House Without Lies (Lily’s House Book 1)

by Rachel Branton

  “Thanks,” I said, “but all we’ve been doing for the past two hours is eating. Jameson and I both brought too many snacks for the trip.”

  Her laugh once again filled the kitchen. “You call him Jameson? Good choice.”

  I wanted to say that mothers were always right, but it wasn’t true, or my girls wouldn’t be with me, and I’d be in Flagstaff right now. “He looks like a Jameson. I hope that’s okay.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind sharing it with you. It means you’re on my side.” She winked at me to show she was kidding as she hooked her arm around one of mine. “Let’s go meet the rest of the clan.”

  We crossed the kitchen and went down the three steps into the family room, where Jameson’s family had stopped the games they were playing and stared, a sea of interested brown eyes. Heidi released me and started the introductions, her hands moving in front of her in sign language as she presented her husband, Antonio, and their children Linda, Robert, Eric, and Angela. “You met Tim already,” she added. I knew from Jameson that the three oldest after him—Linda, Tim, and Robert—were each a year apart, eighteen, seventeen, and sixteen, coming like a flood after five years of Jameson being an only child. Eric was twelve, and Angela ten. What he hadn’t told me was that Angela was deaf.

  As the family members were introduced, each spoke and signed their greetings. When the girls or I responded, Jameson or one of the others translated our speech. It was a beautiful thing, the ease with which they spoke and signed simultaneously, and for several minutes I found it difficult to look past their hands. Angela was the only light-haired Perez, taking after her mother, but her eyes were definitely her father’s. Antonio Perez had black hair sprinkled liberally with gray and was a foot shorter than Jameson. He was handsome with a sort of European flare that reminded me of vampire movies.

  “Come play with us!” Eric demanded. “We can play Bang! But at the table because there’s more room.”

  Heidi leaned over and turned off the television. “Oh,” she said, sighing with relief. “That’s so much better.”

  The girls didn’t know what Bang! was, but the Perez kids were eager teachers, and soon they were at the large kitchen table firing bullets, playing misses, and using their alcohol cards to gain life points as outlaws, deputies, and renegades had a shoot-out to the death.

  Jameson didn’t join the game but knelt between a beautiful checkered coffee table and his youngest sister, who had remained on the couch. Her arms and hands moved at light speed as she talked to her brother.

  “What’s she saying?” I asked.

  “That you’re pretty.” He signed as he spoke. “That your eyes are kind. And some other stuff I’m not translating because it’s embarrassing.” Angela laughed at that.

  I reached into the only experience I had with sign language—a single season viewing of Switched at Birth—and told her thank you.

  She grinned and signed something before hopping up and running into the kitchen to watch her family play the card game. “She says ‘you’re welcome,’” Jameson said, rising from the carpet.

  “I figured. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “What? That she’s deaf?” He shrugged. “Honestly, I didn’t even think about it. Not until we arrived, and I saw you guys watching my mother sign. Angela’s been deaf all her life. We all learned ASL because we wanted to be a real part of her world. It’s an entire unique community. Even Payden and my aunt learned. It was kind of funny because my father picked it up better than he has English.”

  Tears choked me. Because if Angela had been born in my family, I couldn’t say that my parents would have reacted the same way. She would have more likely been hidden from view, maybe institutionalized. “I like that you know sign language.” In fact, I liked it a lot. “Will you teach me?”

  He nodded and signed “Yes,” another of the few signs I recognized.

  “What about Spanish? Do you know that too?”

  “Not as well as ASL. My mother speaks Spanish too, and my parents tried to teach me when I was young, before I began school. My grandparents would also come to visit, and I spent a summer in Spain with them when I was seventeen. But I’m not as good as I should be, and none of my other siblings, except Linda, speak it at all. With my mom being American, and my dad kind of quiet, it was just too hard to keep it up.”

  I wondered what else I didn’t know about him. “Guess it’s strange to have the last name Perez and not speak Spanish.”

  He laughed. “It happens a lot around these parts.”

