Redemption Road (Jackson Falls #5) (27 page)

He dropped heavily into the vinyl booth and set the muddy plates
on the seat beside him. “The truck’s shot. I sold it to the guy for parts. I
don’t know what to do now. With our transportation gone, I don’t think I have
enough money to get us there.”

She took a sip of coffee. With both hands wrapped around the warm
mug and her eyes focused on the steam rising above it, she said quietly, “I’m
not going with you.”

Their eyes met. “Don’t do this,” he begged. “We’ve come so far.”

“I thought I could do it. I thought I could marry you. Leave home,
start a new life, be the wife you deserve. I can’t.”

“Is this your idea of payback? I broke your heart, so now you’re
breaking mine?”

“Damn it, Mikey, you know better than that!”

“So why—” He glanced around the diner, lowered his voice. “Why are
you doing this?”

“I’m seventeen years old. I’m not ready. What the hell am I
supposed to do while you’re out on deployment? Sit around with all the other military
wives, the ones that are twice my age, and pretend we have something to say to
each other? I can’t just follow you blindly around the world. I have my own
dreams, Mikey. Things I want to do. Berklee. Maybe, if I’m lucky, a career in
music. I have Emma, and Leroy. Dad and Casey. I love you, but I love them, too.
I don’t want to be three thousand miles away from them, all alone, while you’re
off in Kuwait or Germany or Yokohama, saving the world.” A tear trickled from
her eye, and she swiped angrily at it.

“So what the hell am I supposed to do now?”

“Live your life. It’s not our time, Mikey. Can’t you see that? Can’t
you see that this was the universe’s way of saying we’re not ready? Live your
life, and I’ll live mine, and who knows? Maybe somewhere down the road, things
will be different.”

His heart was breaking, shattering into a million pieces. And yet,
somewhere inside him, there was a slender thread of what felt remarkably like
relief. “I wish I could hate you,” he said, “the way you hated me. But I
can’t.”

“I never hated you. I was in love with you, and you threw it back
in my face.”

“I didn’t do it to hurt you. I did it to save you.”

“I know that now.”

They sat, silent, both of them locked inside their thoughts. The
waitress came by and left the check. “So,” he said hoarsely, “what now?”

Paige took a final sip of coffee and picked up the check. “Now,”
she said, “we find a pay phone and we call my dad.”

Harley

When he rang the doorbell, Leroy started yapping. After a second,
when Casey didn’t answer, he opened the door, stuck his head into the front
hall, and shouted, “Hello? Anyone here?”

From the living room, she said, “In here.”

He ushered Annabel into the house ahead of him. While Leroy raced
around them, sniffing excitedly, Annabel dropped her overnight bag on the floor
and took off her boots. Harley followed suit, and with Leroy excitedly
accompanying them, they entered the living room.

Casey was on the couch, feet up on the coffee table, a blue plaid
blanket resting across her legs.

“Thank you so much,” she said. “I really didn’t think it was
necessary for Annabel to stay with me, but you know how Rob is.”

She put up a good front, but some things, she couldn’t fake. Her
pale skin, her sunken eyes, told the real story. He wondered when she’d last slept
for longer than a couple of hours. “No need for you to be alone,” he said.  His
mother had lost a baby when he was nine years old. She’d never said a word
about it to him. That wasn’t her way. For Southern women in those days, babies
were a private matter, and not something they discussed with the kids or the
menfolk. But he would never forget the day he’d found her at the clothesline,
on her knees beside the old wooden clothes basket. The image was forever branded
in his mind of his mother kneeling there, laundry flapping around her, those
chapped, callused hands covering her face as she sobbed, the low, agonized
keening of a grieving mother.

“Annabel and I will do just fine,” Casey said. “Right, kiddo?”

“Right. Where’s Emma?”

“In her room. She’s due to get up from her nap any minute now. You
can go up and get her if you want.”

His daughter scampered up the stairs, with Leroy at her heels, and
he stood awkwardly, not sure what to say. He finally settled for silence. Crouching
before her, he took her hand in his and just held it. A single tear escaped
from her eye and trickled down her cheek. “Oh, Harley,” she said. “I wanted that
baby so bad.”

“I know you did, sweetheart. I’m so sorry. You need to cry. Let it
out.”

With her free hand, she wiped away the tear. “I will. When I’m
ready. The doctor said we could try again. It won’t be the same. I already
loved that little baby. And I know, from firsthand experience, that you can’t
replace one child with another one. There’s always room in your heart for
another, but that doesn’t fill the empty place the lost one left behind.”

