Dead Silence

by Brenda Novak

  Her mother studied her for several minutes, her eyes clouding with her own pain. “Does acknowledging it make it go away?” she countered. “I did what I had to do. Someday I hope you’ll forgive me for that.” With a final wave, she set off across the porch, her heels clacking on the wooden boards until she reached the lawn. “I’ve got an appointment. Call me later if…if you’d like to see me again.”

  “I’ll call,” Grace said and watched her go.

  The cool, dim interior of the Hill Country Pizza & Pasta Parlor finally brought Grace a welcome reprieve from the heat. She’d just showered, but it was the hottest part of the day and she already felt sticky again. The air had grown muggier and muggier all afternoon, but it had yet to rain. She guessed the rain would fall tonight as a constant drizzle.

  “Here’s your pizza.”

  The teenage girl who’d taken her order hovered at the table with a small pie. As Grace moved her salad to the side, the door opened and a small group of men walked in.

  “Thank you,” she said to the waitress and immediately averted her face. She didn’t want to make eye contact with anyone, didn’t want to be noticed or drawn into conversation. She’d only come to have an early supper and to escape the heat.

  But it wasn’t three minutes later that she heard the same men talking about her.

  “I swear it’s her, Tim.”

  “Grinding Gracie? Nah…”

  “It is! Rex Peters told me she was coming back to town.”

  “What for?” someone else asked. “I thought she’d become an assistant district attorney somewhere. There was an article about her in the paper.”

  Grace couldn’t decipher the response. She told herself to block them out and finish her food. But a moment later, someone gave a low whistle and said something about how good she looked, and she couldn’t help glancing over.

  One of the men stood at the front counter. He had his back to her as he ordered, but the other four were the jocks she’d admired so much in high school. Seeing them made her skin crawl. She no longer wanted to be here, didn’t want to acknowledge them. She wasn’t the person she used to be.

  “Maybe we don’t recognize her with her clothes on,” Joe Vincelli said. The meaningful snicker that went with those words brought his name back to Grace right away. He was the reverend’s beloved nephew. He’d also coined the humiliating nickname that had been written on her locker and echoed after her in the halls.

  “Shut up, she’ll hear you,” someone growled. Was it Buzz Harte? She couldn’t be sure. He seemed to have changed the most; he’d certainly lost a lot of hair.

  More murmuring and a few muffled guffaws made Grace’s ears burn. Heart pounding, she stared down at her plate. Fourteen or fifteen years ago, she’d had sex with at least three of these men in fumbling back-seat trysts or behind a building. Obviously, they remembered those encounters with far more relish than she did. She didn’t know how she could’ve allowed anyone to use her so terribly, especially the boys who’d attended high school with her.

  Except that she’d been searching for something she couldn’t find….

  Feeling faint, she wiped off the sweat beading on her upper lip, and wondered if she could slip out of the restaurant without having to pass right by them.

  Then Joe’s voice carried to her again, louder than the others, and it was as if no time had passed at all. “She was one hell of an easy lay, wasn’t she? All you had to do was crook your finger, and she’d spread her legs. I did her once behind the bleachers with my parents sitting about ten feet away.”

  Grace’s chest constricted as they laughed, which made it difficult to breathe. With Joe, it had been even more complicated than wanting so desperately to be liked. She’d felt she owed him some type of compensation for the loss of his uncle.

  “She once asked me if she could be my girlfriend for a few weeks,” Tim said. His voice was much lower than Joe’s, but she heard enough words to be able to string them together. “I told her yes before I screwed her, then broke up with her right after.” His subsequent laugh was a bark of disbelief. “It’s amazing how anyone that stupid could get into Georgetown.”

  Someone—Buzz?—must’ve smacked him because he groaned.

  “Stupid? Come on. She’s definitely not stupid. She was—” his voice dropped, but she managed to cull the meaning “—screwed-up…something weird going on in that house….”

  “There wasn’t anything weird going on until they killed my uncle,” Joe said defensively.

  “You don’t know what happened to your uncle,” Tim said, a little more clearly. Joe started to argue, but Tim raised a hand. “And, trust me, they were weird from the beginning.”

