Healing Stones

by Nancy Rue

  “No—but—” She brought her voice down to conspiratorial level. “That nasty ginseng stuff makes me feel like I’m gonna throw up. Don’t tell my mom, though.”

  “Your secret’s safe with me.”

  “What are you two cooking up over there?” Mickey called from the table she was wiping down. “I don’t think it’s tea.”

  Audrey and I looked at each other and giggled. The moment I had a chance, I went into the bathroom and breathed hard until the tears were safely banished.

  Audrey was off at two. I was too, actually, but since I had no place to go, I stayed and sat on a stool in the kitchen, grinding Himalayan salt while Mickey prepped the afternoon’s goodies.

  “So,” Mickey said, “does my daughter have another new boyfriend?” I looked up from the salt grinder, but she already had her hand up to stop me from answering. “Sorry—I’m gonna go ahead and take my foot out of my mouth now. Whatever she’s told you, it was obviously in confidence. I wouldn’t know what that feels like, mind you. Oh—late customer.”

  She hurried out to the dining room, pad in hand.

  So—not so much with the mother/daughter relationship. That surprised me. I personally was almost ready to bare my soul to Mickey. I hadn’t met anybody that non-judgmental and intuitive since Mama Costanas.

  I stopped, hand full of salt crystals. What would my mother-in-law think of me now? Even the memory of her round, freckled, unwrinkled face cinched around me like a vise. I’d married a family as much as a man, led by a matriarch who would put her baggy arms around me, skin falling against me like panels of silk, and span the distance my own mother had enforced between herself and me.

  My mind clicked back to the Daily Bread kitchen, where Mickey had returned to unroll a blanket of dough. Mama Costanas would have words for me now. I couldn’t hear them. I could only hear myself cry.

  “I’ve been wondering when you were finally going to do that,” Mickey said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  I reached for a paper towel. She stopped me with the sharp pause of her hands on the dough. “Touch that and you draw back a nub.”

  “You’re paying me to work, not—”

  “Right now I’m paying you to sit there and bawl your eyes out and hopefully tell me what’s going on with you.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “You’ll think . . . I can’t.”

  “The way I see it, you can’t not.” She didn’t take her eyes off the almond butter she smoothed across another flat of dough. She still didn’t look at me as she rolled it into itself, a roll, a tuck, another gentle roll. “I’m going to go ahead and admit I know what’s going on down in that apartment.” Roll, tuck, smooth. “You’ve tried the pacing and the hand wringing and the forgetting to eat. Then came the hibernating. Now it’s put a cheerful face on the agony that’s ripping you up.”

  She used a tool like a triple pizza cutter to cut the roll into wraps, pecans peeking their faces out of the spirals. I cried on.

  “You think I’m losing it,” I said.

  “No—I think you’re doing everything you can to find it.” She picked up each roll and placed it firmly in the pocket of a muffin tin. “That’s the reason you ended up in our apartment and in our restaurant.”

  A sob bubbled from my nose.

  “Now you’re getting real.” Mickey slid the muffin pan into the oven, closed the door, and folded her floury hands onto her arms. “You’re here because this is part of you finding yourself.” She nodded at the cinnamon sticks hanging in bunches over her head. “It’s real here. You won’t find anything fake. Including yourself.”

  I leaned forward on the stool, into a fold. She caught me in her dusty arms, soft as the dough that was so much a part of her. I felt her hand on the back of my head, kneading and smoothing.

  “Talk to me, baby girl,” she said. “Anything you say in this kitchen will flow right through me and disappear into the atmosphere.” She held me closer until I melded to her touch, and I cried the loose, sweet, bubbling tears of a child.

  By the time the pecan rolls were done, I’d told Mickey Gwynne everything. And when I was through, she simply said, “Oh, sweet baby girl, I’m so sorry.”

  “Not half as sorry as I am,” I said.

  “No—now you listen to me.”

  She took my face in both hands, and I knew by then I must be as smeared with flour and sweetness as she was. “You’re a human being, and you made a mistake—”

  “A big mistake—”

  “And nobody wants to cut you a break. That’s what I’m sorry about.”