  The Perez household was louder than I expected, even after Jameson’s warning, but the girls were having a great time. There was no awkwardness that wasn’t immediately laughed away. At dinner, all fifteen of us fit around the table, with one spot to spare. After a blessing on the meal, everyone raced for the food, and when I was slow, Jameson began filling my plate.

  “Around here it’s who can grab the best food first,” he said. My girls already seemed to know that, and they beat even the Perezes for seconds.

  After dinner, Antonio and Jameson took me to see Antonio’s garage-turned-shop. He was working on a bookcase, a fireplace mantle, and another dining table like the one he’d made for his family.

  “Your work is amazing,” I said.

  “I don’t make lot of money,” he responded in heavily accented English. “But I am happy, and it is honest work. I have been home these past ten years with Angela.”

  I knew I shouldn’t be jealous of a little girl for having a father who wanted to be home with her, but for a moment, I felt very much alone as I recalled my relationship with my own father. “I think that’s perfect.”

  Antonio grinned and gave me a wink. “If you stick around, eh? One day I make you a table.”

  “Well, I’m going to have a big house with a ton of foster girls who will probably ruin it.”

  He laughed. “Oh, yes. Good. Happy house. Lots of children. A big table is what they need. For now”—he picked up a pair of bookends from a table full of similar ones—“you have this.”

  The entwined pair of cheetahs was decidedly heavy. “Oh, it’s beautiful, but you can’t—”

  “We sell them at craft fairs,” he said. “They are easy to make.”

  “Our bread and butter,” Jameson explained. “My mother sells them while he finishes the big pieces.”

  “How did you learn to work with wood? Who taught you?” I asked Antonio.

  “My father and grandfather. I no think it was for me, and for a long time I denied the call, but it finally found me.” His words reminded me of what Jameson said about his father leaving his accounting job.

  “Mario is also an artist,” Antonio said. “Once I thought he would follow my footsteps, but now he follows my first profession.” His smile showed he didn’t care.

  I looked at Jameson. “Will you show me something you made?”

  “The coffee table,” Antonio said.

  “The one with different colors of wood on the top? Wow, I’m impressed.”

  Jameson groaned. “Just don’t look too closely. Angela can do better, and she’s only ten.”

  At that, Antonio looked proud. “She only lacks strength, but she feels the wood. In here, I wear earplugs. She does not hear the saw. We make a perfect pair.”

  We all laughed and returned to the house, with me clutching my new bookends. The noise hit us again in a wave, but I was more used to it now.

  I made a dash to the coffee table for a second look. Squatting next to it, I could see a few places where the joined wood was beginning to separate slightly, but it was still beautiful. “Very nice.”

  Jameson shrugged but looked pleased. “It’s okay.”

  “Your family is nice.” I ran a hand idly over the coffee table. “Thank you for bringing me.”

  Jameson stood with his hands in his pockets. “I wanted you to see where I’m from, and I wanted you to meet them.” He glanced into the kitchen, where the kids were playing a round of Skip-Bo. “They are a big part o
f me.”

  “I can see that.” I wondered if he knew how lucky he was. I did—and being here changed the way I felt about him. I still wanted him, he was still attractive to me, but now there was an added depth, one I couldn’t resist.

  I looked down at the coffee table to hide the tears seeping into my eyes. He must have sensed something because he squatted beside me. “What is it?”

  “I have this dream,” I said. “A big house with all the girls. There’s lots of laughter, music, and even a dog.”

  “A dog?”

  “Yeah.” All weekend, Elsie had talked non-stop about the dogs she and Ruth had walked on Thursday and Saturday, and seeing her come alive made a dog a permanent part of my dream house.

  I risked a glance and found his mouth curved into a smile. “And there’s chaos, messes, and sometimes fighting, but most of the time there’s just a sense of . . . family, even for strangers. That’s what you have here, and it’s really . . . good.”

  “I’m glad you think so.” He put his hand over mine, and this time his touch caused an ache inside me that I couldn’t name.