  “Because of her bitch of a mother,” Joe grumbled.

  After that, there were several whispered remarks. But Grace wasn’t listening; she was struggling to hang on to her composure.

  Unfortunately, her stomach wasn’t cooperating. It churned and ached as her mind painted pictures of what she’d done with these men when they were boys.

  She’d tried to make up for those mistakes ever since. But it wasn’t enough, was it? It was never enough.

  “Go say hi to her, Joe,” Tim said. “Maybe you can do her right here. If you make her squeal, maybe she’ll tell you what happened to your uncle.”

  Joe’s response was a muted snarl as the man who’d been ordering now joined the others at the table. “What’re you guys talking about?” he asked, his words resonating clearly.

  Grace hadn’t seen this guy’s face, but she didn’t need to. It was Kennedy Archer—the most handsome, the most athletic, the most admired of them all. She knew him instantly but couldn’t stop herself from looking up to confirm it.

  He hadn’t gotten fat. Nor had he gone bald, like some of his friends. He was still tall and broad-shouldered, with dark-blond hair and dimples on either side of his poster-boy smile. And, according to the campaign signs all over town, he was running for mayor, hoping to take the seat his father had occupied for so long.

  Their eyes met. Surprise lit his face as recognition dawned, and he quit yanking on the tie he’d been trying to loosen.

  Grace turned immediately away. In the restaurant business, four o’clock was the slowest part of the day. What were the chances that Kennedy Archer and his bunch would gather at the pizza joint while she was here, just like they used to when she worked behind the counter at sixteen?

  She remembered watching every move they made, trying to anticipate their needs, to be funny, cool—and had to bite her lip to contain her roiling emotions. She hadn’t expected to confront them all at once, hadn’t prepared herself for the feelings that doing so might evoke. It seemed as though they’d shoved her back into the skin of the needy child she used to be.

  How could she let that happen? Why hadn’t she seen it coming?

  She’d been too focused on what mattered to her as an adult, of course. Clay and Irene—and her stepsister Madeline, whom she hadn’t called yet. High school was like another life to her, a dark time when she’d despised herself far more than anyone else could.

  Suddenly, she realized she couldn’t stay where she was any longer. Bile rose from her stomach, burning the back of her throat….

  Standing with as much dignity as she could muster, she hurried to the back of the restaurant and into the bathroom.

  Once the door closed behind her, blocking out the curious stares that had followed her from the table, she launched herself into a toilet stall and fell to her knees, just in time to lose what little she’d eaten of her dinner.

  3

  She wasn’t coming back. The other guys had finally forgotten “Grinding Gracie” and gone on to talk about the election, the price local farmers were getting for cotton, a father/son fishing trip they were planning to take together in August. But Kennedy found himself glancing over at the table where Grace Montgomery had been sitting. Her food was still there. She’d eaten a little salad, but her pizza was untouched and growing colder by
the minute.

  Was she okay? He rocked back in his chair to check the darkened hallway that led to the restrooms, but he didn’t see her. How long could it take to go to the bathroom?

  “Kennedy, what’s wrong with you, man?” Joe said, nudging him. “You too good for the rest of us now that you’re going to be mayor?”

  “I’ve always been too good for you bastards,” he teased as he lowered his chair. But after a few halfhearted remarks about the fishing trip, he let the conversation slip away from him again. He was waiting for Grace to come out. The guys had been groaning and whistling at her while she walked to the bathroom, making stupid comments that said they had more testosterone than brains. He wanted to say something to Grace that would smooth it all over, help her feel welcome. If he could.

  Another ten minutes passed. Their own pizza came. They devoured it, and still she didn’t appear.

  He checked the hall once again. Nothing.

  “Why are you so preoccupied?” Buzz asked.

  “I’m not,” he said, but he’d been thinking about the topless woman he’d seen in the window earlier. Now he knew who it was. Grace. She had to be staying at Evonne’s place. There couldn’t be two women with a body like that.

  But why was she renting a house when she had a mother, a brother and a stepsister in town who each had plenty of extra room? What was it with that family?

