McKettricks of Texas: Tate (17 page)

“No,” Tate said. “Maybe you didn’t mention it because you know I don’t give a rat’s ass what Cheryl does, as long as she takes good care of my kids when they’re with her.”

Garrett snapped his fingers. “Maybe that was it,” he said, clearly delighted to be nettling Tate.

“In about another second,” Tate replied, “I’m going to wipe up the ground with you, little brother.”

Garrett removed his cuff links, rolled up his sleeves. “Bring it on,” he said.

That was when the spray struck them, ice cold and shining like liquid crystal in the last light of a long, difficult day.

Both of them roared in surprised protest and whirled
around to find Austin standing a few yards away, holding the garden hose and grinning like an idiot with a winning lottery ticket in his pocket.

“Peace, brothers,” he said, and drenched them completely with another pass of the hose.

Water shot through the open window of Garrett’s car and made a sound like fire on the fancy leather seats, then sluiced down the inside of the windshield.

Tate laughed out loud, but Garrett bellowed with rage and advanced on Austin, dripping wet, ready to fight.

Tate went after their kid brother, too, but for a different reason.

Water fights were something of a McKettrick tradition, and it had been way too long since the last one.

J
ULIE SEEMED A LITTLE TROUBLED
when she and Paige dropped Libby off in the alley behind the house they’d all grown up in.

“Are you sure you won’t come home with us for supper?” she asked. “My special spaghetti casserole has been simmering in the slow cooker all day and Calvin would love to see you.”

Libby, standing by her back gate with the straps of her high heels in one hand and her clutch purse tucked under the opposite arm, shook her head and smiled. “I’d love to see Calvin,” she said sincerely, “but Hildie needs a walk, and I plan on getting to bed early tonight. The sooner I fall asleep, the sooner this day will be over.”

Paige, out of the back seat and about to climb in up front, rose onto her tiptoes to peer at Libby over the roof of the car. “No hard feelings, Lib?” she asked hopefully.

Libby shook her head again. “No hard feelings,” she replied.

“I could bring over some spaghetti casserole,” Julie fretted. “Leave it on the porch if you and Hildie are still out walking when I get here—”

Libby cut her off. “Julie,” she said,
“I’m fine.”

Paige got into the passenger seat and shut the door.

Libby waved.
“Goodbye.”

Still, Julie waited until Libby had fished her keys out of her bag, unlocked the back door and stepped inside to greet an overjoyed Hildie.

Behind her, Libby hear the Cadillac drive off.

After receiving a royal welcome from her favorite canine, Libby opened the door again, and Hildie trundled out into the yard. By the time the dog returned, Libby had washed out and filled the usual bowls with kibble and water.

While Hildie ate and drank, Libby exchanged her dress for tan cotton shorts and a T-shirt. The hateful pantyhose went into the bathroom trash can, and she flung the shoes to the back of her closet. Short socks and a pair of sneakers completed the ensemble.

The walk was pleasant, restoring Libby a little, and by the time she and Hildie got home, she was getting hungry. Wishing she hadn’t been quite so quick to turn down Julie’s offer to drop off some of her famous spaghetti casserole, Libby was taking a mental inventory of the contents of her refrigerator as she stepped through the front gate, and didn’t immediately notice the figure huddled on the porch steps.

Hildie gave a half-hearted little bark—she wasn’t much of a guard dog—and Libby stopped in her tracks, fighting an urge to pretend she had the wrong house, turn around and flee.

“Marva?” she asked, instead.

Her mother wore a black and gold, zebra-striped caftan from her extensive collection of leisure garments, along
with plenty of makeup. “It’s about time you got home,” Marva accused, making a petulant face. “I don’t have a house key anymore, you know.”

Libby considered the distance between the condominium complex and her place, and frowned. Marva often took long walks, but never without her prized athletic shoes, and tonight she was wearing metallic-gold flats with pointed toes. “How did you get here?” Libby asked.

Marva jutted out her chin, still angling for a welcome, evidently. “I took a cab,” she said. “It’s not as if I could count on any of my
children
for a ride, after all.”

Libby remembered to latch the gate, leaned down to unhook Hildie’s leash. There was precisely one taxi in Blue River, and it was often up on blocks in the high weeds behind Chudley Wilkes’s trailer-house, though he’d been known to fire it up when someone called, wanting a ride someplace and willing to pay the fare.

