by Sally John
“Maiya!” She spoke away from the phone. “I can’t bring the phone to you. This is the only spot in the house. Here she comes.”
“I love you, Teal.”
“I love you, River.”
Maiya came on the line. “Hey, Riv!”
“Minnie McMouse! How’s it going?” Again he listened to the day’s events, laughing at his teenager’s rendition. She sounded happy, at ease.
“River, have you seen Jake?”
He frowned. “Honey—”
“I just need to know—”
“He’s fine.”
“What’s happening?”
Should he tell her what he had not told Teal? Wiser not to. “He’s fine.”
The truth was, Jake’s boss and River had both spoken on his behalf, both promising to spend time with him. The judge set bail and the boss paid it. Jake was back to work and doing well.
Despite what Jake had done to his family, River could separate himself and speak in court as a professional. The kid needed to pay the consequences of unlawfully entering the school, but for nearly two years he had toed the line well.
“Come on, Riv. At least tell me if you’ve seen him.”
“All I’m going to say is that it will be a long time before I trust him again.”
“Do you trust me again?”
He melted at the anxious note in her voice. “I think this time away will be good for you, to help you learn about the consequences of your choices. But yes, I trust you.” He chuckled. “Mainly because you’re my adorable daughter who has me wrapped around her little finger.”
She laughed loudly. “NW.”
NW. No way. “Yes, way!” He dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper, his cheat sheet for text shorthand. “Just, well, just . . .” He scanned the list. “Just G-O-I!” Get over it.
“W-E.” Whatever.
“My brain is cramping.”
“N-P.” No problem. “G-2-G anyway.”
“G-2 what?”
She giggled. “Got to go.”
“Right. I heard you’re having dinner with the grandparents.”
“Yes. Mom promised she would be civil.”
River clenched his jaw and a fist. Nine years ago poor Maiya had been traumatized by Owen’s ranting. It still bothered her. Teal’s history with the man was appalling.
Maiya said, “So no worries.” The little-girl voice carried a grown-up conviction.
He relaxed his muscles and eyed the texting paper. “Shoot. Are you sure? Because I really wanted to say H-O-T-Y-Z-I-G-T-B-A-B-R.”
“H-O-T—?” She burst into laughter. “Good one, Riv. L-Y-L!”
“Love you lots too.”
Still laughing, she cut the connection.
River’s smile faded. He felt like he had on the garage floor right after the quake, hopeless and helpless with only one thing to do.
Even if Teal held her tongue, they would want to follow the acronym: Hold on to your zingiezangers; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.
“God, take care of them.”
Chapter 26
CEDAR POINTE
Teal awoke with a start and sat straight up in the strange bed. Her heart pounded and thudded. Ice water coursed through her veins and perspiration soaked her neck.
What in the world was she doing in Cedar Pointe?
She listened for odd noises, straining to hear a dog bark or a car alarm pierce the quiet. She heard only the rustle of Maiya turning in her sleep in the next room. The faint glow of a streetlight seeped at the edges of the blinds.
Teal shivered and lay back down, pulling the covers to her chin. It had not been sounds or bright lights that had awakened her. No, it was something within herself, a turmoil of junk. Guilt, fear, regret, anger, questions, hatred, unforgiveness, spite.
Oh, the list was endless.
At home she had convinced herself long ago that she had moved on and held no grudges. The past was past.
But in Cedar Pointe she smelled the cedars, tasted the sweet blackberries that grew everywhere like weeds, saw the awesome sea stacks, and then she resented all over again the parents who had stolen the goodness of the place from her. She looked at the innocent, hurting faces of Lacey and Will and felt guilty for having a child of her own and good health. She stood near the place where her baby had been conceived in an act of vengeance and felt her face redden with a shame that no one else knew about.
“God, I dealt with this nine years ago,” Teal whispered aloud. “I was so happy. You were so real to me. I wanted everyone to know that You cared about me, that even a loser like me could make it. I came back to make peace.”
