by Cimms, Karen
“Hopping, huh?”
“Absolutely hopping.”
She poked at her salad and thought about what he said. He didn’t prod her to talk. After a while, the silence felt strangely comfortable.
When the waiter returned, Jeff apologized and asked him to clear the third place setting. They talked all through dinner and dessert, and by the time they had finished their coffee, they were the only ones left on the deck. When Jeff motioned for the check, the waiter informed them it had already been paid.
“He’s a piece of work, isn’t he?” she asked, shaking her head.
He grinned. “That’s my dad.”
“You’re lucky. You know that, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I do.”
“My father grudgingly accepted the role but never embraced it. My mother, in her own special way, made me rue the day I was conceived.”
She was touched by the honesty of his grimace.
“And my husband, whose parents were far worse than mine, did his best, but he had no idea how to be a father. He spoiled the first one and often treated the second like some alien life form.” She folded her napkin and rested it alongside her empty coffee cup. “Then there’s me. I tried so hard not to be my parents that I hovered over my kids until I drove them both crazy. My daughter probably hates me, and my son most likely hates his father because of me. It’s such a mess—and that, believe it or not, is the least of it. I’m not getting any Mother of the Year awards for having disappeared without telling anyone where I was going or even that I was going.”
To his credit, Jeff just listened. He didn’t offer advice, and he didn’t try to fix anything.
When they got back to the house, she invited him in for coffee. They sat on the deck overlooking the cove. The moon, high in the sky now, cast a beam of yellow across the water. It had been a beautiful day and other than a few bumps, a beautiful evening. She felt uncharacteristically unburdened. Her work with Liz was going well, but that was different. It was work. It was hard, soul-searching, gut-wrenching, let’s-get-to-the-bottom-of-this-and-fix-it work. But tonight felt as if her heart had been a piece of furniture in a closed-up house, and Jeff had come along, thrown open the windows, pulled off the dust cover, and exposed her to the light.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kate was growing stronger. Not only was Liz helping her get a handle on her post-traumatic stress disorder, but they were tackling the pain of her childhood. She wasn’t responsible for her mother’s unhappiness and disappointment. It was an unfair burden, and she was trying let it go. She was even learning to let go of the guilt she carried from the shooting.
To believe that she was a valuable person worthy of love no longer seemed a concept out of her reach. Figuring out how to fix her relationship with her children still loomed, but she had to believe she’d get there eventually. Tackling what Billy had done? Despite what Liz said, that might be something she would never be able to deal with.
In the meantime, her new family, as she had come to think of Jeff and Harold, was making her feel at home and more settled than she’d felt in the months before Harold showed up on her doorstep. Jeff would often come up from his parish in Ogunquit on Tuesdays, his day off. He would call the evening before, and they’d make plans to go out on the boat if the weather was nice.
Even though being out in public places still caused her palms to sweat and her pulse to quicken, at least at first, they’d sometimes go shopping at the Maine Mall or in the Old Port. It was difficult, but she was learning coping mechanisms for high-anxiety situations. Jeff even talked her into going to the movies. It was almost like dating but without the awkward good night at the door—or the danger of having to get her heart back from the man who still possessed it.
Baby steps.
Despite that improvement, she wasn’t so sure she was ready when Tom called to tell her he’d heard back from the private investigator. She gripped the phone tightly, prepared for the worst.
“Well?”
“It’s not what you thought. Not even close.”
“So you’re about to tell me Billy’s been donating fifteen hundred dollars a month for the past twenty years to an orphanage in Houston?”
“Not exactly. He doesn’t have another kid. And it’s not going to an old girlfriend, either.”
“A new girlfriend?” She was being glib, when what she really wanted to do was throw up.
“No, but you still won’t like it.” She heard him shifting restlessly on the other end. “Jessie Jones is his mother.”
She slumped against the kitchen counter. “What?”
“Jessie Jones is his mother.”
“No, she’s not! What the hell kind of detective did you hire? His mother’s name is Janet Donaldson. Or at least it was.” Despair washed over her. This detective had gone on a wild goose chase and come back with a duck.
“No, Kate. It’s her. She’s been blackmailing Billy all this time.”
“What the hell? How did he—”
“Jessie Jones is her stage name. She claims to be a singer. The detective tracked her down at a bar not far from the address where Billy’s been sending the checks for the past few years. All it cost him was a few drinks, and she sang like a canary.”
If the topic hadn’t been so serious, she would have laughed at him for adopting the lingo of a mobster. Instead, she told him to go on.
“The more she drank, the more she talked. Turns out Billy has been paying her so she and his father would stay away from you and the kids.”
Her jaw unhinged. “What?”
“That’s right. Blackmail. What our guy was able to piece together was that Janet showed up not long after Billy won his Grammy. Said she even met you once. Do you remember?”
