Her Mother's Shadow (23 page)

O
n the drive to Nola's the following morning, Mackenzie tuned Lacey's car radio to a particular station she'd discovered and started mouthing the words to the songs. It distressed Lacey that the songs, obviously so familiar to Mackenzie, were completely unknown to her. She loved music, owned several dozen CDs, and listened regularly to the radio. But it was clear that she was out of it when it came to knowing what a preteen would like.

She glanced at Mackenzie, who was clutching her cell phone in her hand like a lifesaver. When it came to cell phones, though, Bobby was really no better than Mackenzie. He was always checking for messages. A few times he even went outside to take a call, claiming that the signal seemed stronger out there than in the house, but it was obvious to Lacey that he simply wanted privacy. She wondered who he wanted to speak to without being overheard. It was none of her business. She had to remind herself of that.

With Mackenzie unable to call her Phoenix friends due
to the early hour, Lacey knew this was the best time to talk to Mackenzie about chores.

“Could we turn the radio down for a sec?” Lacey asked her. “I wanted to talk to you about helping around the house.”

Mackenzie didn't touch the volume button. “What do you mean?” She sounded suspicious.

“I mean that we all have certain chores we do in the house,” Lacey said, turning the volume down herself. “I thought you might like to have some, too. You know, so you'll feel like part of the family.” It had sounded good when Gina had said those words the day before, but she instantly knew that her awkward presentation wasn't going to produce the result she was after.

“I'll
never
be part of this stupid family,” Mackenzie said. “I don't even want to be.”

Lacey tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Well, I still think it's important for you to do your share, don't you?” she asked.

“What exactly do you want me to do?”

“You can pick,” Lacey said. “The bathrooms—”

“No way.”

“You can sweep the sand out of the kitchen. Or dust. You can vacuum if you want, but I know I always hated doing that when I was your age.”

Mackenzie rested her head against the headrest and looked up at the ceiling of the car. She let out a huge sigh.

“We haven't even asked you to help with the dishes.” Lacey glanced at the girl again. In profile, Mackenzie had Jessica's nose, right down to the indignant little flare of her nostrils.

“Why don't you have a dishwasher?” Mackenzie asked.

“Because the house is supposed to be historically accurate back to the early twentieth century,” she explained for the hundredth time. “There were no dishwashers then.” It was her turn to sigh. “Don't you think it's even a little bit cool
to live in an old lighthouse keeper's house?” She always felt personally offended by Mackenzie's negativity about the house. Even as an eleven-year-old, she'd had an appreciation of Kiss River's history.

“There is nothing cool about it,” Mackenzie said. “It doesn't even have air-conditioning.”

Lacey laughed at the small joke, but Mackenzie didn't seem to notice that she'd made one. Perhaps she hadn't meant to. God, she could be a sour kid.
It's fear.
Lacey reminded herself of Bobby's words.
Remember that. She's scared.

“So, how about you wash or dry the dishes?”

“Every meal?” Mackenzie sounded incredulous.

“No, just dinner.”

“Sometimes I eat at my grandmother's.”

“Well, of course you wouldn't have to do them at home when you eat over there.”

“And what about tonight?” Mackenzie asked. “Bobby's taking me to a movie.”

“You'll have plenty of time between dinner and the movie to dry the dishes.” She was grateful that Bobby was taking Mackenzie out; she wanted the evening with Rick, determined to make the effort to reconnect with him.

“Mom doesn't dry the dishes,” Mackenzie said, not even seeming to notice that she spoke of her mother in the present tense. “She says it's better to let them air-dry.”

“Well, there probably weren't as many, since she used the dishwasher most of the time, right?” Lacey asked. “And there were just the two of you in the house. When there are as many dishes as we have, you have to dry them or there's no room in the rack. And since you'll be working in the kitchen, how about you sweep up after the dishes are done. You'll be in there, anyway.”

Mackenzie let out her breath in a shocked little puff. “What am I,” she asked, “your maid?”

“No, you—”

“You're probably happy my mom died so you could have someone come clean up your house.”

Lacey wanted to smack her. Pull the car to the side of the road and just let her have it, but she kept her hands tight on the wheel, her eyes straight ahead.

“That's not true, Mackenzie,” she said. “And I think you know that.”

A silence stretched between them and Lacey could practically hear the wheels turning in Mackenzie's brain.

“All right,” the girl said finally. “I'll dry the dishes and sweep the kitchen. But I won't vacuum or dust or any of that other stuff.”

“That's fine,” Lacey said. “That's fair. Thank you. The broom is in the pantry.”

“An actual
broom?
” Mackenzie said, as if she'd never seen one. “Do you even have to be historically accurate when you sweep? Mom always uses a Swiffer.”

“A Swiffer wouldn't get up the sand in the kitchen,” Lacey said.

“You are
so
not like my mother,” Mackenzie said, turning up the volume on the radio again. “It's hard to believe you were ever friends.”

 

After dinner that night, Lacey washed the dishes and Mackenzie dried. Or at least, she pretended to. The dishes were put away half-wet, and Lacey didn't feel up to arguing with her over it. She wiped down the table and counter-tops as Mackenzie ineffectively swept the kitchen floor, as if the broom was too heavy for her to use properly. Was she being intentionally sloppy in her work or was she simply a
lousy housekeeper? Whichever the case, Lacey kept her mouth shut. They'd had enough animosity between them that morning. She didn't think she could handle any more that night.

Mackenzie was in her room when Bobby arrived to pick her up for the movie, and Lacey called up the stairs to let her know he was there.

