Crooked Little Lies

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  But in Lauren’s estimation, too late wasn’t so easily defined; it wasn’t a place you could point to and say, there, that’s the one—the exact moment when ordinary life ended and the nightmare began. In hindsight, as hard as she would search for it, Lauren would never find that precise moment, the one where, if only she’d realized the nature of the calamity that was taking shape, she might have done something, acted in some way to prevent it, a way that would have kept them all safe.

  2

  The trouble with life, as far as Annie Beauchamp was concerned, was that it never gave you a clue about what was coming. When a terrible thing happened, life just charged at you, running full out, clobbering you, usually from behind. You were down then. You were left sick in your stomach and broken in your heart, trying to pick up your wits, your scattered pieces, and when you looked back, you saw that you didn’t have a clue, not one inkling.

  That’s how it was when her dad walked out on her and her mom, when Annie was three, and that’s how it was when her mom died late on a Saturday night in April two years ago, in a car accident, and that’s how it was on that Friday morning in October, when she went to Madeleine’s, the café where she worked as a waitress, only she didn’t know it yet.

  Anne didn’t suffer a single pang of prescience when Madeleine came out of the kitchen after the lunch rush to ask about Bo—would Annie call and see if he could come in and work the dinner shift? Madeleine often employed Bo to bus tables and wash dishes. Plus he was a pretty good prep chef when he was on his meds.

  Annie said she’d try to find him, and setting down the sugar shaker she was refilling, she pulled her cell phone out of her apron pocket, thinking, as she always did, of how kind Madeleine was. Thinking Bo better have his phone on—he often didn’t—and agree to come in and help Madeleine out or she’d kill him. But he didn’t answer, and when she called his dad, who was her stepdad, although she’d never called him anything other than JT, JT said he hadn’t seen or heard from Bo in a week.

  “So, how are you? What have you been up to?” Annie asked. JT hadn’t set eyes on her in more than a month, but she didn’t expect him to comment on it or to ask how she was. They’d drifted apart after her mom died.

  “Oh, you know, the usual,” JT answered, which meant work, home, beer, frozen dinner in front of the TV, and bed, in that order. Get up tomorrow, do it all over again. Once Annie had asked her mom what she saw in JT, and her mom had said he was regular, as regular as the six o’clock news. She could count on him to work, to bring home his pay, to have dinner with her at home and stay there, plus he was kind. Unlike Annie’s dad, she meant. Who knew where that guy was?

  Annie told JT maybe he and Bo could come to the café and have dinner one day soon, get the family together, such as it was. That was how good she was at predicting the future, how good she was at planning for it.

  “Yeah,” JT said. “Sure thing, kiddo. We’ll do that, maybe next week.”

  Annie hung up. He hadn’t expressed any concern about Bo. But she almost never worried about her stepbrother, either. She knew his ways and his places and how he could get distracted. She ducked her head into the kitchen and told Madeleine she hadn’t found him yet, but she’d keep trying. Madeleine nodded, as unperturbed as Annie.

  She said, “You’ll be here early tomorrow, do your baking.”

  It was a command, but after a year and a half working at the café, Annie was used to the older woman’s brusque manner. In fact, she’d come to appreciate it. There was never any doubt where you stood with Madeleine, and underneath, her heart was softer than warm butter on a summer day anyway. Who else would keep a job open for Bo? He was in high school when Madeleine first hired him, more reliable and less crazy acting, but every year since then, he’d lost a little more ground to some world he conjured in his head.

  Annie handled his money when he would let her have it. She paid his bills, and like JT, she kept a bedroom for him in her house, although he preferred living on the street. Living free, he called it. Living close to nature. He only carried the cell phone she’d given him, because she insisted. He didn’t want electronic gadgets, not even a TV; he couldn’t watch it. The moving pictures and voices alarmed him. He didn’t need a bed, either. He didn’t sleep that much. Mostly, he walked. And walked. And wrote things down in a small notepad he kept in his shirt pocket. He was like Thoreau, he’d say. You ever heard of him? he’d ask. Annie didn’t know why he walked so much. Not exactly. But when he did, he was determined. At twenty-three, he appeared more certain of his direction in life than she was at twenty-seven. Annie told herself that in his time, people had said Thoreau was nuts, too, and a fanatic.

