by Natalie Grey
He winked at the young man staring up at him and the girl who had peeked around the corner. John held the knife out. “Todd, isn’t it?” The young boy nodded. “Would you take this back to the kitchen?” The young boy took a few steps and reached out to grab the knife. John cautioned, “See how I’m holding this blade, with the cutting edge away from me and the handle to you?” Todd nodded. “You say thank you when you have it in your control. That’s when I release it to you.”
“Thank you?” His voice was part-curious, part-scared. His mom was still crying into the big guy’s chest.
“That’s right. Now take it to the kitchen.” Todd turned and walked in that direction.
Bethany Anne came up. “C’mon, John, let’s get this out of the public view, so we don’t become this evening’s entertainment.”
She was right; no reason to create new stories for people to talk about.
John spoke to the top of the head on his chest. “Cheryl Lynn? We need to go inside.”
His cousin nodded and wiped her tears with her hand, then grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into the house. Bethany Anne walked behind him and closed the door, holding the pizza box in the other hand. She said softly, “I got this.”
John nodded, “My boss will get the kids fed. Why don’t we go talk about this in the bedroom?”
He was able to get Cheryl Lynn to start down the short hallway. He followed his cousin and started to close the bedroom door.
He heard Bethany Anne speaking from the dining room before the door shut. “My name is Bethany Anne. What’s yours?”
Chapter 3
Cheryl Lynn grabbed the tissues, a little travel package she had been hoarding for the worst cases of sneezing she experienced. Dallas was horrible for her allergies.
John’s huge hand held out a handkerchief. She took it and nodded her thanks.
“How did you know?” she asked, trying to dry the tears from her face.
“The group I work with apparently keep tabs on family members. I was told early this morning that things were bad with you and Mark, so I got here as fast as I could.”
She nodded, her shoulders slumped. “You always told me he wasn’t a good guy.”
“No ‘I told you so’s’ from me. We live with our decisions, and you’ve already paid that price.”
A small laugh escaped her lips. “I’m still paying that price.” She looked up at him. “Did you know that he cheated on me?”
John shook his head.
She looked back down. “He did. Not just once, but a lot. I found out about at least four times. He claimed he needed to feel like a man. That the women were nothing but conquests. He didn’t love them.” She sniffed. “At least, that was what he said.”
John let her get it off her chest. He had tried to get Cheryl Lynn to see the true Mark back in college. Mark had been into himself then, and he was still into himself. Cheryl Lynn had rebuffed his efforts at first, and that had made him want her all the more.
She told the story again: how they dated off and on through college and she had never given in. She had made him “put a ring on it” before she would go to bed with him. While her personal beliefs had had something to do with her decision, in the beginning, she had been too shy. A late bloomer, she hadn’t felt she was attractive, despite Mark’s advances and other guys asking her out.
Mark had been the most aggressive guy, and she finally realized he must be telling the truth since he was still going out with her after two and a half years.
Now she realized it had all been about the conquest with Mark. With the ring and the bedroom, she had just been one final notch.
They’d had Todd quickly and Tina soon after. Cheryl Lynn had focused on the kids, and Mark’s occasional forays into the bedroom suited her just fine. She hadn’t spent much time or effort trying to figure out why Mark was so easy-going with her lack of interest. It had only been in the last couple of years when she wanted adult companionship again as the kids started becoming independent that she had realized she and Mark didn’t have a close relationship.
She wasn’t stupid. Momma had always said to find out your problems and face them head-on. She tried to be the sexy little vixen she knew Mark liked, but after the first two or three times, he got tired, and it was back to square one.
She had hired the investigator to just cover her bases. She hadn’t expected him to come up with so much evidence. The first time she was told about another woman, she had held out hope that it had been a one-time fling.
When she got a call for the fourth time, she realized she wasn’t facing her problem head-on. She had been hiding from it and from her disgrace, and from her feeling that she didn’t know what to do.
When she was done yelling at Mark, expecting some sort of argument, he merely told her that since the house was in his name, she was welcome to leave that night. The kids could choose who they would stay with.
Mark had expected them to stay with him in the house with their toys and games.
He had finally gotten angry when all three had packed their bags and gone into the garage. He started ranting and yelling about how rejecting their dad wasn’t going to help them in life. That leaving him was tantamount to saying they didn’t love him.
Both kids had kept their comments to themselves and gotten into Momma’s Honda Accord. It had been paid off two years back.
The only thing it shared with her husband’s car was the silver color.
The first place she found to stay had been a nice motel. It hadn’t taken Mark forty-eight hours to cancel all of her credit cards and move the money from shared accounts into others she had no access to.
Then she had to find a place that would accept cash and ask few questions. She had connections with a local church where she had donated money and items. She had never thought she would be the one who needed the help.
She asked, “How did you find me?”
John smiled. “The church.”
Her brow furrowed. “They promised they wouldn’t tell anyone.” She didn’t like the fact that they were passing on information.
“My boss can be persuasive,” was all he told her.
