looking down the length of herself, she thought of changing out of her jean shorts and T-shirt into linen capris and a peasant blouse. She realized she was nervous, and it only made it worse. It struck her that if Emmett were here and she’d invited Roger to the house, it would be entirely different, and somehow it seemed unfair. Why should asking a man to dinner suggest one thing when it was a woman alone and something else entirely if her husband was present?
When Roger arrived an hour later, she had tidied the kitchen, but she hadn’t changed, and she was still nervous.
And he had brought a six-pack of beer anyway. “Hostess gift,” he said, following her into the house.
“You didn’t have to bring anything.” She took it from him, handing him a bottle before stowing the rest in the refrigerator.
“You aren’t having one?” He twisted off the cap.
“I’m not much of a drinker,” she said. “I don’t like the taste unless it’s something sweet like a frozen grasshopper.”
He made a face.
“I know.” She smiled. Emmett made the same face, but he would get out the blender and whip one up for her if he thought she had a yen.
“Nothing from Jordy yet?” Roger leaned against the granite-topped island. He was good-looking for a fiftysomething man who was going gray at the temples and maybe a little soft in the middle. There was about him—that element of mischief she’d noticed before, something boyish and lighthearted in his demeanor. She wondered if he seemed less burdened because he had never married, never had the worry of children.
Answering Roger, she said she hadn’t heard anything. “I called his cell phone, and it rang in his bedroom.” She’d gone there and looked in, and then, defeated by the mess, she’d left, closing the door behind her. She used to nag him about the dirty clothes and the endless, mostly nacho cheese–flecked paper plates thrown everywhere. But at some point, she realized she had to pick her battles. A messy room, even a filthy, food-encrusted room, wasn’t as life threatening, say, as AIDS. Or driving drunk. At summer’s end, when he’d returned to college, she’d wade into the garbage pit, feeling as if she needed a hazmat suit. If history was any indicator, it would take her four days to restore the area.
Roger said, “He’s not going back to UT. Did he tell you?”
“Yep, and he knows I’m not happy about it. His dad will be furious.” But maybe Emmett would be relieved, Sandy thought. He could argue then that there was no need to hang on to Jordy’s college fund. She found Roger’s glance. “Won’t it look bad if he doesn’t go back?”
“It would certainly be better for him to be occupied. The trial’s months away. It’s a lot of time to fill. He needs something to do.”
Sandy thought of his new job, working for Libby Hennessey. Why had the woman hired him? Did she know the circumstances?
“He can’t drive,” Roger said. “I think that’s a huge roadblock, not to mention a blow to his pride. He’d have to hoof it around campus, and never mind the dent it would put in his social life. I told him he could get a bike, a good one, pretend he’s training for the Tour de France.” Roger laughed. Sandy didn’t.
She invited him to sit down on the small overstuffed sofa in the breakfast nook. She rarely had time to curl up there herself, although that wa
s how she’d envisioned using the space when she’d furnished it.
“I really like your house,” Roger said. He unfolded his arm along the sofa’s back, propped his ankle on his knee, looking around admiringly. “It’s comfortable, pretty, like a garden, but without being—” He paused.
She eyed him, brows raised. “Without being?”
“Froufrou. You know, a lot of that lace-doily stuff like my granny had.” A flush bladed his cheekbones, and the look in his eyes was abashed and yet delighted. He’d cut himself shaving beneath his left ear, and a bit of tissue clung to the spot. It was somehow endearing. Sandy looked away. But it took effort. She had wanted to keep holding on to his gaze.
She got tomatoes, a head of lettuce, and an onion out of the refrigerator.
Roger asked if he could help, and it startled her to find he was right beside her, near enough that she caught the scent of his aftershave, something lemony.
“I’m a pretty good prep chef.”
“I think I’ve got it,” she said. “But you could get the meat for me. It’s in a saucepan in the fridge.”
He found it and set it on the counter. He got a second knife from the rack and diced the onion while she chopped the head of lettuce. She looked at him, at his hands, the sure way he handled the knife. The muscles of his forearms knotted and unknotted smoothly below the rolled cuffs of his oxford shirt.
As if he felt the weight of her attention, he turned to her, their eyes locked, and she felt the jolt of his desire. The slightest twitch, and he would close the distance between them, lower his head, and fuse his mouth to hers. She would be lost. Sandy doubted they would make it farther than the little sofa, and a part of her desperately wanted that, wanted to abandon herself to him. It had been weeks since Emmett left, weeks of fighting to keep her panic at bay, keep her head level, keep working and earning, keep food on the table. Pay the bills, see to the household chores. She was tired, so tired of the fear, of carrying it alone.
She lowered her glance and kept still, almost afraid to move.
“I’ll get the salad bowl, if you tell me where it is.” His voice, so close she felt the warmth of his breath, was pitched low. It seemed intimate, like an invitation.
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