“Maybe if we’re too young to be parents, we’re too young to get married!” She turned away from him, her shoulders stiff as she stared out the window into the darkness beyond.
“Come on, Paige. Don’t be this way.”
“I’m not feeling very warm and fuzzy toward you at the moment.”
“Look, if we put enough miles behind us tonight, we can make it to Vegas in one more night of driving. We’ll get married at one of those little chapels, we’ll find a decent hotel, and we’ll have a wedding night to remember for the rest of our lives.”
She continued staring out the window. He sighed, and punched the button to play the radio. When he found nothing but static, he punched it back off.
And in a strained silence, they drove on through the night.
They were somewhere west of Omaha when the truck quit. Just up and quit, without giving a two-week notice. Engine silenced, power steering gone, power brakes virtually useless, every idiot light on the dash flashing crimson. With every ounce of strength he possessed, Mikey wrangled the F-150 into the breakdown lane. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t seen this coming; he’d known for some time that this would be the truck’s last cross-country trip. He’d barely made it home from Stanford as it was. The Beast was old and tired, and deserved to be put out to pasture. But he’d counted on it getting them to Camp Pendleton, where he’d planned to sell it for junk, and as he rolled to a stop, his heart sank. This was bad. Really bad. Not only were he and Paige stuck here at two in the morning, in the breakdown lane next to a cornfield somewhere in the nation’s Heartland, but he had places he needed to go. Deadlines he couldn’t miss.
This wasn’t just bad. It was disastrous.
***
While Paige sat in the diner across the street from where they’d towed his truck, he talked to the mechanic. The news wasn’t good.
“You have a blown head gasket,” the guy said. “Your oil’s got water in it. It’s a miracle your engine didn’t seize.”
“How much to fix it?”
The guy considered. “Oh, probably five or six to replace the gasket.”
“Hundred?”
“There’s a lot of labor involved.”
He didn’t have that kind of money to spend on a decrepit Ford pick-up. He didn’t have that kind of money, period. It would be a miracle if they made it to Camp Pendleton at all.
“There’s more,” the guy said. “I looked it over pretty good. Your frame’s shot. Rusted all to hell. There’s no way it’s ever gonna take another sticker.”
“So you’re telling me the truck’s toast.”
“That’s what I’m telling you. If you want to sell it for parts, I could probably give you a hundred for it. Nobody’ll give you any more than that.”
His funds were almost gone. The tow, after they’d sat for three hours by the side of the highway, had cost him thirty-five dollars he hadn’t planned on. Now, they had to find a place to spend the night while they figured out their next move. If he sold the truck, that would help, but he had no idea how, unless they hitch-hiked, they were supposed to make it from Nebraska to California.
License plates and registration in hand, he returned to the diner, his heart heavy but his wallet fatter by a hundred dollars. Paige sat there and watched him walk toward her. She took in his dejected expression, the license plates in his hand, and said in an odd, tight voice, “End of the line?”
He dropped heavily into the vinyl booth and set the muddy plates on the seat beside him. “The truck’s shot. I sold it to the guy for parts. I don’t know what to do now. With our transportation gone, I don’t think I have enough money to get us there.”
She took a sip of coffee. With both hands wrapped around the warm mug and her eyes focused on the steam rising above it, she said quietly, “I’m not going with you.”
Their eyes met. “Don’t do this,” he begged. “We’ve come so far.”
“I thought I could do it. I thought I could marry you. Leave home, start a new life, be the wife you deserve. I can’t.”
“Is this your idea of payback? I broke your heart, so now you’re breaking mine?”
“Damn it, Mikey, you know better than that!”
“So why—” He glanced around the diner, lowered his voice. “Why are you doing this?”
“I’m seventeen years old. I’m not ready. What the hell am I supposed to do while you’re out on deployment? Sit around with all the other military wives, the ones that are twice my age, and pretend we have something to say to each other? I can’t just follow you blindly around the world. I have my own dreams, Mikey. Things I want to do. Berklee. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a career in music. I have Emma, and Leroy. Dad and Casey. I love you, but I love them, too. I don’t want to be three thousand miles away from them, all alone, while you’re off in Kuwait or Germany or Yokohama, saving the world.” A tear trickled from her eye, and she swiped angrily at it.
