by Erin Healy
Molly scraped her oatmeal and raisins into a bowl and set it on the table. Lexi was still waiting for her question-behind-the-question. Molly sat and spooned the sticky cereal into her mouth.
“Thank you, Lord, for this food,” Lexi said by way of reminder.
“Ditto,” she said around the spoon.
Lexi shook her head but let it go. A scolding at this moment could shut down the conversation.
“Mom, you know how you’ve said that some things you tell me are family business? Like I shouldn’t be talking about it with my friends?”
“Mmmhmm.” Their odd little family had plenty of history that didn’t need to be broadcast to the world. Molly didn’t know the half of it.
“Well, is family business something we can talk to other family members about?”
Confusion caused Lexi to squint.
“I mean, if you tell me something, is that something I can talk about with . . . well, with Grandpa when we visit him? Or with Gina? Because Gina’s like family, isn’t she? And she’s your best friend, so she probably already knows our family business anyway is what I’m thinking.”
Lexi’s brain searched wildly for their most recent topic of “family business” and a memory of Molly’s reaction to it. The mental file eluded her. Molly’s grandfather had been admitted to a mental hospital several years ago, after his breakdown, and they visited him once a week. She never seemed troubled by those visits, and Lexi had never asked her to keep that piece of family laundry in the basket.
“You’re going to have to give me an example of what you mean, sweetie.”
Molly swallowed and pursed her lips before saying, “If someone talked to me and told me that our talk was private and I shouldn’t tell you about it, would that be right?”
“Absolutely not!” Lexi bit her lip, sensing she’d been too forceful. “Except for some good secrets,” she qualified. “Like birthday or Christmas secrets.”
“Like when Gina got tickets for you to see the Switchfoot concert!”
“Exactly.”
Molly looked doubtful. “Why would Grandma think you’d be mad about a good secret?”
“Grandma? She called you?”
“Uhhh, she came here.”
Lexi’s mother had dropped by the house. That’s what Gina had been reluctant to tell her last night.
“When did she get into town?”
Molly shrugged.
“Do you know where she’s staying?” Another no. “I take it you two didn’t talk about food.”
Alice Grüggen was a travel writer who focused on regional cuisines. She and Molly could go on for the longest time about how to cook pasta or what spices brought out the flavors of summer squash.
“Oh, we did, but that’s not really why she visited.”
“So, spill the beans.”
“Are you mad?”
Lexi took a deep breath. “For now, I’m mostly confused.”
“She said we should make it a secret ’cause you’d be mad if you found out.”
Lexi sat on her true reaction to this news. Molly was not to blame for any of this. “Generally speaking, those would be considered bad secrets.”
Molly sighed. “So I should tell you? I worried about this. If I tell, she’ll be mad. If I don’t tell, you’ll be mad.”
“No one’s mad at you, Molly. I think you have a feeling you should let me know, otherwise we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
“You and Grandma don’t like each other.”
Molly’s powers of observation grew by the day. Lexi missed some things about the girl’s earlier years, one of them being that it was easier to hide certain facts from her. “We love each other”—which was true, in its paradoxical kind of way—“but we don’t agree on a lot of things.”
“Like about my dad?”
Grant? This was about Grant? Lexi felt her neck flush. What was her mom doing? Lexi had never spoken a bad word about Grant to Molly, and she tried to answer her daughter’s questions about him as truthfully as possible. But Alice knew Lexi had no intention of making him fess-up to being a father and play some halfhearted role in Molly’s life. If he didn’t want to, and that was as plain as his abandonment, who was Lexi to force him? She didn’t even know where he lived. He hadn’t contacted her since he left when Molly was two.
“What did Grandma say about your dad?”
Molly looked at her bowl of oatmeal. “Nothing.”
Lexi was ten seconds away from shaking the information out of her daughter. She counted. Several possible questions danced around in her head. One saved her from doing anything rash: “Don’t you think you’ll feel better if you tell me what’s bothering you?”
Molly looked at her, surprised, like she hadn’t considered the situation so simply until now. “Yeah.” She pushed her bowl away. “Yeah.”
She left the table.
Itching to follow Molly, Lexi stared at the dish, which still had quite a bit of cereal in the bottom. Instead, she picked up the bowl, and the dirty pot that was on the stove, and put them in the sink, then filled them with water.
“Molly?”
“Just a minute,” she called from her bedroom.
Lexi decided that if Molly opted not to open up, she’d call her mom later in the morning. She hated talking to her mother.
Molly’s slippers slapped her heels as she returned to the kitchen a few seconds later and held out an envelope to Lexi. It was addressed to Molly, in care of her grandmother.
The envelope looked to Lexi almost as ominous as the one she had received from Ward. She took it.
“What’s this?”
“It’s a letter from my dad. You’re not mad, are you?”
Lexi’s fingertips felt electrified on the paper. She looked at Molly, who was wearing a combined expression of hope and anxiety. A letter from Grant to Molly. He’d never had any contact with her since he’d left. Molly’s eyes were analyzing her, waiting to see if Lexi would allow her this unexpected joy of having finally connected with the man she must have dreamed of many, many times.
