Hissy Fit

by Mary Kay Andrews

  “What if I love him? What if I want to believe him? Should I give him another chance? That’s what I’ve been wondering. Should I have given A.J. another chance? People make mistakes.”

  “Messing around with your best friend, when you’re getting married the next day, that’s more than just a mistake,” Daddy said. “That’s a character flaw. A big one, if you ask me.”

  I dug my toes into the wet sand. “Gloria says all the Jernigans are like that. She says Drew and even Chub were runarounds in their day.”

  “She shouldn’t have told you that,” Daddy said slowly.

  “But it’s true, isn’t it?”

  Daddy looked away. “There’s always been talk. I don’t like gossip. Never have. And after your mama left, well, I knew everybody in town was talking about us. Nothing I could do about it. But I’m not gonna be the one talking about the Jernigans.”

  I leaned back with my elbows on the picnic table. I could hear the soft hooting of mourning doves, and frogs croaking over near the edge of the lake. The moon was nearly full, and its reflection seemed to fill the surface of the water.

  “You talked about people keeping things to themselves,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Does that include you?”

  He nodded, waiting.

  “Does it make you mad, still, that she left?”

  “Sometimes. Does it still make you mad?”

  I laughed. “Austin says I have abandonment issues. He says I’ll never have a good relationship with a man until I deal with my feelings about Mama. He says I need closure.”

  Daddy slapped at a mosquito that had landed on his arm. “Did Austin go to psychiatry school before or after he was at florist’s school?”

  “I think he watches a lot of daytime television,” I admitted. “But even armchair psychiatrists get it right every once in a while. I really do want to know what happened to Mama. I need to know. Why did she leave us? Where did she go?”

  “And why didn’t she send for you?” Daddy was looking right into my eyes.

  My own eyes widened. “You knew?”

  “About the suitcase under your bed? Yeah. I found it the one and only time I did any real spring cleaning at the house. I took it out and opened it up. Found your little pajamas, your blue jeans and T-shirt, and your favorite Barbie doll. About broke my heart when I realized why you had it hidden under there.”

  “I wanted to be ready,” I said softly. “I thought she’d pull up in the driveway in her Malibu one day, and honk the horn. And I’d look out the door, and there she’d be, hollerin’ ‘Come on Keeley, dollar waitin’ on a dime!’ And out the door I would go, because my suitcase was already packed.”

  “Whatever happened to that suitcase?” he asked. “I kept checking, and after a couple years, it was gone.”

  “I grew up some.” I put my hand on Daddy’s arm. “And I’d heard all the gossip. I knew she left with that man. Darvis Kane. I knew she’d broken not just my heart, but yours too. And I got so I hated her. I told myself if she ever did call or write, I wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t write back. And if she showed up, I’d tell her right to her face to go to hell.”

  Daddy shook his head. “We been keeping things to ourselves for a long time, haven’t we, shug?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  “I remember the day I looked under your bed, and the suitcase was gone. That night was the first time I slept good after she left.”

  “Why?”

  “You were all I had left,” he said, looking away again. “And I thought the same thing as you. I thought she’d come back, take you away with her. And there’d be nothing left for me.”

  I slid my hand down his arm and squeezed my father’s big, callused hand. He squeezed back.

  33

  We sat in the dark at the picnic table, looking out at the lake, for a long time, until the bugs ran us off, back to the shelter of the Tahoe.

  It seemed safe, somehow, to talk there, away from the house and memories of her.

  “Gloria says you been asking a lot of questions about Jeanine,” Daddy said. “It kind of upset her.”

  “I know. And I know the two of you were trying to protect me. You guys did a good job of raising me, Daddy. I’m not perfect, but I’m not as messed up as a lot of kids whose parents went through divorce and stuff. But I’m a big girl now, and there are things I need to know about her.”

  “All right,” he said, his voice wary. “I’ll tell you as much as I can.”