“So what the hell am I supposed to do now?”
“Live your life. It’s not our time, Mikey. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that this was the universe’s way of saying we’re not ready? Live your life, and I’ll live mine, and who knows? Maybe somewhere down the road, things will be different.”
His heart was breaking, shattering into a million pieces. And yet, somewhere inside him, there was a slender thread of what felt remarkably like relief. “I wish I could hate you,” he said, “the way you hated me. But I can’t.”
“I never hated you. I was in love with you, and you threw it back in my face.”
“I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it to save you.”
“I know that now.”
They sat, silent, both of them locked inside their thoughts. The waitress came by and left the check. “So,” he said hoarsely, “what now?”
Paige took a final sip of coffee and picked up the check. “Now,” she said, “we find a pay phone and we call my dad.”
Harley
When he rang the doorbell, Leroy started yapping. After a second, when Casey didn’t answer, he opened the door, stuck his head into the front hall, and shouted, “Hello? Anyone here?”
From the living room, she said, “In here.”
He ushered Annabel into the house ahead of him. While Leroy raced around them, sniffing excitedly, Annabel dropped her overnight bag on the floor and took off her boots. Harley followed suit, and with Leroy excitedly accompanying them, they entered the living room.
Casey was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, a blue plaid blanket resting across her legs.
“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really didn’t think it was necessary for Annabel to stay with me, but you know how Rob is.”
She put up a good front, but some things, she couldn’t fake. Her pale skin, her sunken eyes, told the real story. He wondered when she’d last slept for longer than a couple of hours. “No need for you to be alone,” he said. His mother had lost a baby when he was nine years old. She’d never said a word about it to him. That wasn’t her way. For Southern women in those days, babies were a private matter, and not something they discussed with the kids or the menfolk. But he would never forget the day he’d found her at the clothesline, on her knees beside the old wooden clothes basket. The image was forever branded in his mind of his mother kneeling there, laundry flapping around her, those chapped, callused hands covering her face as she sobbed, the low, agonized keening of a grieving mother.
“Annabel and I will do just fine,” Casey said. “Right, kiddo?”
“Right. Where’s Emma?”
“In her room. She’s due to get up from her nap any minute now. You can go up and get her if you want.”
His daughter scampered up the stairs, with Leroy at her heels, and he stood awkwardly, not sure what to say. He finally settled for silence. Crouching before her, he took her hand in his and just held it. A single tear escaped from her eye and trickled down her cheek. “Oh, Harley,” she said. “I wanted that baby so bad.”
“I know yo
u did, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. You need to cry. Let it out.”
With her free hand, she wiped away the tear. “I will. When I’m ready. The doctor said we could try again. It won’t be the same. I already loved that little baby. And I know, from firsthand experience, that you can’t replace one child with another one. There’s always room in your heart for another, but that doesn’t fill the empty place the lost one left behind.”
“My momma lost a baby when I was a boy. She had a houseful of kids, but that lost baby just about broke her heart.”
“Thank you. Thank you for loaning me Annabel, and for caring. You’re a good man, Harley Atkins.”
He kissed her hand and stood. “Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?”
“Yes,” she said. “There is. I need a favor.”
“Anything for you,” he said. “Anything at all.”
“Don’t give up on my sister. She has a big heart, she just hasn’t realized it yet. She needs somebody like you in her life. Somebody who’ll make her want to be a better person. I think you’re that somebody.”
As he walked down the flagstone walkway to his truck, he thought he could detect a change in the air. Something fragile, but burgeoning. It had been a warm day, and they’d lost a lot of snow. Pretty soon, there’d be daffodils poking their heads up through the soil. He’d already seen buckets hanging from maple trees around town. New beginnings. Maybe there was some new beginning waiting around the corner for him.
And for the first time in a long time, his heart swelled with hope.