Of course she remembered. A couple of months after Devin was born, Janet had approached Kate at a park near their apartment, although she’d lied about who she was. Billy had shown up a few minutes later and, visibly shaken, had whisked Kate and the kids away. At home, he’d told her who the stranger was, and later that night, he’d told her how she had abandoned him after his father had been run off by his grandfather. She’d chosen her husband over her son. The last time he’d seen her, she’d conned him out of his college money and the small inheritance he’d received from his grandparents.
“I do remember. But after that day, we never heard from her again.”
“You never heard from her. That’s because Billy told her to stay away. She agreed, for a price. She told the detective all she wanted was the money, anyway—she’s not the grandma type, she told him. She said whenever Billy tried to cut back or weasel out of paying, she’d offer to fly north with his father and pay you all a visit the next time he was on the road.”
This was unbelievable.
“You still there?”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t make sense. Was he afraid she was going to tell me something he didn’t want me to know?”
“I don’t think so. It sounds like he just didn’t want her or his father in his life, and he was willing to pay to keep them away.”
“Why not just tell me? Good lord. I did everything else he asked of me for twenty-four years. Why was this different?”
“As hard as this might be to believe, Janet told the detective Billy is afraid of his father—still. That’s why he’s been willing to send checks every month since 1991. They started at five hundred dollars and went up from there.”
She couldn’t wrap her head around any of it. “Billy isn’t afraid of anyone, Tommy.” The more she tried to work it through, the more confusing it became. “Maybe he’s just trying to help her out. She’s his mother, after all. Maybe he just didn’t want me to know, although I’d never begrudge him helping his family. But to lie about it? Okay, not a lie—but an omission is almost a lie.”
Most of her fights with Billy had been about money. For someone who often made good money, he had been extremely frugal. Not to mention secretive. Kate had no access to their checking account and no i
dea how much money he made. It had been an issue throughout their marriage.
“I wonder if this is why we never took fancy vacations or bought expensive things,” she mused, “because he always had to make sure he had money to give to her.”
“Without asking him, you may never know.”
Kate’s eyes roamed across the blue summer sky outside the window, unfocused. Actually, that wasn’t true. Maybe there was another way.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Kate stuck the scrap of paper on the refrigerator with a magnet from a sandwich shop in Yarmouth: Jessie Jones, 1955 Beechnut Street, Houston, Texas
According to her calculations, Billy had easily given his mother over $180,000 over the years. It was mind-boggling. The more she thought about it, the angrier she got. She thought of all the fights, especially the ones about money.
One particularly ugly fight came to mind from about eight years ago. Billy had quit touring to focus on his own band again, but there was no money coming in. Nothing was going his way, and naturally, Kate had been getting the brunt of it.
It all escalated when she came back from the grocery store one afternoon empty-handed because her debit card had been declined.
“Do you know how humiliating that was?” She was furious not only for looking like an idiot at the SuperFresh but for wasting the time it took to do the damn shopping in the first place, and then knowing she’d have to turn around and do it all over again. She was sick of never knowing how much money was in their bank account, and she was fed up at his refusal to discuss finances with her.
“I’m sorry,” he’d said, but he seemed more annoyed than sorry. “I’ll transfer money into the household account now, and you can go back and get your groceries.”
“My groceries? Oh, hell no. You go. I already wasted two hours. I have to figure out something to feed Devin for dinner now and get him to basketball practice by six thirty.”
He gave her a look. “I’m not going to the store.” He acted as if she’d not only asked him to do the grocery shopping but to do it wearing a sundress with a flower in his hair.
“Well, one of us has to go, and it isn’t going to be me.”
He slammed his fist onto the counter. “Jesus, Kate. You know I’m under a lot of stress right now.”
“And I’m not? I just waited in a long line with people I’ve known most of my life, only to be told my card was rejected. I could hear the whispers starting behind me before I even knew what was happening. Do you know what people must think?”
“I don’t give a fuck what they think.”
“Well, I do. I’m the one who sees these people every day. I’m the one who lives here.”
He glared down at her. “I don’t live here?”
She snorted. “Hardly. And now you’re trying to go back on the road, which means you’ll be around even less.” She threw her purse on the dining room table so hard it slid off the other side, dumping its contents all over the floor.
“I’m so tired of this.” Now that the horse was out of the barn, she couldn’t stop it from running away with her. “I’m tired of always being alone. I’m tired of being a single parent. I’m tired of never having any fucking money. For someone who’s supposed to be a goddamn rock star, we never have any fucking money, and I’m sick of it. The house is falling down around our ears, and you just sit there and play your guitar like you’re fucking Nero.”
The ice in his blue-gray eyes matched the tone of his voice. “The house was falling down before we moved in. If you’ll remember correctly, I didn’t even want to move into this fucking house. I bought it for you. I hate this fucking place.”
She wheeled around, ready to strike. “Nice. Maybe you wouldn’t hate it so much if you’d get a regular job so we can fix it, and then maybe we might even be able to do something like go on a damn vacation once in a while.”
“I do have a job, Kate.” His voice was dripping with venom. “I’m a musician. I was a musician when you married me.”