During that visit, she had gone from tongue-tied to belligerent in record time. All the good intentions to be gracious had disintegrated when face to face with her family.
She had tried to explain her forgiveness to Randi and Owen. “For what?” they had asked.
She had almost laughed. “For what? For starters, the physical abuse.”
“Physical abuse?” they had asked. “You were abused?”
Lacey had been stuck in the middle, as always. Although in private she had cried and hugged Teal, she still had to live in the same town with Owen and Randi. By not entering into the debate, she chose their side. Understandable. But Teal did not live with them. She washed her hands of the entire mess and went home with little Maiya to live happily ever after.
Until now.
Whatever had possessed her to head north?
Duh. The usual reason behind any rash decision she made: her emotions. In the wake of everything, they blinded her to any reasonable thought processes. Going on feelings alone, she decided to split ASAP.
And here she thought she had matured beyond such actions. Right.
She had been a mess, fueled by anger and anxiety, all the post-trauma stuff. Why hadn’t River put his foot down?
Teal twisted her lips into a wry smile. He had mentioned she might see a counselor. Why would he go beyond that? In their early days of dating, he had put his foot down once or twice. She stomped on it. She was not about to sign up for a relationship that meant he got the final say when it came to her personal choices.
They worked on the whole equal-but-different stuff and reached a basic conclusion. They agreed to freely disagree. If Teal did not notice a train coming at her, then River would pull her away from the track without hesitation. Over time she learned to respect and trust his voice.
Evidently a train was not barreling down the track in her direction.
Even if it did feel like it.
In her defense, she had been hit with emotional overload. The tipping point was Maiya’s behavior. Her daughter needed serious attention. Thanks to Lacey’s input, Cedar Pointe seemed an easy, immediate place to make that happen.
Perhaps Teal and Maiya might connect in a new way. A girl from LA should easily decide on her own that Camp Poppycock was at the ends of the earth. Voilà. New insight and appreciation would be born. She would vow to never again feel treated unfairly or lie to her parents.
Except that so far Maiya was having a blast. Aunt Lacey and Uncle Will loved her to pieces. Their coffee and gift shop was now Maiya’s own playground. She had her stepfather’s delight in nature and had already called him to insist that he visit because she heard there was an amazing river he had never seen and it was full of salmon.
Stepfather? Since when had Teal identified River by that term?
Since a few hours ago when Maiya asked a question and father entered the equation like never before.
Taking advantage of their atypical situation—the cozy cottage, going to bed at the same time, no cable television or Internet to distract—Teal had tucked Maiya into bed.
Maiya smiled and hugged her. “’Night.”
“’Night, honey.”
“Mom, can I ask you a question?”
In the dim light Teal looked at her little girl, a sure on the tip of her tongue, a no shouting in her head.
&nb
sp; They had spent the evening at Will and Lacey’s house. Randi and Owen’s last-minute cancellation had been rude and predictable but honestly made things more enjoyable.
The aunt and uncle from heaven owned a Wii. She beat Will at bowling. Lacey showed her old photos of herself and Teal when they were little. They pigged out on Will’s spaghetti and Lacey’s cream cheese brownies. Teal even allowed Maiya some Facebook time on their computer.
The whole time reeked of family in a good, wholesome way, but Teal feared it.
She had at last replied to Maiya. “Sure. Ask away.”
“Is he here? In Cedar Pointe?”
“No.”
No. Bio Dad was not there.
“It just feels like my father belongs here. . . .” Maiya’s voice had trailed off and she shrugged.
A shiver went through Teal now. How long could she go on pretending that the guy was nowhere near?
Teal sat at the kitchen table across from the clueless mother who had abandoned her just as surely as her biological father had, and she put on her game face. This visit was like questioning a deceitful husband in court. Teal needed to maintain a stony expression, let loose with a rueful smile occasionally. It would serve everyone better than if she flew off the handle.
