A Smile as Sweet as Poison

by Helena Maeve

  “After Shanghai, I didn’t really see a point.”

  Hazel turned to look at his profile. “Why not?”

  “It was a pipe dream. I was pretending to be someone I’m not.”

  Someone Chinese. Hazel flattened her tongue to the roof of her mouth. She knew a little of what it was like to feel on the outside, but Dylan and Sadie dealt with isolation in a much more present way. They couldn’t fade into the crowd. In Dunby or at the prestigious, elite private college where Dylan had first met Ward, they stood out like sore thumbs.

  “You didn’t find your folks?” she asked, tentatively. The impulse to cover his hand with hers over the gearshift was quickly dismissed.

  “I found them. Well, my birth mother.” Dylan sighed. “She wanted nothing to do with me. It was ridiculous to assume otherwise. She gave me up because she didn’t want me—and here I am, as Californian as they get, barely able to string together two words of Mandarin…” He looked out the windshield, staring at the cars in front with a grim expression. “So no more C-pop. You’ll have to get your fix elsewhere.”

  It might have been a joke, but the barb slid home with effortless finesse.

  “We still talking about music?” Hazel wondered.

  Dylan was slow to answer. When he did, he sounded more run-down than nettled. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I don’t know what you want anymore. I don’t know what Ward was talking about last night…”

  Hazel choked on a breath. She had convinced herself that Ward would come clean to Dylan after she retreated to the bedroom. He’d been riled enough to sacrifice whatever promises he might have made. Hazel’s debts to him more or less guaranteed she couldn’t play at being offended if he spilled the beans.

  But he hadn’t.

  “He did something for me,” Hazel confessed, pressing a hand to the staccato rattle of her heart. “He helped me with something important…” Because I begged him. Because I wasn’t too proud to admit I was in over my head then. Ward must’ve expected her to greet news of a trip to Dunby with the same relief. He didn’t understand that debts were accruing too fast for Hazel to keep up.

  Why should he? The rich talked about deficits and liability as desirable obligations. They didn’t cringe with every credit card bill.

  “And you can’t tell me what that is,” Dylan surmised. He cut his eyes to Hazel as if to persuade himself of the conclusion.

  Hazel shook her head. She wasn’t strong enough to broach that subject. Not like this, not in the car, about to embark on a trip down memory lane in the one place she knew she wasn’t welcome.

  With a sigh, Dylan flexed his hands around the steering wheel. “He mentioned Sadie’s getting married. You didn’t say anything.”

  “I know.” She had no easy excuse for it, either.

  “Is that what this is about? A commitment thing?” he asked as he overtook a red sedan. “Is that why you don’t trust us? Because—”

  It took Hazel a few good seconds to puzzle out his meaning. When she did, she couldn’t stop him fast enough. “Dylan, we’ve only just met. We barely know each other… I don’t want to marry you.”

  “Oh.”

  Hazel felt like kicking herself, but bewilderment was no compelling reason to lie. “I’m sorry if—”

  “No, no.” He heaved a breath, relief slackening his hold around the wheel. “To be honest, me neither. I mean, years from now, sure, but—”

  “Yeah.” For the sake of her fragile mental health, Hazel was going to pretend she hadn’t registered that last part. She refused to consider the path that kind of thinking could lead her to.

  “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  Dylan nodded. “I have to trust that you two know what you’re doing or we might as well end this right now, yeah? I’m not ready to do that, so…okay.”

  You can’t force yourself not to mind being kept in the dark. Hazel thought of three years of slowly meandering down a slippery slope. She thought of little sideswipes chipping away at her dignity until she was so low she’d gladly suffer the red bead of the camera and the white burst of flashes that came later, the intolerable certitude that she deserved every humiliation.

  Willpower was a mighty thing. Dylan had survived four years in a college filled with the likes of Ward and convinced himself it wasn’t so bad. If he put his mind to it, he’d believe that Hazel had acted in his best interest—whether or not that was the case.

