The Year Everything Changed (22 page)

Chapter Thirty-five
Ginger

Ginger held John’s hand while they waited in line to buy cotton candy. Rachel and Cassidy were next in line to ride the roller coaster, something John was too small to get on and Ginger too cowardly. “So, what do you think, pink or blue?” she asked John.

“Blue.”

“What about Cassidy?”

“She likes blue, too.”

“You’re absolutely sure your mom lets you eat this stuff? I don’t want to get in trouble with her.”

“She buys it for us all the time.”

Ginger laughed. “Yeah, I’ll just bet she does.” She paid for the spun sugar and looked around for a bathroom. As she remembered, wet paper towels were a necessity with cotton candy.

They found an empty bench under a tree to wait for Rachel and Cassidy. “Are you really my aunt?” John asked.

“Yep, I really am.”

“How come I never saw you when I was a little kid?”

“I didn’t know I was your aunt when you were a little kid.” She ruffled his hair, smiling when he tilted his head to get away from her. She loved being around him and Cassidy, loved talking to them, listening to them, hearing them call her Aunt Ginger. If she wasn’t careful she was going to turn into one of those obnoxious relatives who pinch chubby little cheeks. “If I had known, I would have come to see you all the time.”

“Uncle Logan sends us presents.”

She had a feeling she was being set up. “What kind of presents?”

“He got me a fire engine for my birthday.”

“A real one?”

John laughed. “No, silly, a ride around one. It has a bell and goes really fast downhill. But my dad won’t let me go downhill anymore ’cause I almost got hit by a car. It was an accident. I didn’t turn fast enough and went out in the street.” The story was important enough to pause eating for the telling.

Ginger took a tuft of candy off his nose and popped it in her mouth. It was as sweet and gritty as she remembered. She pulled a small cloud off the bottom of his wand, bit into it, and let it melt in her mouth the way she had as a child. “Where does your Uncle Logan live?”

“Washington.” Bite. “We went there to see him one time.” Lick. “He took us to his firehouse.” Wipe hand on pants.

“I’ll bet that was fun.”

“I didn’t like it when he turned on the siren. It hurt my ears.”

If anyone would have told her a year ago that she would eagerly give up a day at a spa to spend it in an amusement park with an eight- and a five-year-old, she would have said they were nuts. That the trip was her idea was even more unbelievable. The tickets were sent as a thank-you for the lateral transfer she arranged for a woman who wanted to be in Houston to be near her dying mother. Normally Ginger would have passed the tickets on to someone who had kids. This time the first thing she did was call Rachel.

“Is your Uncle Logan your daddy’s brother?”

He frowned. “Huh uh, he’s my Uncle Logan.”

She considered explaining the connection but decided to leave it for another time. She heard a series of clicks that indicated the roller coaster was on its way up the first big climb. “There they go. Can you see your mom and Cassidy?”

He turned to look. “I don’t see them. Yes I do,” he squealed. “There they are.”

Ginger wasn’t looking. A tall man in a yellow shirt and tan shorts had caught her eye. He had his back turned to her, his arm around a woman who had her arm around his waist. There was something strikingly familiar about the man—his build, the way he stood, the way he wore his sunglasses propped on top of his head, the careful comb-over to cover a growing bald spot on the back of his head. The woman tilted her head to look up at him. He bent to give her a kiss, exposing his profile. Ginger’s stomach did a slow roll.

It couldn’t be. She had to be mistaken. Marc was in Kansas City at a meeting of district managers and wasn’t due home until Wednesday. He’d tried to get out of the meeting. They’d had plans for the weekend, important plans. They were going to the wine country. Ginger had made dinner reservations at Mustards months ago. It was someone who looked like him. A double. Supposedly everyone had one.

Two kids, a boy and a girl, came up to talk to him. The girl tugged on his back pocket. He turned. Oh, God—it was him. He wasn’t in Kansas City. He’d lied to her.

He’d lied so he could be with them
.

Despite the ninety-five-degree heat, goose bumps covered her arms. She couldn’t let him see her. Not now. Not like this. Not when he was with Judy—with his children.

But she couldn’t get up to leave. She felt weighted, anchored to the bench, the sight of Marc with his family was so painful it stole her breath. Still, she couldn’t look away. They seemed so happy, the perfect unit, his daughter laughing and hanging on to his hand, his son waving them toward the roller coaster line. Judy looked up at him and smiled.

The cotton candy Ginger had eaten rose on a swell of bile. She was going to be sick. She put her hand over her mouth and swallowed hard. Once. Twice.

John pointed and shouted, “See, there they are.”