  I gulped. “Austin has been doing some research. Online. You can check state databases that way. He did some checking and he says it looks like you two never got a divorce. Is that right?”

  “Research,” Daddy said, with a trace of annoyance in his voice. “He’s right. I never did get a divorce.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t know where she’d gone off to.”

  “Did you even try to find out?”

  For the first time he gave me a sharp look. And his voice was pinched, almost angry. “Hell yes, I tried. There was a police investigation, of course, after I reported her missing. At first they suspected maybe I’d done something to her. That’s how they think, when a married person goes missing. But after a while the sheriff gave up looking. I’d been at work at the car lot all day the day she left. About a dozen people vouched for me. And there was never any sign of foul play or anything. And Darvis Kane was gone too. There was a lot of talk about that. He’d left a wife and little kids behind too. You know how that looked. Even still, I didn’t give up. I wanted to know why. And I wanted to be able to tell you something, even if it was that we were getting a divorce. So I hired a private detective. Spent thousands, chasing down dead ends. In the end I didn’t really find out any more than I knew the day she left.”

  “Nothing? You mean she just disappeared?”

  Daddy spread out his fingers on the steering wheel. The dull gold of the wedding band on his left hand shone softly in the moonlight. “Best I could find out. She just walked out, Keeley. And no, there wasn’t a note, nothing like that. Believe me, I looked and hunted. I tore the house apart, thinking maybe she’d left some little clue. But there was nothing.”

  “Did she take a lot of stuff with her?”

  Daddy winced. “An overnight bag was missing. She had lots of clothes, so I couldn’t be sure of what she might have taken with her. Her closet was full, so it wasn’t like she just cleaned it out and took off with everything she owned.”

  “What about her car? The red Malibu?”

  “That’s the only thing that detective did to earn his pay. He tracked it down through the VIN number. It turned up in a used car lot in Alabama. She’d sold it for eight hundred dollars cash.”

  “What about Darvis Kane?”

  Daddy’s face reddened. “If I could have found him, I believe I would have killed him. For months I kept my shotgun in the car. Eventually Gloria took it and kept it at her house for a long time. She knew what I was thinking. Always has. Even now, sometimes, I’ll be someplace like Atlanta, or Birmingham, and I’ll look over, and I’ll think I see him, walking down the street, or driving in the lane next to me.”

  “He was married to Paige’s Aunt Lisa, wasn’t he?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did she ever hear from him over the years?”

  “Lisa Kane never would talk to me. Not after the first few days, when it got apparent they’d taken off together. She went around town saying some pretty ugly things about Jeanine. Gloria went out to that trailer of hers, tried to talk to her, but she ran Gloria off. She moved over to Athens to stay with another sister, and after that, I don’t know what happened to her.”

  “You think Mama ran away with Darvis Kane, don’t you?”

  He held his hands palms up, examining them, like he was searching for a clue there.

  “I didn’t know what else to think.”

  “Did you have any idea she was…seeing somebody else?”

  “Not at the time.” />
  “What about later?”

  “Later on, Gloria admitted to me that she’d heard some talk about Jeanine. That she was running with a fast crowd. At the time she didn’t want to believe it. Your mama was like a little sister to your aunt.”

  “And there was never any sign? That she was unhappy? Or wanted out?”

  “She seemed…restless. She’d go for long drives. Some days she’d leave you with a baby-sitter and just drive around. Said she just wanted some time for herself. She was so young, when we got married, and then when she had you. It was different for me. I’d been in the army, college, seen a little bit of the world. I always knew I’d come back home, start a business and a family. Your mama, I guess she was just finding out who she was, and what she wanted.”

  “And what she didn’t want,” I said, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

  He ruffled my hair. “Don’t you ever think that. She always wanted you. Always. The day she found out she was pregnant? She drove over to Atlanta, I forget which mall, and bought a bunch of maternity clothes. Had to pin the britches together, they were so big, but she was so proud and excited to be pregnant, she couldn’t wait to have everybody know we were having a baby.”