  “It’s about me,” she admitted. “Something I did, a long time ago. If you want, I’ll tell you when I get back.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “No, I do.” Hazel tipped her head back against the leather seat, the Tesla purring smoothly around them. “You should know who you’re sleeping with.”

  Dylan scoffed. “Hey… I already know that.” He took a hand off the steering wheel to seize her fingers in his. “I know you, Hazel. And I like being with you. Everything else is just—minutiae. We’ve all done things we regret.”

  Not like this. Rather than contradict him, Hazel turned her palm over and let their fingers slide naturally into perfect alignment.

  Dylan liked holding her hand. She clung to that knowledge as though to a life raft.

  * * * *

  Too kind for his own good, Dylan offered to stay with her until she went through security, but Hazel turned him down. She didn’t want tearful goodbyes any more than she wanted to do something stupid—like ask him to come along to Missouri. They kissed in the car, then Hazel darted out and stalked away briskly on legs that didn’t entirely feel like her own.

  She had no bag to check in and her rucksack contained whatever clothes she’d been able to pack in a rush, plus a nicer pair of flats to change into once she arrived. The TSA waved her through without any hassle. She toyed with the thought of window-shopping through the Duty Free area while she waited for the boarding call, but the price tags were prohibitive and only served to remind her that she was flying out on Ward’s money.

  After browsing the shelves for a while, she bought a stuffed giraffe anyway. It was slightly lopsided—probably not by design—and seemed somewhat lonely among round-faced teddy bears, monochrome orcas, and the odd pink rabbit.

  Armed with her christening gift, Hazel took the plunge and called Buddy to let him know she was coming.

  “You don’t have to pick me up—”

  “Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “My baby sister doesn’t visit every day, does she?”

  “You’re three hours away,” Hazel pointed out, trying to be the reasonable one for a change.

  Her brother laughed. “And you’re, what, five? Sis, I’ll be there. Try not to get lost on your way out of baggage claim.”

  “I’m not twelve.”

  Miles away and living an entirely different life, Buddy snorted, as though the sister he remembered fit neatly into what the expected of the woman Hazel had become. He wasn’t wrong. Her sense of direction had never been great.

  It was how she’d wound up tangled in a relationship with two men way, way outside of her league.

  “All right,” Hazel conceded. “I’ll see you at the airport.”

  “Hey, sis?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Glad you decided to come. It’ll make Ma’s day.”

  I highly doubt that. She hung up with a stitch in her side and butterflies in her stomach. She was committed now. She couldn’t turn back.

  Chapter Eleven

  Green and gold fields fanned out on either side of the road, an endless succession of wheat and corn spanning the breadth of the state from north to south. Here and there, they passed a snarl of squat brick buildings erected around a church, or a farm crested on the top of a hill like a distant sentinel. This was mostly flat country, the ribbon of the interstate snaking around crops and clumps of trees that would’ve had environmentalists fighting tooth and nail to preserve in the city.

  Buddy drove past the Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge just as the sun was beginning to slant across the f
latland in the west. Amber-orange rays bounced off the shimmering waters of the Castor River, translucent despite the pollution Hazel had heard so much about on the news.

  She thought of taking a picture and emailing it to Dylan with some pithy remark about misinformation. She didn’t follow through.

  One text message to his number and Ward’s was all the conversation they’d had since Hazel had boarded her flight. Neither one had replied.

  “Bet you got no idea where we are,” her brother needled when he caught her glancing out of the window.

  “We just passed Scott City.” Hazel had glimpsed a sign at the last off-ramp.

  “Uh-huh. And where’s that?”

  She rolled her shoulders into a shrug, yawning. “Want me to ask if we’re there yet?”

  “It’s what you use to do with Pa, remember? You were a little terror. Kept jumping over the seats like a monkey.”

  “That’s ’cause you kept pinching me.”

  “No, that’s what you’d tell Mom when she lost her shit,” Buddy countered, the same I didn’t do it expression on his face he’d worn fifteen, twenty years earlier.

