Heat flooded her face, the back of her neck. “The cabinet to your right,” she said. “It’s white with green stripes.”
He stepped away from her.
Had she imagined his interest, then? Flattered herself? She felt deflated and relieved. And horrified. Some combination. What was she thinking? Suppose Jordy came home and found her—she swallowed, and finding her breath, told Roger about Patsy accosting her in the parking lot. “You said I should expect it.” She brought plates, silverware, and napkins to the table.
“It’s unfortunate.” He followed her with the salad. “I’m surprised Michelle’s parents have waited this long to file.”
“But you haven’t heard from their attorney?” She sat down.
“Not yet.”
“If Michelle doesn’t recover—”
“Don’t take that on, Sandy. Not now.” Roger sat across from her, his gaze intent, purposeful. He was trying to keep her whole, keep her functioning. She thought without him she might spin straight off the planet.
“I didn’t tell Jordy about it—the run-in with Patsy.”
“Good. Don’t, okay? It won’t help him. I wish to hell the woman had left you alone.”
“Better me than him.” Sandy drew her napkin across her lap and picked up her fork.
Roger took a bite of salad and sighed, eyes closed, savoring the flavors of spicy meat, freshly diced vegetables, grated cheese, her special cilantro-and-lime dressing. “Delicious,” he said, and tucked another bite into his mouth. He ate the way he did everything else, with eagerness and gusto. It was refreshing.
Sandy thought how she missed it, the pleasure of having someone here who enjoyed the meals she prepared. Jordy ate in his room these days, or in front of the television. In ordinary time, TV during meals was banned. But these weren’t ordinary times.
Roger finished his beer, and she brought him another.
He picked at the label on the bottle, watching her for a moment.
“What?”
“You’re not eating.”
As if to defy him, she picked up her fork and tucked a bite into her mouth, keeping his gaze, hoping for—what? Something to happen between them? These feelings she kept having—they were disgraceful, warped, even, and yet somehow they enticed and beguiled her. She didn’t know what to do about them.
“I’ve got some news,” he said, and when he looked away, her stomach tightened.
She set down her fork, waiting.
“You won’t believe it, but it turns out there’s a second witness. The cops have known from day one, but they only let me know a couple of days ago. They said his statement got separated from the accident report somehow. I’m not sure I buy that excuse—”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I wanted to hear what the guy had to say first.” Roger’s glance dropped from hers and came back.
The knot in Sandy’s stomach tightened. “What?”
“Well, first thing after I got the word, I texted the guy photos of Travis and Jordy, and he ID’d Travis as the driver. That was a couple of days ago.”
“But that’s good. That’s the best news—”
“He’s got a record. I just found out.”
“What kind of record?”
“He’s a trucker, Nat Blevins, out of Detroit. I asked a friend of mine up there to check him out. According to what he faxed over, it’s mostly domestic stuff. He and his wife evidently like to drink and knock each other around on a regular basis. There have been multiple calls to the Detroit cops, a whole avalanche of restraining orders.”
“Please don’t tell me he was drinking the night of the accident.”
“Says he was as sober as a judge, but that’s not really the issue. God, I hate having to tell you this.” Roger looked at the ceiling, brought his gaze back. “When I called to ask him about his trouble with the law up there this afternoon, he told me he wasn’t a good witness anyway. He’s not sure anymore who was behind the wheel.”
“He changed his story?”
“Looks that way.”
Sandy fiddled with her napkin.
“It’s possible he was pressured.”
“By who? Huck?”
Roger shrugged. “It would help a lot if I knew the motivation for his harassment of Jordy.”
“I don’t understand it, why Jordy won’t say. On the one hand, it’s as if he wants to end up in prison, but I know he’s scared, too. Really scared of going there.”
“Yeah. I’m getting the same impression. Look, try not to worry, okay? We’ve got weeks to go before the trial. Anything could happen.” Roger went on, saying all the right things in an attempt to comfort her, to reassure her.
The dishwasher was on the fritz, and he helped her do the dishes by hand, drying what she washed. When they were finished, he had a look at the machine. It was a simple fix, he said. He’d get the part tomorrow when he went to Georgetown, and if she would be home, he’d stop by after work and do the repair.
“I don’t want you to go to all that trouble,” she said, but it wasn’t only that. It was the intimacy they’d shared earlier, coupled with the further intimacy that allowing him to do a home repair—a job that was essentially a husband’s duty—suggested. Or else she was imagining all of it. She didn’t know, and it disconcerted her that her world, the one she’d been accustomed to, was so chaotic now, so altered by events beyond her making or choosing, that she couldn’t tell anymore what was real or where the boundaries were, or how to feel about any of it.
“It’s no trouble.” Roger pulled his keys from his pocket. “But I should go now. I’ve got court first thing in the morning.” He headed for the door, and she followed him. She didn’t want him to go, to leave her to wait for Jordy alone. She thought of his embrace, of how it might feel to be held by him, to lean against him, to lie down next to him, even to make love with him.
They stepped onto the front porch, and he turned to her. Her hands hung at her sides, and he circled her left little finger with his own fingers, and his look was heated, regretful. “If things were different,” he began, and she gave her head a brief shake.
