Brenda tried to concentrate on Cody as she spread mayonnaise on the bread and took a handful of potato chips from a bag. Had he actually observed her in Nick’s arms? Might he ever blurt out that information in front of Steve? Or anyone? She longed to hustle Cody out the door and tell him to never come back. But he was rambling so happily now, as if he had found peace at last.
“I never thought I would see you again, Brenda,” he said. “But Ito see you now—I sure do. After I climbed down from the tree, I looked for you everywhere, up and down the lake and in the woods and on the roads. I searched just the way I searched for my daddy, even though he already had told me he was never coming back. I searched for him a long time, but he was telling me the truth. ‘You’re twenty-one now, Cody. Time to make your way.’ That’s what my daddy said. I thought it would be the same with you, and you were never coming back. But here you are, and how about that?”
She pushed a plate toward the young man as he perched on a stool at the kitchen counter. “Here, Cody. Eat this, and then you can go sit on the porch swing.”
“Okay. But it’s not night yet, Brenda. I don’t go to sleep until it gets dark.” He bit into the sandwich, closed his eyes, and chewed blissfully.
“You look like you haven’t been eating much,” Brenda observed, her heart softening toward Cody as she watched him. “You’re very thin.”
“I found a restaurant where they throw out French fries and onion rings. Sometime you can get pizza there too. I stayed awhile, but then they ran me off. People don’t like me to eat out of their trash. I learned that a long time ago. But sometimes that’s all you can find. Trash-can food is not as good as soup and sandwiches and chocolate cake, like you gave me. It’s cold and sometimes it stinks. But I learned you have to make your way. That’s what my daddy told me to do, and I do it.”
Unable to stop her tears and her trembling hands, Brenda worked for a while in the kitchen—washing dishes that were already clean, wiping the counter until it shone, polishing the window over the sink. Cody devoured three large roast-beef sandwiches and most of the potato chips from the bag. He drank two glasses of iced tea, ate seven peanut-butter cookies, and burped loudly at least three times.
Downstairs, the sound of Nick LeClair’s country-music station kept Brenda in knots. She blotted her eyes and blew her nose, but the tears just wouldn’t stop. As she cried, she began to realize that it wasn’t only Steve and Nick and Cody who had filled her heart to overflowing with remorse, fear, sorrow, pain, and a hundred other jumbled emotions. It was Jennifer so far away in Africa and Justin and Jessica at college. It was the boxes of trophies stashed in the garage, the sewing table in the green basement, the plaid chairs in the dining room. It was the memory of sitting beside her mother on a hard wooden pew, reciting verses of Scripture at Vacation Bible School, watching her father pass the offering plate from one row of churchgoers to another. Her parents, her children, her husband—all the victories and all the mistakes. And God, too. She had lost God, and He had let her go.
Brenda sagged onto another stool as she thought of her flower beds, still unplanted. Her hair, shaggy on the ends. Cody needing help. How could she ever summon the energy to do anything again? Hope, joy, and dreams had all fled, washed away in the flood of her tears.
“You are the best friend I ever had,” Cody announced as he swallowed the last of the cookies. Bread crumbs were scattered across his beard and hanging from the damp ends of his mustache. “You’re just like Jesus, because you share.”
Brenda couldn’t bring herself to face him. She sprayed her flour, coffee, and tea canisters with disinfectant cleanser and began to wipe them with a paper towel. How would she ever get him out of her house? Why wouldn’t he just go away again and leave her alone?
“I believe I will sit outside on your porch swing after all,” Cody announced. “I like it there. That’s where I slept when I stayed with you, before I ran into the woods and climbed that tree.”
“What a great idea,” Brenda said, sniffling again. “I’ll get you a pillow and some blankets.”
Cody followed her onto the porch and watched in silence as she spread the bedding for him. He sat on the swing for a moment, and then he put his head on the pillow and smiled at her.