  Her softness loosened my tears again.

  “Good,” she said. “You’ve got it going now—and I don’t think you should stop.”

  “I can’t feel sorry for myself,” I said.

  “Then let me. Let me be the one who gets that not one single person in your life is seeing you as a hurting woman who made a bad choice—like every other human being has.” Mickey dug her thumb into her chest. The elfin face held firm, as if an edict were being handed down from a miniature throne of wisdom. “You said you’re seeing a therapist?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Go to him—her—whoever—when you need to drag yourself through your stuff. You pray, right?”

  I closed my eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “Are you saying, ‘Please, God’?”

  “That’s about all.”

  “You’re praying. Go to God when you don’t know what to do with yourself. But, hey—” She touched my cheek. “When you just need to be a baby girl and pitch the fit you have coming to you because nobody will forgive you—come here—to me. I don’t care if you spend all day crying while you’re chopping nuts and doing dishes. I’ll come through and tell you it’s okay to keep crying. And—”

  She put up a finger and turned to the muffin tin. She scooped up a wrap, happily spilling out its pecans and brown sugar from the smile of a fold, and cradled it in her hands before me. “And there will always, always be a cookie. Doesn’t get any better than that.”

  I pressed it to my lips. At the moment, it truly didn’t.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Sully couldn’t get Demitria Costanas out of his mind.

  Even four days after their session, when he was engrossed in finding out why Isabella’s engine wouldn’t turn over and had pulled the Impala’s distributor, all he could think about was Demi, looking as mournful and slender as the thing in his hand with its connectors draping down in exile from where they belonged.

  “What’s up with you?” he said to them. “What’s the disconnect?”

  The hole he peered down into made him wonder about the places deep in her soul. When he took off the distributor cap and saw its crusted-down shape condition, he couldn’t help wondering what lie she’d told herself that had brought her life to a freezing halt. When he saw her stuck in the gummed-up carburetor he disassembled on the table, he called it quits for the day.

  Holy crow, you’re obsessing, he told himself. Get outta here and—he grinned as he wiped his hands on a rag—go obsess about something else.

  Ethan Kaye’s situation provided the obvious next choice. They’d had lunch Wednesday, and Ethan ate what Sully considered to be a pathetic portion of the rack of ribs they shared at Metzel’s, a clear signal he was brooding. That and the straight line that dug deeper than ever between his eyebrows.

  “Jackals still after you?” Sully said.

  Ethan nodded. “St. Clair hired an interim professor to replace Demi—the man looked qualified on paper, but he’s completely obsessed with the Apocalypse. Granted, that’ll lend itself to spiritual discussion, but he has the students making a timeline from the Book of Revelation.”

  Sully half grinned. “You’re not serious.”

  “Oh, I’m serious as a heart attack.”

  “What about Wyatt Estes?” Sully said. “Heard any more from him?”

  Ethan took to cleaning a miniscule speck of barbecue sauce from under his fingernail. “Are
you sure this isn’t crossing some kind of line for you—since you’re seeing Demi as a client now?”

  “I’ve thought about that.” Sully sucked on a bare rib and set it on his plate. “A—I’m not planning to break any cardinal rules, but my situation with Demi isn’t exactly conventional. The lines are a little blurred. And—B—my interest in Wyatt Estes is for you, Ethan, not Demi.”

  Ethan gave him a long look. “I’m going to leave the ethics to you, then. You know what you’re doing.”

  “On a good day, yeah.” Sully grinned. “So—what about Wyatt?”

  “I still can’t figure that one out. I know he wants the college turned legalistic, which is going to mean getting me out of there. But a man of his standing in the community—I can’t imagine him being involved in that picture-taking thing.”

  “You mean with Demi and—what’s his name—Archery Boy?”

  Ethan’s eyebrows knit together. “Archer.” He gave Sully a closer look. “I guess my opinion of Dr. Archer has rubbed off on you.”

