Safe from Harm (9781101619629) (5 page)

I said I wanted to know.

“Good. Can we find a place to sit? I need to tell someone and Mark shuts down when I try to talk to him. And I don't want to tell any of the women here. I know this situation makes me look bad.”

Not surprising that Mark didn't want to hear Liz complain about Phoebe. Annie gets testy with me when she thinks I'm criticizing the girls and the girls are half mine. I stacked the books near the front door and we went to the kitchen for some coffee. Liz fetched a carton of milk from the fridge that had
PICKERSLEY-SMYTHE
written on it in permanent marker, which was an indication of how often she was up here at the church, working away at one project or another. She shared her milk with me, rinsed both our spoons and put them in the dishwasher. We found a bench in the great hall and sat down. That's more private than you'd think. You can be seen, but you'll notice anyone coming long before you can be heard.

Liz laid her purse across her lap. It was the size of a carry-on and had more zippers and pockets than a fighter pilot's survival vest. She blew across the surface of her coffee, tasted it and set it on the floor next to her. She put a hand on my wrist.

“Point one, thank you for asking about Phoebe. No one does. They take one look at her and they don't know what to say.” She blew out a puff of air. “
Mark
doesn't know what to say and she's
his
daughter. I don't see anything of Mark in Phoebe except those eyes. I swear she's mainly Jenny's, though it's too bad Phoebe didn't get her mother's looks. Jenny didn't have a brain cell in her head but she was pretty, if you like that kind. Pretty crazy, too. I'm talking too much, aren't I?”

I told her if she needed to blow off some steam, it was okay to do it with me. I try to be a safe place for people to come to. I tasted my coffee and was relieved that it wasn't one of Rebecca's pots—her coffee is so strong it eats a hole through my stomach.

Liz touched her nose with two fingers, smoothing it from bridge to cheek. Her phone made a
brrrr
. “Just a sec.” She pulled her phone out of her purse, pulled up a text message, tapped out a reply, dropped the phone in her purse and zipped it closed. She picked up her mug, blew across it again, tasted it, approved, and sipped some down.

“Point two—I have done everything imaginable to make Phoebe's transition easier. At Mark's insistence, Phoebe moved in two weeks after Jenny died. So she's been with us a month but it feels like a year. Mark stayed at Jenny's place for those two weeks because it took him that long to persuade her to come. You can imagine how excited I was about that.” Another puff of air, this one with an eye roll. “What he should have done was leave her there. She would have been happier.
I
would have been happier.”

“She said something about living with her grandfather—that wouldn't have worked? At least until she could have finished out the school year?” Being yanked out of your school and home so abruptly—that would make any teenager hard to deal with.

Liz's fingers flew out in exasperation. “Uh, yes, she could have if Mark would have let her. He says Jenny's father is a crazy drunk and he wouldn't leave a good hound with the man”

I thought that over. “Liz, isn't Phoebe just finishing her junior year? That's . . . yeah, I'm going to go with Mark on that one. It would be hard for me to leave one of my girls on her own that young.”

Liz tilted her head down and looked up at me like I must be kidding her. “Bear, for all practical purposes,
I
was on my own at sixteen. It could have been a confidence-building experience for Phoebe. She has some money. Jenny had a life insurance policy and I don't need to tell you that Jenny didn't feel the need to pay Mark back any of the money he's been sending their way since we've been married. I want to invest it for Phoebe but so far, she won't let me. If she's going to stay with us for the next year, Phoebe should get DeWitt out and let me sell that crackerbox they lived in, too. It's really mine—I've explained that to Phoebe, but she doesn't want to hear it—”

I said, “Whoa. You lost me. You own the house Phoebe lived in?”

Liz waved away the question. “It's complicated and that's not the point here. The point is her dad doesn't have anything to give her—if she's going to college, she'll have to do it on her own.”

Mark and Liz live in the most expensive neighborhood in First Colony, but Mark wasn't going to be able to help his daughter through college? Huh. Were Toby and Tanner, those golden twins, going to have to work their way through, too? If Liz had been voicing to Phoebe what she was now voicing to me, I could understand why Phoebe might be seeking out a different mother figure over at my house.