  There were days Bo showed up out of the blue on her front porch at dawn, or at noon or two in the morning, holding a fistful of bedraggled flowers, weeds he’d pulled up roots and all from the roadside, or a wilted bouquet he’d found in someone’s trash. There were other days more recently when he’d passed her on the street as if he didn’t know her. Annie fed him and kept track of him as best she could, when he allowed it. It’s what her mother had done, even though Bo wasn’t hers; she had watched over him for the seventeen years she’d been married to Bo’s dad. Annie thought her mom had cared more for Bo’s well-being than JT did. Not that JT’s neglect was intentional. It was just that as Bo drifted further into his own world, JT seemed less able to relate to him, to be with him and look after him. So Annie had assumed the responsibility because someone had to. Someone should care.

  She left the café by the back door and headed to her car, a battered 1983 BMW that had belonged to her mom, that her mom had bought used, that, as of right this minute, had some 322,000 miles on the odometer. Every day, Annie wondered how much longer it could last. She hated how much she relied on the car and how grateful she was for a thing she had only because her mom had died.

  Annie unlocked the BMW’s door, and while she waited for the heat to disperse, Carol Fisher pulled her truck into the adjacent space. Carol’s truck was possibly older and more battered than Annie’s car. Plus it didn’t have a lick of paint on it. But Carol couldn’t care less. She waited tables at Madeleine’s, too, and she’d laugh if anyone—one of their regular diners, say—made a joke about it. “Hey, it’s paid for, asshole,” she’d joke.

  Annie loved her; she loved the way Carol went through life as if it were a joy, a big adventure. She and her husband, Leonard—Len, Carol called him—and four grown sons, who with one exception had stayed in Hardys Walk, owned Fisher and Sons Organic Farm, where they raised livestock, vegetables, and feed crops, all of it grown the natural, organic way. Madeleine bought from the Fishers, a lot of people did. Sometimes the very same people who’d say there wasn’t any money in farming, especially farming like the Fishers did it. If Carol heard them, she’d laugh her big, infectious laugh and agree they were right, there sure wasn’t much money in it. Just one hell of a lot of satisfaction, she’d say. Satisfaction and contentment. Annie envied that.

  How do you get there? she would ask. She wanted so badly to know. But no one could tell her, not even Carol. You just do it, she said. It’s easy, she said. Honey, you can get happy in the same shoes you get sad in, she said. Trust me.

  The truck door slammed, and Annie waited for Carol to come into view. Ordinarily, Monday through Thursday, Carol arrived before the lunch crowd and worked through dinner until closing, but today, she’d had a doctor’s appointment.

  “Hey,” Annie said as Carol rounded the tailgate.

  “Hey, yourself.” Carol stowed her keys in her purse. “You on your way out to the farm? Len’s got your order. I told him to set some pumpkins aside.”

  “The Small Sugars?” It was the only variety Annie would use in her pumpkin muffins, which had made her semifamous. She wasn’t sure how it happened that she’d become the café’s designated baker. Madeleine and Carol—everyone, actually—assumed Annie loved it, but Annie didn’t know that s
he did. She would only go so far as to say she didn’t mind baking, any of it, except the hours, which were horrible. Annie was at work, up to her elbows in flour before the birds sang a single note, every morning except Sunday when the café was closed. Madeleine was old-school. She said the Lord was on to something good when he’d declared Sunday a day of rest. Madeleine said just because you can do a thing like stay open and work seven days a week doesn’t mean you should.

  Madeleine also said baking gave Annie’s life purpose and direction, but Annie wasn’t so sure of that, either. She looked at Carol. “You didn’t happen to see Bo on your way here, did you?”