“I mean a real job.” She was on dangerous ground but kept inching out farther. “Why can’t you teach or something?”
“Because even if I wanted to do that, which I don’t, I didn’t finish college, and since so many years have passed, I’d have to start all over again. Doesn’t seem very feasible to me, unless you plan to support us in the meantime. Why don’t you get a job? Then you can’t bitch at me because you don’t have any money. Or maybe you’d rather I became a plumber or a mechanic.”
His chest was heaving. She knew he was trying to control his temper, but she was out of control now too.
His words were measured. “I’m going through a rough patch right now. You know, this whole deal is for better or for worse.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sick of always having the worse.” As soon as the words left her mouth, she was sorry.
The muscle along his jaw twitched like mad. If she had been a man, he might have knocked her off her feet. She had gone too far.
“Really? Well, fuck you!”
He pushed past her, yanked open the closet, and snatched his jacket, sending the hanger clattering to the floor.
She grabbed his arm as he headed for the back door, but he pulled away.
“Back off, Kate,” he said through clenched teeth, his voice low and threatening. “I’m warning you. Step back.”
“Billy.” She hadn’t meant half of what she’d said. She was tired and stressed, and just as he’d been doing with her, she was taking it out on him. “Please.”
She reached for him again.
“Back off. I mean it. Get the fuck away from me.”
She’d never seen him so angry—not with her, anyway. He snatched the keys to his truck from the hook by the door and left.
Three days passed without even a phone call. He’d stormed off in the middle of a fight before, but this was the longest he’d ever been gone. She went from feeling guilty to being worried and through various degrees of anger. She could have called his cell phone, but she wasn’t the one who’d left.
By the third evening, she began to wonder if she should report him missing. If he did return, after what he was putting her through, she was afraid she might strangle him.
She was too embarrassed to go back to the grocery store, so she went to the bank with the intention of taking cash from her household account and driving to the next town to do her shopping. But Billy had never transferred the money, leaving her with $18.57 to buy milk, food, and gas for her car, which was on empty. Grumbling the entire way, she walked to the small corner market in town to get milk and paid three times as much for a dozen eggs, a package of hot dogs, and a bag of rolls. If he didn’t come home soon, they’d starve.
By the time she returned home, it had begun to snow. Flakes came down fat and fast. In no time, the ground was covered. Her anger grew with each passing hour. Rhiannon and Devin were fighting. All she wanted was to make dinner and go to bed. Not that she would sleep, between worry and anger and of course the unasked question: if he wasn’t sleeping at home, where the hell was he sleeping?
She dumped a can of pork and beans into a small saucepan and turned the stove on to boil a pot of water for the hot dogs. There was a loud pop, and smoke began pouring from the front burner of the ancient range. The lights in the kitchen and dining room flickered and went out.
“What next?” she yelled.
The light outdoors was fading quickly, especially with the snowfall. She could barely see to yank the stove away from the wall to reach the plug.
She trudged through the dark stone basement, guided by a flashlight, and flipped the breaker for the two darkened rooms upstairs. With the stove now toast, she pulled on Billy’s tall rubber boots near the back door and her mittens and went outside to start the grill.
It wouldn’t start. After kicking the damn thing and nearly breaking a toe, she limped back inside to find matches. She wasn’t anxious to light it manually, although the prospect of blowing herself up, along with the house, had
its pluses and minuses.
She rolled a bit of newspaper into a long tube like she’d seen Billy do, lit the end, and turned on the gas. She reached around underneath with the lit paper. The flames swallowed the length of the newspaper, and she wondered why she hadn’t used a tapered candle. It still didn’t light. She pushed the last of the burning newspaper closer to the opening. The grill belched with a loud whoosh and a blast of flames that licked her face and melted her mascara, and she tumbled backward into the snow.
“Goddamn sonofabitch, sick and tired of this shit,” she grumbled, angrily brushing off the snow. She threw all eight hotdogs onto the grill, determined she wouldn’t be turning it on again anytime soon.
She was wondering how much she could get pawning a Fender Telecaster when she heard Billy’s pickup in the driveway.
The truck door slammed. She refused to acknowledge him and kept staring at the grill, even when she sensed him standing behind her. She stabbed at the hot dogs—the cheap kind, because she couldn’t afford the all-beef kind—and rolled them over so they could finish cooking before she froze to death. She gave the pot of beans a stir, although they didn’t seem to be cooking at all.
“What are you doing?” he asked quietly behind her.
“What does it look like?” She sounded just as nasty, if not nastier, than before he left.
“It looks like you’re having a cookout in the middle of February.”
“Well, then, that’s what I’m doing.”
She jabbed at another hot dog but missed. It rolled off the grill and into the snow at her feet. She scooped it up with mittened fingers and threw it back on the grill.
“Jeez,” he muttered.
She glared up at him.
“Why are you cooking outside?”
“Because the stove just blew up.”
His head snapped up to the kitchen window, as if checking to see if it was on fire. “What happened?”