by Dani Collins
“So I find short brunettes attractive. Sue me.”
“No, it sounds to me like you were hard-wired by— What’s her name?”
“I am not hard-wired for anyone. I make my own choices based on what I want and what I can live with doing. If I happen to have a pattern for dating a certain kind of woman, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“Whoa. Listen to you. Not sensitive at all, are you? Why haven’t you gone back for her before? Was she married or something? Hey, was she the one in the paper that time— You know, in that local rag you have sent from up there? Something to do with your dad’s partner?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is a stupid conversation.” He should hang up on her.
“You remember,” she insisted. “I thought it was something in the obits that made you drink all my gin and decide to tear down my rotten deck in the middle of a blizzard. You said no, so I asked if it was the wedding announcement—”
“You’re full of shit and we’re done.” He ended the call and missed the nightstand, dropping his phone to the floor, but he didn’t feel better.
Lovesick. Carrying a torch. Just like his father.
They were all dead wrong. He and Paige had chemistry, sure, and might have had a future if she’d been honest with him, but she hadn’t been, so it was over. That’s it.
Sitting up—slowly—he decided it was a good day to tear out the rotted wood from the closet in the small bedroom.
~ * ~
The house was empty. Bloody empty.
Paige walked into the scent of stale cigarettes, and that hint of oil that came from the garage, and the peculiar musty smell that clung to the coveralls Lyle hung beside his door downstairs, and all she could think about was her brother, sitting in the police station, bruised and definitely not sober, telling her to go forth and multiply.
What a mess. A great big freaking mess.
She should probably eat something, since a cookie and a coffee didn’t exactly make up for skipping breakfast and lunch.
Her stomach didn’t get excited about the promise of food so she sipped a glass of water, standing at the door of the deck, breathing much-needed fresh air, squinting at the too-bright overcast sky. Feeling the weight of embarrassment when she noticed the plastic over Sterling’s kitchen window.
She ought to apologize for that. Offer to pay.
Beg him to take her back.
Like she hadn’t suffered enough rejection today.
When she took her glass back to the kitchen counter, she saw the cash Lyle had told her to take out of his tin downstairs, not for bail either, telling her it wasn’t worth calling their Dad about any of this.
“You want to put him back in the hospital?” he’d warned. “Just take whatever you need to square it up,” he’d insisted in a hard tone.
She scooped up the cash, then made her way across the too long grass to the trail behind the cedars. Maybe if she explained. Maybe if she and Sterling talked it out, she’d understand it herself.
As she neared the house, she could hear the bash of a hammer and Kid Rock bragging about being a cowboy, bay-bee. The back door was open, but she waited for a break in the sound of hammering before she knocked, hard.
The music lowered, and she heard him call, “Yeah.”
“It’s Paige.” She entered the cold house. The front door was wide open as well. “Where are you?”
“Down here.”
She followed the carpet runner down the hall to the room his mother used for storage. He’d pushed all the boxes and excess furniture against the far wall. In the middle of the room was a pile of broken wood and torn strips of faded wallpaper.
Sterling’s T-shirt was wet with sweat from his collar to the middle of his chest. The swelling had gone down around his eye, but he still looked like a basket of overripe fruit. His silence held all the welcome of a ‘Trespassers will be shot’ sign.
“Lyle paid back the value of the invoices.” She showed him the cash.
He shrugged and turned back to the closet.
“Look, there are some things about Lyle you probably don’t know.”
He held up his hand. “Don’t even bother.”
“No, listen.”
He turned away, reached into the closet.
“He’s at the police station right now.”
There was a screech of pulled nails then he emerged with a flaking length of wood spiked with bent nails. “Sounds like he’s where he belongs.” He tossed the wood onto the pile.
“Are you aware that everyone in town knows you called him a thief?”
“He didn’t deny it.” He stepped back into the closet.
“Yeah, well, Zack heard about it and figured he’d take the heat.”
Sterling half stepped out, yanking on something, but frowning at the same time.
“Seems he was worried his father wouldn’t be able to support his little brother or sister, if he was in jail.”
Sterling’s scowl deepened. “What brother or sister? Who’s pregnant?”
“Britta. Zack noticed she hadn’t bought tampons in a while, knew she was mad at Lyle, and put two and two together. He’s a very smart kid. Cam was thrilled.” She swallowed, aching for her friend, recalling both men’s shock, Lyle’s stunned, Are you sure it’s mine?
What a sorry, nasty mess. If only she’d dealt with things differently. Sooner. Better. But no. She’d wanted to keep things going with this man.
“Lyle kind of lost it at that point. He went through something last year with his girlfriend at the time. It was bad. She was pregnant and they lost the baby. He was really upset that Britta had kept this pregnancy from him. He said some stuff. Cam didn’t like the way he was reacting and overreacted himself, threw him in a cell.” Paige pressed where her eyebrow was pulsing with a tick. “Even Britta could see the charges weren’t kosher. She called her father to get a decent lawyer for him.”
“That reminds me, you owe me some evidence.”
“Whatever those invoices are about, he wasn’t stealing, Sterling. If you’d seen the way he looked at me for even thinking it.” She turned her face away, ashamed.