Liz worried at one of the many zippers on her purse, zipping it open and closed, open and closed. “The very first day, I sat us all down for a family meeting and I set out our family plan, and the most basic of our hard-and-fast rules.”

Her purse
brrred
again. This time she reached in and silenced it.

“How did that go over with Phoebe?” My coffee had cooled but I drank it anyway.

“I believe she was grateful. Everyone's happier when they know what to expect and they know they can deliver. That's key, Bear. She wasn't happy about the no-sugar but she'll adjust.”

“What's the no-sugar?”

“That's a hard-and-fast. I'm diabetic and I'm allergic to seafood. There is no sugar or seafood in our house. It's one of our hard-and-fasts. Additionally, sugar makes you fat and there's mercury in seafood which leads to retardation. I do not want to live with a bunch of fat retarded people.”

My jaw dropped. Well, alrighty, then. Miss Liz had just cemented her standing for the Humanitarian of the Year Award. Liz looked perfectly normal. Above normal. On the superior side. But she was spouting the most senseless, insensitive garbage . . .

“So, Phoebe's settling in well?” I meant for Liz to hear the sarcasm in that. She missed it.

Liz stopped messing about with the zipper and half turned on the bench, looking at me full on. “Bear. Does she look like she's settling in well? Would you say Phoebe fits in in First Colony? For Clements High School? I have
begged
her to let me buy her new clothes. She can pay me back in chores. Or out of her insurance money. I've tried. And Bear . . .”

Liz put her mug back on the carpet, set her purse down next to it and slid over the bench until she was right next to me. She smelled of coffee and rubbing alcohol and . . . was it starch? Did anyone still use starch? Way back when I'd come home from school and my mother would be ironing—that smell when she lifted the steaming iron off the linens? Liz smelled like that.

She leaned into me. I could feel her breath against my cheek. “Bear, I believe that girl resents me! You have no idea what I saved them from, Mark and her, both. You don't know how they would be living if it weren't for me!”

She leaned back so she could take in my expression. I had nothing for her.
I
resented her and
I
didn't have to live under her rules, hard-and-fast or otherwise.

“Well, Liz.” I knew I sounded feeble. “I don't think it's unusual for a stepdaughter to have some strong feelings about her stepmother. You might want to . . .” I pulled out my phone and notepad, clicked my contact list and wrote a number and name down. I tore the sheet off and handed it to Liz. “This is Carol Thompson's number. She's a family therapist. I think a lot of her. She's going to be a better . . . ahh . . . the whole stepdaughter thing. Carol could help you with the, the hard-and-fasts.” I nodded my head, slapped my thighs and stood up. That meant we were done.

“I solve my problems analytically and objectively, Bear. I don't know what a therapist could bring to the table.”

I said, “Okay . . .”

“Lately, Phoebe seems angrier that ever, Bear. She's acting out. Deliberately provoking. If she keeps up like this, that girl is headed for a fall. I see that coming. I do.”

I checked the time on my phone. “Liz, consider calling Carol's number, would you? I'm going to get those books out to your car now—there's going to be someone coming to my office soon and I don't want to make them wait.”

We made our way to the end of the great hall, collected the books. I stowed them in the cargo area of her Mercedes GL. Yeah. Mercedes-Benz makes an SUV. Who knew.

The person waiting in my office was Rebecca. She was on her way to Whole Foods Market to pick up lunch and did I want anything. Yeah. I asked her to bring me a tuna fish salad sandwich with sweet tea. Extra sugar, please. That's my hard-and-fast.

•   •   •

One week after my talk with Liz, Phoebe came by the church.

Phoebe hadn't been back to the house in the month since the quarrel with Jo, and she had avoided me on Sunday mornings. But whatever had set Phoebe on her present course, that girl was after big game. Bear, evidently.

I was trying to write my sermon and Rebecca tapped at my door, her eyebrows nearly to her hairline, and told me I had an unscheduled visitor. That's nothing new—people have problems or worries and those can't be foreseen, so I saved my document and got up to greet whoever it was.