  “Then why’d she leave me?”

  “I wish I knew,” he said. “I’d give anything if I could tell you, but I can’t. She was good at covering things up. As good as me, it turns out.”

  “I used to wonder if she was dead,” I said flatly. “Sometimes I hoped it. Because that would mean she hadn’t meant to leave me.”

  He looked shocked.

  “As far as we can find out, she’s not dead, though. Austin did a computer search on that too. There hasn’t been a death certificate issued to anybody with her name or date of birth.”

  “Computers can do all that?” he asked.

  “And more. If I had Darvis Kane’s date of birth or Social Security number, we could do a search on him. Find out if he’s still alive. Maybe even where he is right now.”

  And Jeanine, I thought. We could find out if she was still with Darvis Kane. But I didn’t say it. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

  He turned the wedding band around and around while he thought about it. “Some things, maybe, are better left alone,” he said finally.

  “For you. But not for me.”

  He nodded. “All right. If you’re sure you want to do this, I won’t stand in your way. All the old Murdock Motors files are down in the basement at home. You can look through them, see if you can find Kane’s personnel file. It oughta have what you’re looking for.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I don’t want to know anything about that man. Nothing. You hear? I believe you when you say you need answers. I don’t understand it, not really, but I believe it. I’ve got all the answers I need. I’ve made peace with this, and I don’t want it all plowed up again. You do what you have to, Keeley. But leave me out of it.”

  I said okay. What else could I say? But I didn’t believe him. He needed to know, just as much as I did.

  We were almost back to the house when it occurred to me that there were a dozen more questions I needed to ask him. But it was too late. His mood had changed. As soon as he started the Tahoe’s engine and turned the car away from the park, he’d made just as determined a turn away from our painful past. Cars sped past us on the blacktop. He fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find the rest of the late-night baseball scores from the coast. His jaw was clenched, and he held the steering wheel with such tension, I thought he would wrench it off the dashboard. I’d stirred up something in my father tonight, emotions I’d forgotten he possessed. Later, I told myself. There will be time for more talks later.

  He turned into the driveway and shut off the Tahoe’s engine. “Quite a night,” he said, giving me a rueful smile.

  “I guess you didn’t know you’d be playing twenty questions when you asked me over for salmon loaf,” I said. “Maybe next week I’ll have to cook for myself.”

  “Never,” he said quickly. “You’re my best girl. Besides, who else would eat my cooking?”

  I got out of the car and fumbled in my purse for my own car keys.

  He unlocked the back door and stood there for a minute, looking back at me.

  “You going right home? Or do you want to go down to the basement and poke around, before I lock up for the night?”

  I blinked. After he’d made it clear just how reluctant he was to talk about Darvis Kane, I’d already started planning to look through the files while he was at work in the afternoon. Now here he was, inviting me in, pain or no pain.

  “It’s been a long night,” I said finally. “There’s no rush.”

  34

  On Friday afternoon I had a pounding headache. This should have been a sign of unseen forces at work in my life. I should have known it was an omen. I should have gone home and gone straight to bed and stayed there for the next forty-eight hours. Unfortunately I took it to mean I’d spent too much time on a long-distance phone call to New York, where I was trying to figure out why a fancy fabric house there had waited three months to tell me that the silk for a client’s living room drapes was on back order and wouldn’t be shipped for another three months.

  By the time I got off the phone from New York, Gloria was holding up her phone for me, and gesturing for me to pick up the other line.

  “It’s Nancy Rockmore over at Loving Cup,” she warned. “Some kind of crisis over at Mulberry Hill.”

  “No,” I said flatly, waving the phone away. “I’m all crisised out today. My brain is trying to explode.”

  Gloria pushed the hold button on her phone console. She took the ibuprofen bottle out of her top desk drawer. “Put out your hand,” she ordered. I did so. She shook three capsules into my hand, went to the small refrigerator in the kitchen, and came back with a bottle of Diet Coke. “You need caffeine,” she said.

