Faithful Unto Death

by Stephanie Jaye Evans

  “She wouldn’t suffer financially. Are you kidding? Even if I gave her nothing—which I won’t—HD made damn certain Honey never had to rely on me for a penny. She’s got a trust fund of old Houston money. She’s got more money than me, and she always will. We could be living the high life off Honey’s money alone.”

  I thought they kind of already did live the high life.

  “She owns the house. It’s in her name. Plus, Honey will get half our savings and that’s a significant amount. At least I think it is, though HD probably wouldn’t. I’ve set money away for all the college expenses. Again, not needed since HD set up trust funds for the kids, too. But that’s my job and I’ve done it. And she’ll get twenty percent of my income for the rest of my working career.” He gave a bark of a laugh. “However much that might be, for however long it might last. These are uncertain times, you know.”

  What “uncertain times” might mean, I didn’t know. A partner in a major firm in Houston had about as secure an income as a person could hope for. Twenty percent of what Graham Garcia made would be more than my salary and then some. And I’m making house payments, car payments, putting one daughter through college, and getting ready to put another one through, if I can get Jo to focus more on her academics and less on her arabesque. If Graham followed through on those terms, that would be, by Texas standards, an extraordinarily generous settlement.

  Still, Graham could easily afford to walk away from everything, not even taking into account the money Honey had on her own, and the money that money had made over the years. Because half of that would be Graham’s. The butter is spread on both sides of the bread.

  I said, “Sooooo …” Drawing it out, so he’d understand I was asking why he didn’t go ahead and get it over with. My grandmother used to say, “If you’re going to cut the puppy dog’s tail off, don’t do it an inch at a time.” There wasn’t any point in putting Honey through more hope and despair if she didn’t really have a chance.

  Graham sat down in the chair again and made a tent with his fingers. I could imagine him making that gesture at the negotiation table.

  He said, “Could you get her to divorce me?”

  I looked at him. Kind of a Cruz look.

  “Okay, wait. You don’t want to divorce Honey, but you want Honey to divorce you?”

  He nodded.

  “And you want me to talk her into this?”

  Another nod.

  “You mean, without telling Honey about the someone else you’d rather not talk about?”

  He nodded again, dead serious. He leaned forward.

  I shut him down fast. “No, Graham, I’m not going to do that. I couldn’t. First of all, Honey would never believe it coming from me. She’d look at me like I’d lost my mind, ask me had I lost my conviction in the power of prayer—which I haven’t, though I don’t think God always answers the way we’re expecting. So if Honey is praying that God will heal the two of you, He may be doing just that; He may heal you apart from each other. But there’s no way I’m going to be able to convince Honey that the best thing she can do for you is to divorce you.

  “She’s going to be reading First Corinthians thirteen over and over again. ‘Love always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.’ What she’s going to be believing, coming from where I know Honey comes from, is that if she’s faithful and keeps on loving you, if she prays, if she trusts and hopes and endures, you’ll turn your heart back to her and love her again.”

  Graham sat straight in the chair, his shoulders back, his head bowed so low his chin was touching his chest. His hands were now gripping the arms of the chair and the tips of his fingers were white.

  I leaned forward on my elbows, looking at him hard, trying to get him to look at me. He wouldn’t do it.

  “But you’re not going to, are you?” I said. “Love her again, I mean.”

  Chin still down, he shook his head. No. Then he looked up at me, looked me full in the eyes, no flinching. I saw dark pain in those eyes.

  “What she wants from me, what she needs from me … I think it’s a genuine need, I’ll give her that … I don’t have it to give her. Do you understand? It’s not my fault.”

  Graham pushed himself up from the chair and, as he spoke, walked back and forth across my office, his steps measured and unhurried.

  “It is not within me. And I can’t manufacture the pretense anymore. But there she is, following me, dogging my heels, trying to make things right, trying to find the magic button. And there is no magic button.