Ginger was sure Marc would turn at the noise, but as usual he was caught up in his own world and oblivious to everything and everyone else.

“Here they come,” John announced. “Let’s go.” He jumped up and started toward the line.

She ran after him, grabbing his hand and steering him in the opposite direction. “They get off this way.”

Rachel and Cassidy were disheveled and grinning as they relived the ride on the way down the ramp. Rachel’s smile disappeared when she got a good look at Ginger. “What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” she lied. She had to get out of there.
Now
. “John and I were sitting over there waiting for you. I felt fine one minute and like this the next.” She chanced a quick glance behind her. She panicked when she couldn’t see Marc. “I’m sorry. I have to leave.”

“We’ll all go.”

“No—please don’t.” Thankfully they’d met there, each bringing their own car. “That would make me feel even worse.”

“Are you sure you can make it home by yourself?”

“Positive. It’s not that far.” She handed Cassidy the second cotton candy. “Have fun. I’ll call you later.”

Ginger threw up in a privet hedge near the park exit and again on a freeway off ramp. Her hands were shaking so violently by the time she arrived home that she had trouble fitting the key in the lock on her front door. She held on long enough to call Rachel and leave a message on her machine telling her she’d made it home and was going to bed. She promised to call back later. Finally she crawled into bed and curled into a fetal position. The first tears spilled silently onto her pillow. The sobs that came later rose from a dark, lonely place filled with indescribable pain.

She had never felt so desolate, so alone—so embarrassed. Not even when Marc first told her he was going back to Judy had she experienced this kind of pain. But then his reason had been so noble, so kind, so loving. He was doing it for the children. She understood. She loved him even more because of it.

She’d felt no shame in loving him, in being the other woman. She was his refuge from a controlling, manipulating, evil woman, a woman who made his life hell when he was with her.

How could he show a woman like that the affection she’d witnessed between them? How could the children respond to the two of them as a couple if there was the constant tension Marc described? How could every day be the misery he’d described when he was the one who reached down to take Judy’s hand?

Now shame overwhelmed her. She was not the love of Marc’s life. She was the other woman, the one he used for the kinky sex he couldn’t get at home. She was safe, disease-free, and cheap. Bottom line, what did that make her?

What had she been thinking when she gave up friends and family to follow Marc to California? Why had she hung on for so long? Most humiliating of all, where had she found the blinders that kept her from seeing herself for what she really was?

She was still in bed six hours later when the phone rang. It was Rachel checking up on her. She was sure of it. She rolled over, cleared her throat, picked up the receiver, and chirped what she hoped was an acceptable “Hello.”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t there and I was going to have to tell your answering machine how much I miss you,” Marc said. “Where’d I catch you?”

“Where are you?” she asked, her voice monotone.

“At the hotel. I would have called sooner, but I missed my connection in Denver and just got settled in my room.”

He was making this easy. She should be grateful, but all she could think about was how many times he’d lied to her in the past and how readily she’d believed him and how much those lies hurt now. Why had she never questioned him when he’d insisted she only call him on his cell, never on the hotel phone?

“How was the flight?”

“I got stuck next to an old couple who’d been visiting their grandkids. They insisted on showing me a hundred pictures they’d taken on their visit.” He laughed. “That might be an exaggeration. But only a small one.”

Did he spend time making up these kinds of stories or did they just come naturally? The details were always intimate, utterly believable. “And the ride in from the airport?”

“Other than the cab driver not speaking a word of English, it was okay. Why do you ask?”

“No reason. I guess I just miss Kansas City. How does it look?”

He laughed. “The same. It’s always the same. I don’t understand what you love about this place.”

“I miss my friends. It gets lonely out here.”

“I keep telling you to get out more. What did you do today?”

He only asked to prove his point. “I went out with Rachel.”

“Good for you.”

“And her kids.”

“Oh?”

“Remember me telling you about the woman who sent me the tickets for Great America?”

A long pause followed. “Now that you mention it.”

“We used them today.”

A longer pause this time. “Did you have a good time?”

“For a while.”

He let out a deep sigh. “I can explain.”

“I know. You always have an explanation—for everything.”

“But not on the phone. Give me an hour.”

“Take two. After all, you could miss your connection again.”

“Okay, I deserved that. Just promise me you’re not going to do anything stupid.”

“Like?”

“Talk yourself into anything.”

“Like?”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

She put the phone back on the base, got out of bed, and went to the closet to examine her luggage, trying to decide which piece she should use to pack his things. None of them. It was a matched set her mother and father had given her for her birthday. Paper bags would have to do.