  They polished off another pitcher of beer—no sign of Grace. “Where is she?” he asked Buzz.

  “Who?” Tim responded, overhearing.

  “Never mind,” Kennedy grumbled.

  “Looks like Grinding Gracie’s left her pizza for us,” Ronnie said. “You guys think I should take a piece? Wouldn’t that be funny, to have her come out and see her pizza half gone?”

  “Do it,” Joe urged.

  Ronnie’s chair raked the carpet as he stood, but Kennedy caught him by the arm. “Sit down.”

  “Come on, Kennedy, it’s just a joke.”

  “Forget it. You know she had a rough childhood. Give her a break, okay?”

  Joe arched an eyebrow at him. “I never knew you had a thing for Grinding Gracie. The way I remember it, you wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.” He lifted his nose. “You were an Archer.”

  “I was with Raelynn,” he said evenly.

  “Yeah, he had a girlfriend,” Buzz added.

  “So did I,” Joe replied with a careless laugh. “Grinding Gracie didn’t interfere with that. It wasn’t as if I’d ever like her or anything.”

  Kennedy had known these guys since grade school, but sometimes they got on his nerves. Especially Joe, who in situations like this seemed to bring out the worst in everyone. If not for what Joe had done for him when they were only twelve years old, Kennedy doubted they’d even be friends. “I don’t want to hear it.”

  At the irritation in Kennedy’s voice, they stared at him for several seconds. A few muttered about the pressure he was under. But after a while, the tension eased and they started talking about the Jaguars and what kind of football season they could expect.

  Kennedy listened until he couldn’t stand wondering about Grace anymore. Then, with a silent curse, he got up and went to the woman’s restroom. “Grace?” he said, knocking on the door. “You okay in there?”

  No reply. Just the sound of the fan whirring inside.

  “Grace? If you don’t answer, I’ll have to come in.”

  Still nothing.

  He began to enter—and caught a brief glimpse of her staggering to her feet. But then she hit the other side of the door and held it closed with the weight of her body.

  “I—I’m…fine,” she said. But her words were broken as though she had to gulp for the air to speak.

  Judging by the unusually pale face and saucerlike eyes he’d seen in the mirror, he knew she couldn’t be fine. She was sick. He could smell it.

  “Do you need a ride home?” he asked.

  There was no response, but she was leaning against the door, and he didn’t want to force it open.

  “I could give you a lift right now.”

  “No, you…you go on back to your friends. They’re pretty funny…I—I wouldn’t want you to miss anything.”

  Shit. She’d heard them, just as he feared. He tried to open the door again, but it wouldn’t budge. “The guys—they can be idiots sometimes, you know? I often wonder if they’ll ever grow up. Forget about them, okay? They don’t mean half the things that come out of their mouths.”

  The sound of fabric brushing against the wood led him to believe she’d just slid to the floor.

  “Grace?”

  “Leave me alone.” Her voice was more strident now, but it came from much lower, confirming his suspicion that she was on the floor. “I—I’m not one of your many admirers, so…do us both a favor and go.”

  Go. With a sigh, Kennedy told himself to do just that. But he couldn’t; the words he’d heard his friends say, and how deeply he suspected they’d hurt her, wouldn’t let him. He paced the short hall several times. Then he realized that Joe and the others were still waiting to see what would happen, and decided to take Grace out of the spotlight by returning to the table.

  “You get anything good?” Joe asked and everyone laughed.

  “He’d be smilin’ if that was the case,” Tim said.

  Kennedy scowled. “You guys can be real assholes, you know that?”

  Hunching over the sink, Grace dabbed a wet paper towel to her forehead. She needed to gather the strength to walk out of the pizza parlor. But she was hoping Kennedy and his friends would leave first. She’d face them all later, when she was better prepared.

  Breathe deeply. In and out. In and out. She’d be okay. She’d survived a lot worse than this. It was just the surprise, the throwback to old times that bothered her.

  Forget them. You don’t need them. You never did….