Randi Pomeroy made small talk with her and Maiya. A hacking cough punctuated most sentences. She was fifty-eight and looked a decade older. Gray streaked her dark-brown hair, still thick and cut in an ancient Barbie-doll-style bubble. Scrawny with birdlike movements, she pulled a cigarette from a pack on the table and flipped open a lighter.
“Randi, do you mind?”
“Give it a rest, sweetcakes. It’s my day off.” She laughed, coughed, and lit up. “You don’t believe all that secondhand-smoke propaganda, do you? They’re just trying to take our rights away.”
Teal walked over to the sink and opened the window above it.
“Randi!” Owen’s voice reached them from the living room, above the drone of a televised baseball game. “Maybe the kid’s got asthma.”
“Cool your jets. They would have told us.”
Teal poured another glass of lemonade for Maiya and sat back down.
Randi squinted through a smoke cloud. “You don’t have asthma, do you, Maiya?”
“Nope.”
“’Cause if you did, we could move out to the porch.”
“I’m fine.”
“You like that lemon pie?”
Maiya nodded and forked her last bite. “It’s great.”
“It’s Lacey’s. She keeps us in sweets. Which is why your grandpa weighs three hundred pounds.”
Teal pressed the wince from between her brows. Grandpa.
“Two-thirty!” came the reply.
Randi smiled and shook her head. “He can’t take a joke.”
No kidding.
Teal thought the man might as well be in the same room for as often as he interrupted their conversation, but she was glad for small favors. The voice was less fearsome than the face that had not lost its menacing scowl.
When they arrived, he had greeted them from his recliner with little more than a grunt and told Randi to get him another beer. Always a large man, he had gained some weight, but he had also aged way beyond his sixty-five years. Browned and creased from a lifetime of fishing on the ocean, he was cue-ball bald.
Maiya said, “I love Aunt Lacey and Uncle Will’s shop.”
Randi snorted. “You call them aunt and uncle?”
“Yeah. Why wouldn’t I? They are my aunt and uncle.” Maiya did not miss a beat.
Bless her insolent attitude for once. This was her dig at the reference to grandpa.
Randi said, “Just curious since Lacey’s only half-related to you. You know, we all would’ve come down to visit you, but to tell you the truth, we never had that kind of money. Lacey and Will have been at that shop 24-7 for years, so they couldn’t get away. Owen’s out on that boat all the time. That’s the way life is here.”
“What do you do at the library?”
She tapped the cigarette against a small ashtray. “I’ve been librarian forever and a day. Well, not officially a librarian. Didn’t go to school and get the paper, but I do everything they do.”
Teal tuned out their conversation and wondered how long before the walls closed in on her. They were full of memories best forgotten.
She had grown up in the house, a modest two-bedroom ranch in an old neighborhood. It was in desperate need of updating, but the kitchen and living room had been painted in recent years. The off-white color made the house brighter than she remembered it.
“Oh, trust me,” Randi said. “Your mother was a hellion in her day.”
Teal opened her mouth to protest, but Maiya was already speaking.
“Did she ever get suspended from school?”
“No.”
“Well, I did, Gran.”
“No kidding? Guess the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree, eh? Teal, serves you right for all the problems you caused us.” Her chuckle gave way to a fit of coughing.
Maiya glanced at her watch. “Mom, Aunt Lacey said she’d teach me how to do the register so I can start working at the shop. We probably should get going.”
“Okay.” Wasn’t that scheduled for tomorrow? Teal saved her question for later and scraped her chair back from the table.
Randi protested politely and made vague plans for dinner and a library visit.
Without too much ado, Teal and Maiya headed out the side door, calling a quick good-bye to Owen and bypassing the living room where he sat.