  That and the state Demi Costanas was in. Where was this guy who’d convinced that woman to risk tearing her life apart? But now that Demi was his client, he couldn’t go there with Ethan.

  “Anyway,” Ethan said, “that still mystifies me. It seems like—”

  “I know—we need to know where those pictures came from. I’d like to see what I can find out.”

  Ethan sat back. “You’re really going to play detective, on top of rebuilding an old car and seeing Demi because I asked you to? I didn’t mean for you to spend two-thirds of your time up here on my problems. You came to deal with your own.”

  Sully skirted that one. “I don’t know how much good it’ll do, but I’m going to start looking up photographers—see if I can’t get a feel for who might have snapped the pictures. It would have to be a certain type.” He licked his lips dryly. “Something from the sleaze-ball category.”

  “Whatever you can find out, I’ll appreciate.”

  So on Thursday Sully closed up the garage and went in search of sleazeball photographers. Callow seemed like the appropriate place to start, seeing how the Laundromat across the street had been robbed twice since he’d moved in and the coffee shop around the corner was either a drug drop or merely a breeding ground for ptomaine.

  It was obvious as he headed down the sidewalk on Callow Avenue, the main thoroughfare, that this had been a nice little American town at one point—the kind where people lived their whole lives getting their cuts of meat from the same butcher and being baptized, married, and buried in the same church.

  There were no photographers, and he was about to turn down a side street when he found himself in front of a business that was obviously still a going concern.

  MCGAVOCK’S BAKERY, the pink sign said. SINCE 1942.

  Sully hadn’t seen an establishment like that since he was a kid in Birmingham. Two large display windows were lined with paper doilies and still offered the remains of the day’s baking. Letters painted across the glass read HOME OF THE FAMOUS PINK CHAMPAGNE CAKE.

  The thought made Sully’s teeth ache. Holy crow—it sounded like a recipe for diabetes. He was about to pass when something else caught his eye.

  A girl behind the counter was dropping oversized cookies into a bag and remaining so otherwise motionless in the act that even the string-of-beads earrings that dangled nearly to her shoulders swayed only slightly. Sully peered shamelessly through the window. Ethan, he decided, had used the word detective too lightly.

  The door opened, letting out a wizened old lady who was fairly pink herself and had, in Sully’s mind, probably been buying her cookies there since the grand opening. He slipped inside and watched Counter Girl as she returned the tray of cookies to their case between a display of rum pudding cakes and several flats of plastic-looking petit fours. She looked up at him, and the eyes cinched it. Nobody else had those wide, blue, sardonic eyes with the gold flecks. This was the girl from the Estes auction.

  “Can I help you?” she said, though Sully sensed that she wanted to suggest he either take a picture, which would last longer, or move on. But as she looked at him, recognition seemed to flicker. She didn’t exactly smile—but she didn’t look unhappy to see him.

  “So,” she said, “how’s your car? Don’t tell me you drove it over here?”

  She looked out the window, a bemused look on her face. She obviously had no expectation of seeing the Impala out there at the curb, probably ever.

  “She’s not ready to be unveiled yet,” Sully said. “So can I ask—”

  “What I’m doing working here when I’m an Estes?”

  Sully didn’t try to hide his surprise.

  “You know you want to know.”

  “Okay.” Sully leaned on the counter. “What are you doing working here when you’re an Estes?”

  “Actually I’m not technically an Estes. I’m a Farris.”

  “Do you have a first name?” Sully said.

  She straightened the pink apron she wore over the same-colored T-shirt. Sully was sure it wasn’t a hue she’d chosen.

  “Have we established you’re not trying to pick me up?” she said.

  “Oh, yeah—we got that straight at the auction.”

  “Then it’s Tatum.”

  “What is?”

  “My first name. And I’m here because I want nothing to do with being an Estes at this point in my life. You want to try the pink champagne cake or what?”

  Sully had to grin. He was used to being the one who made everyone else’s head spin. She had his in a mixing bowl and was going at it with an eggbeater.

  “Sure, I’ll try a piece.” His stomach gave a warning gurgle.

