Charlaine Harris (81 page)

Since we'd left Hank and Iona's, we hadn't said another word to each other about the marriage issue, which had popped up like a jack-in-the-box.

Oddly, not talking about it felt . . . okay. We'd gone to the workout room for some treadmill time and then watched a
Law and Order
rerun. We'd been comfortable with each other and relieved to be by ourselves. While we'd been walking on the treadmills, I'd realized that every time we visited our sisters, it was the same emotional wringer. After a short time in that cramped house, we needed to retreat, regroup, and refresh ourselves.

I worried about the bad feelings between my aunt and myself until I reflected that all was well between Tolliver and me, and that was the only relationship I really cared about . . . well, other than the one I was trying to form with my little sisters.

Still, at odd moments during the past evening, I admit that the uncomfortable situation occupied my thoughts. I know it was naïve of me, but I was shocked every time I thought about Iona's pregnancy. I'd lived through my mother's two pregnancies with my sisters, and it still seemed amazing to me that Gracie had been born with all the correct physical attributes and no apparent mental or neurological problems, considering my mother's extensive drug use. She'd had enough will left to restrain herself somewhat during the time she was carrying Mariella, but with Gracie . . . Gracie had been awfully sick when she was born, and many times after that.

I was thinking about those bad days after our treadmill workout the night before. After I'd had a break, I'd taken our hand vacuum out to the car to give the trunk a once-over. I'd taken a shopping bag with me for the trash. When you're in your car as much as we are, it tends to get pretty junky in a short time. While I tossed old receipts and empty cups into the bag, and got all the corners with the vacuum, I worried about my aunt. Iona was healthy, as far as I knew, and she never drank or used drugs. But she was definitely on the older side to be experiencing a first venture into motherhood.

While part of my brain had been trying to remember if I'd seen an oil-change place down the access road, the other part tried to pooh-pooh my own fears. I told myself that lots of women were waiting until later in their lives to start their families. And more power to them, waiting for financial security or a good relationship to form a foundation for child rearing. The problem was, I knew from personal experience how exhausting caring for an infant was. Maybe Iona would be able to quit work.

While I pretended to listen to Mark and sipped the drink our waitress had brought me, I was reliving our little sit-down at Iona's kitchen table. Something I'd seen had troubled me, something I hadn't been able to recall after the hubbub over our family revelations.

As Mark and Tolliver spent way too long discussing retail, I mentally examined every person who'd been sitting around the table. Then I reviewed my memory of the objects on the table. Finally, I succeeded in tracking down the source of my unease. I waited until the brothers fell silent before I obliquely introduced the subject.

“Mark, do you go over to see the girls very often?” I asked.

“No,” he said, ducking his head in a guilty way. “It's a long drive from my house, and I work horrible hours. Plus, Iona always makes me feel bad about something.” He shrugged. “To be honest, the girls just aren't that interested in me.”

Mark had left the trailer and started living on his own as soon as he could, which we'd all agreed was the best thing for him to do. He came by when our parents weren't there—or when they were out cold—and he'd (God bless him) brought us supplies whenever he could. But that meant he hadn't been present like we had when the girls were babies, and he hadn't had as much opportunity to bond with them. Cameron and Tolliver and I had taken care of Mariella and Gracie. On the nights when bad memories woke me up and wouldn't let me sleep, I got scared all over again when I thought of what might have happened to the girls if we hadn't been there. That wasn't the girls' concern, though—and it shouldn't be.

“So you haven't talked to Iona lately.” I had to think in the here and now.

“No.” Mark looked at me, a question on his face.

“You know that Iona's heard from your dad?” It was my stepfather's handwriting I'd seen on the letter protruding from the stack of mail.

Mark would never be a successful poker player, because he didn't look anything but guilty. I had to smile at his obvious relief when the waitress picked that moment to take our orders.

But that smile didn't sit on my lips for long. I was scared to look sideways at Tolliver.

When the waitress had bustled off, I opened my hands to Mark, indicating it was time for him to come clean.

“Well, yeah, I was gonna tell you about that,” he said, looking down at his silverware.

“What were you going to tell us, brother?” Tolliver asked, his voice even and pleasant and forced.

“I got a letter from Dad a couple weeks ago,” Mark said. No, he
confessed
it. Then he waited for Tolliver to give him absolution—but Tolliver wasn't about to. We both knew Mark had responded to the letter, or he wouldn't be so hangdog.

“Dad's alive, then,” Tolliver said, and anyone but me would have called his voice neutral.

“Yeah, he's got a job. He's clean and sober, Tol.”

Mark had always had a tender heart for his father. And he'd always been incredibly gullible where his dad was concerned.

“Matthew's been out of jail how long?” I asked, since Tolliver wasn't responding to Mark's assertion. I'd never been able to call Matthew Lang “Father.”

“Um, a month,” Mark said. He folded the little paper ring that had circled his silverware and napkin. He unfolded it and folded it again. This time he compressed it into a smaller rectangle. “He got early release for good behavior. After I wrote back, he called me. He wants to reconnect with his family, he says.”

I was sure that (entirely coincidentally) Matthew also wanted money and maybe a place to stay. I wondered if Mark truly believed his father, if he could really be that foolish.

Tolliver didn't say a word.

“Has he been in touch with your uncle Paul or your aunt Miriam?” I asked, struggling to fill the silence.

Mark shrugged. “I don't know. I never call them.”

While it wasn't technically true that Tolliver and I were each other's only adult family, with the exception of Mark it might as well have been. Matthew Lang's siblings had been hurt and disgusted too often by Matthew to want to maintain any relationship with him, and unfortunately that exclusion had spread outward to include Matthew's kids. Mark and Tolliver could have used help—could have used a
lot
of help—but that would have entailed dealing with Matthew, who had been too difficult and frightening for his more conventional siblings. As a result, Tolliver had cousins he barely knew.