It didn’t take as long as she’d anticipated to strip her condo of everything belonging to Marc. A razor, aftershave, underwear, his favorite wine, cigars and the humidor she’d bought him for his birthday. She considered throwing in the gifts he’d given her over the past three years but decided they’d be put to better use at a battered women’s shelter.

Or Goodwill.

Or the Dumpster downstairs.

She put the bags by the front door and sat on the sofa to wait. Like always. She was good at waiting for Marc. Too good. If she had a dollar for every hour she’d spent this way, she could donate it to the local PBS and receive every premium they’d offered at their last beg-a-thon.

Why was she waiting for him anyway? They were really finished this time, and there wasn’t anything he could say that would make her change her mind. Her heart lightened at the conviction. It wasn’t the absolution she would have liked for what they had done to his wife and his children, but it was a start.

She grabbed her purse and keys and moved the bags to the small porch outside her front door. Marc would think she was still inside and be slow to accept her not answering his summons. She liked imagining him knocking on the door, waiting, expecting, impatient, and finally giving up believing her strong enough to wait him out.

Without a destination in mind, she headed north. She’d gone twenty miles before she realized she’d subconsciously headed for Rachel’s, the one place she knew without question she would find what she desperately needed—a friend.

Oddly, and completely unexpectedly, she had a flash of longing for her other two sisters, too. Elizabeth was wise in a wounded way, her battle scars a shield for the vulnerable little girl she still sheltered inside. Christina was young and bold and brash and lived her life poised for a fight, passionately looking for proof she was worthy of being loved, poignantly expecting to be disappointed.

Despite the baggage they all carried there was a strength of character that shone through. Ginger felt a wondrous and deep sense of pride knowing she was connected to them.

Chapter Thirty-six
Christina

Christina looked at Ginger across the walnut dining table. Ginger fascinated her. Four out of the four times they’d been together she’d looked as if she was about to step onto a runway—makeup, hair, clothes, skin, everything perfect. “Have you ever had a bad hair day?”

Ginger looked up from her shrimp and avocado salad. “No. Never. Well, maybe when I was on the track team in high school, but I try not to dwell on things that upset me.” She reached up and flipped her hair over her shoulder. “I wake up looking exactly like this every morning. Don’t you?”

Christina self-consciously ran her hand through her recently cut and colored hair. Lucy had recommended a hairdresser who’d done miracles with what remained of the coal black and pink mess she’d lived with for the past six months. “Okay, I admit that may have sounded a little sarcastic, but it wasn’t intended. I was just curious how someone like you always looks so put together.”

Ginger took a second to wipe the corners of her mouth. “Someone like me?”

“You know—beautiful.” Hell, all she’d been trying to do was liven up the luncheon conversation. She’d decided that as long as she was forced to spend time with these women she might as well learn something about them. “Haven’t you ever wondered how some people seem to have it all and others look like they were beaten by an ugly stick? Or maybe you don’t notice things like that.”

“We’re both freaks of nature.”

She said it so easily, it was obvious she had given it thought—lots of it. “So, is it hard being that different from the rest of us?”

Ginger smiled, exposing impossibly white, perfectly aligned teeth. “Are you baiting me?”

“Leave her alone,” Rachel said in tandem. “She’s had a rough week.”

“So have I,” Elizabeth said softly. “I found out I’m going to be a grandmother.”

They all looked at her. “That’s bad news?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know why I said that,” Elizabeth answered. “Of course it isn’t bad news.”

“Then why do you look as if you caught your best friend in bed with your husband?” Christina asked.

Rachel flinched, Ginger shot Christina an angry look, Elizabeth looked as if she was about to cry. “Sorry—bad analogy,” Christina said. To Rachel she said, “I didn’t mean anything by—”

“It’s all right. I think we’re starting to get the picture, Christina,” Rachel said. “You spend a lot of time with your foot in your mouth.”

“Boy, do I. Even when it was wired shut.”

“Are you ever going to tell us about that,” Elizabeth asked.

Christina hesitated, looking from one woman to the next. Innately she understood that she could trust them not to judge her the way her mother had. “My boyfriend broke my jaw.”

Ginger gasped. “What a low-life bastard.”

“I hope he’s in jail,” Elizabeth said.

Rachel didn’t say anything. But then, Christina hadn’t expected her to. She’d figured it out a long time ago. “I don’t know where he is. He stole everything, including the movie I’d financed and we’d worked on together for two years, and bailed while I was in Mexico recuperating.”

“What are you going to do?” Rachel asked.

“I don’t know.”