As much as Lexi resented Grant, she couldn’t steal that from Molly. If he betrayed her, however, if he smothered this spark he’d lit behind Molly’s eyes, Lexi would hunt him down.
“No. I’m not mad. Did Grandma read it?”
Molly nodded.
“What does it say?”
Molly hugged herself. “You can read it.”
“Really? You’d let me do that?” Molly’s openness shamed Lexi. The girl couldn’t know that Lexi would have read it without permission.
“Yeah. Go ahead.”
Lexi tapped the edge of the envelope on the table. “Okay. I will. Thanks for letting me. But I think I’ll wait until I’ve had a rest.” She couldn’t read it in front of her child. It would be impossible to hide her feelings, toward Grant or her mother. Molly looked disappointed.
“We’ll talk about it after school, before I go to the restaurant. You go get ready now. I’ll drive you this morning.”
“Why? I can walk. I still have time.”
Still holding Grant’s letter, Lexi walked into the living room. “The weather’s getting colder.”
“Mom, it’s March. It’s been cold.”
Lexi raised the slat in the metal blinds again. Her little Volvo was where she had left it, and it didn’t appear to have been tagged with a parking citation.
“All the more reason. I’m going to drive you to school for a while from now on, okay?”
“But you said driving me to school is a waste of gas.”
True. It was terrible how the things parents said came back to bite them, Lexi thought. “Not anymore. Really, Molly, if you’re embarrassed by me I’ll drop you off a little ways out.”
Molly rolled her eyes and tossed her hair as she went to her room to get dressed.
“Sheesh, Mom, of course you don’t embarrass me.”
Lexi looked down at the letter in her hands and wondered if Grant had anything to
do with Ward’s sudden reappearance and Norm’s parole. The past they all shared was tangled enough that the possibility wasn’t out of the question. She and Grant had not parted on the best terms, and she couldn’t say what the last seven years had done to him.
Until she knew what was going on, she wasn’t going to let Molly do anything alone.
{ chapter 5 }
Grant Solomon’s feet drummed the dirt shoulder of the county road on the north side of Riverbend. His conscience had sent him jogging farther than usual this Friday morning.
Giving that letter to Alice had been a mistake.
There were only a few things that Grant was sure of any more: He’d screwed up his life. He loved his daughter. And he should have delivered her letter himself, after talking to Lexi himself, instead of hiding behind the skirts of his mother-in-law.
The truth of this had kept him up all night. He was an idiot. Idiocy would hound his life no matter how hard he tried to outrun it.
Grant ran harder. It was seven thirty and he was due to work in an hour, with three miles of flat dry plains stretching out between him and home.
Home. A rat hole of a trailer in a deteriorated park, the only place he could find—even with Richard’s good word—worthy of an ex-con on a janitor’s salary. He let his gaze travel up the mountainside ahead. The home he really wanted was above him, out of reach in Crag’s Nest, behind that ridge that the rising sun was touching. Lexi and Molly were living in an apartment now, Alice had said. Grant wondered who had taken over the old bungalow on Fireweed Street, and how much it might cost him to get it back.
All of it.
It was pointless, wondering. Lexi alone was unaffordable. Nothing he could dream up would buy his way back into her good graces. Not even the fact that she was still his wife.
He wondered if she’d found someone else by now.
Alice would have told him, wouldn’t she?
Not necessarily.
Grant allowed himself a hope for Molly, though. Not that she’d ever look up to him as a real dad, but that they could at least find a way to know each other, maybe even like each other—grab a burger together now and then. Go on a hike. Exchange text messages. He’d get the two of them phones on one of those family plans.
Lexi’s love for Molly might have allowed a guarded reunion, before this latest stunt. He cursed himself. Now, he’d be lucky if she didn’t tell Molly he was dead. Maybe Molly already thought he was dead. Who knew what Lexi had been telling her over the years? Grant’s foot shifted sideways over a loose rock. He caught himself and resumed his hard rhythm.
He’d call Alice as soon as he got back. If Lexi hadn’t been home last night, there was a chance Alice still had the letter. He’d get her to hold off so he could do this right. For once.
Grant’s shins took a beating as he knocked out the remaining miles in a race to his telephone.
As he left the road and turned up the gravel driveway that led into the trailer park, Alice was pulling out. She drove her late-model Beemer past the split-rail fence that was collapsing of dry rot and turned toward Grant. She rolled down her window.
Grant slowed to a walk and worked on catching his breath.
“When you didn’t answer your phone, I decided to drive over,” she explained when she reached him.
His forearm caught the sweat that was overflowing his eyebrows.
“Long run,” he said between drags of air.
“Plenty of distance to go out here.” Alice’s gaze on him was steady. Wary.
Grant shook his head. “What? . . . Did you think . . . I’d split?”
“The thought crossed my mind.”
He exhaled audibly. The morning sun glinted off Alice’s sunglasses.
“You can’t expect people to trust you just because you want them to,” Alice said.
“I don’t.”
“Glad to hear it, because you’re still earning my good faith. But Lexi has too much pride to accept my help, and that little girl needs a father, so I’ve extended you some credit based on what I know for sure. Don’t default on me, now.”
