It wasn’t as if she’d literally abandoned me for no reason, like Peyton’s mom had her and Stevie. I wondered if Judy had children and if they ever saw her. I ran my fingertips along the bottoms of my eyes in an attempt to staunch tears stealing down my cheeks. I was glad I’d forgotten to take off my sunglasses, even though they now felt garish with their blingy frames in a place like this. I left them on anyway.
“Amanda Black, you say?” The receptionist smiled up at me, making no mention of my sunglasses, or wet cheeks, of course. She would be used to seeing sad visitors.
“Yes.”
“Do you want me to call your husband and tell him you are here, hon? Or do you just want to go on back?”
I sniffed back my tears. “Excuse me?”
“Your husband, Mr. Black.”
“My husband?”
She nodded, still smiling. “He’s with Judy now.”
Keith. My husband was here. In Judy’s room?
“No need to call,” I managed to say. “I’ll just – join them.”
“It’s room 213.”
I turned to go.
“Other way,” she said, still smiling. Such a patient woman she was. I turned down the opposite hallway, finally pulling off my sunglasses, so I could have a better view.
I knew Keith agreed to help Adri in her compassionate pursuits, but visiting Judy by himself was a little over the top. Had he been bitten by the same do-gooder bug as Adri? Maybe he wanted to support Adri’s cause more directly than a check and being a spokesperson, but surely he would have told me.
I counted the doors. Were there really more than two hundred rooms in this place? How terribly sad. I pictured the families absent of grandpas and grandmas, and in some cases, moms like my own, and dads.
The smell was something I’d never forgotten. It was a mix of cleaners, air fresheners, and body odors that didn’t matter there where nobody was trying to impress anybody else. Passing a woman in curlers, sliding her walker down the hall, I recalled Marta and me trying to fix our mother’s hair when we visited. She was a beautiful woman and we knew she wouldn’t want to be seen looking terrible as the nurses tended her. We had done her hair every weekend, doing it up in styles that made her smile when she looked in the mirror, even though she didn’t recognize us much of the time.
This place could sure use some of those new air fresheners Marta and I sold at The Southern Pair. The stuff they used at Cottonwood Manor reminded me of a department store bathroom.
210…211…212…
I stopped at Judy’s door.
213.
Chapter Twelve
I wish I could say I had a better reaction when I saw what I saw inside that room, something compassionate and considerate, a rushing forward and offering a comforting embrace, but my mute button had been pushed. I just wasn’t at all prepared to see my husband sitting on the bed beside Judy, holding her hand while she slept.
Cowboys weren’t supposed to cry. Why was he crying?
The image before me depicted my husband like a character in a movie, shiny trails mapping a streaming pattern down his shadowed cheeks. That was when I started to fit the broken pieces together.
A glance around the room lifted the veil—a framed picture beside the bed was of a rodeo queen next to a cowboy whom I recognized instantly; a purple hat encircled by a gleaming rhinestone tiara, resting on an antique dresser; and a framed eight by ten photo of Judy and two smiling children, only I now knew it wasn’t Judy because the kids in the photo were my kids. Peyton had the exact same picture on her bedside table back at the ranch.
“Violet,” I whispered.
Keith’s eyes found me, his eyes wide. He ducked, brushing the back of his sleeve across his face. He sniffed, tried to get himself under control. I felt, as much as read, the embarrassment in his eyes, the worry about what I might think, and then the compassion as he let go of her hand and walked toward me, to reassure me.
I backed away, thinking about running. This was worse than our wedding day. Much worse.
I turned, ready to flee.
“Mandy. Stop.”
I did, not turning around to face him, but believe you me I didn’t want to. I knew something wasn’t right, although my brain hadn’t had time to process what my heart already knew. I couldn’t run.
I let Keith take my hand. I glanced back at Judy—no, Violet—still sleeping, and followed Keith out to the parking lot. How I’d walked right past his truck parked by the main doors of the manor without noticing, I have no idea. Inside the truck, Keith started it and cranked on the AC.
“Holy cow, Keith. What is happening?”
He said nothing for a long while. I also couldn’t find any words, which was not like me at all, but what was left to say? In my mind, during my most jealous thoughts, I’d rehearsed what I’d say to Violet if she ever came back, what I’d tell Keith if he ever decided he would take her back – which I know was a ridiculous worry – and none of it fit this situation.
With all my humorous quips and usual quick-wittedness gone, I reached for Keith’s hand. He didn’t just take mine in his own, but gripped it until my fingers hurt.
“Ouch,” I whispered, making a feeble attempt at teasing.
“I’m sorry,” he said, loosening his grip, but only slightly.
“Honey,” I said. “I don’t know what to say. Have you known all this time?”
“No,” he said, his voice thick with emotion. “I just found out a few days ago when Adri brought me here for a tour because of all that spokesperson stuff she wants me to do.” He stared straight ahead, his jaw rigid. “I was walking past her room and Adri said, ‘Let’s go see Manda’s friend Judy.’”
“We weren’t really friends,” I mumbled. “She’s just that lady from the rodeo…you know. Then I saw her again at the library, and—well, she’s sweet.”