“Are you hungry?” Libby asked, sitting down beside her mother on the step. Up close, she could see that Marva’s red lipstick had gone on crooked and was mostly chewed off. “I could make scrambled eggs—”

“The cabdriver was a hayseed,” Marva went on, as though Libby hadn’t spoken at all. “He claims he’s related to John Wilkes Booth, on his mother’s side. Booth’s mother, not his.”

“Chudley likes to spin a yarn, all right,” Libby said. “Not many people call for a taxi in a town this size, so he has a lot of time to study the family tree. Over time, he’s grafted on a few branches.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me in?” Marva asked. “I came all this way, and you just leave me sitting on the front porch like some beggar.”

Libby figured there no use pointing out that she’d just offered to whip up some scrambled eggs and hadn’t planned to serve them on the front porch. “Of course you can come in,” she said, rising.

All this time, Hildie had been standing on the walk, head tilted to one side, studying Marva as though she had sprouted out of the ground only moments before.

“Whose dog is that?” Marva fussed, though she’d made Hildie’s acquaintance at least once before. “I don’t like dogs. It will have to stay outside.” She made a go-away motion with the backs of her hands. “Scat! Go home.”

“Hildie is my dog,” Libby said carefully, a sick feeling congealing in the bottom of her stomach. “She
lives
here.”

“Shoo,” Marva said, paying no attention to Libby. Most of her conversations were one-sided; she did all the talking and none of the listening. “Go away.”

Hildie hesitated, then backed up a few steps, confused.

“Mother,” Libby said, annoyed, as well as alarmed, “
don’t.
Please. You’re scaring her.”

But Marva had turned her head to stare at Libby. “Did you just call me ‘Mother’?”

Libby wasn’t sure how to answer. Years ago, before she’d packed a suitcase and left, Marva had hated being addressed by that term, or any of its more affectionate variations.

“It doesn’t matter,” she finally said. “Let’s go in and I’ll start the scrambled eggs.” Then, more firmly, she called her dog. “Come on, Hildie.”

Hildie hesitated, uncertain, then lumbered toward Libby, full of trust.

“I won’t be in the same house with that horrible creature,” Marva warned.

“Then you’ll have to eat your supper out here,” Libby
replied, very quietly, “because Hildie is coming inside with me.”
And, furthermore, she is not a “horrible creature.”

Marva began to cry, sniffling at first, then wailing. “You hate me! I’m all alone in the world!”

The truth was, Libby didn’t hate Marva—she’d shut that part of herself down a long, long time ago—but she couldn’t have said she loved her, either.

“Come inside,” Libby urged gently. “I’ll brew some tea. Would you like a nice cup of tea?”

Marva stepped over the threshold, stood in the small, modestly furnished living room, looking around. She didn’t seem to notice when Hildie slunk in behind her and took refuge behind the couch.

“I lived here once,” Marva said, as though she’d just recalled the fact.

“Yes,” Libby confirmed, at once suspicious and sympathetic. “You lived here once.”

And then you left. Even though Paige and Julie and I begged you not to go.

“Where did he die?” Marva asked. Her mascara had run, and her hair was starting to droop around her face, but the expression in her eyes was lucid. “Show me where he died.”

Libby moved to stand where her father’s rented hospital bed had been, during the last months of his life. “Here,” she said. “Right here.”

I was holding his hand. Paige and Julie were here, too. And the last word he said was your name.

“On the living-room floor?”

“In a hospital bed.”

“Well, I’m not surprised. The man had no imagination.”

Libby struggled to hold on to her temper. She’d lost it once already today, and she wasn’t about to let it go again.
Moments before, she’d considered the possibility that Marva was genuinely ill. Now, she suspected she was being played, manipulated—again. “Dying doesn’t require much imagination,” she remarked, with no inflection whatsoever. “A lot of courage, perhaps.”

Dad raised us, provided for us, sacrificed for us. He loved us and we knew it. That’s more than you ever did.

“Courage!” Marva huffed. “Will Remington was a small-town schoolteacher, content to plod along, living in this rat-trap of a house and calling it home. Driving a secondhand car and buying day-old bread and clipping coupons out of the Wednesday paper. How much courage does that take?”

