No One Needs to Know (8 page)

“Of course I’m right,” Ryder said. “But you don’t sound too sure. Hell, if you want to chicken out, that’s fine by me. We don’t have to do this tonight. It’s not my kid. I don’t care. This was your idea, bro.”

“I know it was,” Tad said, staring at his reflection in the darkened window above the sink.

“You were too good for her. She treated you like shit, man. I know it was two years ago, but let’s face it, you’re still pretty raw about it. If your baby wasn’t involved, I’d just say fucking forget about her. She’s not worth it. But then she’s got your kid, your son . . .”

Tad nodded. He felt his heart racing. “Damn it, I have a right to take what’s mine. We’re doing this tonight . . .”

Dawn tugged at the knife sheath. It pinched and pulled at the skin on his back. “That’s on good and tight,” she said.

“Come over here and get a little Dutch courage,” Ryder said to his brother.

Taking the straw from Ryder, Tad bent over and quickly snorted up one line, then the other. Shuddering gratefully, he rubbed his nose. “More,” he murmured.

Ryder shook his head. “You know how too much coke makes you sweat. Might loosen the tape, and you’ll want to have that knife tonight.”

Tad picked at the remnants of white powder on the glass tabletop, and then licked his fingers. “I’m just going there to get my son. What do I need the knife for anyway?”

Ryder gave him a tiny little smile. “For when that cheating whore gives you an argument,” he said.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

Thursday, June 5

Ellensburg

J
oey let out a little cry.

Laurie blindly felt around for the nightstand lamp and switched it on. She squinted at the clock at her bedside: 2:51
A.M
.

After that phone call at ten, there hadn’t been another. Maybe her threat had made some impact. At least that was what Laurie had told herself while frosting the third cake. She’d finished emptying out her desk, and started nodding off during the Jennifer Aniston movie. She’d woken up in time for the gag reel along with the end credits, which looked like the best part of the movie. She’d peeled herself off the sofa and crawled into bed shortly after midnight—with Brian’s baseball bat by her side.

Now propped up on one elbow, Laurie pushed her hair away from her face and stared at the baby monitor on her nightstand.
Please, don’t start coughing.
It wasn’t unusual for Joey to let out a little cry in his sleep now and then. Most nights, she’d just ignore it. But now, each little noise from his room was cause for alarm. And she wasn’t just worried about his cough either.

She listened and waited. She didn’t want to go in there if he was about to nod off again. She would give him sixty more seconds—and if there wasn’t another peep out of him, she’d switch off the light and go back to sleep.

On the nightstand was a small photo of her and her mom. Laurie had found it earlier tonight in an envelope in the desk’s bottom drawer. She’d propped the snapshot against the baby monitor on her nightstand. It was one of those photo-booth snapshots. She had no idea what had happened to the other three pictures from the strip. Maybe they weren’t very good shots of her mother, so she’d gotten rid of them. Then again, Teri Serrano hardly ever took a bad picture in her younger days. In this photo, she was movie-star gorgeous—with exotic eyes and shimmery, shoulder-length black hair. In the photograph, she was laughing. Crammed inside the booth with her was Laurie’s skinny, serious, eleven-year-old self.

“You’re no fun at all,” her mother was forever telling her.

Her mom didn’t leave her much choice. One of them had to take on some responsibility. From an early age, Laurie got up, dressed, fed herself, and then went off to school—all while her mother slept. Laurie did the housework and prepared the meals. Teri was a lousy cook. She would have lived on Chardonnay, cupcakes, Bugles, and microwave burritos—if her young daughter hadn’t intervened.

Life with Teri was anything but dull. Her mom was always moving them—usually to get away from either a lousy boyfriend or trouble at work. Laurie would just get used to a place, and her mother would suddenly up and move them again. She often chose their next destination by opening a Rand McNally map of the U.S., closing her eyes, and going wherever her finger landed. Then Laurie would help her mother load up the old Ford Celebrity, and they’d head to the next city.

