Healing Stones (23 page)

“I still don't get why you're mad at
me,
” he said. “I'm not the one who—”

“Yes, do announce it to the entire bakery, would you, Van?” Tatum wafted a hand in Sully's direction, and Van shrank inside his flannel shirt.

Sully was having a hard time believing Tatum had ever been involved with this guy.

Van's chin quivered.

“Oh, please, don't make a spectacle of yourself,” Tatum said. “Just go—and don't let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.”

Sully felt a pang for the kid as he hunched over the box and turned toward the door. Naturally, half the contents spilled out, as inevitable as Tatum's eye-rolling exit to the kitchen.

“Let me give you a hand,” Sully said.

Van scooped up two books and an over-sized valentine, dropping one of the volumes before he could get it into the box. Sully leaned over to pick up a square that floated his way—a picture of Tatum, obviously in happier times. She teased the camera with her smile, even then lighting up the corner of the bakery.

“You want this?” Sully said.

Van snatched it from him and after three tries managed to cram it into his back pocket. Somehow he got out the door.

Tatum emerged from the kitchen as the three cylinders banged the pickup down Callow Avenue.

“Now you see why I hate men,” Tatum said. “No offense.”

“None taken.”

Sully watched her face smooth back into its mask.

“Thanks for staying.”

“Didn't look like you needed any protection.” Sully quickly scraped his chair back and stood up. “What do I owe you for the coffee?”

“There wasn't enough coffee in that cup for me to charge you.” She almost smiled.

As Sully passed the cobwebbed hardware store, he forced his focus away from Tatum's veritable banquet of issues and back to Wyatt Estes.

Uncle Wyatt could be about to pull his funding. Did he smell another scandal? Was Kaye about to get blindsided again?

Sully wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and looked at the smear of pink on his skin. Ugh. He hadn't seen the last of champagne cake.

CHAPTER TWENTY

I
tried to find a use for that stupid rock. I took it in the car with me to at least remind myself not to put myself down, though that didn't work well. On Wednesday I brought it into the prep room to observe while I rolled silverware. It seemed crazy at first—what wasn't?—until I discovered something strangely soothing about contemplating an inanimate object. At least it couldn't accuse me.

Maybe the rock gave me the insane burst of courage to call Rich. Or maybe my concern for Jayne just overrode anything he might say to me.

Almost.

He gave me monosyllabic answers at first, until I said I was concerned about her spending so much time alone.

“You had to rub it in, didn't you?”

I stopped.

“You're the reason I'm working nights, Demitria.”

“This is not about you,” I said. “I'm trying to talk to you about our daughter.”

“She's fine. We're working it out. Anything else?”

I cramped my fingers around the phone. “Just because I was an unfaithful wife doesn't mean I'm not a good mother.”

“Oh, you're a great mother.” The serrated sarcasm sawed through me. “Only, great mothers don't lie to their kids so they can go off and sleep with somebody who isn't their father.”

“Rich—for Pete's sake!” I said. And then I heard the click of me hanging up on him.

Sullivan torqued a head bolt down and thought it was too bad he couldn't do family therapy with the whole Costanas clan. He glanced at the manual he had propped on a cart. The head bolts had to be torqued down in order . . .

Rich would probably require years of extensive healing help. Sully had people who could do wonders with him.

And then there were the two children.

Sully torqued the wrench.

First get them out of that hole of a house with the despondent father—then shake the attitude out of that Christopher kid.

Dang, was the bolt stripped or what?

Typically kids that age turned against the offending parent, but these two didn't seem to have considered for a second what their mother had gone through with a depressed husband—especially since they themselves had obviously suffered in his silences too.

Sully wiped his hands and frowned at the manual. He was as stuck with those heads as he was with the ones on his car.

He tossed the rag and went into the office, where a cold frappuccino waited for him in the tiny refrigerator he'd picked up at a church yard sale. He'd offered one to Demi at their session yesterday, but she'd been too busy pacing—until he asked her the question
that had catapulted her out of there like she was on the end of a large rubber band.

He was enumerating, with her help, all the things she'd lost in this crisis—including the ego boost she'd been getting from Zach. She gave Sully a death stare on that last one, but she didn't leave. Not then.

“You feel like you've lost everything,” Sully said to her. “Including yourself.”

“I have.”

“So, then . . .”

He hesitated, but she stopped pacing and motioned him on.

“Then, if Rich divorces you—so what?”

He was sure the brown eyes would implode.

“Did you just ask me
so what
?”

“I know it matters, Demi. But you say you've lost everything already. Some of that you may not be able to get back. Some of it you can, with or without Rich.” He held his breath.

She folded her arms across her chest, eyes swimming. “You're asking if I'm worth salvaging if I don't have my family back.”

Sully ran his finger along his nose.

“I don't know,” she said.

“That's better than no.”

“Is it?”

“It's the only question you need to answer.”

The slim shoulders strained. “Do you have a game show for this one?”

Sully nodded slowly. “I think it's
Survivor
, Demi.”

“I hate that show.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I hate
this
show.”

“I understand.”

“I have to go.”

There had been no desperation in her eyes, so he'd let her go to wrestle with herself.

He hoped she was winning.

He downed the rest of the frappuccino and headed back to the garage. When he leaned over to pick up the manual that had slid to the floor, he noticed the front door was slightly ajar. A paper bag printed with DAILY BREAD lay inside.

Bread? A stink bomb? A thanks-for-every-thing letter?

Actually, it was more than one letter Sully discovered as he emptied the contents onto the tool table. There were at least twenty, all folded neatly and each with a name printed in a different color ink. A single sheet floated on top of the pile.

Sullivan,

Who was that who left you in a huff ? I don't even know who I am anymore. Maybe that's what I need to find out. These letters
are who I think I am. It's a start, huh?