“I don’t think I’ll lose you again, Brenda,” he said in a low voice. He reached up and touched her damp cheek with his dirty fingers. “I see you, and you see me. Now we can be together…like before. You’re crying, because you’re happy that I came back. My daddy used to tell me he was crying because he was happy. He said he was happy to have me. And now you have me. So I think I might go to sleep right here for a little while.”
Brenda pulled the blanket up over his shoulder and patted his arm. “Rest now, Cody. You just rest.”
Steve couldn’t believe his eyes as his car pulled up to the garage of the house in Deepwater Cove. The bum was back. The familiar shape, covered in blue blankets, reclined on the porch swing as if he belonged there. This was not a complication he needed, especially with so much on the line right now. No doubt he would have to take time to talk this over with Brenda, but he certainly couldn’t afford any delays today.
Heading home early, Steve had decided to shower and change clothes after a round of golf with a client that afternoon. Though he enjoyed wearing jeans and an old T-shirt, dinner at the country club required a pair of nice slacks and a white shirt. Sometimes he would do without a tie, but not if he was about to close a deal.
The afternoon on the golf course had been hotter than he had expected, Steve thought as he drove into the garage and let the door down behind him. He always carried a change of clothes in his gym bag, but tonight was special. Jackie Patterson had been working with her attorneys in St. Louis, and she’d called earlier in the day to say she had put together a deal she thought Steve would find attractive. Nervous, excited—and at the same time irked that the homeless guy was back—he pushed open the door to the kitchen.
Brenda’s voice carried in from the foyer.
“No!” she was saying to someone. She sounded agitated, almost frantic. “Not now…I mean…not ever. Just go, okay?”
Steve stepped around the corner into the entrance hall and saw his wife standing with the handyman from A-1 Remodeling. She was clutching her purse to her stomach and pushing on his arm. Steve couldn’t remember the guy’s name, but he had one hand on Brenda’s shoulder and a worried expression on his face.
“Honey?” Concern sweeping through him, Steve moved into view. “Is something wrong?”
Brenda and the man both gasped audibly as they turned to stare at him. And what he saw written on their faces was guilt. Plain as day. Absolute, undeniable guilt.
Steve gazed at the two of them as thoughts and images he couldn’t accept whipped through his mind. His wife and this man…together? Impossible. No. Not Brenda.
He glanced at her disheveled hair and swollen eyelids. Was she crying? angry? afraid? Now he focused on the handyman—his paint-spattered jeans and work boots, his faded T-shirt and blue eyes.
“Brenda?” It was all Steve could bring out of his throat.
“Nick is leaving,” she fumbled out. “He’s done. Finished downstairs.” “Is something the matter here?” Steve asked again. “I heard you talking to him. You sounded upset, and you told him no. What was that about?”
There was a moment of awkward silence. Then the handyman spoke up. “She said no, because…because, see, I was asking her for more work. But she’s done with me. We’re finished.”
“There’s a bridge,” Brenda said, overlapping Nick’s words as she faced her husband. “The drainage ditch in the front yard needs a bridge, remember? I promised Brad Hanes could build it.”
“Ashley’s husband? I thought Brad did major construction projects. Houses and offices.”
“Yes, but…” Brenda moistened her lips. “But Ashley and I agreed at the tea club. It was a trade. The Sunday night supper and the bridge.”
Steve tried to force
down the terrible certainty that something had gone badly wrong in his house. “Brenda, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“Nick can’t build the bridge,” she said, “because Brad is going to do it.”
“She paid me already,” the handyman told Steve. “So we’re all settled up. I’d better get going.”
“I wrote a check.” She turned to the man who stood awkwardly in the foyer. “Well, thanks again, Nick. You did a good job.”
Nick tipped the brim of his ball cap. “Thank you, Brenda…and you, too, Steve. Glad I could help out here. If you need any other small jobs done, give me a holler.”
Before Steve could say anything else, Nick left the house, shutting the door behind him. Brenda turned immediately and fled toward the master bedroom.