“Your boss?” John pointed his thumb in the direction of her kitchen and dining room. “That lady is your boss?”
He nodded. “Yes, she is. You saw her? I didn’t think you were tracking too well.”
“I’m not, but I notice everyone who’s around my kids.”
He asked, “Are the kids skipping school?”
She shook her head. “Spring break. I have to deal with school on Monday.”
John heard a knock on the front door and cocked an ear. Cheryl Lynn asked, “What is it?”
He put up a “wait one” finger as heard Bethany Anne answer it and ask what the total was. “My boss ordered more food and is taking care of the delivery driver.”
“Oh!” Cheryl Lynn started reaching for her pocketbook.
“Don’t. It’s already paid for, and she wouldn’t accept your money anyway.” John knew how all of his family had been brought up. It was a testament to how upset Cheryl Lynn was that she wasn’t out front; normally she would be making them tea or coffee in the kitchen right then.
He looked at her eye. “How did you get the shiner?”
She reached up to her eye. “I was roughed up this evening by some guys Mark sent after me. I think they were supposed to hurt me more, but I was able to get in a few licks and run.”
“How do you know Mark was behind this?”
She glared up at him. “Because the prick I kicked in his manhood told me at the very end that “Mark sends his regards.’ I ran away before confirming the last name.” She practically dared John to criticize her efforts.
“Is that why you came to the door with a knife?”
She nodded.
There was a knock on the bedroom door, and John opened it. A medium pizza box was thrust through. “Eat up; there’s more.” John grabbed the box, and Bethany Anne closed the door on him.
He turned to the bed and opened the box. She had placed two plates and napkins inside, with a third plate keeping them from getting greasy. He pulled out a pepperoni slice, put it on the plate with a napkin, and handed it to Cheryl Lynn. “Eat this. You need your energy.” There was another knock on the door.
He turned back to the door after Cheryl Lynn took the plate and pulled it open. Bethany Anne had two sixteen-ounce Cokes and a small medicine cup. In it, there was red medicine that smelled like cough syrup to John. He took the bottles in his left hand and the medicine in his right. “It will help with the eye,” she told him. John nodded, and Bethany Anne closed the door again. He kept his back to his cousin and brought the medicine close enough to sniff it.
There was a hint of copper in the medicine. Blood.
John smiled wistfully. God, he loved his boss.
He turned to his cousin. “Grab a Coke and open it. I want you to down all of the medicine and wait until you can’t stand the aftertaste, then drink some Coke. Got it?”
“I have kids, you know. It isn’t like I don’t have medicine-taking skills. Besides, I don’t have any medicine in the house that will help me right now.” She took the small cup. “This smells like cough syrup. That isn’t going to help.”
“Trust me. By the morning your eye will be fine,” John said. She raised a dubious eyebrow at him. He shrugged and added, “I’ll bet you a ‘truth’ if I’m wrong.”
“Any truth?” She and John had played Truth or Dare all the time as kids. John had fallen out of a tree when he was five because she had dared him to climb it. Thankfully, it had only knocked the wind out of him, and he had never told his parents anything other than that he had fallen trying to climb.
When John confirmed with a nod, she downed the medicine with a smile. “I’ve always wanted to know if Angie Garcia’s story about the two of you in the back of the movies was true.” She made a face. “Gahh! That shit is awful. I hope she didn’t poison me with something out of date. I didn’t pay attention to the expiration when I bought that stuff at the dollar store.” She lasted twenty seconds before taking a large gulp of the Coke.
“You’re going to have to wait for a while to get the Angie Garcia truth since I’m sure that is going to work just fine.”
“Says you!”
John grinned. “Yup, says me. Now, what do you want to do about Mark?”
She frowned. “Why, are you going to go beat him up? This isn’t high school, you know.”
John replied, “Oh, he will pay for what he has done. I told him before he married you not to hurt you and a promise is a promise. But, if you’re asking if I’m going to go beat him up in front of the teachers and everything, then no.”
She sighed. “Well, a girl can hope.” She smiled when John grinned at her response.
“Trust me, he will wish he had treated you with loving hands. But enough about that dick. How about we find out what you want to do with your life and with the kids? If you could do anything, what would it be?”
“Why, do you know a Prince Charming who is unmarried and wants a woman with children who can make a mean lasagna from scratch?”
John scratched his chin. “Well, they aren’t princes, but you will have their interest when you admit you can cook a mean lasagna.”
She stood up and reached around her cousin’s huge chest. John put his arms around her, and the net of safety she had been sensing finally reached the dark recesses of her brain. There was nothing, she was sure, that Mark could do to her now that little John was here.
“I don’t need or want a man right now, but someplace that Tina and Todd can be safe going to school would be wonderful. You know Mark is going to fight, right?”
John’s chest rumbled as he laughed, “Trust me when I say my boss has dealt with bigger and meaner pricks than Mark. Just believe me about the size of the troublemaker. You can see she’s still good.”