“My momma lost a baby when I was a boy. She had a houseful of
kids, but that lost baby just about broke her heart.”

“Thank you. Thank you for loaning me Annabel, and for caring. You’re
a good man, Harley Atkins.”

He kissed her hand and stood. “Is there anything I can do for you
before I leave?”

“Yes,” she said. “There is. I need a favor.”

“Anything for you,” he said. “Anything at all.”

“Don’t give up on my sister. She has a big heart, she just hasn’t
realized it yet. She needs somebody like you in her life. Somebody who’ll make
her want to be a better person. I think you’re that somebody.”

As he walked down the flagstone walkway to his truck, he thought
he could detect a change in the air. Something fragile, but burgeoning. It had
been a warm day, and they’d lost a lot of snow. Pretty soon, there’d be
daffodils poking their heads up through the soil. He’d already seen buckets
hanging from maple trees around town. New beginnings. Maybe there was some new
beginning waiting around the corner for him.

And for the first time in a long time, his heart swelled with
hope.

Colleen

They took a private jet to Omaha, then rented a car. Beside her,
Rob was silent as he drove. “Remember,” she told him, “she’s fragile right now.
Don’t be too hard on her.”

“I want to spank her. And I want to hug her. I’m just not sure
which one I want to do more. But Casey said something last night that made me
think. She reminded me that she was just a year older than Paige is now when
she eloped with Danny. I guess your perspective changes with time. And with parenthood.”

“That it does, my friend.”

He glanced at her, then returned his eyes to the road. “We are,
aren’t we?  Friends?”

“We are. And there’s nobody else I’d rather see my sister with.”

He took the highway exit, followed the two-lane blacktop road into
the center of town. The Midtown Inn was on the left, just after the Chicken
Coop restaurant. Rob clicked his blinker and pulled into the parking lot. They
exited the car without speaking and headed together to Room 105. Rob rapped on
the door, and Colleen took his hand. Squeezed and then released it. “Stay cool,
brother-in-law,” she said.

The door swung open, and her son stood there, looking gutted. Without
speaking, he swung the door wider, and she followed Rob inside.

Paige was sitting on the foot of the bed, dried tears streaking her
face. “Daddy,” she said, and Rob folded her into his arms. They stood there,
rocking back and forth, no need for words between them.

Colleen embraced her son. “I am so happy to see you,” she said. “We’ve
been so worried.”

His eyes avoided hers. “Yeah, well, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine.”

“No?” He met her eyes, and she was surprised by the hostility she
saw in his. “Why should you care, anyway?”

Hurt, she said, “I’m your mother, Mikey. That’s why. When we get
home, we’re having a long talk. There are things I need to tell you. Things I
should have told you a long time ago.”

“I’m not going home.”

“What do you mean?  Of course, you’re going home.”

“No. I’m really not. I enlisted in the Marines. I have to report
to Camp Pendleton in five days.”

It took a moment for his words to register. Stunned, she met Rob’s
eyes and saw her own shock reflected there. “Why?” she demanded. “Why would you
do something like that?”

“Because I wanted to make something of myself! Because I hated every
F-ing minute of college! Because I didn’t want to follow in Dad’s footsteps and
become a goddamn teacher! Because I wanted to do something with my life that
mattered!”

Colleen closed her eyes against the images in her head. Weren’t
the Marines known for going boldly into tricky and treacherous situations? “I
wish you’d talked to me first.”

“Why, Mom? Why should it even matter to you? I’ve never mattered
to you. Why should you suddenly give a damn what I do?”

The pain in her chest cut like a shard of glass as years of
pent-up anger unfurled and sparked, a match to sawdust, all smoke and flame and
fury. Grimly, she said, “You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about.”

“Oh? Don’t I? If you ever gave a damn, you wouldn’t have walked
away from me.”

“I didn’t!” she snapped. “I didn’t walk away from you!”

“Funny, but I don’t seem to remember you being there.”

“I didn’t walk away, Mikey.”  She took a deep breath to still her
trembling. “Your father sent me away.”

His chest rose and fell with his heavy breathing. “Like I’m
supposed to believe that.”

“It’s the truth.”

“You’re a liar. Do you hear me? You’re a goddamn liar. All you’re
trying to do is make yourself look good and make Dad look bad. Well, guess
what? You can just go to hell!” 

