by Maggie Marr
His voice tentative as if the remark were a test balloon sent into a storm, Cade said, “Bobby’s not a bad guy.”
Tulsa planted her hands on her hips. Not a bad guy? She took one step forward and closed the distance between her and Cade. Even though she was angry and even though he had pissed her off, heat still crackled between them. A fire that she wanted to squelch but couldn’t contain. She turned that fire inside and she used it to propel her thoughts, her words, her energy in reply to Cade’s flawed belief that Bobby Hopkins was not a bad guy.
“He hasn’t seen his daughter in nearly fourteen years,” Tulsa hissed out in a voice just louder than a whisper. “He hasn’t sent a dime of child support.” Tulsa ticked off each wrong on her fingertips. “Hasn’t called, hasn’t even tried to be a part of Ash’s life, and you tell me he’s not a bad guy?”
“According to Bobby, those facts aren’t exactly true,” Cade offered.
Tulsa pulled her head back. She cocked her hip and tilted her head. “What do you mean, those facts aren’t exactly true?”
“I mean according to Bobby, he did call. He did go by when he was in Powder Springs and he did send checks—at least a few times—early on.”
“Right.” Tulsa squinted. “And you believe him?”
Cade shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I?”
“Right.” Tulsa rolled her eyes upward and gazed at the stars. “Why wouldn’t you?”
A pain pulled at her heart. Tulsa turned away from Cade and for a split second she closed her eyes. She bit into the side of her cheek. She couldn’t afford these feelings of loss and betrayal and even anger. They weren’t just about Ash and Bobby and Savannah. She was smart enough to know that her and Cade’s shared past caused a part of the tumult rolling through her body. She turned and stared blankly into the window of Curios & Cameos. The reflection of the street light flame flickered against the window glass and Tulsa’s eyes caught the shiny copper outline of an angel, her arms reached toward the sky.
Once again, Cade believed another person instead of a McGrath. She didn’t turn to Cade, but she caught her temper, her tone, and held it tight.
“How about because Savannah would never intentionally keep Ash from her father if he’d shown a bit of interest in raising her?”
Tulsa wanted him to believe her—to understand—to see the goodness in the McGraths, to see past Hudd, past Bobby, past all of it, and to be loyal to Tulsa and what she believed.
But they were talking about two different things. Cade about Bobby and Tulsa about her mother. While the logic in Tulsa’s brain screamed that she was being impossibly unfair, her heart expected Cade’s unconditional loyalty—even after all these years. She wanted—no needed—him to irrevocably and unequivocally believe in her and what she thought. It wasn’t rational and it wasn’t fair, but her thoughts were honest.
She’d never say these words to Cade. She’d never tell him all that rushed through her mind standing on a cold street between an angel and her lost love. Instead, she turned away from the angel that reached to the heavens, away from her truth, and locked eyes with Cade. “What could Savannah possibly gain?”
Cade stared into Tulsa’s eyes. “Maybe less than she had to lose.”
Chapter Thirteen
The next week was a flurry of Skype meetings, conference calls, and legal research. Tulsa spent the majority of the week in the Powder Springs Legal Library in the basement of the courthouse. The custody case was on hold until the settlement conference. While Grandma Margaret’s house was quiet during the day with Ash at school and Savannah out back in her workshop, Tulsa took comfort in the shelves of legal books. The muffled sounds of the law library, the scent of paper and glue—all of it calmed her, focused her. She could work for hours. Friday, when she finally packed up her laptop and drove to the house, her eyes were blurry from hours on the computer.
She opened the door to Grandma Margaret’s house, wanting a hot bath, a glass of wine, and the comfort of family. Instead, when she climbed the stairs to the second floor, she entered a mother-daughter war zone. Both Savannah and Ash wore the same expression: strong shoulders, foreheads creased, lips puckered with their jaws jutted forward. Neither of them aware that they were mirror images of the other, plus or minus eighteen years. The red-and-blue hall runner worked as a no-man’s-land and divided angry adolescent from mother.
“It’s not fair!” Ash planted her fists on her hips. “I’m fourteen! Everyone goes to football games. Even you went to the PSHS football games—”
“That was different.” Savannah raised her hand in a dismissive wave that served only as a red flag to Ash, who was so determined to wrench away her independence.