“Is that because she has you protecting her all the time?” Her voice muffled. John’s suit coat was getting extremely soggy.
“Maybe, but maybe not.” John rubbed Cheryl Lynn’s back, trying to give what comfort he could. John grunted as he thought back through all of the times he and Bethany Anne had done operations together.
“Truthfully, usually it’s not.”
Chapter 4
Mark answered the Trac phone. He wouldn’t do anything stupid like take calls on his personal phone. “Hello?”
“It’s done, but she was a feisty little bitch.”
“Hey! Watch how you’re talking about my wife. I’m the only one who can talk about the cunt like that.”
“Whatever,” came the reply over the phone.
“Was she walking when you finished?” Mark asked.
“If by walking you mean running as fast as she could, scared to death with an ugly-ass black eye, then yes.”
Mark held in his frustration. “Look, I was explicit that I wanted her to crawl out of a ditch, not run away from three grown men. What, you couldn’t hurt one little woman?”
“Which part of ‘she put up a fight and caught us by surprise’ didn’t you understand?” was the gruff reply Mark received.
“The part where I thought you had a clue. When you split only half the money I promised—which I’ve already paid you—my response might make better sense.”
“Don’t be a prick, Mark. We are just waiting until after midnight, then we will go back and do a B and E. Eric followed her far enough to see where she went. We’ve got where she lives.”
“Good! Good.”
“What do you want done with the kids?”
Mark considered his response and answered, “Frankly, I don’t give a damn.
“Why is your hair so black?” Tina asked Bethany Anne while stuffing another slice of cheese pizza into her mouth. Her mom and brother preferred pepperoni, so they always ordered pepperoni and made her take off the meat. Tina thought the grease left too much taste behind and messed up a truly beautiful experience. Cheese pizza done right was an exquisite experience. It was, she considered, the purest form of pizza, and should be held in high esteem.
Bethany Anne cocked an eyebrow at the young girl who had peppered her with questions all through dinner. Bethany Anne had watched the two children eat significantly more than what Bethany Anne thought they normally would.
If they had been fed regularly.
Bethany Anne kept a conversation going with the two kids. Well, Tina mostly. Todd had asked a couple of questions and then timidly asked Bethany Anne if he could play games on her phone. When she agreed, he scarfed down six slices and a third of the chocolate chip cookie dessert she had purchased, then took her phone and went to go play a pigs in space game.
She kept her other ear open to listen to John and Cheryl Lynn. This husband or ex-husband, she wasn’t sure if they had been officially divorced yet, was a world-class goat-fucking douchebag. On the trip to Dallas, John had given her the background between him and Cheryl Lynn, which had made Bethany Anne happy she had come along. It allowed her to get a peek into John’s early days when his life was climbing trees and skinning his knees and spending long afternoons talking to his friends and family while listening to the cicadas and drinking Kool-Aid or the cheaper Flavor-Aid.
Good times.
Times when he was that guy in high school you didn’t mess with, teenage hormones maybe making him a bit quicker to punch someone than he should be. The time before he went into the military that took him down the road that ended in an operation out in the Florida Everglades.
When destiny had sunk a knife deep in his chest.
She came back around to think about Tina’s question. “You know, I’m told my mother had the darkest hair; so dark you would think it had blue highlights.”
“Really? I don’t know the genetics behind that. I wonder if it is a recessive trait since you don’t see it too often.”
This time it was Bethany Anne who forgot to close her mouth.
“Flies are g
oing to land in there if you don’t shut it.” Tina smiled and took another bite of her pizza.
Bethany Anne closed her mouth. “What do you know about genetics?” Bethany Anne figured that it was probably safe to eat the three remaining pepperoni slices now, so she grabbed one and reached for the parmesan cheese. Before she had been turned, she would have dropped half a bottle of red pepper flakes on her pizza, and was her happiest when it made her sweat. Now she was very careful. With her modified taste buds, a hot pepper could damn near make her cry.
She wouldn’t admit it to anyone, but she had asked TOM to shut down the pain receptors in her mouth the first time she had sprinkled red pepper flakes too heavily on her pizza.
Lesson learned.
Tina swallowed. “I know a little. I liked the class when we talked about it, which was right before spring break. I had started to look for websites to learn more before Daddy got so mad and turned off our web access and phones. Now I’m hoping Momma will let us go to the library so I can look it up.”
“You want to go to a library?” Bethany Anne was pretty sure she hadn’t wanted to see the inside of a library at her age. At that age, she was still tagging along with her dad to the base and running through all the courses and training classes she could. Sometimes she got on a physical course that was a little too much; she had been lucky to not get hurt.
She had, however, fallen off a log you were supposed to cross that had a four-foot-deep water hole underneath. She had been showing off and slipped, flipped, and landed in the water on her stomach. The pain of the breath getting knocked out, and feeling like she couldn’t breathe had brought back the respect she should have had for the course.
Tina answered, “It’s the only way I’m going to learn more about genetics.”
Not if John and I have anything to say about it, Bethany Anne thought.