“Yes.” He said. “But I took one look at the pictures on her dresser, of Peyton and Stephen, and I knew she wasn’t just some lady.”
“I had no idea,” I said, afraid he’d think I set this up or something, although that would have been pretty complicated to do, even if I’d known.
“Ever since then, it’s been… some kind of nightmare.”
“I can’t imagine. What a shock.” Everything I said sounded staged, inadequate.
He could only nod his agreement.
“All this time, we all thought—you thought—”
“I know. I was so wrong.” He sank his chin low. “I should’ve known something wasn’t right. She wasn’t the kind of woman who would’ve abandoned us.” He looked at me, the depth of his broken heart fathomless in his eyes. “I can’t believe she went through this alone.”
“It’s so sad,” I whispered, grasping at words, but they evaporated like clouds, too insubstantial to hold the weight of reality.
Keith’s face transformed into a grimace, like the people who picked up something in The Southern Pair that reminded them of something sad, something painful. I reached over and squeezed his shoulder, thinking of Judy’s treasures inside her room, neatly organized on her dresser. Things with happy memories attached that must have made her smile.
“Oh, honey,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”
And then he did something I’ve never seen a cowboy do, certainly not my husband. He leaned his forehead against the steering wheel and sobbed. I had barely gotten over seeing my husband crying silently at Violet’s bedside, and now he was weeping.
Keith was my western romance novel hero. He didn’t cry.
But he did. His whole body, those muscular shoulders of his that had absorbed my own tears in the past as I’d confided to him about my lost babies and about my mother, shook like a silent earthquake.
“Oh gosh, Keith.” I whispered into my hand, my own cheeks growing wet.
I dried them quickly in the hem of my t-shirt. This wasn’t my pain. This wasn’t at all what I’d wanted for Keith, for Peyton, or Stephen, back when I’d insisted on getting rid of their mo
ther’s things.
I still couldn’t believe it.
Judy is Violet?
Even though it was pretty awkward in the cab of the truck, I scooched real close to my husband, reached around his shoulders and waist, and held on. He obliged by turning and pulling me close to him. He cupped the back of my head in his hands and cried into my hair. I didn’t say a thing, certainly not that he was about to squeeze me to death, but just held on to him, letting him pour it all out.
Keith needed me, and it reminded me that I’d been all about myself lately. All I’d talked about was what I needed from him lately – for him to retire, to be at home with the kids, to get rid of Violet’s things, to help Daddy more at the orchard, to affirm me, to answer his phone – and I’d given very little thought at all to what Keith might need, or even that he had needs. He was so strong, such a man – such a cowboy – that I thought he was too tough to ever be vulnerable.
When his tears turned to choking sobs as he fought to regain control, I fished around in the cab of the truck until I found a purple bandanna that I recognized as Peyton’s. I pressed it into his hands, and turned away while he dried his eyes, blew his nose, and cleaned himself up. I was glad for tinted windows and a large pickup cab. My poor husband. My poor kids.
No, Violet’s kids.
Chapter Thirteen
“Young early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
“What?”
“It’s why she’d fade away sometimes, forget to change Stephen’s diaper, forget where Peyton was. She went to a doctor for help when Stevie was still a baby, and was diagnosed when she was only thirty-four. She didn’t tell me any of this, just apparently started getting everything ready, and, less than a year later, she left us while she still could.”
“But she’s way too young.” I did the math and realized she’d have only been three years older than I was right now.
“It’s not common, maybe five percent of all Alzheimer’s cases, or something like that,” he said. “Apparently, it happens. The doctor told me about rare cases like hers, where the people were in their thirties. Hell, I looked it up on the internet and only managed to find two.” He looked at me, his eyes wet. “Two cases buried in a search list of tons of articles about older people. Maybe there were more, but—” He choked up.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered, dumbfounded.
So this was what Keith had been up to all this time. Not just ranch business. I wished I’d been there with him, although something told me he’d needed to do it himself.
“Can you believe, in one of the cases I found, a man was only twenty-nine?” He shook his head in disgust. “Violet won the damned Alzheimer’s lottery.”
I choked up, too. I tried to imagine what it would have been like for Violet, a young mom, to forget to feed her baby, pick up Peyton from school, and not know what was wrong.
“I should’ve known something was off,” he said.
“You couldn’t have.” I used a dry corner of the bandanna to clean up my own face. I knew I looked hideous with my makeup smeared, but it didn’t really matter at that moment.
“So, she planned everything?”
“She made a living will while she was still in her right mind. She set things up with that lawyer to divorce me without having to see me, to make it look like she was just leaving.”
“But why? She could’ve just told you, and then you could have taken care of things. You and the kids could have visited her…and…” I thought of the sad visits to my own mother, the pain in my daddy’s face every time he looked at her.
“I wish she would have done that,” he said.
Maybe, I thought, he wouldn’t if he had seen what my dad had gone through. Violet had known what was coming. She wanted to save him, and their children, from seeing it happen. For a moment, I was struck by the deep love she must have had for him. My heart fluttered.