  I swallowed the pills with a hit of Diet Coke and burped delicately. “My head still hurts,” I whimpered. “Can’t you deal with whatever’s going on over at Mulberry Hill?”

  “No,” she said, popping three ibuprofens into her own mouth and helping herself to my Diet Coke. “I’ve got headaches of my own. The cabinet guy just called from Annabelle Waites’s house. Her Sub-Zero is half an inch too wide for the slot it’s supposed to fit in. And Annabelle has suddenly decided that she wants the spice cabinet to have glass-front doors instead of the paneled door we’d decided on. She’s having some kind of meltdown.”

  “Oh,” I said meekly. I took another, fortifying sip of Diet Coke, then picked up on line two.

  “Miss Nancy,” I said tentatively, “Gloria says you’ve got some kind of crisis over at the house?”

  “I don’t have a crisis,” she corrected me. “It is four-thirty on Friday. In thirty minutes I’ll be off work. In forty minutes I’ll have a Chivas and water in one hand, and the remote control in the other. But my boss, and your client, Will Mahoney, now, he has a crisis.”

  “What now?” I asked.

  “He wants to know what he’s supposed to serve dinner off of tonight,” Nancy drawled. “Seems pretty bent out of shape about it too.”

  “Dinner?” For a minute there, I had no idea what she was talking about.

  “Yeah. Dinner. He’s got his boxers all in a bunch about some dinner he’s fixing tonight. Some woman from Atlanta he’s trying to romance? Sent me clear over to Athens to buy flowers and fancy wine and likker and steaks. You know they’re getting seven ninety-nine a pound for a goddamn filet mignon over there? That’s a crime and a scandal if you ask me.”

  “Dinner!” It was all coming back to me now. Will was planning on showing his new home to Stephanie Scofield, the woman of his dreams.

  “Men!” I exclaimed, rubbing my throbbing temples with my fingertips. “I bought him eight place settings of china and silver and crystal. Tell him it’s all right in the cupboards. If it was a snake, it’d bite him. There are pots and pans and tabl
e linens too.”

  “I think he found all the dishes and crap,” Miss Nancy said. “It’s the table and chairs that he can’t seem to find. I can see him overlooking something like a steak knife or a wineglass. But he’s real adamant about not having a goddamn dining room table.”

  “Oh for God’s…” I started to say. But then I stopped. My gaze traveled across the office and finally focused on a chunky pine kitchen table and two country French ladderback chairs set on either side. The tabletop was covered with fabric samples and old sketchbooks. I wrinkled my brow. I’d bought the table and chairs at the Scott Antique Show in Atlanta three months ago, to serve as a little dining area in the studio’s kitchen, but had intended to have them loaded on the van of furniture for Will Mahoney’s pump house. Somehow, they had never made it on the van. Somehow, they were still sitting right here in our studio.

  “The dining room furniture is here,” I said, my voice meek. “It never got loaded on the truck. Tell him I’ll bring it right out there.”

  “Good,” Miss Nancy said. “I’ve never seen him this worked up before.”

  I put the phone down and groaned, then looked around for Gloria. Just then I caught a glimpse of her car zooming down the street, away from me and my new crisis.

  I picked the phone up again and dialed Manny Ortiz’s number and prayed. His sister-in-law, Isabel Saldana, picked up on the third ring.

  “Moving by Manny,” she said, with only the slightest trace of a Cuban accent.

  “Isabel? It’s Keeley Murdock,” I said. “Is Manny anywhere you can reach him? I’ve got an emergency delivery this afternoon.”

  “Keeley!” she said, her voice warm. “That paint color you picked out for the office is fantastic! I don’t know how you talked Manny into going with lime green, but you are a genius. It changes everything. So sunny. I don’t even mind coming to work in the morning.”

  “Thanks, Isabel,” I said. “I’m glad you like it. But I’ve got to talk to Manny.”