“Different? How is it different?”
Tulsa remained still and hoped to avoid the crossfire. With Savannah retreating to her room it seemed that Tulsa might have escaped being caught in this argument until Ash turned to her. Her jaw hitched forward with attitude and her eyes pleaded with her aunt for help.
“Tell her what you told me.” Ash’s words shot out fast and her tone held a hint of desperation.
Tulsa’s fingertips tingled. A sense of self-preservation forced her silence. She took one step back. Savannah, now just inside her bedroom door, stopped with Ash’s words and turned to Tulsa. Her head tilted and her gaze pierced Tulsa like an arrow through the eye. The corner of Savannah’s mouth drew down into an unpleasant look. The lock of Savannah’s jaw combined with her exasperated breath emphasized her displeasure.
“What…” Savannah took one step toward Tulsa, her eyes in a threatening squint. “…did you tell her?”
“I’m not sure.” Tulsa bit her bottom lip and raised her eyebrow. “What exactly did I say?”
“You said that Grandma Margaret let you have more fun than should have been allowed, that she let you—”
“You told her that?” Savannah snipped off Ash’s words. Her angry gaze was now directed at Tulsa. “You think I should raise Ash the same way Grandma Margaret raised us?”
The back of Tulsa’s neck tingled. She couldn’t remember what she said and doubted any answer would please both Savannah and Ash. “Uh.” Tulsa looked from her sister to her niece, her head swiveling between the two. “I don’t remember—”
“So you agree with her then?” Crimson filled Ash’s cheeks and red patches dotted her neck. Her bottom lip trembled with betrayal.
“I didn’t say that either.”
“Then what do you think?” Savannah asked, her voice almost a dare.
Tulsa couldn’t win. No matter what words she spoke, the answer was beyond Tulsa. She remembered facing off with Grandma Margaret when she was a teenager, the need to be independent and with her friends so all-encompassing to her teenage self. But she wasn’t a mother. Ash seemed so young, so pure, so untouched by all that went wrong in life, and Tulsa understood Savannah’s desperate need to protect Ash. Indecision was not a territory Tulsa inhabited with ease. Indecision wasn’t a luxury Tulsa had in her career, and yet indecision strangled Tulsa’s words as she stood in the hall between Savannah and Ash.
Tulsa raised both her shoulders in an unfamiliar expression of uncertainty. “I don’t know?”
“Aaaaah!” Ash raised her hands toward the sky and spun on her heels. Savannah followed suit. Two doors slammed.
Tulsa stood alone in the hall. Well that hadn’t worked.
She counted to ten and let the sparks of fury dissolve. She guessed that by virtue of Savannah’s age, she’d cool down the fastest. A few moments later, Tulsa slowly opened her sister’s bedroom door.
Savannah sat in Grandma Margaret’s antique rocker with a needlepoint back and stared out the window.
“I didn’t know you kept that,” Tulsa said, referring to the antique that Savannah worked forward and back.
“It soothes me.” Savannah grasped the wooden arm rails. Her movement was hard and fast and the rocker squeaked in protest with each forward dip.
“Is it working yet?” Tulsa asked in a soft but plucky t
one. A risk, to try humor on an angry McGrath, but sometimes comedy worked.
“She’s only fourteen,” Savannah burst out, her voice sharp—her anger more directed at the facts than at Tulsa. “She started high school three weeks ago and now she wants to go to a football game? Alone?” Savannah’s lips turned down and a sad expression cut across her face.
“Alone? Or with friends?”
“Either way, she doesn’t want me around anymore,” Savannah said, her voice heavy.
Tulsa ran her fingertips over the wedding-circle quilt in rose and light blue on Savannah’s bed. Savannah hadn’t been much older than Ash when she first met Bobby Hopkins at a football game on a fall night not much different than this very one.
“She’s not you,” Tulsa said softly.
Savannah slowly raised her head and met Tulsa’s gaze. A lifetime of understanding flashed between the sisters. No father—a grandmother that loved them and raised them but vacillated wildly between an overbearing nature and a cold, unyielding one. A mother… a mother who was rarely around and when Connie was in Powder Springs, she spent most nights boozing.