“You have to do something,” Ginger said, outraged. “You can’t let him get away with assault and battery—and, and robbery, or theft, or whatever you call it when someone steals something like that.”

“He already has gotten away with it. He had a half-dozen witnesses swear he was with them the night he hit me. There wasn’t anything the police could do.”

“What about him stealing your movie?” Elizabeth asked. “You have to be able to do something about that.”

“I’ve been watching to see if he’s submitted it to any of the film festivals, but if he’s changed the title and submitted under a different name, there’s no way I would recognize it without being there or at least seeing a synopsis.”

“Can you prove it’s your movie?” Rachel asked.

“Yes—at least I think I can. He’ll have the same people lined up to lie about my involvement in the production, but it won’t work this time. When he stripped the house he stupidly left behind all the receipts showing that I was the primary investor. I’m going to talk to Lucy to find out what she thinks I should do.”

“I agree with Ginger,” Elizabeth said, animated with anger. “You can’t let him get away with it.”

Christina sat back in her chair bemused and more than a little surprised and pleased by their fierce concern. “If I were a sheriff I’d want the three of you on my posse.” Ready to change the subject, she looked at Elizabeth. “You never did say whether congratulations were in order about being a grandma.”

Elizabeth chased a shrimp around her plate with her fork. “My daughter is twenty-one, she’s never worked a day in her life, she’s dropped out of school because she’s too embarrassed to go through the pregnancy in front of her friends, she decided against an abortion because someone showed her some pictures, she can’t decide what to do with the baby when it’s born, and she’s annoyed because she’s going to miss the rest of the summer in the Hamptons. Oh, and to top it all off, she doesn’t want to tell the father because she doesn’t like him and she says the feeling is mutual.” She folded her napkin and put it beside her plate. “I’m not even fifty and I feel like there are three generations instead of one separating me from my daughter. When—no,
how
—did women start treating sex like a box of tissue—use it, toss it, forget about it? Is that the equality everyone fought for? I’m not saying you should wait for the honeymoon, but shouldn’t you at least feel something for your partner? You don’t have to love him, but shouldn’t you at least like him?”

“So . . . I guess we can assume you haven’t been spending a lot of time setting up the nursery,” Christina said.

“Sorry. I had no right to dump my problems on all of you, but this is something that’s been eating at me since Stephanie dropped her little bomb.” Elizabeth tried to smile but couldn’t pull it off. Instead, she started crying. After several stunned seconds passed in silence, Ginger went to her and gave her a go-ahead-just-let-it-all-out hug.

“Well, hell.” Rachel tossed her napkin on the table. “Elizabeth’s daughter screwed up Elizabeth’s life, Christina’s boyfriend screwed up hers, Ginger dumped the man she thought she was going to marry, and I can’t decide what to do with my philandering husband. There’s no way Jessie can top any of this.”

Jessie’s Story

It took me almost a month and over a thousand miles on the old Studebaker I bought when I got to California to discover it wasn’t going to be the piece of cake to find my family that I thought it would be. They weren’t any of the places Ma had told me to look when they left for California, and no one at any of the camps remembered them. I finally ran across a cousin in Salinas, and he told me, last he’d heard, they were living in a Farm Security Administration camp near Bakersfield.

I passed a ragged city of tar-paper shacks a half-dozen times looking for their camp before I stopped and asked about them. Never once did it cross my mind that she and Pa would have come to this, not with four able-bodied people in the family to work the fields and put money aside. Yet, there she was, living on the generosity of people who had nothing to give.

I’d let myself believe they were getting on all right because it was what I wanted to believe. Pa had always found a way to get by, even in the worst of times. I was busy living an adventure, the hero of my own dime novel, never for a minute thinking the people I’d promised to help could be dying and discarded like so much roadkill.

Ma told me my brother went first, in a senseless fight. No one knew what started it, Bobby Ray using his fists, the other guy a knife. Grandma caught a cold the second winter that took her in the spring. My sister just up and disappeared one day, leaving for the fields in the back of a truck with a dozen others in the morning, missing when it came back that night. Ma never saw her again. She said she believed losing his girl that way was what finally did Pa in. She couldn’t get him to eat after that, even when out of desperation she traded her wedding ring for a side of fatback and cooked up his favorite beans and cornbread. He left her long before he stopped breathing. When it came time, burying what was left was just a formality.

I tried to get her to come back to Texas with me, thinking she’d want out of California any way she could. But she said she’d never liked Texas much and didn’t feel right leaving Pa behind. I think it was more the hope my sister would turn up one day that kept her there.