Unable to make himself move, Steve tried to digest what he had seen and heard. The brief scene in the foyer had looked like something out of one of Brenda’s chick flicks…a movie where everyone ended up in tears. Inside the Hansens’ house stood a man with his hand wrapped around a woman’s arm. The woman was rejecting him in an anguished, heart-wrenching tone. But the woman was Brenda…Steve’s wife. And the man—Nick, the remodeler—had on a greasy baseball cap and paint-covered jeans and a ratty T-shirt. He was no romantic hero, and yet Steve had seen Nick touching Brenda. All that…plus a homeless kid lay asleep outside on the porch swing. And there had been something about a bridge and a Sunday night dinner and a tea club, and none of it made sense.
Suddenly aware of the passing time, Steve shook himself back to awareness and hurried down the hall. He found Brenda in the master bathroom with the door shut, and it sounded like she was sick…or was she crying?
He knocked on the door. “Brenda?”
Nothing like this had ever happened before. For so many years, Brenda had always been the same—blonde and sweet and gentle, loving toward the children and her husband as she puttered away in the kitchen or garden. What had happened?
“Brenda, it’s me. What’s going on in there?”
“I’m fine.” The words were barely audible.
“I need to take a shower and change clothes before my dinner. Are you planning to be in there awhile?”
Silence. He rubbed his eyes and tried to think what to do. Somehow things at home were coming apart at the seams. In his business world, he neatly stitched up deals almost every day. But here, in Deepwater Cove, great rips had been torn in the fabric of his life. The stuffing he had relied on to cushion him from hardships and trials had burst out and was floating away like feathers in the wind. He didn’t even know how to begin to catch it.
“Are you upset?” he asked. “I saw the kid on the porch swing. Did he say something to you?”
“No.” Brenda opened the bathroom door and shouldered her way into the bedroom, head low and hair covering her face. “Go ahead and take your shower.”
Steve hesitated in the doorway. “Brenda, something’s wrong. I can tell you’re not feeling well. Is it that man? That A-1 guy…Nick? Did he do something?”
“Just take your shower and go to the club,” Brenda replied. Like the last brown, dead leaf of winter, she drifted down onto the bedroom’s bay-window seat and turned her face toward the evening sky. Propping her arms on the sill, she pressed her cheek against the glass pane.
Steve glanced at his watch. Jackie Patterson would be arriving at the club any minute now. She would walk into the dining room, and the hostess would seat her at Steve’s reserved table. Ashley Hanes or one of the other waitresses would ask if she wanted a drink. And then she would wait.
He rubbed his hand around the back of his neck. “Brenda, I’m supposed to be at the club in ten minutes. I’ve got an important dinner.”
“Go ahead,” she said. Her voice was flat.
“But something’s going on here at the house. You have to talk to me.” He walked toward the window seat. “I’ve never seen you this way. What happened?”
“Go to the club.”
“I’m serious, Brenda. Is it the kid on the porch? What’s his name?”
“Cody. He’s fine.”
“Did Nick do something that upset you? He was…he was touching you. Holding your arm.”
She closed her eyes. “Please go away, Steve. I don’t need you. I don’t need anyone.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“It means I’m fine. Go away.”
Steve’s cell phone vibrated. That would be Jackie calling to find out where he was. He decided to ignore her for a moment. Frustration built in his chest like steam in a sauna. How could Brenda do this? She was just sitting there like a lump. A few minutes ago, she had been so agitated, nearly in tears, pleading with the handyman. Now she slumped on the window seat like an old coat someone had cast aside.
“Brenda, please talk to me,” he demanded. “I mean it. I want to know why that man had his hand on your arm.”
She said nothing. As if she were dead.
Lifting his phone, Steve glanced at the ID. As expected, it had been Jackie Patterson. He punched in her number. Jackie’s voice came on the line.
“Hey there,” he said, forcing cheer into his tone. “Listen, Jackie, I’m running a few minutes late. My wife is…she’s not feeling well.”
“Oh, why didn’t you call me sooner?” Jackie asked. “Now here I am at the table all by myself.”