  “You should know that my family is nothing like this,” I felt compelled to say. “My sister is great, but you saw my mother, and . . . I don’t even know my father.”

  “That’s okay. In that house of yours, you can do it any way you want. You don’t have to do what they did.”

  “Dessert!” Heidi called from the kitchen. “Hurry and get it. It’s starting to get dark and you guys need to get going.”

  “She hates me leaving in the dark,” Jameson said. “I don’t think she’s realized that it’s going to be dark before we get back to Phoenix, however fast we get out of here.”

  Laughing, we hurried over to the table for large slices of double-layer chocolate cake with whipped raspberry filling. This time I found myself at the counter with the wall on my left and Payden on my right. For the first time since our arrival, he was away from Elsie, who was separated from him by Angela.

  He leaned over in my direction. “Lily, I need to talk to you about something.”

  The seriousness of his voice made me put down my fork. “What?”

  “A guy came to the store asking questions. He put up these.” He passed me a folded sheet, which I started to open.

  His hand shot out to stop me, but not before I caught the slightest glimpse of Elsie’s face on the paper. “Not here. She’ll see. I didn’t tell him anything, of course, but one of the other clerks remembered seeing Elsie. You can’t bring her to the store anymore.” He glanced over to where Elsie and Angela were busy writing notes to each other and giggling, though I’d learned that Angela was fairly adept at reading lips. “I’m sorry,” Payden added.

  My stomach had fallen with that glimpse of Elsie’s picture. First the Internet plea to find Halla and now flyers of Elsie. “Thank you,” I said mechanically. “I’ll take care of it.”

  Payden nodded, staring down at his cake as though he’d lost his appetite. My own cake had no flavor, but I forked up a mouthful anyway. What was I going to do?

  Feeling eyes on me, I turned to see Jameson at the table, wedged between his father and his brother Tim. There was a question in his eyes. “Later,” I mouthed.

  Somehow I finished the cake and said goodbye to Jameson’s family without puking or bursting into angry tears. Heidi hugged me as I left, whispering in my ear. “You’re everything he said and more. I hope you’ll come see us again.”

  “Thank you. I will.”

  As the girls piled into the van, Jameson pulled me aside. “What was on that paper? Payden’s not in trouble, is he?”

  Wordlessly, I handed it to him, and he opened it, shock immediately registering on his face. “Oh, no.” I was glad his back was to his parents, who stood at the door to wave goodbye.

  “She ran away at least five and a half or six weeks ago,” I said. “Maybe more. She’s been with me for more than a month of that time, and there’s been nothing like this before. Why now?”

  “I don’t know. But this says her father’s from Tempe. All his contact info is here.”

  I took back the flyer. “I knew she had to be from somewhere in Arizona from the comments she’s made, but Tempe is so close. I . . . these flyers are going to make it impossible for her to go anywhere. And one of the clerks at Payden’s store already identified her.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “‘Missing and endangered,’ it says. So what do you think? Could he have thought she’d come back, and when she didn’t, he finally put out flyers?”

  “Possibly.”

  “What should I do?”

  His jaw tightened with resolve. “We’ll think of something.”

  13

  The weeks flew by with me working to keep everything together. Halla started going with Ruth again to work, using her wig, and Elsie didn’t leave the house, except to Makay’s or on errands with me at night in the car. We spent a lot of time on the roof once the heat of the day had eased enough to make it tolerable. I also finished the rest of my foster parent training.

  For the first time in my life, work was a welcome distraction. I loved being with the kids at Teen Remake, especially on my full Friday at Teen Nature, where I worked from noon to ten. Makay was with Elsie and the girls, so I didn’t worry about them, and seeing Jameson at the camp was a plus. Though we didn’t have much time for privacy, we did steal a few kisses under the moonlight at the camp before I headed home.

  I was falling for him, I had no doubt about that. I only hoped he felt the same way.