  “No, is he MIA again?”

  “Off on one of his treks, I guess. Or maybe at the library.” Annie remembered the time a year or so ago when the library had been closed and locked with Bo inside it all night. He hadn’t even noticed. They’d found him the next morning, asleep in the aisle between books on philosophy and astrology, with something by Carl Sagan in his hand. He’d repeated passages from it for weeks afterward, so frequently Annie had thought she would go insane. She could still, if called on, repeat them herself. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” If Bo said it once, he’d said it a thousand times. Annie wasn’t sure of the meaning, even after he tried explaining it. She remembered him saying the quote reminded him of her, of her love of baking.

  “But I don’t know if I love baking,” she argued.

  “You’ll learn to,” he said, “if you do it long enough. You need something in your life to love.” Someone, he had added. He meant not only her mother. That was impossible, though. No one else would ever be as constant or as tender as her mother. No one would ever care so much about her. Annie had thought when her mom died, long before Annie was ready to let her go, that she would die, too. But she hadn’t.

  She met Carol’s gaze now. “I’ll go by the library on my way out to the farm. He’s probably buried in the stacks.”

  “Driving everyone nuts,” Carol said.

  “Yeah,” Annie said. There were folks in town who went out of their way to avoid Bo. They ignored him, pretending he was invisible, and there were others who tolerated and looked out for him, but they also got exasperated with him, the way he would pace and talk incessantly or not answer them at all. At the library, he could make a pest of himself, given the way he would wander the aisles, repeating himself, quoting whole passages from memory hour after hour. He pulled books off the shelves, too, but the librarians had somehow managed to train him to put them back. Otherwise, Annie was certain they would bar him from the premises.

  “You called JT?” Carol asked.

  “He hasn’t seen him.” Annie settled into the BMW, slammed the door, started the engine, and a part of her brain did register a funny hiccup, one she’d not heard before, but she ignored it. Lowering her window, she said, “I’ll see you later.”

  Carol waved. “Call me if you find Bo.”

  Annie said she would. She didn’t give it a second thought, that Carol had said if and not when.

  3

  Hey, you.”

  Lauren felt Jeff sit beside her on the edge of the bed. She felt his palm, cool on her cheek, felt him tuck strands of her hair behind her ear, and his tenderness surprised her. He hadn’t touched her, not in days, perhaps weeks. She couldn’t pinpoint exactly when the shift away from her had taken place. It was possible she imagined it, his aloofness and the increasing strain between them. It seemed to her that her thoughts, the impressions her mind seized on were like sand castles, built and destroyed at the whim of some mental tide that seemed beyond her control, even her understanding. But his closeness now opened an ache inside her, as if her body recognized some nurturing touch it had been missing.

  “How’s your head?” he asked. “Still hurting?”

  “I’m really sorry,” she said as if the pain were her fault. The headaches were part of the raft of symptoms that continued to plague her in the wake of the accident. They weren’t migraines, per se. She didn’t have the visual anomalies that often went along with those, nor did she suffer from nausea, but they still packed a punch that could level her.

  “What have you taken?”

  Of course Jeff wanted to know. It was only natural, given her history.

  “Just what Dr. Bettinger gave me.” Lauren couldn’t remember the name of it. She did remember that when she’d voiced her concern, he informed her he was fully aware of her situation and what he was prescribing was non-narcotic. He’d given her an affronted look. Maybe it was ridiculous to think a doctor would prescribe addictive drugs to a recovering addict. Still, she didn’t like Dr. Bettinger much. His demeanor was as cold as his hands.

  Lauren missed Margaret. Her hands when she examined Lauren had always been warm. Even when Lauren was a tiny girl, Margaret had run warm water over the disk of her stethoscope before putting it on Lauren’s chest. But Margaret had been more than Lauren’s doctor; she had also been her godmother and the one who kept Lauren together and functioning when her parents died suddenly, before Lauren finished college. Margaret had often said in the days following the accident that Lauren was brave. Holding Lauren through the hours of pain, she had whispered into Lauren’s ear, I think you are so very brave.