Lyle had looked at her with contempt. Like he’d expected better of her. Like she had let him down.
“You’re so soft-headed where he’s concerned.” He went back into the closet.
“Damn it, Sterling.” She took a few steps forward, wanting him to understand. Wanting him to care enough to try to understand. But he didn’t and he wouldn’t.
She was better off without him since this wouldn’t be such a disaster if she hadn’t been so scared of losing what little she had with him.
“I’m supposed to be doing things right. Handling things better than Dad, not running around destroying people’s lives, accusing them of things they didn’t do.”
“You really believe he’s innocent?” He challenged on his way to tossing another chunk of two-by-four into the center of the room. “Yet you were with the lawyers yesterday, convinced he’d stolen.”
“I haven’t asked Dad about it. Maybe he knew.”
Sterling snorted. “That’s not very comforting, is it?”
Oh, this was hopeless. She ought to quit humiliating herself and leave.
He hooked a hand near his hip, retrieving his hammer from a loop at his waist.
The motion drew her gaze, and something on the closet doorjamb fixed it. The original faded green paint had never been painted over. Short horizontal marks climbed the space from about three feet off the floor to about four and half.
“What are those?” she asked, feeling her lips go numb as she saw the initials.
“What?”
“Those.” She pointed.
He turned to examine the penciled dashes, all of them dated through the late-fifties, each one accompanied by a pair of letters.
“Granny measuring her kids, I suppose, ‘cause A.L. is Uncle Alf, the one I stayed with while I went to Harvard. Larry was his middle name. P.B. is Aun
t Pearl. Belinda,” he added, dragging his finger down.
“And?” Paige waited until his nail underlined the third pair.
“Sigrid Evelyn. Mom never uses her first name. Doesn’t like it.”
Paige lifted her gaze to his, didn’t say anything as she drew her father’s ring from beneath her T-shirt and held the chain taut. The ring rolled and skittered.
With love. S.E.
Sterling closed his eyes in a slow wince. “Fuck.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Sterling pulled into his parents’ driveway and parked, wondering if his father had come home yet. He couldn’t do this if his father was here.
Judging by what he’d come to talk to his mother about, however, he would understand if his father never came back.
“Wait here.” He wasn’t sure why Paige had climbed into his truck. If she thought she was providing comfort, she had another think coming. The way this situation was looking, there was nothing he was going to want from her ever again.
“I want to know,” she said stubbornly.
What was there to know? Her father was an asshole. This shouldn’t even be possible.
Perhaps she sensed his resentment. She climbed from the truck in silence and avoided looking at him.
Clutching the ring she’d given him, the chain dangling and tickling his knuckles, he climbed out of his side and met her at the front bumper. She wore a frown of worry.
Worry didn’t begin to touch on what he felt. Fortunately, his storm of emotion was overshadowed by hope that it had nothing to do with his mother. But deep in his gut, he knew. He just knew. Paige, at least, had the advantage of expecting this kind of behavior from Grady. For Sterling, his mother having an affair was a crack in the foundation of principles that had supported him his entire life.
And an affair with Grady Fogarty? Shoot me now.
He gave one short knock on the kitchen door, then opened it and stepped in. Paige to followed.
“Mom?”
“I’m in the dining room. Is your father with you?”
“No.” Sterling peered over the saloon doors, saw she had photographs spread on the table. He pushed through, holding one door for Paige.
“I’m making up a history of your father’s contribution to the community. I found these of our twenty-fifth anniversary. Remember that party? I’m thinking we should have another. Forty isn’t the milestone fifty would be, but it would give us an opportunity to invite— Oh.” She lifted her head and saw Paige.
Paige hung back, biting her lip.
Sterling didn’t want to see that this was hard for her. He looked back at his mother. She didn’t greet Paige, only lifted her plucked brows in cool inquiry.
“We were wondering about this, Mom.”
She glanced at the ring dangling off the chain and stiffened with recognition.
After a moment, she went back to shuffling photographs. Her hand shook. “It looks like Grady Fogarty’s.”
“Did you know it has your initials inside it?”
Silence.
“Because if you have a connection to Grady— Do you?”
“It’s none of your business, Sterling. It is absolutely no one’s business.” Least of all hers, she seemed to say with a cutting glance toward Paige.
Paige slid a step along the wall, was stopped by the cherrywood plant stand.
“You gave it to him, didn’t you? When?” He dropped the ring into the middle of the photographs showing their happy family moments. All those high morals of hers, the ones she’d always demanded he subscribe to, were as flawed as those photographs, faded and unfocused and showing tattered corners. “How long did it go on? When did it end?”
She let out an impatient breath and her chin went up. “This isn’t anything that needs to be discussed, Sterling.”
“Did you search Dad’s office?” Paige asked.
“I don’t have to answer to you.”
“No, you don’t,” Sterling said with a back-off look at Paige. “But the police are going to want to know. Did you break into Grady’s house? His car?”