“I know, don’t worry,” he said. “But don’t think for one moment you’re alone in this, okay? I’m right here. You can count on me. Just call. Okay?”
She nodded, and he left her there.
“Thanks for dinner,” he said, walking backward, finally turning from her. He got into his car, something black and sporty and built low to the ground. Jordy had told her what it was, a Porsche, she thought. He had said it could really go. She thought of the trucks she and Emmett drove. She had a truck kind of life, not a sporty kind of life.
She wondered what that might feel like—a sporty life.
Back in the house, she found her cell phone and called Emmett. It didn’t ring once before rolling to his voice mail. He was avoiding her. It wasn’t the first time she’d had the thought. “I need you,” she said, and stopped when her voice broke, when tears salted her eyelids. And when she found her composure again, she said, “The dishwasher’s broken, and a witness Roger found out about who would have testified for Jordy changed his story.” After that, she carried her phone into the kitchen and curled into a corner of the little sofa to wait—for Emmett to call, for Jordy to come home.
She hadn’t meant to fall asleep, and at first she wasn’t certain what woke her up, or where she was. She lifted her head inches from the sofa arm, smacking her mouth, mopping at the drool that crusted one corner. Her back and neck—everything—ached.
“Mom.”
“Jordy?” She got up, fumbled with the wall switch.
“No,” he said. “Don’t turn it on.”
Her attention caught on the urgency in his voice. “Why? What’s wrong?”
He walked past her, going from the kitchen through the great room and into the living room to the pair of windows that overlooked the front yard. “I think someone followed me home. They’re parked out there, at the end of the drive.”
“What time is it?” Sandy came up behind him.
He had his knee in the seat of an armchair, finger parting the drape behind it, peeping out. “Look,” he said. “Isn’t that a car? See it? To the right of the oak tree.”
She bent over his shoulder. It was a moment before her eye found it, several inches of car hood, a chunk of bumper, the only parts of the car that were visible in the wind-scattered moonlight. Midsize sedan, she thought. Light colored.
“Why would anybody follow you?” But even as Sandy asked, she was thinking of Patsy Meade, that if Michelle Meade’s mother would accost her in a parking lot, then she was probably capable of almost anything. “Should we call the police?”
Jordy straightened. “What if it is the police?”
“You keep coming back to this idea that Huck has got it in for you, that he’s framing you. Why would he do that? Something so terrible? Why would he risk his job that way, Jordy?”
“Because he’s an asshole?” Jordy headed for the kitchen.
Sandy followed. “If you can’t tell me, then you’ve got to tell Roger. He’s your attorney. Anything you say to him is privileged.”
“You think he wouldn’t use it at the trial, that it wouldn’t come out then?” He opened the refrigerator, got out a bottle of water. “If it was anything, I mean.”
Sandy saw the time: 2:06. The numbers glowed red on the microwave. “Where have you been all this time? I hope you weren’t drinking.” She thought she smelled it, beer. But maybe that was a memory left over from when Roger was here. And maybe she was deluding herself, the proverbial ostrich.
“I’m whipped; I’m going to bed.” Jordy drained the water bottle and tossed it in the recycle can. He was in the doorway to the hall when he stopped. “I’m sorry,” he said, keeping his back to her. “For taking your truck, for being pissed off and making you worry. I’m sorry that Aunt Jenna lost her only kid, and that my best friend is dead, and that Michelle still hasn’t woken up, and for the whole damn mess, but I can’t fix it, Mom.”
His voice was gruff. He turned to her, and she took a step toward him, but just as he had earlier, he warded her off, showing her the flat of his palm. “I think it would really be best for me to plead guilty, you know? Get it over with, take whatever’s coming. It won’t make up for Trav—”
“But if you weren’t driving—”
“There’s times I wish I was gone with him.”
“No, Jordy—” She started toward him again.
“Stay,” he said, and the syllable was blunt edged, hurt.
“You don’t have to go through this alone, honey.” Sandy repeated the comfort Roger had offered her. “I’m here. I’m in this with you, and I support you no matter what.”
“But you don’t believe me.”
“I never said—”
“No, Mom, we both know where everyone in this family stands. No one believes me. Not you or Aunt Jenna or Dad or the grands. No one. Roger only believes me because it’s his job. That’s what happens when you get a reputation for being a liar—when you are a liar.”
A silence came. She didn’t know how to break it. She thought he would go, but he seemed not to know how, or maybe he had more to say.
She touched her brow and said, “I don’t know how we got here,” and she realized she didn’t even know where here was.
“Does it really matter, Mom?”
11
Libby was anxious to talk to Ruth about what Jordy had confessed to her, the alarming predicament he was in, but Ruth didn’t have time for a serious talk until Monday. They agreed to meet at her office before the other real estate agents and the office staff arrived. Libby drove into town, early, stopping for danish on the way.
“What is going on?” Ruth asked, greeting Libby at the door.
“You won’t believe it,” Libby answered. As she explained it all to Ruth, heard it all again out loud, she thought how crazy it sounded. She thought of the jeopardy Jordy was in.