Colleen
They took a private jet to Omaha, then rented a car. Beside her, Rob was silent as he drove. “Remember,” she told him, “she’s fragile right now. Don’t be too hard on her.”
“I want to spank her. And I want to hug her. I’m just not sure which one I want to do more. But Casey said something last night that made me think. She reminded me that she was just a year older than Paige is now when she eloped with Danny. I guess your perspective changes with time. And with parenthood.”
“That it does, my friend.”
He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “We are, aren’t we? Friends?”
“We are. And there’s nobody else I’d rather see my sister with.”
He took the highway exit, followed the two-lane blacktop road into the center of town. The Midtown Inn was on the left, just after the Chicken Coop restaurant. Rob clicked his blinker and pulled into the parking lot. They exited the car without speaking and headed together to Room 105. Rob rapped on the door, and Colleen took his hand. Squeezed and then released it. “Stay cool, brother-in-law,” she said.
The door swung open, and her son stood there, looking gutted. Without speaking, he swung the door wider, and she followed Rob inside.
Paige was sitting on the foot of the bed, dried tears streaking her face. “Daddy,” she said, and Rob folded her into his arms. They stood there, rocking back and forth, no need for words between them.
Colleen embraced her son. “I am so happy to see you,” she said. “We’ve been so worried.”
His eyes avoided hers. “Yeah, well, I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“No?” He met her eyes, and she was surprised by the hostility she saw in his. “Why should you care, anyway?”
Hurt, she said, “I’m your mother, Mikey. That’s why. When we get home, we’re having a long talk. There are things I need to tell you. Things I should have told you a long time ago.”
“I’m not going home.”
“What do you mean? Of course, you’re going home.”
“No. I’m really not. I enlisted in the Marines. I have to report to Camp Pendleton in five days.”
It took a moment for his words to register. Stunned, she met Rob’s eyes and saw her own shock reflected there. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would you do something like that?”
“Because I wanted to make something of myself! Because I hated every F-ing minute of college! Because I didn’t want to follow in Dad’s footsteps and become a goddamn teacher! Because I wanted to do something with my life that mattered!”
Colleen closed her eyes against the images in her head. Weren’t the Marines known for going boldly into tricky and treacherous situations? “I wish you’d talked to me first.”
“Why, Mom? Why should it even matter to you? I’ve never mattered to you. Why should you suddenly give a damn what I do?”
The pain in her chest cut like a shard of glass as years of pent-up anger unfurled and sparked, a match to sawdust, all smoke and flame and fury. Grimly, she said, “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”
“Oh? Don’t I? If you ever gave a damn, you wouldn’t have walked away from me.”
“I didn’t!” she snapped. “I didn’t walk away from you!”
“Funny, but I don’t seem to remember you being there.”
“I didn’t walk away, Mikey.” She took a deep breath to still her trembling. “Your father sent me away.”
His chest rose and fell with his heavy breathing. “Like I’m supposed to believe that.”
“It’s the truth.”
“You’re a liar. Do you hear me? You’re a goddamn liar. All you’re trying to do is make yourself look good and make Dad look bad. Well, guess what? You can just go to hell!”
He grabbed his coat and stormed out the door, slamming it behind him so hard that the ugly picture on the wall nearly fell. “Mikey!” she said. “Damn it, Mikey!”
“I’m sorry,” Paige said. “It’s not really you he’s mad at. It’s me.”
“Let him go,” Rob told her. “He needs to be alone.”
Colleen looked at her brother-in-law and shook her head. “No,” she said. “What he needs is the truth.”
She found him at the far end of the motel complex, sprawled on a wooden bench outside the laundry room, hands shoved in his pockets. She sat down beside him, stretched her legs out next to his. Said quietly, “I have been this family’s sacrificial lamb for way too long. But I’m done with the secrets and the lies. I’m not crazy enough to paint myself as a saint. Or as a victim. But I’m not a villain, either. This isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong. This is about facts, and truth, and opening the windows to let in the light.”