  She sliced into a pink concoction that sat up on a cake pedestal like a cotton candy castle dotted with icing puffs. As it fell onto the plate, Sully’s worst fear was realized: pink inside too. It would match the Pepto-Bismol he was going to have to take later.

  “So—do you want a cup of coffee, or are you going to try to gag it down dry?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She leveled those eyes at him. “You look like you’re about to taste the hemlock. It’s just cake.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  The only thing making it worthwhile was the possibility of finding something out about Wyatt Estes.

  Halfway into his second piece, he knew that Wyatt was Tatum’s uncle, her mother’s brother, and that he—more than anyone since his grandfather—had been responsible for building the sizable Estes financial empire in Kitsap County.

  “So I take it your working here is part of a family feud,” Sully said. He was having trouble resisting a plunge into Game Show Theology. That thing that simmered beneath her surface fascinated him.

  “Sort of,” she said.

  Sully pretended to enjoy his next mouthful and waited.

  “It has its benefits and drawbacks,” she said. “Right now I’m the one doing the drawing back.”

  “Well put,” Sully said.

  “Oh yeah, I’m positively eloquent.”

  “Not to mention humble.”

  “Whatever.” Tatum took the empty plate he pushed toward her. “You know,” she said, “I’m not sure why I just told you all that.”

  “Because I’m new in town and I wanted to know who the movers and shakers are around here, and you were nice enough to tell me.”

  “Like you so care about movers and shakers,” she said. “You live in Callow and own a thirty-year-old car.”

  “Don’t let her hear you say that,” Sully said. “She’s sensitive about her age.”

  “Okay,” Tatum said.

  “Now I heard . . .” he said as he dug for his wallet to pay for the punishment that surged up his esophagus. “I heard that Wyatt Estes gives a bunch of money to that college—what is it—Covenant Christian? Is he a major donor?”

  She didn’t miss a beat taking his money, poking numbers into the cash register, handing him his change. But when her blue eyes me
t his again, the gold in them had hardened.

  “I wouldn’t know about that,” she said. “Look, I need to get back to work.”

  She didn’t wait for Sully to leave before she disappeared into the back room.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I checked myself in the rearview mirror before I left the car in the driveway. My eyebrows were tweezed, but I hadn’t used pencil. I went for groomed but not made up in the way Rich always said looked like a girl had been run through a floor polisher. I couldn’t get the whole view of my face, but I could see that my bangs wisped over my forehead— deliberately careless—and my lips were smooth but not goopy. Rich would never kiss me when I was wearing lipstick.

  “Like there’s the remotest chance he’s going to kiss me today,” I said to them.

  Or maybe ever. The thought tore a path right through my stomach, over and over. That was why I’d chosen to come to the house to get a picture of myself as a kid at a time when Rich would be getting up and, once again, the kids wouldn’t be there. Although I was beginning to wonder if Christopher had somehow had a chip installed in me so he could track my every move and show up whenever I tried to finagle a moment with his father.

  I climbed out of the Jeep and surveyed myself one final time in the side mirror. Between the dots of drizzle was the whole me, and to my own surprise, I didn’t cut as pathetic a figure as I felt like inside. That was due in part to my kitchen crying sessions with Mickey.

  I’d spent the last two afternoons, between lunch and the tea crowd, weeping shamelessly while she produced chocolate saveur. Make that weeping, wailing, and gnashing my teeth. She nodded and sifted and grated and passed me a cookie every now and then.

  I let myself into the house and decided that the fact that Rich hadn’t had the locks changed was a good sign. So was the fact that Christopher wasn’t there.

  But Rich wasn’t home either, which surprised me. He should just be getting up, having a cup of coffee, turning on the TV, scratching his armpits like he always did for the first hour after he climbed out of bed. It ached in me that I knew him that well.

  But the coffeepot was cold, and his bed hadn’t been slept in. When I heard the Harley roar up the driveway, I found myself hurrying out of the bedroom—our bedroom—as if I didn’t belong there.