The Dead of Summer (24 page)

She was quite right about that. I didn’t know my granddaddy. Mama had never even spoke of him. Up until this point, I didn’t even know he existed.

“The hell I would have paid after your daddy found out I went to the cops—” She shook her head sadly. “No, I needed another plan.”

“Is that when we left?” I whispered, suddenly understanding the packing up and sneaking off in the middle of the night. It was all making sense now.

“This is the part where I’m afraid I’m not going to win mother of the year,” Mama gulped as she twisted her bottom lip. A salty tear bounced off her lip and on to the bed.

“It’s okay, Mama,” I reassured her as I tucked myself closer to her body.

“I couldn’t just get up and leave. I had no money of my own yet since I had just started working and your daddy would be on full alert if I just walked out. I knew I needed a plan, a plan to get away and without him finding us.

“I had to keep going to work for two reasons, to save money and so that your daddy wouldn’t get suspicious. I tried to only work while you were at school. Unfortunately, I had to leave you alone with your daddy sometimes so I would make excuses to call or have the neighbor stop over; I was a nervous wreck when you were alone with him. As soon as I would come home, I’d inspect you for bruises and scrapes and there always would be something, even as innocuous as a paper cut. Even something that minute would enrage me, so I started stealing money out of your daddy’s wallet, just five dollars here and there to add to my growing stockpile. I skimmed a bit off my check every week, promising myself we could leave when I reached a thousand and then two-thousand and then five-thousand. I felt like I was never going to feel ‘safe,’ never going to be able to escape.

“When your daddy was on the road, I could scrimp on groceries and toilet paper and put more money away. He wouldn’t know the difference. And I broke out the good stuff when he came home so he didn’t suspect. I considered it practice for when we were living on our own, without his money.

“Then, he struck me with a doozy. One night he told me he wanted a son, he wanted to have another baby. He said I failed him by not giving him a son to carry on his name. What would happen if I told him no? What would happen if I did have a baby and it was a girl? Would he beat her because she wasn’t a son? That’s when I knew I would never get away because there was no way I could afford to raise two children on my own on money I swiped from his wallet.”

“I started working as much as I could when your daddy was on the road, telling him that I had actually quit my job so that I could bank the entire paycheck. I was squirreling it away everywhere. And I was doing everything in my power to avoid having a son.” Mama looked away, red creeping up her neck. I didn’t want to know what she had to do, I but I was willing to bet it added to my daddy’s fury.

“It took nearly a whole year, but he went on a trip cross country. He was gone for two weeks. I knew I had to act then. We left the day after he did…I tracked his route so I knew where to avoid. Then, I packed you up and in the middle of the night, we drove north. And then, we drove east. And south.

“On the day he was scheduled to come home to Texas, we were in a cheap motel in Chicago. I couldn’t sleep that night, just imagining that he would find us, bust through the door, and drag us back to Texas kicking and screaming. And then, I would never be able to get away again. I walked on eggshells for weeks, driving in an erratic pattern, hoping that I was untraceable. I probably acted pretty stupidly, but somehow, he didn’t find us.

“When I finally felt safe, we arrived in Novella, this town in the middle of nowhere. I was still looking over my shoulder, frightened every time I went out…”

“Which is why you refused to leave the house,” I said, my mama’s phobia suddenly making a lot of sense. Everything was becoming clearer. Now the secrets were all out.

Mama responded with a nod. “I had to change our names, too,” she practically whispered.

Apparently, except for
that
secret.

My head whipped around, practically smacking her in the nose in the process. “What do you mean by that?”

“Well, I didn’t completely change your name. I thought that would raise too many red flags if I did. It was a lengthy process and it scared me. So I dropped your first name on your birth certificate. And I went back to my own maiden name, hoping your daddy would only be looking for us by the names he knew.”

“Kennedy isn’t my name?” I asked incredulously. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. My whole life was a lie. I gripped my comforter in my hands, like holding it would ground me to the earth and I wouldn’t fall off. Anything was possible right then in my head.