He grabbed his coat and stormed out the door, slamming it behind
him so hard that the ugly picture on the wall nearly fell. “Mikey!” she said. “Damn
it, Mikey!”

“I’m sorry,” Paige said. “It’s not really you he’s mad at. It’s
me.”

“Let him go,” Rob told her. “He needs to be alone.”

Colleen looked at her brother-in-law and shook her head. “No,” she
said. “What he needs is the truth.”

She found him at the far end of the motel complex, sprawled on a
wooden bench outside the laundry room, hands shoved in his pockets. She sat
down beside him, stretched her legs out next to his. Said quietly, “I have been
this family’s sacrificial lamb for way too long. But I’m done with the secrets
and the lies. I’m not crazy enough to paint myself as a saint. Or as a victim. But
I’m not a villain, either. This isn’t about who’s right and who’s wrong. This
is about facts, and truth, and opening the windows to let in the light.”

Reaching into the pocket of her jeans, she pulled out the chip she
carried everywhere. She’d held it in her hands so many times, she’d worn it
smooth. Mikey’s gaze followed it as she held it up, and he glanced quizzically
at her. “It’s from AA,” she said. “My five years sober chip.” She flipped it to
her son, and he caught it in midair. She took a deep breath and said, “Hi. I’m
Colleen, and I’m an alcoholic.”

Mikey didn’t say a word. “It’s where I met Irv,” she said. “He was
my sponsor.”

“I don’t understand.”

She raised her hand, scraped the hair back from her face, and
said, “I fell in love with your father when I was twelve. We grew up together. But
Jesse was four years older than me, and I was an awkward, gangly, long-legged
twelve-year-old. If he thought of me at all, he thought of me as a younger
sister. It was Casey he was interested in. He and my sister dated for four
years. I spent those same four years worshiping him from afar, while planning
her early demise.”

Mikey let out a soft snort, and she took it as a good sign. It
meant he was listening. “I’d just about accepted the fact that he was going to
marry my sister and become my brother-in-law when a miracle happened. My sister
met Danny Fiore and eloped with him. That put Jesse back on the market. By that
time, I was sixteen, and determined in the way that only a teenage girl can be.
I did everything I could, used all my feminine wiles, pulled out all the stops,
to make him mine. And it worked. I trapped him. At seventeen, I got pregnant on
purpose. Your father, being the honorable guy he’s always been, made me his
wife. And I, being seventeen and full of high-flown ideas about love and life
and marriage, thought I’d just achieved everything I’d ever want.”

She paused, saw that he was still listening. “There was just one
problem. My new husband didn’t love me. He was too polite to say so, but I knew.
A woman always knows. Our marriage was a disaster, but I was seventeen years
old, and at seventeen, you tell yourself lots of pretty little lies. That it
will work out. That things will change. That he’ll eventually come to love you.” 

Mikey folded his arms across his chest. Cleared his throat. Said, “Is
there a point to all this?”

“I’m getting to it. By the age of twenty, I was married to a man
who didn’t love me, stuck at home with a two-year-old all day, and my life
consisted of scrubbing toilets and folding diapers. I loved you more than
anything, but I was so bored, so lonely, so damn miserable. So sometimes, on
the weekends, I’d leave you with your dad and I’d go out with my girlfriends,
and we’d party. That’s what everyone did in that one-stoplight town. There
wasn’t anything else to occupy us, so the minute we were of legal drinking age,
we partied.

“The other girls could drink, and it wasn’t a problem for them. But
I couldn’t handle my liquor. I’d wake up the next day and have no memory of the
night before. More than once, the girls brought me home and your father carried
me upstairs and poured me into bed. I knew he didn’t approve, but he never said
a word. If nothing else, he was a dutiful husband. He took care of me.

