The event went off without a hitch, and the parade was over by eleven. Most of the participants stuck around to disassemble their floats before heading over to the diner—the site of my emotional breakdown and confrontation with Lonnie—for a celebratory lunch. By the time the band was out of uniform and loading their instruments on the bus, most of the crowd had cleared out.
“Hey,” I said to Grace, who was now clearing flowers from Luke’s float, “thank you… for… earlier.”
“Charlie’s a stubborn ole mule,” she said, shaking her head. “I wasn’t about to let him lay a hand on Lucas.”
She looked at me for a moment and then straightened up. “About what happened at the diner—”
“I’m sorry, Grace,” I said, genuinely remorseful. When I’d attacked Lonnie, I had every intention of hurting him, but I had never wanted to hurt Grace. Hearing me say those things—no matter how true they were—couldn’t have been easy for a wife to hear about her loving husband. “I let my anger get the best of me; I hope you can forgive me—”
“No need for apologies, Julie,” she waved her hand. “This fight isn’t between us, sweetheart. It’s between Lucas and his father. No one blames you for what happened back there.”
“Thanks,” I nodded, “you have no idea how much it’s been weighing on me—”
“How’re your shoulders?” she asked, brushing my hair aside. “Did he hurt you?”
“I’m okay,” I tried to pull away, but she took a firm hold on me—just like she’d done to Charlie when he went after Luke—and pulled the neckline of my sweater back to look at my arms. I took a deep breath because I knew exactly what she would find. When Lonnie had grabbed me, he hadn’t done so gently. The large bruises on my shoulders were proof enough.
“My God,” she whispered, running her fingers across the fading marks. “Honey, why didn’t you tell me?”
“Grace,” I lowered my head. “He snapped because of me. It was my fault—”
“But he hurt you—”
“Who hurt you?” Luke stepped up on the float and gently pushed Grace away. He pulled the back of my shirt away to see what Grace had discovered, and then looked back to me. The softer gleam he’d worn earlier quickly faded, and it was suddenly replaced with a protective rage.
“Charlie?” he asked, bending to meet my stare, but I kept from looking at him. “Julie!”
“Let it go, Luke. It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done—”
“Did Charlie do this to you?” he ignored me.
“No,” I knew, as well as he should have, that Charlie would never lay a finger on me, “it wasn’t Charlie.”
“Derek?” He stopped for a moment and took a deep breath. “I’ll kill that sonofa—”
“Calm down, Lucas,” Grace put her hand on his back.
“I’m not going to calm down until she tells me what happened,” he said, looking down at me. His face was growing redder by the second. “Julie?”
“This is why I didn’t tell you, Luke,” I said. “I knew you would overreact.”
“Overreact?” he yelled. “Someone hurt you. That’s not okay.”
Luke was chivalrous, yes. Even in that moment, all he wanted was justice. But then something happened; his demeanor changed far too quickly. What was once anger and rage suddenly became sorrow.
“Why do you trust Grace and not me?”
“I didn’t tell Grace,” I looked at my feet. “I didn’t tell anyone. And I’d never planned to. She only knows because she was there when it happened.”
And then I didn’t have to say another word. The realization hit him in a nanosecond. Another wave of anger swept across his face as he whipped around to look at his step-mother.
“I’ll kill him,” he said, less to her and more to himself.
He turned away and jumped off the float without another word, no doubt on an unstoppable mission to find his father.
Grace and I shared a mutual look of worry, but there was nothing we could do.
Luke was gone.
SIX
Just a Little Series (Part 1) Page 26