“I always wanted to name you Kennedy anyway, because of Jackie Kennedy, I thought she had such class, but I never even told your daddy that because he would have told me I was stupid. He wanted to name you after his mama.
Donna
.” She practically spat the name out like it was poison. I cringed. I wasn’t a fan of it, either.

“So I just wrote in the
Kennedy
on your birth certificate for the middle name and never told him. When we left Texas, I started calling you Kennedy instead of Donna and you never protested. I reckon you were just too shell-shocked anyway to even question it. When you eventually did ask about your daddy, I blurted out that he had been killed in the war. I don’t even know why I said that. It never occurred to me that you could have checked up on it.”

“Well, duh,” I blurted out. “Why would I have doubted you?”

Suddenly, another thought occurred to me. “If you didn’t leave the house, where did you get the money to live?”

Mama blushed a little. “I’ve been making a little money here and there,” she said, waving her hand in the air, as if the money just appeared out of nowhere.

“Mama,” I held her gaze with my eyes as if our roles were reversed. She was the child and I was the concerned mama.

Mama let out a deep sigh. “I’ve been writing.”

I wrinkled up my nose. “Writing? Writing what?”

“Articles,” Mama mumbled into her fingers as she chewed them nervously.

“For?” I waved my hand in the air like a magician. I felt like I was playing twenty questions with a four-year-old. Mama glanced away.

“
Southern Mom
.”

Southern Mom? The magazine that littered the coffee table in our living room? The one I flipped through when I was bored and never saw hide nor hair of my mama’s name?

“I’ve read
Southern Mom
cover to cover,” I said, “and your name is not in there.”

Mama bit her lip and mumbled what sounded like, “Insanie.”

“Huh?”

Mama raised her chin and offered me a weak smile. “I’m Sadie.”

“As in
Sweet Sadie
?”

Mama nodded and gritted her teeth as if this was the most embarrassing concept on the planet. Sweet Sadie was a monthly column in
Southern Mom
. Sadie would tell amusing anecdotes about her kids and the crazy situations she would get in. Sadie was a lovable goofball who screwed up a lot and definitely could
not
be my mama.

“Mama, you can’t be Sadie. Sadie has three kids and a husband and a dog named Rover,” I said with a raise of my eyebrow.

Mama shrugged. “I made it up. The whole thing. Every story I’ve written in that column is made up. Well, pretty much. I did write about the time you shaved your arm hair.”

“Dear Lord, Mama!” I yelped. “Are you kidding me?” I gazed at the hair on my arms which had grown back even thicker after Lindy had told me to shave it three years ago. “What if people at school saw that?”

“Oh, Kennedy! Nobody knew it was you!
You
didn’t even know it was you!”

“Still!” I was annoyed she had risk embarrassing me like that.

“I did what I had to do to make money. I didn’t want to have to go out a get a job because then I thought there was a chance your daddy would somehow spot me, find me, track me. . .I don’t know. But he found me anyway. . .” Her voice trailed off again.

“How
did
he find you?” I finally asked. It certainly wasn’t because she had left the house.

A veil of sadness passed over my mama’s face. “Mama Grace,” she said in a small voice.

“What?” She could have knocked me over with a feather. Mama Grace? My sweet old grandma turned us in? Okay, maybe sweet wasn’t the word for Mama Grace, but I highly doubted she would walk a man like my daddy right to her very own daughter and granddaughter. If my daddy was anything like Mama had been describing him. It just didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

“Mama, that doesn’t make sense. Why would Mama Grace tell Daddy where we were?”

“Because I never told her what he was doing. I never told her how he was hurting you or why I was leaving. In fact, I never even told her I was leaving,” Mama mumbled guiltily.

“So you just up and moved us away without even saying goodbye? Maybe Mama Grace could have helped us! Instead, she never even knew where we were!” Now I understood why I had never gotten any birthday cards or money for Christmas or anything from Mama Grace. Or anyone for that matter. We had just disappeared off the face of the earth. It should have made me feel better; my grandma hadn’t forgotten me as I always thought she did. But somehow it made me feel worse.

“I didn’t want your daddy to be able to sweet-talk her into telling him where we were. I was so careful about everything.” Her lip quivered. “Believe me, Kennedy. Leaving Mama Grace clueless was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do.”