  He had aged well—Whitley men always did. His star quarterback good looks had settled over the years into something a little more respectable than intimidating. All the same, with his square jaw and blue eyes, Hazel didn’t doubt that there were women in Dunby who still sighed wistfully when he walked into a room.

  It had been the case all through high school. Small towns needed their celebrities and Buddy definitely made the local A-list. He had founder blood in his veins and the kind of bullish vigor every father in town tried to inspire—or beat—into their sons. He could’ve made girls fall at his feet if he’d put his mind to it, but dating had never been a priority for him.

  Their mother’s grooming had awakened in Buddy the same awkwardness and guilt that Hazel had felt when she’d fallen off her pedestal. They were the only Whitleys left to carry forth the family name, a duty that grew heavier and heavier every year.

  At least Buddy had done his bit for the family gene pool.

  “What?” he groused. “You’re staring.”

  Hazel shook herself. “Sorry, it’s just…you look happy.”

  “Duh. I just had a kid, sis.”

  “No, I know… Happier than the last time I saw you.” It had been Buddy who’d driven her to the airport in St. Louis. Buddy who had sat beside her while she waited for the check-in to open, crammed into a too-narrow plastic seat at four in the morning. They hadn’t talked much then. He hadn’t hugged or kissed her before she’d boarded her flight. He hadn’t asked any questions.

  Whitleys weren’t supposed to run away, but Hazel had. She hadn’t stopped running since.

  “Like I said,” Buddy repeated, “I just had a kid.” Sunlight played on his wheat-blond hair, making him look so much younger than his thirty-two years. But he was their mother’s son and under that all-American, corn-fed exterior lay a core of steel. He didn’t have to say I don’t know what you’re talking about for the lie to fester between them.

  Hazel trained her gaze on the windshield and beyond, to the rolling dales pocked with green and rusted boughs, and the corrugated signs pointing the way to Sikeston, Portageville.

  Dunby.

  * * * *

  Poplar trees shook and sighed in a gentle breeze as Buddy switched off the engine.

  “Here we are. Home sweet home…”

  How many times had she walked this street as a kid? How many times had she dreamt herself back here and woken up in a cold sweat?

  Hazel pushed open the passenger side door and hopped out. Here was the jut of sidewalk where she’d twisted an ankle in third grade. There was the yard where Mrs. Pacheco’s dog had bitten her hand. Across the broad, tree-lined lane, stood an all brick, Georgian-imitation house, too big for the two souls who now lived in it.

  The bottom dropped out of her stomach when she saw the white door swing open.

  “Ah, and here’s the welcoming committee,” Buddy muttered under his breath. He had her backpack over one shoulder, strap folded in his broad fist, and he was twirling the keys to the Ford in the other. He elbowed Hazel in the ribs. “Better not keep her waiting.”

  Left to her own devices, Hazel would’ve ducked away under the pretense of revisiting familiar sights, but she had an escort and their mother wouldn’t take kindly to being given the slip.

  Deep breath. Hazel spurred her feet into motion and crossed the street.

  Mrs. Whitley had barely aged a day. She was still the blonde, reedy mater familias that had once run the town council. Her Grace Kelly good looks had sharpened with age, so that the point of her chin and the depth of her wide-set eyes gave her a vaguely birdlike appearance now.

  Hazel smothered the urge to finger-comb her hair into place under her scrutiny.

  “Hey, Mom.”

  “Hazel.” Mrs. Whitley held out her arms. “Come here, darling. It’s been so long.”

  Do you count the days? Hazel obediently folded herself into her mother’s embrace. She wondered if the neighbors were watching. Were the Rileys still next door? Hazel couldn’t remember if their daughter was Maya or Maria. She had vague memories of an inflatable pool in their backyard, a birthday party in another lifetime, but it might have been her imagination.

  She’d always been a creative child.

  “You look—”

  Mrs. Whitley held her at arm’s length for a moment and Hazel braced herself for the pronouncement.