  It wasn’t true, but when Margaret said it, Lauren had almost believed it.

  Jeff left the bed, went into the bathroom, and came back with a cloth dampened with cold water. She settled it over her eyes. “If this keeps on, I don’t think I’ll be much use at the farm.”

  “I doubt you could stand the ride in the shape you’re in.”

  Lauren heard the sound of drawers opening, and lifting the cloth from her eyes, she saw that he was stuffing a canvas bag with socks and underwear, his shaving kit. “You’re going?” She had hoped he wouldn’t, that her headache would serve to delay the whole process.

  He zipped the tote. “We’ve got to get the property on the market. You know that.”

  “So you keep telling me, but I don’t know why you won’t at least consider selling this house. It’s worth more. We could buy a smaller house or a condo. We’d save so much more than just the mortgage payment—all the fees and just trying to keep up the yard and—”

  “How can you want to coop us up like that? Do you really want to listen to the neighbors flush their toilets? Do you want to fight some jerk next door when his TV’s on too loud?”

  “Then why not live at the farm? It’s only until we’re back on our feet.”

  “Lauren, for Christ’s sake, we’ve discussed this a hundred times. You want me to drive a hundred sixty miles a day to work? You want the kids in some Podunk school? The academics in those country-school systems suck, and don’t even get me started on their athletic programs.”

  “C’mon, Jeff. You don’t know anything about the schools up there.” Lauren rose on an elbow, wincing at the pain that arced across her brain.

  “I know what it takes to get recognition, to make a name for yourself, to earn respect. I know college athletic scouts don’t generally mess with 3A programs.”

  “That’s assuming Drew wants to be scouted, that he’s good enough at football to be given a scholarship.”

  “Oh, that’s nice, Lauren. I love how you have faith in him.”

  “He’s not you, and you aren’t your dad. You aren’t going to make news fodder out of your life or Drew’s the way your dad did with all that ‘Wilder the Wildman’ foolishness, and I thank God for that. You’re a good dad, Jeff, a better dad.”

  He sighed. “Look, Drew’s a good player on his own. He deserves whatever chance I can give him.”

  “Assuming his grades come up enough for him to play again.”

  “He’s already brought them up, and now that you’re better and things are getting back to normal, I know they’ll stay that way.”

  “But even so, he’s not
the big football hero, the star quarterback you were. He doesn’t crave playing like you did. I’ve heard you say it, that he doesn’t have the same fire in his belly.” Lauren lay back. It was an old argument, one she had less and less energy for.

  “How’s he going to go to a decent college without a scholarship? It’s only four years until he graduates. What do you think I’m going to do, pull the money out of a fucking hat?” Jeff sounded more perplexed than angry.

  Still, Lauren was annoyed. “There are grants, loans we can apply for.”

  The silence that came was battered yet familiar, a recurrent injury that, unlike her physical injuries, didn’t seem inclined to heal.

  “It’s not shameful to need help, Jeff. It doesn’t make you a failure.”

  He broke their gaze, wiping his hands down his face, blowing out his breath.

  “Jeff?”

  “You just don’t know.”

  “Well, if I don’t, it’s because you won’t tell me. I’m not an invalid or incompetent. I’m your partner. We’re equal, and that means I take my share of whatever load of bad news it is that you’re carrying.”

  The look he shot her was resigned. “Let’s not do this, okay? We’re both under a lot of pressure. Let’s just get the farm sold, then we can talk about what’s next.”

  “I don’t understand the rush.”

  “The decision’s been made. What’s the point of waiting?”

  She shifted her glance.

  “C’mon, babe. Let me handle it, and I’m not saying that because I don’t feel you’re competent. I just want the life we had. I want it to be good again. Like it was.”

  Before the accident, he meant. BTA.

  “I’m damned if I’ll give up. I’ve worked too hard.”