“She has chores now,” she said, returning to the kitchen. “Drying the dishes and sweeping the floor.”

“Excellent,” Bobby said. “How'd she react to them?”

“She said I wanted her to be my maid. And if you notice—” she ran one bare foot across the floor “—she didn't do such a great job.”

Smiling, he tugged at a strand of her hair, and he might have been touching her breasts for the shock it sent through her. His smile changed quickly to a grin, as if he knew how he was affecting her. He
had
to know. She turned away from the crooked grin, relieved to see Mackenzie walk into the room, grunting her hello to her father.

“You two better get going,” Lacey said, feigning a look at her watch to avoid Bobby's eyes. She ushered them toward the door with a maternal sweeping of her hands. “Go on,” she said. “Have a good time.”

Once they were out the door, she leaned against the counter, arms folded tightly across her chest, eyes squeezed shut.
Get a grip,
she told herself. Since when had her hair become an erogenous zone?

Clay walked into the room. “Whoa,” he said, feeling the grit on the floor beneath his bare feet. “I thought Mackenzie was going to sweep?”

“She did.”

He looked at her quizzically. “You all right? What's the matter?”

“Nothing.” She tried to look surprised by the question, wondering what he'd seen in her face.

Clay opened the pantry door and took out the broom. “Well, I have another idea for a job for her,” he said as he started to sweep.

“You've got to be kidding,” Lacey said. “She'll run away if we ask her to do anything else.”

“This one I think she'll like.” Clay was smiling as he swept. “She can be the victim with the dogs.”

Lacey knew exactly what he meant. Clay needed people to hide in the woods for the search-and-rescue trainees to find. “That's actually not a bad idea,” she said. She reached into the pantry for the dustpan and handed it to him. “But you'd better be the one to ask her,” she said. “She turns up her nose at anything I suggest.”

Upstairs she took a quick shower and changed into long pants and a T-shirt, then walked out to her car for the drive to Rick's house. Although it was still light outside by the time she turned onto the road leading to his cottage, the trees quickly engulfed her car and it might as well have been ten o'clock instead of eight. She parked behind his BMW, got out and walked along the wooded path to his house.

The trees created a nest here, she thought. A dark little nest. No wonder Bobby had trouble working in Rick's cottage, and no wonder he loved working in her sunroom. A few times in the evenings, after Bobby had left, she'd walk into the sunroom to stare at the piece he was creating: a mammoth tusk belt buckle adorned with the intricate image of three dogs. Every day there was more detail in the portrait. Still no color, but the precision of the stippling and engraving was simply astonishing. She could smell Bobby in that room. He wasn't one for aftershave, but the scent of his
shampoo or his deodorant or maybe the laundry detergent he used on his clothes lingered in the room, mixing with the faint tobacco smell that was so much a part of him, and she liked to simply sit there and breathe it in.

Damn it.
Here she was, about to knock on Rick's door, and she was still fixated on Bobby. Her counselor—whom she was thinking she might need to revisit sometime soon—had warned her that her resolve would be tested occasionally. She'd thought her test had been the men at the gym, those hard-muscled guys who cut their eyes at her when they thought she wasn't looking, who left the gym in tight jeans and climbed onto their Harleys. She knew now that her real test had arrived in an old VW bus.

Rick opened the cottage door with a smile, his hair damp from a shower, his teeth perfect and very, very white, even in the dim light of the woods. She smiled back, as warmly as she could. Gina had thought nothing of Clay in the beginning, she reminded herself, and then he'd grown into someone she treasured.

“I made dessert,” he said.

“You
made
it?” That was the premise for their getting together tonight: dessert. She'd expected something store-bought. Ice cream, perhaps, or cookies. She followed him into the kitchen, where he'd been slicing strawberries to put on top of a freshly baked angel food cake.

“I'm impressed!” she said. “How can I help?”

“You can just stand there and talk to me,” he said, slicing a fat strawberry into a bowl.

“How is it, having Bobby live with you?” she asked before she could stop herself. “He's been here over a week now. You've got to promise you'll let me know if his welcome starts wearing thin.”

“It's no problem at all,” Rick said. “We get along fine.”

She wondered what conversation would be like between them, two men with absolutely nothing in common.

Rick glanced at her as he picked up another strawberry. “He's in AA. Did you know that?”

“Yes, and I think it's great,” she said. “Tom's in AA and it turned him around.”

“He goes to a lot of meetings,” Rick said, and she could not quite tell if he thought that was a good thing or not.

She glanced toward the corner of the living room, where his computer monitor sat on a table, next to two tall stacks of papers.

“How about you tell me about your book,” she said. “We've never really talked about it.” They had discussed his work so little. Always talking about her, about Mackenzie, about Zachary Pointer's parole hearing. Maybe the reason she felt so little for him was because she hadn't allowed herself to get to know him.

“That's because I don't want to bore you,” he said, the smile still on his face as he pulled a bowl of whipped cream from the refrigerator.

“I want to hear about it, though.” She picked up one of the strawberry slices and popped it into her mouth.

“Let's construct our desserts and eat out on the deck,” he said, handing her a serrated knife to use on the angel food cake. “And then I'll tell you all about my book until your eyes glaze over.”

They piled berries onto their slices of cake and topped the desserts with whipped cream, and then she followed him outside. The deck tipped a bit to the south, and Lacey felt as though the rotting wood might cave in under her weight. She sat down on a creaky old porch swing, while he lit a couple of citronella candles. It had grown dark out, and the only other light came from the cottage windows.