  During the days or evenings we didn’t have work, Jameson was with me and the girls, watching more than our fair share of videos, playing games, or making something in the kitchen. He’d taken to bringing groceries, and somewhat guiltily, I let him. Between my last paycheck from the factory and a gift from Tessa, I’d paid June’s rent and our utilities. We were scraping by on food, even with Jameson’s help and Payden’s offerings, but we would be getting funds from DCS soon, and I expected a paycheck from Teen Remake any day.

  Most nights we tried to kick Jameson out before midnight because I worried that DCS would somehow find out and think he was living with us and take Zoey and Bianca away. Since the girls were finally out of school, we could sleep in many mornings, but there were still Ruth and Halla’s errands, and Saffron, who woke us up every day with her blow dryer as she got ready for work.

  The knock we’d feared on the door hadn’t come yet, though the flyers of Elsie were plastered everywhere. I began to hope it would all die down.

  Some three weeks after our visit to his family, Jameson came into one of my Thursday morning sessions with Jill and asked to see me. Jill smiled knowingly, and the girls in our session tittered.

  My face flushed, and that made them laugh harder. “Be quick about it,” Jill said, grinning.

  “What’s this about?” I asked as Jameson pulled me into an empty room.

  He didn’t answer, his lips closing the distance between us, and for the next few blissful moments, I let myself become lost in his touch. When we broke apart, he was smiling and so was I.

  “I don’t think they’re paying us to make out,” I whispered.

  “No, but I had an idea last night, about Ruth. It was something you mentioned that social worker said when she came to your apartment, and why you keep kicking me out every night so early. I didn’t want to get your hopes up, but my hunch panned out.”

  “What hunch?”

  “That guy Ruth’s mother has living with her? Tyron Fisher? Well, I asked Bea to look him up through her connections with the police department. Turns out, he did time for rape.”

  I stared at him. “What?”

  “Yes. And get this, the girl was only sixteen. There’s no way DCS would place a child in any house he was living in.”

  “Can it be that easy?” Goose bumps rippled up my bare arms.

  “Hard to believe, but I think so.”

  “What if Ruth’s mother dumps him
when she finds out she’s losing her extra food stamps?”

  “That’s where Bea comes in. She can feel her out just like you did, and once she determines that Ruth’s mother will likely do it again . . .”

  “But they’ve interviewed her before—several times. After the first time, she just got another boyfriend, and he assaulted Ruth too.”

  “Bea’s more determined than whoever had the case before. I think we should trust her.”

  I hesitated. Jameson was making a lot of sense, but it was still hard for me. Ruth had been through too much already.

  Jameson’s smile was nervous. “The worst that can happen is they send her home, and she runs away again. Ruth’s mother only wants the food stamps, right?”

  “And to clean her house, I think. Ruth’s the only one of my girls who does her chores without me riding her.”

  “Good.” Jameson smirked. “I might have had something to do with that.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, remember that first day we met? While you were getting ready for work, I told Ruth and Halla I’d give them ten bucks if they’d make sure your place was clean when you got home.”

  I gaped. “It was. I remember being surprised. Please don’t tell me you’re still paying them.”

  “Oh, no, but I do bring Ruth a box of toaster tarts a couple times a week. She loves that junk.”

  “That would explain the boxes I keep finding stashed behind the couch. I thought she was hoarding food again.”

  “She probably is hoarding them,” he said with a grin, “but I hoard chocolate-covered cinnamon bears and you hoard croissants, so who cares? Anyway, if she gets sent home, we tell her not to clean and to eat a lot. That way her mother won’t care when she runs. I really don’t think it will go that far, but by then you’ll have a new apartment. The point is she’ll be safe from the boyfriend. Besides, once Bea knows Ruth was assaulted, she won’t send her back if there’s a chance it’ll happen again.”

  He waited, and I knew it was my decision.

  Jameson cared about Ruth, and I’d seen her blossom these past three weeks under his care. He’d even helped me with her new hairstyle that had turned out quite well. Ruth trusted him so much that she hardly ever wore her boy clothes anymore when he was around, and that was becoming a problem because we didn’t have enough clothes to fit her long legs.