“All day,” her friend said. “He’s been at it all day, from the sound of it. All week, ever since Tuesday morning. I don’t know if he’s quit his job, or gotten himself fired, or if he’s pickled his brain until he doesn’t know. Just that he’s managed to be sober enough when he gets home to lie his ass off to me about where he’s been and what he’s been doing.”
Hearing Mimosa Lane’s moral compass saying the words “lie his ass off” got to Sam more than her friend’s agitation. Julia took off pacing again, her knee-length, Ralph Lauren print skirt swishing about her in pleated perfection. The sleeves of her purple silk blouse floated around her arms. Her leather shoes were just right, their kitten heels giving her enough lift to show off her legs without looking as if that was what she wanted them to do.
Julia looked utterly cool and capable. And devastated.
“All day?” Sam repeated, treading carefully. “He’s been…”
“Drinking down at McCradey’s. All week. They open for early lunch, he settles in at the bar for a sandwich, and he doesn’t move until it’s time to come home for dinner, or so Law Beaumont says. He’s their regular day bartender now. He was one of my volunteers at Chandler when I ran the PTA. He only worked nights back then, and his days were almost always free. With him and Sheila split up now, he’s paying alimony and child support and only sees Chloe on the weekends. So he’s pulling double shifts every weekday he can, and he thought I should know that Walter was there again. That he was there every day now, he said. Because my husband’s evidently been doing this since the shooting, off and on, only now it’s every day, and Law says today’s been the worst of all…”
Sam’s head was pounding as Julia’s frantic explanation wound down. She’d felt shell-shocked all day, a low-level panic persisting ever since Cade had let her off the hook about the essay.
I won’t have to do it alone, and you won’t have to do it with me. Isn’t that great?
Yeah, it was great.
She was a coward, just like Brian had said. And no matter how much she talked about wanting to change for herself and her family, she hadn’t been there for her son that morning. How many more chances was she going to get before Cade stopped expecting her to be there for him at all?
“What are we doing, Julia?” She gazed at her friend, who’d been agonizing for months over how to help her husband, while Julia hadn’t really done much of anything at all except worry. “How did everything get so messed up?”
They’d been leaning on each other since January, but neither one of them had wanted to face the harsh reality that it was time to start leaning on their own families again, before it was too late.
Julia swallowed, as if she were afraid to answer. “We’re living our lives the best way we know how.”
Lonely… But never alone.
“We’ve been hiding from the people we love for so long, they think we don’t want to be there for them.” Sam had been so determined to see her stay at Julia and Walter’s as moving forward. Brian was proud of the stand she’d made. But she’d kept seeing other things all day, over and over in her mind.
Cade curled up on the patio swing at the house the morning of the shooting, waiting for her to come home from the night walking that had kept her at such an emotional distance from her family. He’d known how upset she was, and he’d wanted to be with her and help her somehow. But now that he was struggling, even when he’d told her exactly what he needed her to do to help him—the same way she’d been trying to get Brian to understand what she needed—what had Sam done? She’d totally bailed on helping her child.
So Cade had gone and found a friend to help him, the same way she had when she’d left their family to stay with Julia. The same way Julia was here now, instead of confronting her husband.
“We’re both cowards,” she said.
Her friend looked hurt and confused, but concerned, too. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
“Beverly Turner came over with Mallory this morning. Nate and Cade worked together today. They may finish their homeschooling for the rest of the school year together.”
“How wonderful!” Julia’s typical enthusiasm was the final straw.
“As wonderful as your life with Walter?”
Julia raised a hand to her throat. “Th-that… That’s not fair.”
“Relationships seldom are.”
“What’s gotten into you, Sam?”
“Life. Love. Not being able to handle either one like an adult, the same as you.”
She’d been relieved when Cade had begged to let Nate stay. She’d been relieved—grateful beyond words—to not have to talk with her sensitive, loving child about something only she could explain to him. Shame had been eating away at her ever since. But had that led her to take Cade aside and talk with him, once he stopped demanding her attention? Of course not.
“I love Brian and my boys with all my heart. You love Walter and Justin and Austin. So why do we keep doing this?”
“Doing what?”
“Everything we can to avoid the only thing that will make any real progress in our families.”
“I’m not avoiding anything. I came here thinking my friend would help me deal with my husband, before the rest of the town knows what he’s been up to.”
“We’re the biggest hypocrites on the block. You rock everyone else’s world, including those people at the school board meeting, with the way you take charge of whatever needs to be done. But you can’t face the decisions you have to make for your own family. I take a stand against my husband and tell him we have to face some tough choices so our family can heal, he turns himself inside out so that can happen, only I’m the one who can’t do my part. I never could.”
“Oh, please—you’re one of the strongest women I know.”