She didn’t make any close friends. There didn’t seem much point in trying. So cooking became her companion. In the kitchen, Laurie had control. She could be creative, and it was the one thing she did that her mother appreciated. Teri never noticed that Laurie had done the laundry or cleaned the apartment, but she really enjoyed a good meal. Whenever one of her boyfriends treated her to dinner at a classy restaurant, Teri would charm her way into the kitchen and get the recipe from the chef. Then she’d give it to Laurie to duplicate.

Laurie could still see her sitting in front of the TV with the dinner plate on her lap. “Oh, sweetie, this is even better than what I had in that hoity-toity restaurant,” her mother would say, gobbling up Laurie’s rendition of the latest borrowed recipe.

Every new place they moved into, Laurie checked the kitchen first, and then she took a look at her bedroom—if she got one. Often she shared a bedroom with her mom, which became awkward whenever Teri had a man over. Many a night, Laurie cooked an elaborate dinner for her mom and the latest boyfriend—and then at bedtime, she was relegated to the sofa in the living room.

Her dad wasn’t in the picture at all. He’d played the bass guitar in a band called Sump Pump. Apparently, they’d been a real hit in Jacksonville, Florida, in the mid-eighties. That was where he and Teri had gotten married. When the band split up, he split, too—for good. He just took off one morning. Laurie had been thirteen months old. She and her mother didn’t hear from him again. But Teri never filed for divorce.

“Sweetie, the things you should know about your father are this,” her mother told her. “He was a very talented musician, sexy, a lot of fun—and, well, you know how some people have a severe reaction to nuts, like an allergy? They eat one nut and suddenly their throat closes up and they go into a coma or something. Well, that was Art Serrano with responsibility. He just couldn’t handle it—not even a little bit.”

Laurie wanted to tell her mother that it took one to know one.

Early on, she’d made up her mind that she wouldn’t be anything like Teri. She would be a terrific mother to her children.

Yet here she was, planning a sudden, furtive move to another city to get away from a pissed-off former lover. And here she was, switching off the light and ducking back under the covers—when her child had just cried out in the middle of the night.

He’s fine, everything’s fine,
Laurie told herself. She’d waited three whole minutes without another sound from him. If Joey was still awake, she’d have heard him on the monitor. And if by chance anyone had climbed in through his bedroom window, she’d have heard that, too. Besides, no one could break in that way. A few days ago, she’d sawed off part of a broom handle and vertically wedged it into the window frame for extra security.

Laurie assured herself once again that Joey was okay, she should go back to sleep. But she lay there in the dark, staring up at the popcorn ceiling.

It was just her and Joey, no grandparents, no relatives, no one else. It had been the same setup with her and her mother. They only had each other. Laurie wondered if Joey would spend most of his childhood and teen years resenting her the way she’d resented Teri. Yet she and her mom had been a team, nearly inseparable.

When she’d headed off to Central Washington University, Laurie had been horribly homesick—even though she’d never really had a steady, stable home. She’d worried about Teri on her own. Her mom wasn’t as pretty as she used to be. She no longer had guys doing things for her—or a daughter to look after her. Teri lived only two hours away in Spokane. But Laurie was busy with school and waitressed most weekends, so weeks passed between visits home. Each time she made that bus trip to Spokane, she noticed her mother getting heavier and more sedentary—old before her time. Her beautiful black hair had lost its luster, and was ceding to gray; so she’d cut it short.

When Laurie and Brian were engaged and the wedding date drew near, her mother had a meltdown trying to find a decent dress to wear to the ceremony. “I can’t fit into anything,” she lamented. “I’m so big. God, what’s happened to me?”

Laurie tried to convince her that she was still beautiful. But Teri didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t want Laurie to take her shopping at Lane Bryant. She didn’t want to hear about all the gorgeous, self-confident TV and movie personalities who were full-figured, plus-size women. Three days before her wedding, Laurie received a letter from her mother—with a check for a hundred dollars, which she could hardly afford. There was also an apology note:

Dear Laurie & Brian,

Please forgive me for not coming to your wedding. I just can’t let people see me looking this way. Give my best to everyone there. I’m so proud of you, Laurie & so happy you’re marrying such a wonderful man. Be happy, you two.

XXXX—Me

The worse Teri felt about her weight, the more she stayed at home—and ate to compensate for her misery and loneliness. She just didn’t know how to take care of herself.