  “This is what it’s like, living in that house with her. It’s like living with a starving child. You don’t have any food to give the child, but the child doesn’t know that, can’t understand, and their eyes follow you all the time, hoping, begging, pleading. Starving. The child is always either losing it completely, and screaming like a mad thing, or doing things, trying to please you, as though if only they’re good enough, you’ll give them some food.

  “But you don’t have any goddamn food.”

  He stopped in front of me and leaned over. His blue eyes were unblinking. I pushed my chair back.

  “If I stay with her, it’s going to kill me, Bear.”

  “Have you prayed about this, Graham?” I was shaken by how strong he was coming on.

  He made a sharp chopping movement with his hand, dismissing my suggestion. The look he gave me was of cynical complicity.

  “I don’t talk that talk, Bear.” He flung himself back into the chair.

  Evidently he didn’t think I walked that talk, either. That shook me, too. I went back to my previous question.

  “So why don’t you just divorce her? I don’t understand.”

  It obviously wasn’t the money. If Graham had been old-time Church of Christ, I might have understood. There was a time in the Church when the only permissible reason to leave a spouse was for “the sin of infidelity.” In my parents’ day, there were couples who lived together separately, furiously feuding and secretly praying that the other would slip into an affair, leaving the “righteous” partner free. I knew of wives who had stayed in physically abusive marriages rather than challenge that injunction. God preserve us from that kind of sick thinking.

  He shut his eyes tight, his mouth thin and bitter. He stood up. Touched the knot in his tie. Reached into his pants pocket and pulled out an iPhone and turned it on. He started walking, stopped, and faced me again.

  “I know you don’t understand. But I need you to get her to divorce me, Bear. Talk to her, not to me. And you get her to do it soon. That’s something you better understand. Time is of the essence. Something bad is coming. It’s not my fault. It’s on you now.”

  “Your saying so doesn’t make it so, Graham.”

  He reached the door and looked at me, his hand on the doorknob.

  “It’s on you.” And he left.

  I looked around me at the Bridgewater golf course. Everything green and clean. Everything so ordered and affluent. But Graham Garcia had died out there just hours ago, when the moon was pouring its milky light down. And it was on me now.

  Seven

  My cell phone rang as I headed for my car—the first four notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Merrie made that custom ringtone for me. She’d gotten hold of my phone when I left it at home one day and downloaded Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus,” the whole thing. It was embarrassing. I asked her to instead change it to play the first four notes of “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” because it had special meaning for me (those four notes coinciding with the words “Onward, Christian,” a good message any time of any day). Also, those four notes are the same note, G, so when my phone rings, it just beeps. And that suits me.

  It was Wanderley.

  “Mr. Wells!”

  “Who is this, please?”

  “You don’t recognize my voice?”

  I was pretty sure I did. “Detective Wanderley?”

  “Yep. What can you tell me about Mr. HD Parker?”

  “Besides his
being Honey’s father?”

  “I’m all clear on the family relationship.”

  “Did you try Googling him?”

  There was a prolonged pause meant to convey Wanderley’s extraordinary patience with a dense and uncooperative man.

  “I did my research on the Web, Mr. Wells. I was hoping you could fill me in on the intangibles.”

  There wasn’t all that much I knew, but I shared what I had. I couldn’t see that it would be any help. When I’d finished, there was another pause, this one communicating that I hadn’t given Wanderley all the information he was looking for.

  “Was there something else?” I asked and leaned my butt against the car.

  “Yes.”

  I waited.

  “You raised those girls out here in the ’burbs? Did they go to preschool?”

  I said they had.

  “Can you tell me where you sent them?”

  Now I paused.

  “Detective Wanderley, are you looking for a preschool for your daughter?”

  It came in a rush.

  “Clotilde wants to put Molly in preschool starting in the fall.”

  “Clotilde?”

  “Molly’s mom. She goes by Chloe.”

  “I don’t blame her. Will Molly be three by September?”

  “Three in October.”