Sam laughed. “Beverly’s strong. She’s creating even more trouble between herself and James, bringing Nate over to me, but she did it anyway. Kristen’s strong for standing up to Roy and the school board. Even though she loves this community and desperately wants her contract renewed for next year, she’s fighting for the truth about the shooting to come out, so the right choices will be made for the school and the kids. The Dickerson family is strong, dealing with every parent’s nightmare—losing their child—but they showed up at that meeting to make their voices heard. They’re still trying to understand. They’re not giving up. But you and me… Your husband drinks until you and your boys are half afraid of him, then apologizes the next morning and all is forgiven, because you don’t want to deal with the alternative. So he’s still drinking. I’ve been telling myself that I can’t come home until Brian deals with what he has to, only…”
“Only what?” Julia sounded more furious than Sam had ever heard her, even during Julia’s argument with Walter Monday night. “Speak for yourself, Sam. If you want to spiral into a permanent pity party no matter how many good things you still have going for you, be my guest. But don’t drag me down with you. I needed a friend, not a lecture. If you can’t be there for me with Walter, I understand. I’ll simply—”
“Take him back and pretend this isn’t happening either, just like all the other nights it hasn’t happened since January?” Sam heard herself attacking her friend for the very same kind of avoidance she and Brian had perfected. But she couldn’t seem to hold the words back. She’d been holding in too much all day.
“My life may not be as perfect as it seems on the outside,” Julia said. “But I’m doing the best I can to keep what’s important to me. And what’s important to me is having my family together, including my husband, whatever I have to do and however long I have to keep taking him back. Most people don’t get over a decade off to figure out what they’re going to do about the mistakes they’ve made. The rest of us have to find a way to do the best we can with the crappy hand we’ve been dealt. Otherwise nothing gets done. We hurt and deal with things badly and we paste on whatever Band-Aid we have to, to just hold on for another day. Even if it means never ge
tting to the bottom of what’s wrong, or never fixing everything completely, or never making some grand gesture to prove just how honest or strong or courageous we are. Wake up, Sam, and be grateful for what you have—a husband who loves you more than life itself, and two fine boys who don’t need you to be a hero for them as much as they need their mother back. Knock this shit off, before you throw away more than our friendship.”
Sam felt as if she were melting beneath her friend’s glare.
God, what had she done?
She’d never heard Julia talk this way. And she’d caused it. She’d meant well, but she sounded like a judgmental shrew who’d needed her best friend to feel as bad as she did, so she wouldn’t feel so terribly alone.
That wasn’t true.
It couldn’t be true.
You’re the best woman, wife, and mother I know…
“I care about you, Julia,” she said, because her friend had to know that. Now. Before it was too late to fix this. “I’m so sorry I—”
“I need to get to McCradey’s.” Julia turned to leave.
Sam rushed to her side. “Let me go with you. I’m worried about you. I swear that’s all I’ve been trying to say.”
“Is that what ‘you’re a hypocrite’ means in New York?”
“No. I’m so sorry I said that to you. And I—”
“What’s happened?” a voice said from behind them.
Brian was in the doorway leading in from the garage. Neither Sam nor Julia had heard him come up the driveway.
“Oh, thank God you’re here.” Julia ran to him and away from Sam. “I need your help,” she said, the same as she had when Sam first answered the door. “Please, Brian. I don’t know anyone else I can turn to. It’s Walter. Please help me get him home.”
“Of course.” Brian pulled her into the gentlest of hugs, no questions asked. No hesitation. “What can we do?”
Chapter Nineteen
McCradey’s was a local dive. The first time Brian had stepped inside the corner pub just a mile down the road from the northern end of Mimosa Lane, it had felt just right to him.
His favorite joints in Manhattan had had the same lived-in feel. The seedier, the better had been his mantra in college and the early years of his marriage and fledgling career. You wanted to relax in a bar and forget your world for a while. Comfort and no stress and blending in were what mattered, so the rest of the day could slip away. Atmosphere was more important in a place like Chandlerville, where a man’s wife or his girl would want to know where he’d be hanging out for ball games and prizefights and whatever else he’d have more fun watching with the guys instead of at home alone.
Not that McC’s was a place where the local ladies cared to make regular appearances—an added bonus for their men. The food was basic, but good. The beer was reasonably priced, with enough variety on tap and bottled in the fridge to mix things up. The flat-panel TVs overhead were always set to sports channels, and positioned so at least one of them could be viewed from each end of the bar and from every table.
It had been longer than Brian had realized since he’d been there. He pushed open the bar’s oak door, Julia and Sam close behind him, trying to remember the last night he’d ventured out alone on a Saturday to cut loose. He’d never been one to stop for a beer on the way home from work, though he’d known for years that some of the other dads on the lane were five-day-a-week regulars. A few more, rumor had it, since the shooting at Chandler.
Folks were handling the fallout in their own ways, many struggling in private, the way Sam and Brian had. Others preferred gathering with friends in public places like McC’s, trying to reclaim a flicker of what the world had felt like before the security of thinking their kids were unconditionally safe had been forever ripped away.
Walter had evidently been even more private than Sam and Brian as he’d dealt with his demons. He and Julia had always been hyperaware of their standing in the community. It wasn’t as if they were prudes—they’d always served beer and wine when they’d hosted parties in their home. But Brian, like everyone else, had pegged Walter as a responsible, conservative neighbor, a sought-after CPA for a private Atlanta firm and a dedicated family man. So what if he had a few beers on the weekends?