Rebecca stepped back and Miss Phoebe made her entrance in six-inch-high platform shoes.

The shoes were the least offensive items of what she was wearing. Now, I know I'm conservative about what a young woman should wear. It didn't bother me a bit when Annie Laurie and I were dating and she wore a bikini at the pool—well, it bothered me but in a good way. But I hate it when my girls wear them. I do. But at least that's outside—at the beach or the pool, not right in my church office. Not paraded past all the other church offices to get to my church office.

Phoebe's skirt barely covered her bottom. She was wearing so much metal that a retired guy on a Galveston beach was finding his metal detector mysteriously drawn to the northwest. The tank top she had on was cut low in front and even lower in back and it was cropped short enough to expose her pierced and tattooed navel. Honestly. In suburban Texas. On a school day. At the church. It was dressing as an act of aggression.

She propped a fist on a hip, jutted the other hip forward and tilted her head down so as to look up at me through her lashes. “I wondered if we could have a talk,” she said. She was trying to channel Lauren Bacall—she'd probably never heard of Lauren Bacall, but that's who she was doing.

I said, “Oh, my gosh, Phoebe, what the heck are you dressed up as?”

Okay—I know it. It wasn't a good thing to say, it wasn't what Jesus said to the woman at the well or to Mary Magdalene or to any of the other problematic women in his life, but it came straight out of my mouth without taking the usual detour through my brain.

Big surprise, I embarrassed her.

“What's wrong with what I'm wearing?” She had flushed up to her roots—newly blackened, I noticed.

Now I felt bad for embarrassing her. I said, “No, you're fine. Have a seat.” I waved a hand over at the small couch and the chairs in my office. When Phoebe sat I said, “Oh my gosh,” and tossed her the throw that was folded over the back of a chair.

She caught it and said, “What's this for?”

What it was for was for her to spread over her lap because the girl's panties were showing when she sat down—that's how short that skirt was. This time, my brain grabbed hold of my mouth before I could tell her just that and instead I came out with, “You look cold. It's cold in here. It's always cold in here. Rebecca, don't you think it's cold?”

Rebecca said she thought it was warming up, which was unnecessary, and she took the easy chair across from Phoebe and crossed her slim ankles. She gave Phoebe her big, friendly smile. I sat down on the arm of a chair.

Phoebe took in that Rebecca had joined us, looked all nonplussed and said, some sarcasm seeping in, “I thought we could talk in private.”

I said “Oh! Absolutely,” and Rebecca reseated herself at her desk outside my office as I led the way down the hall to one of our conference rooms.

It's a big room, lined with framed architectural drawings of the church building—it holds a table for twelve, notepads and pens at every chair, and nothing else. Not so much as a potted palm to hide behind. There's a couple of ficus trees, but they provide no cover at all. The conference room has a glass door, and one wall is floor to ceiling glass. Soundproof, yes, but there is not a thing that can go on in that room without it being visible to the entire church office staff and anyone else who happens to walk by. It's designed this way on purpose.

I took a seat at the table and looked expectantly at Phoebe. She gave the space a slow appraisal before curling over the chair across the table from me, her hands on the upholstered back, swiveling it gently to and fro.

“Mr. Wells, Bear.” I didn't want her calling me Bear. I'm Mr. Wells at least until you're out of high school. “I wanted a
private
meeting.” She swung the castered chair too far to the left, lost her footing on those mile-high heels and would have fallen to the floor if she hadn't had ahold of the chair back. She nearly brought the chair down with her. As it was, she ended up knees splayed either side of the chair, arms wrapped around its back. I pretended not to notice the mishap. It was the kindest thing to do. Her cheeks were flaming now and I felt sorry for her.

“Can you tell me what you want to meet about, because if it's this thing between you and Jo, then it's Jo you need to—”

“I can tell you in
private
.”

I picked up a notepad and pen and tapped the pad of paper with the pen. “Phoebe, this is as private as it gets.”

She looked around the open, glass box of a room with contempt and gave the chair a shove.