I wasn't sure exactly how he felt about Paul's and Miriam's self-preserving decisions, but he'd never made any attempt to contact them in recent years, when Matthew had been safely behind bars. I guess that spoke for itself.

“What's Dad doing?” Tolliver said. His voice was ominously quiet, but he was holding together.

“He's working at a McDonald's. The drive-through, I think. Or maybe he's cooking.”

I was sure Matthew Lang wasn't the first disbarred lawyer to work the drive-through window at a McDonald's. But given the fact that while I'd lived in the same trailer with the man, I'd never seen him cook beyond popping something in the microwave, and I'd never seen him wash a single dish, that was kind of ironic. Not enough that I'd bust out laughing, though.

“What happened to
your
dad, Harper?” Mark asked. “Cliff, was that his name?” Mark felt it was time to point out that Matthew wasn't the only bad dad around.

“Last I heard, he was in the prison hospital,” I said. “I don't think he knows anyone anymore.” I shrugged.

Mark looked shocked. His hands moved involuntarily across the table. “You don't go see him?” He actually sounded amazed at my heartlessness, which I found almost incredible.

“What?” I said. “Why would I? He never took care of me. I'm not going to take care of him.”

“Wasn't it okay before he started using drugs? Didn't he give you a good home?”

I understood this wasn't about my father at all, but it was still really irritating. “Yes,” I agreed. “He and my mother gave us a nice home. But after they started using, they never thought twice about us.” There were lots of kids who'd had it worse, who hadn't even had a trailer with a hole in the bathroom floor. Hadn't even had siblings who were willing to watch their back. But it had been bad enough. And later, awful things had happened when my mother and Tolliver's father had had their crappy “friends” over. I remembered one night when all of us kids had slept under the trailer, because we were so scared of what was happening inside.

I shook myself.
No pity
.

“How'd you know to bring up Dad, anyway?” Mark asked. He looked sullen. Mark had always been a transparent sort of guy. It was clear I wasn't his favorite person at the moment.

“I saw a letter from him on Iona's table. It took me a while to remember where I'd seen the handwriting. I wonder why he wrote her. Do you reckon he's trying to get Iona to let him see the girls? Why would he be doing that?”

“Maybe he thinks he ought to see
his daughters,
” Mark said, and he flushed, a sure sign he was angry.

Tolliver and I looked at our brother, and neither of us said a word.

“Okay, okay,” Mark said, rubbing his face with his hands. “He doesn't deserve to see them. I don't know what he's asking Iona for. When I saw him, he told me he wants to see Tolliver. He doesn't have an address to send Tolliver a letter.”

“There's a reason for that,” Tolliver said.

“He'd seen some website that tracks her,” Mark said, nodding toward me as if I were sitting far away. “He said you-all's website had an email address, but he didn't want to contact you through her website. Like he was a stranger.”

The waitress came up with our food then, and we took the little ritual of spreading napkins and using salt and pepper to regroup.

“Mark,” Tolliver said, “is there any reason you can think of that I
ought
to make any effort to include that man in my life? In Harper's life?”

“He's our dad,” Mark said doggedly. “He's all we've got left.”

“No,” Tolliver said. “Harper's sitting right here.”

“But she's not
our
family.” Mark looked at me, this time a little apologetically.

“She's
my
family,” Tolliver said.

Mark froze. “Are you saying I shouldn't have left you-all in that trailer? That I should have stayed there with you? That I let you down?”

“No,” Tolliver said, astonished. We exchanged a quick flicker of a glance. “I'm saying Harper and I are together.”

“She's your stepsister,” Mark said.

“And she's my girlfriend,” Tolliver said, and I smiled down at my salad. It seemed such an inadequate term.

Mark's mouth hung open as he stared at us. “What? Is that legal? When did this happen?”

“Recently; yes, it is; and we're happy, thanks for asking.”

“Then I'm glad for you,” Mark said. “It's good that you have each other.” But he still looked doubtful. “Isn't it kind of weird, though? I mean, we grew up in the same house.”

“Like you and Cameron,” I said.

“I never felt like that about Cameron,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But this is the way we feel. We didn't start out this way, but it's the way we ended up.” And I smiled at Tolliver, suddenly feeling ridiculously happy.

He smiled back. Our circle closed.

“So what do you want me to tell Dad?” Mark said. There was a little desperation in his voice. I couldn't imagine how Mark had pictured this conversation going, but it had not turned out to his satisfaction, obviously.

“I thought I'd made myself clear. We don't want to see him,” Tolliver said. “I don't want him to get in touch with me. If he emails us through the website, I won't answer. That last year . . . you were lucky you were out on your own, Mark. I'm glad you were old enough to leave, to start your life. I've never blamed you for leaving, if that's what you're thinking. Even if you'd been in the trailer, you couldn't have stopped anything that happened. And you brought us food and diapers and money when you could. We were glad one of us had made it out into the real world. My job at Taco Bell wouldn't have been enough.”

“You don't think I was just running away?” Mark sawed on his steak, his eyes on his knife.

“No, I think you were saving your life.” Tolliver put down his fork. His face was serious. “That's what I really believe. And that's what Harper believes.”

Not that Mark was so concerned with my opinion, but I nodded. It had never crossed my mind to think any differently about it.

Mark tried to laugh, but it was a pretty pitiful attempt. He said, “I never intended this evening to get so intense.”

“It's your dad reappearing. Not your fault.” I smiled at him, trying to will him to lighten up.

But that seemed to be a lost cause. “You really haven't visited your dad?” he asked me. He was wrestling with my attitude.

“No,” I said. “Why would I lie about that?”

“What is his illness?”