Retreat (11 page)

    
“I’m thinking about it. I just …” she
trailed off.

    
“Had other plans,” Meg finished for her.

    
“Yes.”

    
“I understand. But think about it, okay?”

    
“I will,” Clara said. “It was good to see
you. Tell Grady I said hi. I’ll give you a call. Maybe we could go out one
night.”

    
“You, too,” she said, gazing down at Jenna.
“Grady’s usually out on patrol at night. Maybe I’ll see you back at the
office?”

    
“Yes. Maybe,” she said.

    
Meg had married her high-school sweetheart,
Grady Brown, who was now one of Brighton’s
three police officers. Clara always thought he was a sweet guy, too nice to be
a cop. It was clear from the beginning that he loved Meg more than the world.

    
“Okay, well, goodbye then,” Meg said.

    
“Bye. Goodbye Jenna,” Clara said, smiling
softly at the little girl.

    
Jenna grinned and hid behind Meg’s leg.

    
Clara regained a cold, rubbery sensation in
her legs as she tramped through the overgrown brush that laid claim to the
walking path she followed back to the bungalow. When she got there, she
showered and slipped on another set of sweat clothes from the box in the bottom
of the closet, wondering why on earth she’d kept them at all.

    
The pants were bright teal, of all colors,
and had elastic at the bottoms that cinched at her ankles. She preened in front
of the bedroom mirror momentarily, amazed at how bad a pair of pants could make
a relatively thin girl look. The extra-large white sweatshirt with the Brighton Bears High School
logo ironed onto the front didn’t help.

    
She decided to avoid floor-length mirrors
altogether until she had a chance to replenish her wardrobe. She gathered the
clothes she ran in, her new Wal-Mart outfit and her sleep shirt from the small
wicker hamper in the bathroom and threw them into the washing machine, which
was tucked underneath the dryer in the mudroom behind the kitchen. Other than
her suits, which needed to be dry-cleaned, the clothes in the washer were the
only half-decent things she had to wear. When they were clean she’d slip the
Wal-Mart outfit back on and hit the mall.

    
It was nearing
noon
when she broke down and pulled a bottle of
beer out of the fridge. She justified the early consumption by counting the
barley and hops as grains. She figured the beer would fill her up enough to
keep her stomach from growling until her clothes had finished tumbling in the
dryer. Taking the edge off wouldn’t hurt either.

    
She was uncapping the bottle when she heard
a knock on the screen door’s wooden frame.

    
“Clara!” her mother called, pushing the
squeaky door open and walking in. “Are you home?”

    
“Mom?” she questioned, walking out of the
kitchen as her mom entered.

    
Josie Campbell stood two inches shorter
than her daughter, and wore her light brown hair pulled into a half-back that
waved down past her shoulder blades. Today she had on a flowered, earth-tone
tunic and a pair of faded blue jeans.

    
“What are you doing here?” Clara asked, too
surprised to respond properly.

    
“I came to check on you,” her mother said,
taking the beer from Clara’s hand and eyeing her teal sweats. “You’ve had us
all worried. You’ve been so secretive since you got back. You keep yourself
hidden away out here by the lake cut off from the world.”

    
Josie always had a gift for exaggeration.

    
“I just got back last night,” Clara said,
grabbing another beer out of the fridge for herself. “I didn’t mean to be
secretive. How did you even know I was here?”

    
“Meg called your father,” Josie shrugged
her petite shoulders, as if Clara should have known.

    
“Of course,” Clara said, nodding. News,
what little there was, traveled fast in Brighton.

    
“The real question is why are you here?”
her mother asked.

    
Clara thought she’d have more time before
she’d have to face her parents. She hadn’t quite decided how to frame her
situation for them. She forced a smile to reach her eyes.

    
“I’m taking a break,” she said casually.
“Trying to figure out what’s next for me.”

    
“A break before the wedding?” Josie asked
suspiciously.

    
“There isn’t going to be a wedding,” Clara
admitted. She might as well get it over with.

    
“Well that’s a relief,” her mother replied,
reaching up slightly to put an arm around Clara’s shoulders and ushering her
out the screen door to a set of blue resin chairs on the front porch. “Are you
planning to stick around for a while?” she asked.

    
“I’m not sure,” Clara said, relieved at her
mother’s calm reaction. “I haven’t made any firm decisions. This is as good a
place as any to sort it all out.”

    
“I see,” Josie said, pausing to take a long
swig of her beer. “Well, I’ll make it easy for you. After college you were your
dad’s right-hand man. You were the one who encouraged him to go out on a limb
and try to do something different with the business. You were just starting to
get through to him and then it was like, poof! you were gone.”

    
“I didn’t just disappear into thin air,”
Clara said. “You both knew where I was going.”

    
“Don’t get me wrong,” Josie continued as if
Clara hadn’t said a thing, “he understood why you wanted to work for a bigger
company. But now that you’re back you’re going to need to work for him. For us,
technically.”

    
“Just like that?”

    
“Yes. Just like that,” Josie said flatly.
“You’ve had your little vacation from responsibility down there in Tulsa but now it’s over.”

    
“I wouldn’t exactly call it a vacation from
responsibility,” Clara corrected. “I was going to get married, Mom. Isn’t that
the ultimate responsibility?”