His mother narrowed her eyes a fraction as she looked between them. Setting three photos to the side, she said, “I had a quick peek for the ring, yes. Took your father’s keys and let myself into Grady’s office. I thought there might be—” She cut herself off, dragged a photo by the corner from beneath the ring. “Your father and I don’t agree on certain things, except that we’d rather keep our private lives private. Kindly don’t tell him you’re aware of...this.” She nodded at the ring. “He’ll never come home.”
“You expect him to want to?” Sterling pushed his hands into his pockets.
“He always did before.” She brought her head up, a tiny pucker between her brows. “Did he say he wouldn’t?” With a distracted glance around, she located her handbag and dug into it. “No, he’ll come. He just needs a few days.” Bringing up a gold case, she shook out a cigarette.
“You smoke?!” Where the hell was his mother? Who was this woman?
Her hand continued to shake as she held the cigarette between two fingers and moved to the fireplace for a match. “Not usually in the house.” She lit it and drew on the cancer-stick like it was saving her life.
“I don’t believe this,” he breathed.
Of course his father knew, had always known. That’s what the lake trips were about. The, I’m not enough anguish. Ah, Dad.
Paige shifted and her sweater whispered against his mother’s faux marble wall. His mother was right about one thing: this wasn’t her business. If Paige only knew what his father had been through because of hers, she’d have the grace to leave.
As he glared at her, the little emotion that had been in Paige’s expression—sadness, regret, apology, he wasn’t sure—became hidden by a tense, neutral poker-face. She went from looking at him to looking through him.
He jerked his gaze away, ignored the tearing sensation in his chest, and watched his mother blow out a stream of smoke, touch a fingertip to the end of her tongue. Something like smugness teased the edges of her mouth.
It pleased her that this was driving a wedge between him and Paige. He had the feeling of a train derailing beneath him.
“You were the reason my mom left,” Paige said. “And Olinda.”
“He was a sexual predator, Paige. Don’t make out like it was her fault. It couldn’t have happened more than once, and probably a long time ago, right, Mom?”
Paige’s mouth curved with cynicism. “I have a hard time seeing your mother as a victim. Were you, Mrs. Roy?”
Something tragic flashed in his mother’s expression before she bent to tap her ash into a potted fern. “The victims were the women he flaunted, thinking to make me leave my husband for him.”
“Because he loved you, wanted a life with you? And you didn’t feel the same? You bought him that ring,” Paige said.
“That was early days. I idealized the situation.” His mother’s mouth firmed into a line. “I told him not to wear it. He did it to spite me. I wasn’t about to leave my husband for him, though. It took me twenty-two years to leave that neighborhood.” She drew on her cigarette. “And take my son into a house with you in it? What an appalling mistake that would have been.”
His mother’s contempt seemed to drain the last of the color beneath Paige’s pale skin. Chin up, jacketless and damp, all cheekbones and bony shoulders, Paige absorbed the derision with a tiny swallow.
Don’t, Sterling wanted to say to his mother, and felt the tearing sensation again, like peeling wallpaper strips, starting in his gut, ripping all the way up through his chest, leaving the back of his throat raw.
“So. Are you finished stirring up trouble?” his mother asked Paige.
Jesus, the trouble this could cause. Poor Dad.
“We don’t need to say anything to anyone about this. You can see that, right?” he said to Paige.
“Right. We can just keep pointing fingers at Lyle. He was fixing your car, wasn’t he? That’
s why he bought the parts on the company account.”
Sterling took one staggering step as the implication that this thing had been on and off for years hit him.
“Lyle won’t say anything.” His mother pressed her cigarette butt into the fern.
Paige snorted and drew her arms tighter around herself. “I guess his career has always depended on his keeping his mouth shut, hasn’t it?”
“So does yours,” his mother said.
Paige cocked her head, arrested. “What do you mean?”
“Your tuition? Your father never had that kind of money. I gave it to him. I expected Sterling to come home and wanted you out of town. Then you stayed away,” she said, frowning at her son.
“Dad got a loan from the bank,” Paige said.
“No, he gave me a promissory note with his share of the factory as collateral. That’s what I didn’t want her to find,” she said to Sterling. “Your father doesn’t want me to collect on it because Grady threatened to tell the whole town how I came to have it.” She turned back to Paige with a cold look in her eye. “But Grady is thirteen years overdue paying off that note. Walter wanted to go through the motions of letting you audit and cash out, to hide that.” She waved at the ring. “But I can’t see why we should have to. Especially if all of this will come out anyway.”
Paige, usually so vibrant, paled to deathly gray. She looked once at Sterling. It was a shattered, blaming glance that congealed his blood. She pushed off the wall and through the saloon doors.
One sprang back, smacking against the wall.
Sterling flinched, not just because his mother hated when people did that to the doors, but because he’d just seen something die in Paige. He very much feared it had been whatever she might have felt for him.
~ * ~
Martyrs knew something she didn’t. Taking the high road sucked, Paige decided, as she staggered into her driveway, feet so cold they’d stopped aching, chin rattling, shoulders stiff from hunching in a brace against the gusting wind and steady rain.
Seriously, no one appreciated these gestures. Just like no one gave a damn what she did in her efforts to ensure her family was looked after. Wasted energy is what it all had been.