Now there his neighbor was at five o’clock in the afternoon, elbows spread on the bar with a beer and a shot in front of him, tossing back peanuts and staring at ESPN2 on one of the flat-panels.
And evidently this was exactly where he’d been all week. The man Brian had coached club basketball and football teams with was sucking down booze in the middle of the afternoon like it was just another day in Margaritaville. He was half falling off his stool, actually, with one hand holding on to the bar as if the room were spinning, while with the other he lifted his beer mug for a swallow that didn’t end until he’d drained most of it.
“Oh my God,” Julia whispered.
Sam stood silent and still as stone near the doorway. She hadn’t said a word since Brian had ushered her and Julia to the car after making sure the boys were settled and Mallory was available if either of them needed anything. Something was definitely off between Sam and Julia, not that either one of them was talking about it.
“Let me see what I can do,” Brian said. Julia was staring mutely at her husband. At this rate, she might still be there at closing time and not have managed a word.
“I’ll stay with her.” Sam tugged Julia toward the door. “See if you can get Walter to come outside and talk.”
Brian nodded. His wife led a shell-shocked Julia to the parking lot. He approached Walter, catching Law Beaumont’s gaze. The hulk of a man was filling a pitcher from the taps at the other end of the bar. Law, easily six foot five and 320 pounds, glanced at Walter, shrugged, and went about his business with a sigh.
Brian took the stool beside his friend, raised a finger for Law to bring him a draft, and asked, “Long day?”
Walter grunted, chewed his peanuts, and never looked away from the color commentary on a top NFL rookie who’d been suspended because his drug arrests and pending IRS tax audit were distracting him from grinding bones on the playing field.
Brian shelled a few peanuts and took a sip of the beer Law set in front of him, not certain what he was doing there. But he’d had to do something. Feeling Julia’s desperate trembling after she’d literally thrown herself into his arms, he’d jumped at the chance to fix something, anything, when his own life felt as if it were still teetering on the brink, no matter how much progress he and Sam had made.
“I got an interesting job offer today,” he said. “It’s the offer of a lifetime, you know? But…”
“But everything’s so screwed up, how the hell will you get away with taking it?” Walter kept chewing. He drained his beer, threw back the shot, and signaled for another round for himself and Brian.
“Something like that.” Brian waved Law away before the man could pull him a second draft. He took another sip of the first. “I don’t know. These days, nothing I do to help my family seems to be the right thing. Making a huge change in the middle of the mess Sam and I have made would be reckless.”
Walter grunted again. After Law refreshed his drinks—tequila turned out to be Walter’s poison—Walter cast a bleary glance at Brian. “I always pegged you for a secretly reckless sort of fellow, Yankee.”
Brian chuckled at the nickname. He didn’t mind it a bit. No one in Chandlerville ever completely forgot that he and Sam weren’t from the South. But none of the people who’d taken the time to get to know them really cared, either.
“I used to be, Walter. A long time ago, I used to be.”
“Yeah.” His neighbor let out a sigh and downed his Patrón. “Me, too.”
Brian did the grunting this time. “You? A rebel accountant without a cause?”
Picturing slightly balding, slightly paunchy Walter as James Dean had Brian grinning from ear to ear. His friend was smiling, too, staring down at the fresh beer he hadn’t touched.
�
�I was a semipro bowler,” Walter said. “Did you know that? Back before grad school and the kids and making partners and clients happy, because that kept the bonuses rolling in and everyone in town looking at me like I’m the man you want to handle your money, because I’m as solid as they come.”
Bowling?
Brian had heard once that Walter and Julia used to be on a bowling team, before everything else they did for the community and their family had eaten up their free time. But he’d bet Jeff Kelsey’s kind of money that jonesing for the good old days wasn’t why he and Walter were sitting there.
“You give up things,” he said, carefully feeling his way. “It’s worth it, what you get in return.”
“It’s for shit,” Walter sneered, when Brian had never once, in five years of coaching together, heard the man swear. “You have to give up yourself to get the people in your life to want you? To keep ’em safe and happy? What the fuck good does that do? We’ve got kids killing each other in our schools. Babies—the babies we’ve coached and tried to teach to do right. We’ve got wives who are unhappy and hiding it, and kids who just want the hell out of our houses—at least mine do. They’re never home anymore, after all the time I’ve put into being there for them whenever they needed me, whatever they wanted. We live on one of the nicest streets in Chandlerville, and it might as well be the ghetto to them.”
Brian had wondered about that last part—why the Davis boys had been so scarce lately. Watching Walter once more down half his beer in a single gulp was like a punch to Brian’s gut.
“Is this about your boys?” he asked.
“Nah.” His friend wiped his mouth on the wrinkled sleeve of his dress shirt. “It’s…”
“It’s what, Walter? What the hell? You’re scaring Julia to death, even though she’s right outside, still trying to understand. What, you’ve decided out of the blue to throw your marriage away, because you think becoming a drunk would be a better use of your time? I know everyone’s had it tough since the shooting. But whatever’s going on with you, don’t make the same mistake I did and wait too long to ask your wife to help you deal with it.”
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