  I thought back. “It’s going to be a Mother’s Day Out program then. I think. Chloe and Molly live in Sugar Land?”

  “In the Heights. But I told Chloe I’d pick Molly up and take her every day if she would let me pick the school.”

  This was a completely impractical idea. Wanderley would be traveling with traffic to pick up his toddler daughter, and even in the best scenario, the child would be spending an hour and a half in the car each day. Add in a detective’s irregular hours—my phone beeped to let me know I had another call. I ignored it.

  “Chloe can’t find a program she likes in the Heights?”

  “She’s found one. It’s some hippy Greenpeace-type thing. There’s no math, no alphabet, all they do is garden and sing songs and play with a baby pet pig.”

  I snorted.

  “What?”

  “Wanderley.”

  “Detective.”

  “Right. Listen, your daughter won’t be taking the SATs for another fourteen years. Maybe it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if your baby had a few years digging in the dirt and playing with a baby pig.”

  A long, thoughtful pause.

  “You don’t think she’ll get behind?”

  “I don’t, no. I think it’s important to let a baby be a baby.”

  “You didn’t push your girls?”

  “Not when they were two. And I’ll tell you, I don’t think the pushing made any difference when I started it.”

  “I don’t want to make a mistake.”

  This time I laughed out loud. “Good luck on that one, son. You’re going to make mistakes. Love her and don’t drop her on her head. Everything else, I don’t know. Maybe it’s luck and genes.” My phone beeped again. “Sorry, Detective, I’ve got to go now; someone’s trying to get through.”

  It was Rebecca. I could hear her pugs yapping their fool heads off in the background as I got in my car. Which meant that Rebecca had swung by her house and picked up her dogs before going to get Jo. Jo would come home covered in pug hair and our dog would go into olfactory overdrive. Rebecca is still miffed that I won’t let her bring the pugs up to the office. The pugs don’t drool, yeah, but they shed like an old rabbit coat.

  “All right, Bear, Jo is at ballet class now and she’ll need to be picked up at seven thirty,” Rebecca informed me.

  “That’s a little late, isn’t it? We usually pick her up around five thirty or six.” I strapped myself in my seat and made a U-turn back toward the church.

  “She says she’s working on a new routine and she needs the practice. And you tell Annie Laurie to put a spoonful of butter on Jo’s tofu and sprouts, or whatever veggie glop that girl is having for dinner. Your girl is getting too skinny.”

  “She’s not anorexic, Rebecca, she’s a vegetarian. Can you get those dogs to stop? It’s hard to hear you.”

  I heard paper rustling and there was a snuffling frenzy. Which meant that after Rebecca had dropped Jo off, she had gone through the McDonald’s drive-thru across the street and gotten those overfed little pests cheeseburgers, plain and dry.

  Rebecca said, “I’m not saying she’s anorexic, I’m saying if your shoulder blades stick out farther than your boobs do, you need more padding. Anyway, to my way of thinking.”

  “Well, thanks for picking her up from school; it was a help.”

  There was a small silence. “I picked her up at school.”

  Silence on my part now, while I tried to decipher her pause and the change in prepositions. I couldn’t.

  “Could you please tell me what you’re trying to tell me, Rebecca?”

  Another pause. That woman’s mind is as complex as a Pharisee’s. More benign, mind you.

  “She wasn’t coming from school,” Rebecca said, “not when I picked her up. Some boy pulled up in front and let her out. I was interested in the kids pouring out of the school and I was watching, or I never would have noticed how she joined right in the flow and made her way over to where I was waiting.”

  I was so stunned I ran a stop sign. Bad idea in Sugar Land. A kid in my church got arrested for playing his car stereo too loud. Well, that, and for mouthing off when he got pulled over.

  “Did you ask her what she thought she was doing?”

