Cemetery Road (30 page)

I promised her there is nothing more to be done.

What little I know about O’Neal Holden since I last saw him at his sister’s house is only what I’ve seen in the news. The one-car auto accident that supposedly put him on crutches and tore up his face didn’t get a lot of media coverage, but to O’, I’m sure, any press is good press. I suspect he would feel differently if I ever decide to mail the little micro voice recorder packed away in my luggage to my brother’s friend Jessie Scott at the
Bellwood Carrier
, but I could be wrong. O’ is almost as hard a man to comprehend as he is to hate.

In any case, I’ve done all the worrying about O’Neal Holden I intend to do. My account with the past is closed for good, boarded up and shut down like an old, rotted storefront. I might give a thought to Paris McDonald now and then, unable to do otherwise, but that’s it. I have the future to be afraid of now, and it’s going to take everything I have to build one designed to last.

I will start with my daughter Coral.

I have promised her the truth about her mother, and I will keep my word. I will tell her how, not long after arriving in St Paul, I met and fell in love with a woman named Susan Yancy. We were engaged to be married. But Susan had a little sister, Denise, a wild and self-destructive siren who reminded me of someone else I once loved, someone who’d only recently died, and one night, like a fool, I drifted too close to her flame and she became pregnant with my child. Betrayed, my fiancée left me, and when Denise – shot full of heroin and wasting away – died nine months later, only weeks after giving birth to our daughter, I was left with nothing to do but raise the baby on my own, already determined to tell her nothing but lies about how she had come into the world.

It will be a terrible admission to make, but it will only be part of a much larger story. Coral will need to hear everything, and I will need to share it, in order to help her understand how her father – a man who has always made his living fixing things others cannot – could have ever made such a tragic mess of both our lives.

It is the story of a man who once took a girl who did not belong to him to a dance party and, in so doing, brought a world of hurt to a great number of people, not the least of all himself.

I pray Coral will find it in herself to forgive me.

Just as I pray I will someday learn to forgive myself.