“I know she’s not me.”
Tulsa followed Savannah’s gaze to a photo of a seven-year-old Ash with braids and a gap-toothed grin. Her face was filled with childhood excitement, her lips stained red by the cherry Popsicle in her hand.
“It feels like that picture was taken yesterday,” Savannah whispered; her voice contained both surprise and melancholy.
Time elapsed and with it Ash’s childhood. Tulsa had mental snapshots of her time with Savannah and Ash, but really if she counted the days in her head, it was a drop in the bucket that was Ash’s life.
“I’m sorry,” Tulsa whispered. She closed her eyes and dropped her head. A surrender to her own mistakes. “I… I should have been around more… I should have come back more.”
“You were busy.” Savannah settled her head against the back of the rocking chair.
“I shouldn’t ever be too busy for family.”
“You’re here now,” Savannah said.
After so many years away from Powder Springs, this house, this place, Tulsa understood the comfort that came when you were surrounded by a lifetime of things. Multiple lifetimes. This house, this room, contained remnants from the lives of generations of McGrath women. A picture of Connie with long black hair was on Savannah’s bedside table. Tulsa didn’t keep any pictures of their mother in her house.
“Do you ever think about her?” Tulsa whispered.
“Mom?”
Tulsa’s heart clutched and her chest tightened with that one word—Mom. Her breath shortened and she heard the rush of blood in her ears. Tulsa nodded. Mom. A word that contained so many meanings, none of which seemed to fit Connie.
“Sometimes,” Savannah said. She reached for the picture of Connie. Her eyes remained hard and flat, but the corners of her mouth ticked upward. “I can remember her laugh. How if she was really happy it sounded like a bell.”
Savannah held the picture of their mother out toward Tulsa. Tulsa’s fingertips brushed the cold copper frame when she took the picture from Savannah and a chill rushed up her spine. She studied Connie’s face.
“What do you remember?” Savannah asked.
What did Tulsa remember? She remembered the warmth of Connie’s fingertips on her hair. She remembered green eyes so intense—so wild—so focused on her. She remembered her insides filling with sunshine when Connie held her and Tulsa pressed her nose into her mother’s hair and smelled the lavender of Connie’s shampoo. She remembered wanting her mother home with her, curled up next to her, so badly that her insides ached as though she’d crack in two from the want.
“Do you ever wonder what really happened?” Tulsa asked.
Savannah sat silent in her chair. She no longer rocked. She didn’t smile—emotions tugged at different parts of Savannah’s face—so many that Tulsa couldn’t tell what her sister felt. Savannah sighed. The air rushed across her lips like a release of all her emotion.
“I used to,” Savannah said. “But now…” She turned her face toward the window and stared at the darkening sky. “It’s like I made this big box in my head and I put all the things that hurt inside the box. The questions about Mom, the questions about Bobby.” Savannah turned her gaze back to Tulsa. “I packed all that away and tried to focus on life and on Ash. I tried to put the wondering what happened away with all my other sadness.”
Tulsa nodded. She had the same mental box filled with her own pain. She avoided thinking about her questions surrounding her mother’s death, but they’d never been completely buried.
“I thought I put it away too,” Tulsa whispered. “But being here in Powder Springs, in the house, and seeing everyone… opens all of it back up for me.”
“Well, you left.” There wasn’t anger in Savannah’s voice. She stated a fact. “Since I lived here, I had to come to some sort of peace with Mom’s death or I’d lose my mind.”
“One of my partners at the firm,” Tulsa said slowly, her voice soft. “She thinks…” Tulsa stared at the picture of her mother and then looked up at Savannah. “She thinks Mom’s case was mishandled. She thinks that the case should be reopened.”
Savannah’s face flattened with the words. Her eyes went blank. She shook her head back and forth and then closed her eyes. Her bottom lip trembled and finally with a deep breath, she opened her eyes and looked at Tulsa.
“Why?” Her hands gripped tight the arms of the rocking chair, her fingertips turning white. She jerked her gaze away and searched into the night through the cold, hard window glass. Two sharp little breaths and Savannah turned her head back toward Tulsa. “What good would that do? What would it fix? Who would it help? Mom’s dead.”