Without a word, they clipped along the old stone walkway around to the front yard, through the overgrown grass, past alder and fir trees that kept the yard in continual gloom. At the street they got into the car and Teal drove away. She lowered the front windows and ruffled her hair. The stench of something other than smoke turned her stomach.
“Mom.”
Teal heard a note of panic in Maiya’s voice and glanced over. Her eyes were wide, gazing straight ahead. “What?”
“Is Owen my—my—?”
“Oh! Honey! No!” Teal quickly steered over to the curb and parked. She turned to Maiya and grabbed her hand. “No, no. Owen is not your biological father. He hit me, he ridiculed me, he whipped me with his belt. But he never hurt me that way. He never molested me.”
Maiya exhaled a shaky breath. “His earlobes.”
“Are attached.” Teal pulled her into a fierce hug. “You’re obsessing over earlobes, hon. Trust me, Bio Dad is not in Cedar Pointe.”
“Then where is he?”
Teal felt Maiya’s tears on her neck. “I don’t know.”
“Where is yours?”
“I’ve told you.”
Maiya straightened to look Teal in the eye. “You don’t know either, but don’t you want to know?”
“Never. He left me. That makes him meaner than Owen. I don’t care to learn the first thing about him. And you may not like this, hon, but I feel the same about yours. It’s just not worth the trauma to chase them down and confront them, only to have them say what they’ve been living all these years: ‘I don’t want to have anything to do with you.’”
“But maybe not.”
“Their track record says it all.”
Maiya wiped at her eyes. “It’s so not right.”
“It’s not.” Teal’s heart thudded in her ears. She was shading the truth by lumping the two men together. Her father left when she was three. Maiya’s father left the night he impregnated Teal.
She had never been able to bring herself to explain that, to say that out loud.
Maiya exhaled loudly. “Mom, do we have to go back there, to Randi and Owen’s? It was awful. It was like being in a dark cave.” She shook her head.
Teal stared at her. The sun had been shining through the kitchen window. She remembered seeing it glint off Maiya’s new bracelet.
The darkness Teal had always associated with Randi and Owen was not a figment of her imagination
.
She smoothed Maiya’s hair. “We won’t go back there, not ever again in this lifetime.”
Chapter 27
Lacey felt Will’s eyes on her and looked up from where she sat on a stool near the cash register by the front door. There he was, clear across the shop behind the other cash register at the coffee counter, grinning at her.
He winked.
She winked back and felt all tingly inside, awash in gratitude and delight. Teal and Maiya’s visit had cheered both of them, a sensation long missing from their lives.
“Aunt Lacey.” Maiya stood beside her, intensely studying the cash register. “Where’s the doohickey that scans the price? Like at the grocery store.”
“We don’t need one of those. Happy Grounds is a small business.”
“You mean you have to punch in numbers?”
“Yes.”
“Cool.”
Lacey laughed.
“I never got to do this at the ice cream shop. I only served food and sang.”
“You sang?”
“Most of the waitstaff did. You know, for birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes we’d do impromptu stuff.”
“Now that’s cool. Maybe we can start singing for the customers here. You and Uncle Will. He’s a good baritone.”
“How about Baker, the barista extraordinaire?”
They exchanged a smile.
Lacey said, “He doesn’t say much, but he’ll open up once he gets to know you.” She saw an elderly woman walking toward them, a gift book in her hand. “Ready to get to work?”
“No.” Maiya moved aside. “I’ll watch you for a while.”
“I think not. You’re like your mom. I bet you jump in with both feet like she does, no matter what.”
Maiya giggled. “Well, yeah, I guess I do.”
The woman reached the counter. “Lacey, who is this lovely young woman?”
Lacey made the introductions, confident that her regular customer would not mind waiting while she coached Maiya through the transaction. A few minutes later, Maiya walked her new friend to the door and hugged her good-bye.
The girl was a natural. How on earth had she gotten mixed up with a wild boy and suspended from school?
“Aunt Lacey, you have a weird look on your face. Did I do something wrong?”