Not long after Laurie had returned from Europe and Brian had been sent to Afghanistan, Teri fell and badly sprained her ankle in the Safeway parking lot. Laurie drove to Spokane to take her to Ellensburg, where she could look after her for a while. They would make use of that second bedroom after all. During the drive home, her mom suddenly started sobbing. “When I fell, I felt like such an idiot. And, oh, sweetie, it hurt so much when I hit the pavement. But worse was my grocery bag ripping open. My stash fell out—the candy bars and donuts, everything I shouldn’t be eating. And I saw these people in the parking lot laughing at me—me, the fat lady falling on her ass with all her junk food around her.”

Staring at the road ahead, Laurie took one hand off the wheel, reached over, and squeezed her mother’s arm. “Fuck them, Mom,” she said. “Pardon my French, but fuck them.”

Her mother didn’t stay in the guest room long. After a couple of days, she complained of stiffness in her joints and trouble getting her breath. On her day off from the diner, Laurie took Teri to Kittitas Valley Hospital. Her mom rolled her eyes while the examining doctor mentioned that she needed to lose some weight and exercise more. He wanted to set her up for an X-ray and an EKG that afternoon. Both procedures were done in a different building. It was only a block away, but Laurie knew her mother couldn’t walk it. She had her wait in the lobby of the main building while she brought the car around. By the time Laurie helped her into the passenger seat her mother was huffing and wheezing.

“Mom, are you okay?” she asked, bent over by the passenger door.

Teri nodded impatiently. “Let’s go . . .”

Closing the door, Laurie hurried around to the driver’s side. She started up the car and then glanced at her mom, who had a hand over her heart. She looked chalky.

“I’m lowering your window,” Laurie said, flicking the master switch on the armrest. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Her mother nodded again. Laurie pulled out of the main lot and started down the block. That was when her mother gasped. “Oh, sweetie . . . I can’t—I can’t breathe . . .” She was tugging at the collar of her sweatshirt.

Laurie saw the emergency room entrance up ahead, and pushed down on the accelerator. The tires let out a screech as she turned into the driveway. “Hold on,” she said, clutching the steering wheel. “Hold on, Mom . . .”

By the time Laurie pulled up to the entrance, her mother had passed out. It took three orderlies to pry her out of the car and onto a gurney. One of them put a respirator mask over Teri’s mouth and nose. Then they wheeled her down the corridor. Laurie followed them—until a tall, stern-looking nurse stepped into her path. “This is far as you can go. I’m sorry . . .”

She watched them push her mother on the gurney through a set of double doors.

Another nurse with a clipboard sat her down in the waiting area, and started grilling her about her mother’s medical background, and when she’d last eaten. The nurse was just getting to questions about insurance when a doctor came through the double doors. He was a pale, handsome, thirtyish man in scrubs. He whispered something to the nurse, who showed him the form she’d been filling out.

Laurie stood up. The doctor turned to her. “Laurie?”

She nodded.

“I’m Dr. Lahart. I’m really sorry. We did everything we could . . .”

Wide-eyed, Laurie stared at him. She kept expecting him to say that her mother would need surgery, or that they had to keep her in the hospital overnight. Instead, Dr. Lahart sadly shook his head. “We lost her.”

They told her later that a blood clot must have formed after Teri’s ankle injury in the Safeway parking lot. And that blockage was what caused the respiratory problems, which led to her death.

Brian got a five-day furlough to attend the funeral. They drove to Spokane and cleaned out her mother’s apartment. Laurie found a manila envelope full of restaurant recipes her mother had scribbled down for her. When she was growing up Laurie had figured Teri had done that just so she could enjoy a restaurant-quality dinner at home—courtesy of her daughter. And of course, she’d probably enjoyed flirting with those chefs, working her charms on them to get their culinary secrets.

But it wasn’t until Laurie found the manila envelope in Teri’s sad little apartment that she realized her mom had collected those recipes all these years for her—to encourage her to become a good cook.

Teri hadn’t any insurance. There were medical bills and funeral costs. Brian had been worried about them going broke if she’d stayed in Europe another five weeks. And now here they were, broke anyway.