  “No, I did not. I’m not her momma and it’s not any of my business and I’m not even certain I’ve done right in telling you about it. I know I’m supposed to do unto others as I’d have them do to me, but when He’s talking about the others, does He mean you and Annie Laurie? Or does He mean Jo? ’Cause if I were Jo, I wouldn’t want my dad’s secretary telling tales on me. But if I were you and Annie, I would want to know.”

  My anger rose like scalded milk in a saucepan. I was going to get the truth from that girl, fourteen years old and cutting school to be with a boy. Not like her grades were so stellar she could afford to miss classes. She had improved them lately, but not anywhere near enough to slack off school. Without much thinking about it, I turned my car around yet again and headed toward the storefront studio where Jo has been taking ballet like a religious acolyte for nearly ten years.

  “Doesn’t a parent’s need to know what’s going on with their kid trump the kid’s desire to keep secrets? In God’s eyes?” I said.

  “I’m not sure it does, not in my eyes, and it’s too scary to presume to see out of God’s eyes, don’t you think so, Bear?”

  “Who was the boy?”

  “I don’t know who he was, I know very few teenagers. If they don’t live on my street, or go to my church, I’m not likely to know them.” Despite working for me, Rebecca attends Williams Trace Baptist. “He was a nice-looking fellow.”

  “I don’t give a dang what he looks like.” I had a sudden unpleasant thought. “He wasn’t a lot older than Jo, was he? He wasn’t some predator …”

  “He looked like a high school kid; he couldn’t be all that much older than Jo, though he had to be some older, to be driving. Course, since he’s a teenage boy, I think you have to assume he is a predator, same as you were at that age.”

  I pulled off the road, into the parking lot for the Fort Bend Independent Schools Administration Annex. Kept my foot on the brake while I asked my next question.

  “What about drinking? She didn’t smell like she’d—”

  “Oh, for Heaven’s sake, Bear, you do borrow trouble. No, she didn’t smell like she’d been drinking. You’re not ever going to have to worry about Jo drinking, because booze has calories, and that girl isn’t going to put one unnecessary calorie in her system. Evidently ballet dancers survive off spring water and bean sprouts.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was trying to think.

  “Are y
ou there, Bear?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not going to go tearing over to that studio and yank Jo out of ballet, are you?”

  That was exactly what I was about to do.

  “That’s a stupid question for me to ask,” Rebecca said. “Wait a minute, Bear. Don’t eat the paper, Mr. Wiggles, give it here. Okay, I’m back with you. I know you wouldn’t do anything so foolish as to go publicly shaming a teenage girl in front of all her friends and ballet teachers. All something like that would do is make her furious and humiliated. She’d be so focused on the awful thing you’d done to her, you wouldn’t have a chance of getting her to see that her own deception was wrong and hurtful. I know you and Annie are too wise to fly off the handle and react in the moment. Ya’ll will probably sit down together and talk all this out before Jo gets home tonight, have a plan in hand ya’ll are both comfortable with.”

  You see what I mean about Rebecca having the mind of a Pharisee?

  “Bear?”

  “I heard you, Rebecca.” I revved the engine a couple of times to burn off some anger. It just burned gas. At $3.69 a gallon.

  “So, are you going back to the office?”

  “I believe I’ll go on home and have a talk with Annie.”

  Eight

  From: Walker Wells

  To: Merrie Wells

  Subject: touching base

  Hello, sweet Merrie,

  Did you get hold of Jenasy?

  How’s track? How’s volleyball? How’s Latin coming along? Zarzecki gave you a pretty good foundation; you’ll be able to talk to all the dead Romans you want to when you finally get to Venice. :).

  Mom and I enjoyed meeting Jackson over spring break. He seems real nice. I don’t know how practical it is for a young man to major in education as it would be impossible to support a family on a teacher’s salary, but naturally that’s his business since you aren’t serious about him. You aren’t, are you?

  Are you and Jo keeping in touch? Do you know who she’s seeing? Is there anything Mom and I should know about and if there is and you won’t tell me or Mom would you tell Aunt Stacy?