“Gradually, it got worse. I started drinking at home, during the
day. Just a little, to take the edge off. To combat the boredom and the
loneliness. At first, I drank to feel better. Then, I drank to feel normal. Eventually,
I drank just so I could function. I hid it well. Nobody knew. Not even your dad,
for the longest time. Until the little accidents started to happen. I fell and
broke an arm. I knocked out a tooth and had to have it capped. By that time, I
was drinking daily, and Jesse had figured out what was going on. We argued
about it. I promised to quit. To get help. But I couldn’t keep my promise. I
couldn’t quit. Once you started school, I’d open that bottle as soon as you got
on the school bus. It was the only way I could function. I knew I was in
trouble, but I didn’t know how to stop. Hell—” She paused, uttered a brittle
laugh. “I might as well be honest. I didn’t want to stop. Instead, I became
very, very careful. That’s what I called it, being careful. Because the words
being
careful
roll off the tongue a lot more easily than
sneaky
and
conniving
.
I was on a runaway train, careening down a mountainside without brakes, with
nothing but catastrophe waiting for me at the end. Then, when you were nine
years old, we went out in the car one afternoon. Just the two of us. I don’t
even remember where we were headed. Maybe to the IGA, to buy a loaf of bread. Maybe
to the library, to return an overdue book. I’d been drinking, and I crashed the
car. Do you remember that?”

Mikey’s eyes narrowed, and then they lit with memory. “I got a cut
on the chin,” he said. “Dad came and got us.”

“Yes. Dad came and got us.” She swiped furiously at a tear she
hadn’t known was there. “I knew then that I had to get help. Because, you see,
there was nothing in the world more important to me than you. And I’d put you
in danger. God, Jesse was so mad at me. He told me he’d had enough, that he was
filing for divorce. That he was keeping you.”  She paused, lost in memories. “I
could hardly blame him.”

“So what happened?”

“He’d just published his second book. The first one had really
taken off. He was making a sickening amount of money. He told me he’d send me
to rehab. He’d pay. There was just one stipulation. I couldn’t see you again
until I was clean.”

“I remember now. You went away for a while. You were in rehab?”

“I was in rehab. When I got out, for the first time in almost a
decade, I was clean and sober. The divorce went through. Your dad was granted
custody. There was no point in fighting it. I was a mess. In no way was I ready
to be a mother to you at that point. So I moved back in with Dad and Millie, to
be close to you. Your dad allowed me to spend time with you as long as it was
supervised. I wasn’t happy about it, but I understood. I got a job. A car. Then
I met Kenny Davis. I was fragile, and he was persuasive. So we got married. I
seemed to be headed toward stability, so your father relaxed some of his
visitation rules. You came to visit Kenny and me sometimes.”

“I didn’t like him.”

“No. You didn’t. And after a few months, that marriage went off
the rails, too. Rebound marriages seldom work out. I went into a tailspin. I
couldn’t understand why I kept failing at marriage, so I threw myself a pity
party and I fell off the wagon. Hard. By this time, my drinking buddies had all
deserted me. Their partying days were behind them, and they were all raising
families. I was a liability. They didn’t want me hanging around their kids. Or
their husbands. I called your dad and begged for help, and he sent me back to
rehab, to a fancy clinic in Miami. The second time around, it took. I came out
sober, and I stayed that way. But we agreed that joint custody wasn’t an option
at that point, and might never be. That it was probably better for you, in the
short-term, anyway, if I stayed in Florida. Who knew when I might fall off the wagon
again? Your father had to protect you, and I had to regain his trust. Earn my
right to be your mother.”  At Mikey’s frown, she shook her head. “You can’t
blame him for any of this. You have to understand that he saved my life. Twice.
He wasn’t obligated to me. We weren’t married any longer. He did it because
that’s the kind of man he is.

“It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I’d call you up and
talk on the phone, and when we were done talking, your dad would get on, and
we’d have these long, heartfelt conversations. I’d cry because I missed you so
much. But he held firm to his stand, that I couldn’t see you again until he believed
I was ready.”

“How could you let him do that to you? To me?”

“I didn’t let him do anything. I thought he was right. I was
staying sober, but it was the hardest battle I’ve ever fought. Every damn day,
I was fighting for my life. It was all I could do to hang on by the tips of my
fingernails. I’d already done enough damage, and I didn’t want to screw up your
life any more than I already had. So I stayed in Florida, and tried to put my
life back together, brick by brick. He paid my way through college, Mikey. He
didn’t have to do that. Your father’s a good man. We might not always agree on
everything, but he’s a good man. I got a decent job, moved into a nice
apartment. Eventually, the time came when he started trusting me again. You
were getting older, and I was finally sober, and you started visiting me. He’d
buy you a ticket to Miami, and you’d spend school vacations with me. You
already know that. What you don’t know is that every time I put you on a plane
back to Maine, I went to pieces. But I stayed strong. Even though I wanted a
drink, I didn’t take one. I stayed strong because I knew that if I screwed up
again, there wouldn’t be any more chances. If I started drinking again, I’d
lose you forever.”