Reaching into the pocket of her jeans, she pulled out the chip she carried everywhere. She’d held it in her hands so many times, she’d worn it smooth. Mikey’s gaze followed it as she held it up, and he glanced quizzically at her. “It’s from AA,” she said. “My five years sober chip.” She flipped it to her son, and he caught it in midair. She took a deep breath and said, “Hi. I’m Colleen, and I’m an alcoholic.”
Mikey didn’t say a word. “It’s where I met Irv,” she said. “He was my sponsor.”
“I don’t understand.”
She raised her hand, scraped the hair back from her face, and said, “I fell in love with your father when I was twelve. We grew up together. But Jesse was four years older than me, and I was an awkward, gangly, long-legged twelve-year-old. If he thought of me at all, he thought of me as a younger sister. It was Casey he was interested in. He and my sister dated for four years. I spent those same four years worshiping him from afar, while planning her early demise.”
Mikey let out a soft snort, and she took it as a good sign. It meant he was listening. “I’d just about accepted the fact that he was going to marry my sister and become my brother-in-law when a miracle happened. My sister met Danny Fiore and eloped with him. That put Jesse back on the market. By that time, I was sixteen, and determined in the way that only a teenage girl can be. I did everything I could, used all my feminine wiles, pulled out all the stops, to make him mine. And it worked. I trapped him. At seventeen, I got pregnant on purpose. Your father, being the honorable guy he’s always been, made me his wife. And I, being seventeen and full of high-flown ideas about love and life and marriage, thought I’d just achieved everything I’d ever want.”
&
nbsp; She paused, saw that he was still listening. “There was just one problem. My new husband didn’t love me. He was too polite to say so, but I knew. A woman always knows. Our marriage was a disaster, but I was seventeen years old, and at seventeen, you tell yourself lots of pretty little lies. That it will work out. That things will change. That he’ll eventually come to love you.”
Mikey folded his arms across his chest. Cleared his throat. Said, “Is there a point to all this?”
“I’m getting to it. By the age of twenty, I was married to a man who didn’t love me, stuck at home with a two-year-old all day, and my life consisted of scrubbing toilets and folding diapers. I loved you more than anything, but I was so bored, so lonely, so damn miserable. So sometimes, on the weekends, I’d leave you with your dad and I’d go out with my girlfriends, and we’d party. That’s what everyone did in that one-stoplight town. There wasn’t anything else to occupy us, so the minute we were of legal drinking age, we partied.
“The other girls could drink, and it wasn’t a problem for them. But I couldn’t handle my liquor. I’d wake up the next day and have no memory of the night before. More than once, the girls brought me home and your father carried me upstairs and poured me into bed. I knew he didn’t approve, but he never said a word. If nothing else, he was a dutiful husband. He took care of me.
“Gradually, it got worse. I started drinking at home, during the day. Just a little, to take the edge off. To combat the boredom and the loneliness. At first, I drank to feel better. Then, I drank to feel normal. Eventually, I drank just so I could function. I hid it well. Nobody knew. Not even your dad, for the longest time. Until the little accidents started to happen. I fell and broke an arm. I knocked out a tooth and had to have it capped. By that time, I was drinking daily, and Jesse had figured out what was going on. We argued about it. I promised to quit. To get help. But I couldn’t keep my promise. I couldn’t quit. Once you started school, I’d open that bottle as soon as you got on the school bus. It was the only way I could function. I knew I was in trouble, but I didn’t know how to stop. Hell—” She paused, uttered a brittle laugh. “I might as well be honest. I didn’t want to stop. Instead, I became very, very careful. That’s what I called it, being careful. Because the words being careful roll off the tongue a lot more easily than sneaky and conniving. I was on a runaway train, careening down a mountainside without brakes, with nothing but catastrophe waiting for me at the end. Then, when you were nine years old, we went out in the car one afternoon. Just the two of us. I don’t even remember where we were headed. Maybe to the IGA, to buy a loaf of bread. Maybe to the library, to return an overdue book. I’d been drinking, and I crashed the car. Do you remember that?”
Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5 (Jackson Falls Series) Page 23