Blessings,
Demi

Sully unfolded a few with the tips of his greased fingers. There were several to Rich. As many to Christopher. There was even one to Ethan Kaye. Most of them, though, were for Jayne—all in purple ink and written in curly cursive.

He turned to the Impala and gave her a grin. “Well, holy crow, Isabella,” he said. “Holy crow.”

CHAPTER TWENTY - ONE

A
siren screamed me out of a coma-sleep early Friday morning. I came up on the window seat, straight into the covers-clutching, cardiac-arresting position of the fireman's wife, like I'd done for twenty-one years. The prayers cried out before I knew I was awake.

God—don't let it be Rich!

I squeezed everything so the fear wouldn't take me into places no one who loves a fireman should go: into suffocating smoke and flesh-eating flames and beams-turned-to-tinder crashing onto heads even helmets couldn't protect. Some wives didn't want to know anything about the fire-beasts their husbands fought, and most wouldn't have a scanner in the house. Others went to as many fires as their husbands did, cameras in hand. I always lay still and listened to the siren wail its agony and waited for the call.

Only tonight, there would be no reassuring ring from my husband. The thought that there might never be again drove me into the kitchen, where I flooded the room, and my spiraling psyche, with light.

Four AM. An acceptable hour to make coffee and start the day.

Another siren broke in, shrieked through our sleeping burg, faded to carry its fear to the crisis. A two-alarm.

I found myself cursing Sullivan Crisp with his, “If Rich divorces you, so what?”

This
was “so what.” I'd never know what was happening to him. I would be cut off from his breathing and his burping and the assurance of his still-existence at any given moment.

I snatched up the coffeepot. With or without him, I would keep breathing, keep making coffee.

So what if he divorced me? I would go on living. But who would I be?

I looked at the tangle of covers I'd dumped on the floor below the window seat. I was enmeshed in Rich even in my sleep. Whatever “premise” had claimed me and told me to risk that by giving a chunk of myself to Zach Archer—it was gone now.

So what if Rich divorced me? There would be an emptiness in my soul I could never fill. I put my head all the way down onto the cool counter tile and wept—because I might lose my husband.

It was a Mickey-cry I decided, when I was done and had all manner of gunk and tears to wipe off my face and the countertop. It was one of those cleansing cries that left me knowing something.

I loved. Wasn't that goodness in me, that I could love like this?

I wasn't the rotten excuse for a woman I'd named myself. I didn't know what to do with that. I only knew it.

Which was why I got dressed one more day and climbed into the car and drove through the morning mist toward the Daily Bread.

I realized halfway there I hadn't drunk that cup of coffee I'd poured. I flipped on the blinker and swerved into a parking lot, headed for the ubiquitous strip mall java shop.

As I pulled up in front I could see a line of people inside, waiting to order their lattes, so I leaned back to close my eyes—until the Jeep's plastic window rattled and I jerked up to a hooded figure, one brazen hand saluted over his forehead so he could peer in.

“What?”
I said.

“Is this what you do all day?” a familiar voice said.

“Christopher?”

I fumbled to unzip the window.

“You just hang out at coffee shops?” he said when I got it open.

I looked around me. “No—what are you doing?”

He pushed his tailbone out so he could rest his lanky arms on the Jeep door.

“I saw you in traffic,” he said.

“And you followed me?”

“I thought I'd see what you do all day.”

I gripped the steering wheel. “I've told you in my e-mails that I'm working on Main. I even gave you my schedule—”

“I don't open your e-mails.”

I gripped harder. “But you'll follow me into a parking lot to find out what I'm doing.”

It was ludicrous, and I would have laughed, except that I saw his eyes dart away. It was the look he used to get as a little boy when he knew I was about to discover his ulterior motive for sharing a cookie with his sister or dashing off from the dinner table to do his homework without a cattle prod involved.

I sat up straighter. “You're checking up on me to make sure I'm not with someone.”

“
Should
I be checking up on you?”

“You obviously think so.”

“Why wouldn't I, Mom? With your record—if it looks like a tawdry clandestine meeting—and it smells like one—and it sounds like one—”

“Christopher,” I said. “I want you to shut up—now.”

He was startled enough to let go of the door. His next words were stiff. “I thought you should know what you've done to Jayne.”

His words started through me like an ice pick, but I flung open the passenger door. “Get in.”

“I don't—”

“I said get in.”

He smacked my door frame with both hands, his version of having the last word. My mind raced as he crossed in front of the Jeep, shoulders hulking forward. How could I do anything to Jayne when I couldn't even talk to her?

Christopher folded half of himself inside the car. The other leg hung out in the drippy rain.

“What about Jayne?” I said.

“This is totally messing her up.”

“Enough with the guilt trip. What's wrong?”

“She's grounded until, like, her sixteenth birthday. I told Dad to take her cell phone away, which he did.”

“She's alone at night, and he's not letting her use her cell?” I scraped my nails through my hair. “What if something happens?”

“I'm there.” His mouth went into a grim line.

“Why is she under all this punishment?” I said. “What could she possibly have done?”

“She's turning into you.”

“What?”

He squinted one eye, as if I'd blown his eardrum. “We went to see her play.”

I knew that. I'd spent that entire weekend looking at my watch, picturing her on stage writhing under the imagined grip of witchcraft, and swelling to her curtain calls. And I'd sobbed my gut out.

“She played this—well, basically, whore.”

“She played Abigail Williams,” I said. “She was a confused, messed-up teenage girl!” I shook myself. “It was a
character,
for Pete's sake.”

“Yeah, well, Dad was ticked off at you for letting her take the role.”

I chomped down on my lip. I wouldn't get into the fact that I'd tried to discuss everything Jayne did with Rich, and he'd grunted, “Whatever you think.” I waved Christopher on.