  “Healthy. All that sun must do you good.” She looped an arm around Hazel’s elbow, pulling her indoors. “How do you like it there? Do you exercise? You’re a little tanned. I do hope you’re careful about exposure. You know how you used to burn in the sun…”

  And so it began—the questions about her diet, the thinly veiled reminders that she was nearly thirty and still couldn’t be trusted to take care of herself. More importantly, that she was single. Over the phone or in person, the message was always the same. You’re not good enough. Her mother had been trying to fix her in one way or another for the better part of twenty-eight years. She was indomitable. She’d never give up.

  “How’s Rhonda?” Hazel deflected, twisting around to keep Buddy in her sights. “She still at the hospital?”

  “Brought her home today,” her brother announced proudly. “She’s at home, resting. With Bea… You want to see them?”

  “Later,” Mrs. Whitley answered for her. “You’re probably tired from your flight. You should have a shower first. Eat something. Your father will be here any minute.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “Oh, out with the developers at Wardel.”

  “Developers?” Hazel looked from her mother to Buddy. “We’re selling the land? But I thought—”

  Buddy opened his mouth to reply, but Mrs. Whitley anticipated him. “The boys can tell you all about it over dinner.” No one could argue with that note of finality. It would’ve been considered a flagrant faux-pas.

  Nearly thirty and as free of Dunby as she’d ever been, it took only a few minutes for Hazel to revert to toeing the line.

  * * * *

  Rhonda came straight over, baby in tow.

  Figures, Hazel thought uncharitably. Show-off. She cooed and awwed over her niece as she was supposed to, hyperaware of all the people who suddenly seemed to revolve around her. It was nothing like the diner, where even the regulars were more interested in pie and talking about themselves than asking invasive questions.

  “Here, do you want to hold her?” Rhonda asked, already, settling Bea into the crook of one arm to hand her over.

  “Um, I’m not sure I know how to… Oh, okay.” The objection fell on deaf ears. Hazel held out her hands, twenty-eight years of using her upper limbs suddenly flying out the window as she struggled with how to handle a bundle of flesh that grimaced and made little keening noises if uncomfortable.

  “Support the head,” Mrs. Whitley put in for good measure.
>
  As if Hazel needed the extra pressure.

  Rhonda tittered, arranging Hazel’s arms around the baby. “You’re doing great. See? She likes you.”

  “Pretty sure she doesn’t know who I am…”

  Two big blue eyes peered at Hazel through plump lids. Baby Bea was rosy and round all over, her small face set in a considering pout. She didn’t seem to have made up her mind yet.

  “Nah,” Rhonda scoffed, “she’s very perceptive. Couldn’t stand the nurses taking her out of her crib and handing her to me. She’s just starting to warm to Buddy, too. Got his eyes, though.”

  Hazel looked up at the wistful tone. Rhonda was widely regarded as something of a local beauty. If she’d been the type to join pageants, she would’ve had a truckload of trophies. Hazel couldn’t picture her uneasy about any part of her body, including her brown eyes. “’Least she didn’t inherit the juggernaut jaw.”

  Bea made a soft sound, as though in agreement, and yawned.

  “How’s everything in LA?” Rhonda wanted to know. “Sadie Lang said you two work together now?”

  Hazel let her gaze rest briefly on her mother but Mrs. Whitley was flawlessly poker-faced. “Yeah, she’s been a huge help.”

  “I don’t remember you guys being friends…”

  “We weren’t. You know, needs must.” It was a cruel way of putting it. Sadie had been her only ally when everyone else who’d ever laid claim to the title had turned their backs on her—Rhonda included.

  Painful memories abated when Bea whimpered in Hazel’s arms.

  “I think I’d better take her,” Mrs. Whitley interceded. “Sweetheart must be so tired.”

  “Yeah, think her daddy let her do some of the driving when I wasn’t lookin’.”

  Rhonda surrendered her daughter easily enough, but Hazel didn’t miss the way she tracked her with her eyes, as though afraid her mother-in-law might abscond with the baby.