I bought her a house with a bus stop close by and as much new furniture as I could before she told me that it was more than she wanted to take care of and she was sending the next delivery back to the store. I’d come with money enough to buy a farm, money I believed would make me a man in my father’s eyes. I was determined not to take any back with me, so I bought a good-sized piece of land outside Bakersfield, thinking eventually Ma might want to settle on something where the neighbors couldn’t see in her windows.

I had a long time to live with the guilt of knowing I could have come sooner if I’d been willing to come with less. Ego never carried a heavier price tag.

When I got back to Texas I proposed and Denise accepted. We were going to be married that next summer, but then Pearl Harbor came along, and a year or so later I wound up a paratrooper in Europe instead. We jumped on D Day, fought in France for a month, and came back to England. I had a letter waiting for me from Ma’s neighbor saying that she’d died peacefully in her sleep and asking what I wanted done with the house.

About all I remember of the next two months is drinking or being hungover. I sobered up in Holland and, with the exception of a couple of memorable lapses, stayed that way until the fighting was over.

The war changed me. Growing up changed Denise. If us getting married hadn’t been something her family thought of as certain as the sun coming up every morning, and if I hadn’t owed what I did to Wyatt for taking care of the pipeline business while I was gone those three years, I don’t know that we would have gone through with it.

The wedding pulled ranchers and oil men from all over the panhandle and west Texas. The party was big and wild and still in full swing when we left on our honeymoon two days later.

We came home not knowing each other any better than when we left. We moved into a house just outside town that was too small to keep Denise busy past ten in the morning. She was bored, and I was gone too much looking for ways to put excitement and growth into a business that had become static. The life we settled into bred discontent instead of the babies Denise wanted to give her purpose.

We were two years into the marriage before Denise got pregnant. She was sick most of the nine months and laid up the rest, but I’d never seen her happier. It was a good time for us. I was home more, and we were talking like we hadn’t talked since we were kids, making plans and looking forward like we believed again that we were meant to be together.

We had a boy. I didn’t get to see either of them for more than five hours after they took Denise into delivery. I’d paced a gully in the linoleum floor before someone finally came to get me.

A nurse with a starched white hat appeared in the doorway. “Mr. Reed, you can come in now.”

I followed her down a hallway and into a green-and-white room. Denise sat propped up in the bed, a white bundle in her arms. She wore a pink nightgown and a blue bow in her hair, her cheeks had twin circles of rouge, her lips a slash of red. She looked like she’d been ridden hard and put away wet and someone had come along to try to hide the evidence.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

She gave me one of the smiles she saved for special times, the kind that turned her eyes into pools I wanted to swim in the rest of my life. “Come see your son.”

My son. I couldn’t imagine sweeter words. I went to the bed and kissed Denise, believing I said what needed to be said in that kiss, that she would understand how I was thanking her for what she’d gone through and how proud I was. I should have used words. I should have seen the light leave her eyes when I picked up the baby and walked to the window to show him the world instead of settling in next to her. I named him Frank, after my grandfather, foolishly assuming it was a man’s prerogative to name his son. If it had been a girl, I figured Denise would have picked the name. It was the way it had been done in my family for generations. Had I known it would start the wedge between Denise and our son that lasted and grew over a lifetime, I would have let her name him after her father the way she’d secretly planned.

I had something pushing me even harder now to make the business grow—I had a son who one day would be a part of everything I built. Oil was what I knew, so when I heard about new fields opening in Colorado, I went there to see for myself. What I didn’t stop to realize was that it wasn’t the finding, it was the transporting where I could hold my own. I went in a sheep ready for shearing and came out as naked as one of those Greek statues. In the end I had enough left to get us to California and settled on the land I’d bought for Ma.

I’ve always believed real luck comes from the blisters you get working. But then there’s dumb luck. That’s the only way I can think to describe what happened while I was looking to sell the land to get enough money to buy into a couple of blacksmith shops—oil was discovered half a mile down the road. As quick as that, I was a recognized player in the California oil business.

Denise wanted another baby, but no matter how we kept to schedules and the crazy doings that Denise’s mother and grandmother said were never-fail ways to get pregnant, it didn’t happen again. We started thinking the only way we’d ever get another one was to adopt. Turned out those were the magic words. A month after we started looking into it seriously, Denise was pregnant. She was as sick as she’d been the first time, so I took Frank to work with me, thinking I was doing her a favor. Most days we’d leave before sunup and not come home again until after dark. It was an exciting time in the fields with new wells coming in every week. I wasn’t needed there to oversee it, but staying home was like setting up a high-stakes poker game and telling a gambler he had to sit out.