“A lot, I think,” Libby said calmly.
He washed our hair. He told us bedtime stories and listened to our prayers before we went to sleep. Maybe it took some courage to hear his children asking God to send their mother home, night after night. Maybe, damn you, it took courage just to keep getting up in the morning.

Marva whirled on her. “You do, do you?” she challenged hotly. “You think your father was such a hero? Well, let me tell you something, missy—Will was dead his whole life.
I’m
the one who did all the living!”

Hildie peered around the end of the couch and growled pitiably.

Libby left the room, trembling, and came as far as the inside doorway with her car keys in one hand. She jangled them at her mother. “It’s time for you to go,” she said.

Marva frowned. “What about the scrambled eggs?”

“I’m fresh out,” Libby replied. “Of eggs, I mean.”

“But I’m hungry!”

“Then we’ll get you a hamburger on the way over. Let’s go.”

“This is a fine how-do-you-do,” Marva ranted. “I come
to visit my own daughter, in my own home, and I get the bum’s rush!”

“This isn’t your home,” Libby said.
And I wish to God I wasn’t your daughter.
“Things have changed. You moved out years ago.”

Hildie whimpered. She wasn’t used to stress.

“Please,” Marva pleaded, with such pathos that, yet again, Libby wasn’t sure if the woman was mentally ill or had simply changed her tactics. “Let me stay here. Just for tonight.”

“Let’s go,” Libby said, hardening her heart a little against the inevitable guilt. What if Marva actually was sick? What if she was having a breakdown or something?

“I’m your mother,” Marva reminded her.

Yes, God help me. You are. But I don’t have to love you. I don’t even have to
like
you.

“And I’m lonely,” Marva persisted, when Libby didn’t speak. “None of you girls are willing to make room in your lives for me.”

Libby closed her eyes.
Don’t go there
, she warned herself.

“Suppose I die? You’ll be sorry you treated me this way when I die.”

A year after you left, I started telling people you were dead. They all knew better, because they remembered you. They remembered the scandal. But they pretended to believe me, just to be kind.

“Dad loved you so much,” Libby blurted out. Or was it the little girl she’d once been, not the woman she was, doing the talking? “He never stopped believing you’d come back.”

“I couldn’t take you with me,” Marva said, true to form. Libby might not have spoken at all. “You were practically babies, the three of you. And we lived like gypsies, Lance
and me.” She paused, and a dreamy expression crossed her face, all the more disturbing because of her smeared makeup. “Like gypsies,” she repeated softly.

Lance.
Libby had never known Marva’s lover’s name.

Not that it mattered now.

She bit her lower lip, tried to think what to say or do, to get through to Marva, and jumped when a light knock sounded at the front door.

Hildie retreated behind the couch.

“Libby?” Paige let herself in, a small, lidded dish in her hands. “I brought you some of Julie’s casserole—she insisted—” Seeing Marva, Paige’s brown eyes widened. “Oh,” she said.

“Yeah, oh,” Libby confirmed. She could have hugged her little sister, she was so glad to see her. As a nurse, Paige would know if Marva needed medical help. “She’s acting strangely,” she added, gesturing toward their mother.

“Don’t talk about me as though I weren’t even here,” Marva huffed.

The lid on Julie’s dish rattled a little as Paige set it aside on the small table beside the door.

“I love casserole,” Marva said, smiling happily.

Paige marched right over, confident as a prison matron taking charge of a new arrival, grasped their mother firmly by the arm and hustled her toward the door. “Some other time, maybe,” she said cheerfully, casting a reassuring look at Libby. “Right now, Marva, you and I are going to take a little spin in my car.”

“Thank you,” Libby mouthed.

“You owe me,” Paige said.

And just like that, the latest Marva episode was over.

For now, anyway.

Libby locked the front door, leaving the casserole dish right where it was, and turned to Hildie.

It took fifteen minutes to persuade the poor dog to come out from behind the couch.

T
HE WATER FIGHT TURNED
out to be a dandy—even the dogs got involved. When it was over, Tate and Garrett and Austin all sat in the kitchen in their wet clothes, drinking beer and talking about the old days.