  The voice of a little boy heading into the opposite restroom rose in the hallway, and she decided to make her move. The approach of the dinner hour meant there were probably a lot more people in the restaurant. Even if Kennedy Archer and his friends were still around, maybe she could slip by without being noticed. Even if they saw her, she didn’t care. The initial shock was over. What more could they do?

  She splashed some water on her face and patted it dry, then marched into the dining area. Beer mugs, paper plates and silver pizza pans littered the table where Kennedy and his friends had eaten, but the seats were empty.

  Allowing herself a small sigh of relief, Grace ignored the food that had grown cold at her own table and went swiftly outside. She dug through her purse for her keys while she walked, telling herself she’d be back at Evonne’s in a matter of minutes. But the moment she glanced up, she saw that Kennedy Archer wasn’t gone, after all. He was leaning against the front bumper of a Ford Explorer that was parked next to her Beemer.

  It looked as if he was waiting for someone. She hoped it wasn’t her.

  For a few seconds, her footsteps faltered. She’d have to walk around him to get in. But she wasn’t about to let the sight of him stop her. She wouldn’t let him or his friends hurt her ever again, she thought, and picked up speed.

  As she stepped off the curb, he shoved away from the Explorer as if to intercept her, but she circumvented him easily enough.

  “Excuse me,” she murmured and unlocked her car. She might have been talking to a stranger.

  Throwing her purse into the passenger seat, she slid inside, welcoming the feel and smell of the familiar leather. But when she pulled on her door, she realized it wouldn’t close because he was holding it.

  She looked into his face, and let every ounce of the derision she felt for Stillwater’s spoiled, selfish, insensitive men show in her eyes. “Is there something I can do for you?”

  The look registered. He stepped back as though she’d slapped him, but didn’t release her door.

  “I just wanted to say—”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “But—”


  “I know you, remember? I’m sure you and your friends can recall a great many things about me, and I don’t blame you for not being impressed. But I also remember a great many things about you and am equally unimpressed. So save your feeble attempts to be a nice guy for someone who can’t see the shriveled heart behind that phony smile.”

  With that, she glanced pointedly at the hand holding her door, and he finally let go.

  Kennedy watched Grace pull out of the lot. Obviously, she wasn’t the “I’ll do anything to make you like me,” girl she’d been in high school. He wanted to believe she’d confused him with Joe, or maybe Tim, but he knew she hadn’t.

  As he climbed into the driver’s seat of his own vehicle, he remembered Joe bragging to the varsity football team that he could get Grace to have sex with him anytime, anywhere. To prove it, he’d convinced her to meet him in the locker room after the game the following Friday.

  Kennedy hadn’t stayed for the show, but he’d listened as avidly as everyone else to the gossip that had circulated afterward. He’d even laughed when Joe explained how he’d promised to take her to the prom only to stand her up.

  “I never laid a hand on her,” Kennedy said aloud in an effort to ease his troubled conscience. But his conscience wouldn’t relent. Maybe he hadn’t been directly involved—but he hadn’t done much to stop the others from calling her names, had he? He’d been there, standing next to the guys who’d nudged her or tripped her. He’d chosen to ignore it when they slipped a pincher bug into her food at lunch. He’d only intervened when Raelynn was there.

  Raelynn…God, he missed his wife. He’d never known anyone so sweet, so perfect. She used to plead with him to make his friends stop mocking Grace, to persuade them to leave her alone. For Raelynn’s sake, he’d stepped in now and then. But his own mother often spoke of Grace’s family as if they had no right to breathe the same air as decent people, and he’d taken his lead from her.

  His regret tasted bitter as he shut his car door and started his engine. There’d been times he’d felt sorry for Grace, but mostly he’d tried to pretend she didn’t exist. The way she’d stare at him with so much longing in her eyes made him uncomfortable. He hadn’t been mature enough to realize that he had a responsibility to help her. Or maybe he simply hadn’t cared enough to bother. No one had cared. Except her family. When Molly reached high school and walked into the girls’ bathroom one day to find her sister with Tim, she went home and told their older brother. Clay came to school the next day and broke Tim’s nose.