“I guess,” I shrugged. I should be thankful for what she did, but I was still annoyed. And rightfully so—Mama Grace would have never thought my mama was lying about the abuse. Maybe she could have come with us. Instead, I had been stuck alone with my nutjob of a mama for seven years without any other family.

“I didn’t leave the house, I didn’t tell anyone where I was going. I thought we’d be safe. But Sweet Sadie ended up being my downfall.”

“How? I thought it was anonymous,” I said.

“It was stupid really. There was
some
truth in my column. I wrote about a picnic that I went on when I was younger. My uncles were being silly and they were daring each other. They had to see who could eat the most pickled beets in a half hour. The winner got to ask Suzy Mathers on a date. Lenny won and he took Suzy to the county fair where he promptly puked all over her on the Tilt-a-Whirl. My uncle Bobby was right there waiting to take her home. They got married three months later and have four kids. Lenny has never forgiven Bobby.

“Apparently, Mama Grace was reading the Sweet Sadie column and she got an inkling that it had to be me. She wrote to the magazine’s editors, but they wouldn’t give her my address, just an email address. She started sending me emails and…” Mama paused to wipe a tear away. “I couldn’t help it. I hadn’t been in contact with anyone in my family for years. I answered her email. Before I knew it, one thing led to another and I told her everything. She felt horrible for not seeing it sooner, but she said your daddy was long gone. He had moved away shortly after we disappeared. She promised she wouldn’t tell anyone where we were, not even my brothers or sisters. Then asked if she could visit and in a moment of weakness, I said yes. She got really excited.”

“Mama Grace is coming here?” I asked.

Mama shook her head sadly. “She had a stroke a few weeks before she was supposed to come. She was okay physically, but her speech was severely affected. My sister found the plane ticket and asked Mama Grace what it was about, but she didn’t have the words to explain. All Macie could make out was the name
Tracie
. She assumed that the plane ticket was to wherever we were living, which was true. She got excited and called your daddy since he had been looking for us for years. He did a little research on Mama Grace’s computer and voila, he was able to find us.”

I gasped. Now I understood how Mama’s paranoia had been justified. “How do you know this? About him going into Mama Grace’s computer and all?”

“Mark—your daddy—told me when he showed up at the door that day.” Mama’s eyes got cloudy and she looked away from me to stare out the window. And then I remembered. Mama had effectively distracted me from the case at hand with all the revelations and nostalgia.

“And then you killed him,” I said quietly.

“I did what I had to do, Kennedy. When you’re a mama, you’ll understand,” Mama explained.

“To protect me?” I asked, staring back down at my ragged fingernails.

“Kennedy,” Mama reached over and stroked my hair. “Everything I’ve ever done has been for you.”

“How did it happened?
When
did it happen?” I asked as I curled into a ball on the bed, wrapping my body around my pillow. I was ready—I needed to know.

Mama fixed her gaze on a spider climbing up my wall and disappearing under my poster of a kitty that said “Hang in There.”

“It was last Monday. I tasted trouble in my mouth when I woke up. You know what trouble tastes like, Kennedy?”

“Um, no.” Mama was headed off the rails when she started talking about tasting things that weren’t food.

“Trouble is a very distinct taste. It’s a heady mixture of blood and spit in your mouth and the nauseating aroma of the honeysuckle blooming way too much in your backyard.” Mama stood and ran her finger along my dresser, collecting dust as she went. She sounded like a Jane Austen novel.

I sighed audibly. I could see how easily Mama had become a writer. “Mama, you gotta get on with the story. Enough with the theatrics.”

Mama ignored me as she continued to walk around my room, absently picking up object after object and laying it back down in the same place. “I heard the doorbell ring—you had gone out to Lindy’s already—and I went to the door knowing full well he was going to be behind it.”

“Why did you answer then?” It made no sense to me. Mama didn’t answer the door even when the mailman had a package. Why would she answer it when she knew that danger lurked behind it?

Mama shrugged. “I can’t explain it to you, baby girl. I felt compelled to open the door and there he was—with a big smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers. Daisies.”