    
“What did I always teach you? Your first
responsibility is to yourself. Don’t be dependent on anyone. Always have your
own money. Didn’t you hear any of it?”

    
“Yes, I heard it. All of it. That’s exactly
what you taught me. So sue me for taking a break for a little while,” Clara
said, sitting back in her chair and gazing out over the lake.

    
The swimmers were gone and the boaters had
retreated to the shoreline, wary of the impending rain.

    
Clara knew her mother didn’t understand why
she moved in with David in the first place, but this was coming from a woman
who changed husbands like other women changed hairstyles.

    
“I’ve had to be independent, from the time
I was little and you took your – what did you call them – little breathers.
Maybe I needed a little breather of my own, Mom. You know, I may get egged by
your neo-feminist cronies but there’s something to be said for just having to
show up and look pretty every so often.”

    
Her mother’s face lost a bit of color. “I
can’t believe you were happy like that,” she said. “I didn’t raise you to be a
show pony.”

    
“I beg your pardon?” Clara asked, her eyes
growing wide. “I was no one’s show pony. Just because I didn’t have a paying
job doesn’t mean I suddenly gave away all my brain cells.”

    
“Clara, that’s not what I meant,” her
mother said. “And you know it. I just want you to have a way to support
yourself.”

    
“I have my education. I kept my own car and
my own bank accounts. I didn’t bow down and serve if that’s what you’re
thinking.”

    
“Well then at least you took my concerns to
heart. Thank God you kept everything in your own name. Otherwise David could
have cancelled your credit cards and you never would have made it back here.”

    
“Let’s not over dramatize this, Mom,
please?” Clara said, pulling her feet up onto the chair and cradling her knees
against her chest. “Something tells me you’d have spotted me the cash I needed
to get home. But that does remind me that I need to do some major shopping. I
need new everything.”

    
“Just what the hell happened back there?”
Josie asked.

    
“It’s complicated,” Clara said. She
finished off her beer and rose to get another.

    
Josie glanced up at her daughter standing
in the doorway. “So un-complicate it for me, kid.”

    
Clara frowned and held up a finger
signaling one minute. She went inside and grabbed two fresh beers from the
fridge then returned to her wobbly blue chair on the porch.

    
“So?” Josie prodded.

    
“David neglected to tell me that he was
still married and has two young children, whom he basically abandoned.”

    
“You’re kidding.”

    
Clara looked at her. Josie’s mouth hung
open to emphasize her shock.

    
“No, I’m not kidding,” Clara said. “And he
got pissed when I told him I was leaving. I was packing up my stuff and things
got ugly so I bolted. I ran over my own suitcase for goodness sake.”

    
“You should have called a police officer or
had someone else go with you,” Josie said, shaking her head disapprovingly at
Clara. “Those were your things. You shouldn’t have been thrown out into the
street with nothing when you weren’t the one who did anything wrong.”

    
“There was nothing there that was
irreplaceable, except maybe my journal. I’m hoping David just threw everything
into a pile and lit it on fire in the back yard. It’d be a good way to purge us
both of this past year.”

    
“Isn’t Oklahoma in a drought?” Josie asked. “I
think fires are illegal.”

    
Clara studied her mother. “You know what I mean.
I just want him to get rid of my stuff. The thought of him rummaging through it
creeps me out.”

    
“You’re right. Stuff can be replaced. But
people can’t,” Josie said. “How’d you find out about the munchkins anyway? Did
the wife show up or something?”

    
Clara was quiet for a moment and gazed down
at her hands.

    
“Clara? It’s not that hard of a question.”

    
“Jon Griffin told me,” she said.

    
“You’re kidding,” Josie said, perking up.
“Very interesting. Have you heard from him since?”

    
Clara shook her head. “He wanted to call me
but I asked him not to.”

    
“Why not?” Josie looked at her as if she’d
lost her mind.

    
“The last time we were together things
didn’t end up so well.”

    
“You should call him. He obviously still
cares about you a great deal if he made the effort to tell you about David. And
let me tell you, he has much, much more to offer than that David Carpenter did.
I never liked him, you know. He wanted you to give up too much of yourself to
fit into his neat little world.”

    
“You made that clear to him when we came to
visit,” Clara said. She’d been upset with the way her mother had treated David
at the time, but it didn’t matter anymore. “I didn’t think you’d be upset that
I broke it off.”

    
“I think you made the right move, but that
doesn’t mean that I’m not upset for you, honey, because I know it must have
been difficult for you and I don’t like to see you get hurt. I know you say
that Jon hurt you, too, but there is something about that boy that I like. He’s
got fire in his belly.”

    
Clara tried not to think about the kiss
he’d planted on her before he left Tulsa.
That had put fire in
her
belly. But
that didn’t change the fact that no matter what Josie thought of him he’d
proved that he could morph into a cold bastard at warp speed.

    
Clara turned in the chair so she could face
her mother, carefully balancing her weight so she could hang her legs over the
flimsy resin arm.

    
“I tried to call Jon from the hotel when I
was driving back here, but I couldn’t get through.”

    
“Why not call your friend Marcy? She’s still
working there, right?”

    
“I will. As soon as I find her number and
get a phone that works.”