I didn’t let that little twinge of jealousy even make its way into the open. I didn’t know if Keith had thought of it, but we probably would never have married if Violet hadn’t done what she had. The impact of her decision on all of us was too difficult to fathom. Had Violet done the right thing? She must have seen it as an impossible situation. No answer was right. And it was too late to go back anyway. There was no solution at all. None. I didn’t even need Daddy to remind me that this moment called only for compassion, even if it was hard to understand. And so unfair.
I thought of Peyton, who must have been right about her mom the whole time. Even though she was young when Violet left, she remembered, and she knew in her heart that her mom would have never left her and begged her dad not to get her a new phone number or phone. And she must not have been lying when she said Violet had called her, although I wasn’t sure yet how Violet had managed it in her condition; a good day maybe. A flash of memory.
Why does God let stuff like this happen to the people I care about? I thought of the snapping plate, with the purple ring, of Peyton’s crumpling face as it broke in two.
“She didn’t want you and the kids to see her waste away,” I said.
My own mom had tried to stop us from the pain of seeing her like that, however misguided her actions. She couldn’t have arranged to disappear, the way that Violet had. By the time they knew what was wrong with her, it was too far in. Taking her life was all she knew to do. It was the only thing she could control.
Maybe Violet was smart to have taken action while she still had her mind. It was still terrible, but I got it. At least she hadn’t done what my momma did.
“How did she hide it?” I asked.
He leaned back in his seat, his shirt damp at the collar. His tanned face, always so boyishly cute, was filled with lines and edges under his three day shadow. I reached out, attempting to smooth his mop of hair that stood out at all ends. He nudged my hand away.
“I’m fine,” he said but he didn’t look it. “I should’ve known,” he said. “She was seeing some kind of specialist in Nashville, but I didn’t know the real reason. She’d just had Stephen, so it seemed normal that she might be getting some lady stuff done. She didn’t act worried about it, so I didn’t worry either.”
Ah, the age old trick to keep men out of our business. I thought about the times I’d done the same thing myself, back when I was still trying to have children of my own, before the doctor told me I’d probably never be able to get pregnant again. One time, I didn’t even bother to tell my ex-husband that I was pregnant, and that later, I wasn’t.
“So, she set all this up? With the lawyer and everything?”
“She did it all before she could get worse. And this…” He gestured toward Cottonwood Manor. “She paid all of this in advance with her part of the money. I’m glad I gave her extra.”
“You did?”
He nodded, slumping a little deeper into the seat. “I arranged with the lawyer to let her have even more than her share, just to keep her away. I was so angry.”
“And it enabled her to be taken care of,” I said.
He turned toward me. “But don’t you see, honey. I signed those divorce papers, and it was for nothing. I was so angry. I couldn’t believe she was asking for money. I just gave her what she wanted and a hell of a lot more to get rid of her.”
I didn’t say anything. How can a current wife argue against her husband for divorcing his ex-wife? When he looked at me, I’d never seen eyes so filled with grief, even in my father, except in the mirror after I lost my baby girl.
“And you know what’s worse?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “That I didn’t even dig deeper.”
“But you didn’t know,” I said. And what if he had?
“I was hurt; I didn’t try hard enough to find out where she was. Mandy, don’t take this wrong, but…”
He placed a rounded fist over his mouth and then placed his hand on my knee, I guessed to reassure me about what he was about to say.
“I’m not that kind of man. I wouldn’t have divorced my wife if I’d known she was sick
.”
He’d said, my wife.
And he wouldn’t have married me. That was sobering, but it didn’t feel like a bomb, much to my surprise. In that moment, as my husband tried to swim to the top out of an incomprehensible situation, I decided to step out of the role of wife and mother, and into the role of his best friend. Being a wife was too hard right then, but let’s face it, if we weren’t best friends, then what kind of marriage did we have?
“I know you would’ve done the noble thing,” I said. “And she knew it, too. Maybe that’s why she did this. To set you free.”
And then he struggled with tears, not letting himself cry, but the effect was worse than if he had just wept. I didn’t really know what to do, except be there for him, not have anything to compare this to. The only thing I could equate it to was death. Death and loss were always a shock, and accepting it took a long time. This would take a long time.
And why Violet and Keith, Lord? It wasn’t fair.
He banged the steering wheel then.
“I didn’t want to be free. The kids needed her.” He looked at me, apologetically, and I loved him for that small reassurance. “I would’ve taken care of her. I…would’ve wanted to say goodbye.”
The urge to swing open the truck door and run away surfaced again. In order to keep from grasping the door handle, I turned and grasped Keith’s hands. He was going through something that nobody could understand. Surely nobody I knew had ever faced such an impossible, unfair, and devastating situation. Keith let go and cupped my face in his, kissed me, hugged me, and kissed me again.
“I am so sorry,” he said. “Everything I’m saying must hurt your feelings, cowgirl.”
I shrugged, refusing to let this become about me, for once, I had to admit. My former selfishness was emblazoned across a big banner in my mind. I wanted to rip it down.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Cowgirls don’t cry, Keith. You should know that.” He was the one who always said it.
The Real Thing Page 12