“I don’t know what to do now,” Libby said when she finished. “I don’t think I’ve slept for longer than two minutes since Jordy told me all of this.”
“What if he’s lying?” Ruth asked over her shoulder. They were in the tiny office kitchen, and she was making coffee.
“I know. People lie so much nowadays, it’s practically an art form.” Libby opened the paper sack containing the cheese danish she’d brought. It was their shared favorite, and now that they were older, an illicit treat.
“But?” Ruth brought napkins from the coffee service bar, setting one in front of Libby and keeping the other for herself. She poured coffee into mugs and brought those to the table, too.
“I think Jordan’s too scared to lie,” Libby said, glancing at Ruth.
“But isn’t that what people usually do when they’re scared? They lie because they’re guilty and afraid of the consequences, right? You ought to know. You’re the big crime-show nut. How many times have you seen a husband murder his wife and then cry about it?” Ruth asked. “Big, lying tears streaming down their big, lying face, dripping off their lying jaw? Not from grief, or even out of remorse, but because they got caught.”
“I keep wondering, why did Jordan tell me? Why did he come to see me? It’s not as if we’re related.”
“He wants to know about his birth father. Some adopted kids do.”
“I always forget you were adopted.” Ruth had found her birth mother while she and Libby were still students at SMU in Dallas. She’d been living in Wichita Falls twenty miles south of the Texas–Oklahoma border. Libby had gone with Ruth to see her. She’d told Ruth she was fifteen when she got pregnant, and when it was her time, her parents sent her to the Edna Gladney Home in Fort Worth. They had stood over her, too, after Ruth’s delivery, while she signed away her right to mother her child.
“It’s ironic, in a sad way,” Ruth said now, “how Jordy found out, and the timing couldn’t be worse.”
“If only he’d known a bit earlier, he and Beck might have met.”
“I’ve always wondered why he didn’t try and find Jordy sooner.”
“He promised his mother he wouldn’t.”
“I know, but it doesn’t seem as if some promise he made in the heat of the moment to a woman he cared nothing about would have stopped him. It wasn’t as if you were making a fuss about it. You forgave him.”
“That was later, long after he confessed. In the beginning, I made a lot worse than a fuss. You must remember. You took the brunt of it. I was a wreck.”
“But once you worked through all that—”
Libby folded her napkin and folded it again. “Well, not to be too crude about it, but do you have any idea how many times he was in some fertility specialist’s office masturbating over a stack of porno magazines because I couldn’t let go of the idea of having our child?” Before they’d gone that route, on her doctor’s advice, Libby had kept a record, taking her temperature religiously, calling Beck home when the chart indicated she was at her most fertile. Something broke inside her brain when the cause was shown to be her cervical mucus, that it was killing off Beck’s sperm, murdering every dream of the child she so desperately wanted to make with him, before it could even become a possibility. There were cures for her condition, but none of them worked. She moved on to artificial insemination, attempting round after round, and finally as a last resort they suffered through five failed attempts at in vitro fertilization. Her obsession had lasted seven years, during which she had nearly bankrupted them financially and emotionally.
She poked her napkin into the bakery sack. “He never once blamed me. He never said it was my fault he had an affair. He blamed himself. He always said it was his stupid mistake, and I blamed him, too. I made his life hell.”
“He broke your heart.”
“Yes, and he knew it. After that the last thing he was going to do was start a search for the child that was the result, the very symbol, of everything I could never give him.” Libby paused to consi
der. “Had I been a mother and given away my baby, I would have wanted to find her or him. I mean, when we’re in the heat of some horrible time in our lives, when we aren’t thinking clearly, we make mistakes and later regret having made them. Like Beck regretted his affair. Like your birth mom. She was so glad when you found her.”
“She cried,” Ruth said.
“Beck must have wanted to reach out to his son for years.” Libby was caught up with the idea of Beck’s longing. “But he didn’t do anything about it because of me, because of how he thought it might affect me. It was a relief when we could finally talk about it.”
“It might not have happened at all if I hadn’t moved here, if Aunt Tildy lived in some other town,” Ruth said.
“It’s strange how it came together, as if it was meant to. Even though it scared me when you said Sandy was here. But looking back now, who’s to say it wasn’t the universe’s way of getting everything into the open and resolved, once and for all?” Libby pressed her fingertips to her eyes.
“Libby, honey, what is it?”
“I’m fine. I just miss him, and yet, if he had to go, then I’m so happy we were at peace with all of that.” Libby sniffed, pinching her nose. “I think I’m even happy about Jordan seeking me out. He looks so much like Beck.”
“I think so every time I see him, which isn’t often.”
Libby picked up her mug. The coffee had gone cold; she set it down.
“I’ve heard he drinks—Jordy. I know they all drink at his age, but I’ve heard he’s a bit more deeply into it than that.”
“He told me he thinks he has a problem.”
“Really?”
“It made me think of Mia. Even Beck in the early days, and their parents. I’ve heard it can be genetic.”
“I’ve heard that, too. I’ve also heard Sandy is good at ignoring it.”
“I ran into that a lot from parents in my guidance-counselor days. If you pretend your kid is okay, then yea and amen, he is.”
“If only.”
Libby smiled.
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