Still breathless, Grant bent at the waist and raised one hand, making a silent promise. There was little else he could do or say, short of staying the course, to convince Alice of his sincere intentions.
“How’d Lexi react?” he asked. “To the letter?”
“Lexi wasn’t home.”
Relief filled Grant’s lungs with sweet air.
“I gave it to Molly,” Alice said.
“What?”
“Molly and I had a good chat. You should have seen her face when I mentioned you. I couldn’t not give it to her after that. I know I keep saying this, but you’re going to love that girl to pieces.” She saw Grant’s expression. “Oh, it’s not a big deal. Molly gets it. She won’t say anything before we talk to Lexi ourselves.”
“That was not the plan.”
“We all have to improvise now and then. Look, Grant. She’s working tonight at the Red Rocks. We’ll go for dinner. It’s a public place. She won’t make a scene, and I’ll be there as a buffer. Molly won’t be there. What could go wrong?”
Grant could think of a hundred things, starting with the letter he shouldn’t have written. He laced his hands together on top of his head.
“Molly will tell,” he said.
“How on earth can you say that? You don’t know her half as well as I do.”
He was successful in stopping the sharp words that almost left his mouth. “What time do you want me there?”
“I’ll pick you up here at seven. Sound good?”
Grant stepped away from the car and lifted his hand in a wave. “Fine.”
It was not fine. Lexi would not think it was fine. Grant stood on the packed-dirt drive, hands on hips, staring at the gravel. He decided to call his wife.
The decision prevented his heart rate from falling back to its resting level. His rusting trailer was at the back of the lot, and Grant walked there slowly. By the time he arrived, he was still sweating, still short of breath. He entered the unlocked door and the flimsy home, which contained nothing anyone would want to steal, groaned under his weight.
Because his hands shook so badly when he punched Lexi’s number into the phone, he hung up and chose to shower first.
Ten minutes later, dressed in his janitorial blues, he completed the call. The connection went through. Grant looked at the clock. He had five minutes to get to work. After only a week on the job, he couldn’t afford to be late.
He couldn’t afford what might happen if he didn’t explain that letter to Lexi.
She answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?”
“Hi, Lexi.” He wiped a damp palm on his thigh. “How are you?” Lame.I’m lame. Grant closed his eyes.
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Yeah, it’s been a while. It’s Grant.”
When she didn’t reply, he realized he’d been bracing himself for a well-deserved torrent.
“This must come as a real shock. I’m sorry to catch you off guard. You must have a million questions.”
She didn’t ask one. He couldn’t even hear her breathing, maybe because his own breathing was so loud.
“I had to call you this morning.”
“This is not a good time.” Her voice was level, calm.
“I know. I know. You have every right to be mad at me, Lexi. Believe me, no one is more angry at me for what I did than me. I’m hoping you might let me—”
“Mom, where’s my spelling book?” Was that Molly in the background? Her voice sounded so much older than Grant had imagined, though Alice had shown him plenty of pictures.
“Under the bed,” Lexi said, her voice muffled as if her mouth was turned away from the phone.
Grant swallowed.
“We need to go,” Lexi said to him. “School.”
“Yeah. Time really moves, doesn’t it?”
Lexi didn’t reply. Grant wished his fool words back and feared opening his mouth a
gain. He could only make everything worse.
“I need to talk to you about Molly,” he said.
“She’s not your concern.” Lexi spoke lowly, but with the growl of a protective mama bear. Grant wondered if Molly was within earshot.
“I’m sure I’m going about this all the wrong way, but I was hoping I could explai—”
“I don’t need an explanation. For anything.”
“But there’s—”
“I don’t care. Please don’t call again.”
Grant would do anything for Lexi. In light of all he owed her, he’d do anything. Anything but that. He covered his eyes with his free hand. He had never felt more pathetic or desperate. He could not let Lexi—could not let Molly—go.
“Lexi. Don’t.”
She hung up the phone.
Grant lowered the receiver and let it slide out of his hands onto the countertop. The Formica was riddled with gold veins that reminded him of a road map, and of all the highways where he could run and run until the horizon swallowed him up.
Lexi tried to hide her distress over Grant’s call as she drove Molly to school. Though the intrusion stirred up a bitterness in her that she believed she had left behind some years ago, her greater fear was that Grant had more harmful intentions.
Such as reclaiming some paternal right to Molly.
The idea of spending the day camped in the school parking lot came to Lexi’s mind, even though the air was as gray and cold as she’d warned Molly it would be. If Ward or Grant came by . . .
. . . what would she do then? She didn’t even have a cell phone, had never been able to afford one. She couldn’t afford one now, either. She was behind on her utility bill as it was. And she couldn’t live in the school lot five days a week. Fridays were the only day she wasn’t at King Grocery during the school day.
Feeling undecided, she cut the car’s engine and withdrew Grant’s letter from her book bag. The temperature in the car dropped within minutes, and she pulled her jacket around her.
Lexi confessed to herself that she felt some irrational jealousy as she looked at Grant’s familiar handwriting. He had written not to her but to their daughter, and although she had no desire to connect with him, his exclusion caused her some pain.