Tulsa’s heart slammed back in her ribcage with the force of those words. Her throat thickened around the emotions she’d spent a lifetime choking down. Savannah’s questions mirrored her own—what justice would be served after all this time? And right now, while her sister and her niece struggled with Bobby reentering their lives, how could reopening her mother’s case do anything but create more chaos?
“You’re right,” Tulsa said and gently set the picture on the nightstand, but even with her words, a need to know thumped through her veins. A need that Tulsa feared would not be satisfied.
“So what about the game?” Tulsa asked, turning the conversation away from their mother and hoping the upset of her adolescent niece would be easier to solve than the confusion about her past.
Savannah tilted her head to the side. “She wants a boy to bring her home after the game. An older boy.”
“A boy?” Fear fluttered along her insides. “She didn’t mention a boy to me.”
“Welcome to the world of teenagers,” Savannah said. She rested her elbow on the rocker’s arm and placed her head on her hand.
“But I’m the cool aunt from LA. She tells me everything.”
“She told you everything. Now she’s fourteen. She tells her friends everything and we have to rifle through the scraps to figure out what’s going on in her life. Started last summer. Don’t be alarmed.”
“Who’s the boy?” Boys? And cars? Ash alone with a boy in a car? Suddenly Tulsa understood her sister’s panic.
“Dylan Conroy, good kid,” Savannah said. “If he didn’t want to date my daughter. He’s a junior. With a driver’s license. And a member of the football team. They went to grade school together, but he’s definitely not ten anymore.”
Tulsa again glanced at the picture of Ash. “And she’s definitely not seven.”
“Now you understand my concerns.”
Silence settled around them. Much like they couldn’t keep the past contained, they couldn’t keep the future from unfurling. Ash would grow up. She would date. She would leave. They couldn’t protect her from inevitable change. But they could watch and guide and hopefully, if they were really lucky, be there when sadness surrounded her.
“I’ll go,” Tulsa of
fered up.
“I think Dylan is a little young for you, and Ash might get jealous.”
“Funny.” Tulsa wiggled her eyebrows and a grin pulled on her face. “I’ll go to the game.” “Act as a spy. It won’t seem nearly as intrusive if I go instead of you.”
Savannah’s lips pulled up and her eyes came alive with this idea. “You know, that plan just might work.”
Chapter Fourteen
Friday night lights glowed from the Powder Springs High School Football Stadium. The stadium contained seats for nearly a thousand people. The announcers’ booth, painted fire-engine red in recognition of the home team, jutted up in the center of the home side. The air smelled of damp leaves. Snow wouldn’t fall on Powder Springs tonight, but soon.
“You haven’t been here in how long?” Ash asked as they handed the attendant their tickets and walked through the entrance gate and toward the field.
“Fifteen years,” Tulsa said. She carried a red-and-black plaid blanket she’d pilfered from the back of Savannah’s couch.
“Wow. I can’t imagine being able to say I did something fifteen years ago.” Ash looked at Tulsa. “You are so old.”
“Right,” Tulsa said. “Thanks.” Her loose smile acknowledged what at fourteen seemed ancient.
“Ash!”
“We’re over here!”
Closer to the football field, three girls stood and waved. Ash hesitated for a moment, torn between her past with her family and her future with her friends. She turned to Tulsa. “You’ll be okay?” Ash asked.
The concerned look on Ash’s face, as though she needed to take care of Tulsa, was sweet.
“I’ll be fine,” Tulsa said.
Ash leaned toward Tulsa. “Mom said I could ride home with Dylan,” Ash whispered.
“Really?” Tulsa feigned surprise and Ash looked like she might burst from excitement. “That should be fun. What’s his number?”
“Twenty-four.”
“I’ll watch for him.”
“I’ll see you at home,” Ash called. She walked toward the student section but paused and turned back toward Tulsa. Ash’s black curls, so similar to Tulsa’s and Savannah’s, blew in the evening breeze. A twinge yanked at Tulsa’s heart. Melancholy for the little girl that used to run toward her and grasp her hand.