“I just got home from the golf course to take a quick shower, and…”
How could he even begin to explain this thing he didn’t understand himself? Steve dropped into a chair. A photograph of his three children in a soft silver frame sat beside a stack of books on the nearby table. He focused on each of their faces. Beautiful, serene Jennifer. His little missionary-in-training. Goofy Justin, always up to something. And Jessica. So sweet. So loving.
As Jackie Patterson continued venting her displeasure on the phone, Steve thought back to his last conversation with his youngest child. “You know, Dad, maybe Mom misses you,” Jessica had said. “I think she’s lonely.”
He had argued his case, of course, righteously defending himself against Jessica’s nonsensical theory. And then she had told him that what she was seeing in her parents’ marriage frightened her. “I don’t ever want to end up angry and hurt and depressed,” she had informed her father.
Was that how Brenda felt? Steve studied his wife now, her face pressed against the window pane and her swollen eyes shut tight.
“So things always do work out?” Jessica had wanted to know. When he couldn’t assure her of the one thing she most wanted to believe at this time in her life, his daughter had expressed her fear that her parents might divorce. Steve had done his best to convince Jessica that his relationship with Brenda was fine, but his precious little girl had run away shouting at him. Her words had seemed silly at the time—trite and impractical, he had thought. “Then take her to the country club for dinner!” Jessica had yelled at him.
“And I have the proposal here for you to look over,” Jackie Patterson was saying. “The lawyers spent a great deal of time on it, and this is really the best night for me, Steve. I simply have to be back in St. Louis by noon tomorrow for a luncheon.”
“All right,” he told her. “Can you give me a few minutes? I need to take care of a couple of things first.”
“I guess I’ll nurse my drink and hope I see someone I recognize.”
“I’m sure you will.” Steve said his good-bye and put away his phone.
He studied the huddled shape on the window seat, certain no good could come of the impulse that had trickled into his brain as his real-estate client chattered away. It wasn’t smart. It was a bad business move. It might cause him to lose everything he had been hoping for and dreaming of all these months.
But each time he tried to make himself stand, ignore his wife, and walk to the bathroom, he saw his daughter’s earnest face. For so many weeks, Steve had hoped for some solution to Brenda’s problem. He’d prayed for it. Nothing he had done made an
y difference. So maybe it was time for drastic measures.
“Brenda,” he said, rising, “I want you to put on a dress and brush your hair while I change into a clean shirt and tie.”
Bleary-eyed, she turned to him. Her nose was red, and her hands trembled. “What?” she whispered.
“Get dressed,” he repeated. “We’re going to have dinner at the country club with one of my clients. And I won’t take no for an answer.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Brenda followed two paces behind Steve as they entered the dimly lit dining room at the country club. A dark green, richly patterned carpet covered the floor all the way to the cherry-paneled walls hung with gold-framed copies of vintage golf, hunting, and boating prints. The tables, each covered in a round green cloth topped by a square white one, held small candle lamps and elegantly folded napkins. The service staff wore various versions of tuxedos—black jackets, white shirts, bow ties, and black slacks. Some of the serving girls had on skirts and low heels. A mounted deer head with an impressive set of antlers peered out from one end of the room. An elk head gazed impassively from the opposite wall.
Brenda had visited the club many times. Usually it was to take the kids swimming with friends in the Olympic-sized pool or to have lunch in the café with a group of local families after church on Sundays. She could count on one hand the number of evenings she had spent in the formal dining room. That had become Steve’s domain.
Getting dressed and applying makeup tonight had been the hardest job Brenda could remember in years. She had begged to be left alone in the house. Steve wouldn’t hear of it. He took her by the arms, lifted her off the window seat, and propelled her to the closet.
Feeling as though twenty-pound weights were attached to her wrists and ankles, she had managed to pull a dress from its hanger and onto her body. In the midst of toweling off after a two-minute shower, Steve zipped up Brenda’s dress and tossed a pair of her sandals out of the closet. She stepped into them before he led her into the bathroom and put a tube of mascara in her hand.
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