“Try this.” I slide it over his hair, shining with sweat.
He adjusts it and says, “Take a picture, Mom. I want to see!”
I snap the photo on my phone with him on the rock wall, slightly flushed, with his little paper hat making him look like an adorable newsie. I send it to Ethan and have this surge of feeling like I did the right thing.
I show Fitz the photo, and he grins even more. “I look cool,” he says. “Thank you, Mom!”
His joy is so intoxicating that I reflexively squeeze him and realize I haven’t seen his beaming smile much lately. I was working a lot. Coming home too late. Rushed on the weekends and leaving everything to Ethan.
“Glad you like it,” I say. “Grammie will have a better hat for you when we get there.”
He crosses his skinny arms. “I like this one.”
“Okay,” I say, feeling a quivering of pride. “Wear it as long as you want.”
Fitz begins to skip toward my parents’ house. “We’re almost there,” he yells. “Let’s go!”
Easy for him to say, since he’s not lugging a purse, backpack, and scooter. “Go on through the gate,” I say as we approach my childhood home, expecting to see my mom working in her beloved backyard.
I wish for the hundredth time that my parents had moved. I think about it every time I’m at their home. Why not a waterfront condo that wasn’t less than a mile from me, if I’m really dreaming big? Even the other side of town that’s not a block from the scene of the accident that ruined my childhood.
I used to bring it up more, especially before we bought our too-big house and too-big mortgage. I offered to help them move, but Mom trotted out the old argument that all her landscaping clients were nearby. She couldn’t leave the yard that had saved her sanity and was her best piece of advertising. “What would I do in a condo, Juliet?”
She meant, What would I do with your father? When she can’t pin him in his office with his bottle and cable news and retreat to her lawn until he’s good and passed out.
My mom is out back, and I can see her bright-magenta hat through the wide-plank fence. It’s just after 9:00 a.m., so she’s probably been there since sunup. After opening the gate, I steer Fitz around the hedges to where she’s digging.
“Hey, Mom,” I call as we approach.
“Is that my Fitzy boy?” She rises from her position behind the rosebushes. Her yard is nothing short of extraordinary, with a long perfect hedge and a mix of New England plants and flowers. “Did you bring his suit?”
Glancing toward the pool, I sigh at this fixture of my childhood and a very rare sight for backyards on the East Side of Providence. We built it the summer after the accident with Dad’s severance money. A way of luring the neighbors back to us. Not that it worked completely, but it had been a hot few summers, and a couple of friends started coming over. Dad managed enough families coming by to justify a few barbecues.
I think of the ten grand Elle offered me, and that sure as hell wouldn’t buy an in-ground pool. Seems Poe Foundation hush money hasn’t grown with inflation.
“He’s got his suit.” I glance at the rosebushes, lovingly tended around the oval-shaped pool. My earliest lesson from my mother in how appearances matter.
Mom neatly tucks her shears into her dirt-spattered apron. “I have a fun project for us today, Fitz.” She frowns as we stop in front of her. “What’s with that hat?”
“Mom made it,” he says and dips it like a newsie. “She knows how to make hats. But she forgot my water bottle.”
Her eyes widen and then refocus. “Go on into the house, kiddo, and get a drink and snack.”
As Fitz skips toward her sliding door, she takes my arm. Her face reminds me a lot of my sister, and I wonder if Mom thinks that too. If she misses her oldest daughter, who lives far away and refuses to come to our house.
“Are you okay?” she asks softly. “It’s so awful about that professor. Ridiculous that those people at Poe put your name out there. For just a silly wallet.”
Tears start to burn, but I refuse to let them fall. I called her right after I found out about Terrance’s death, of course, but we haven’t actually spoken face to face. “I’m trying to defend myself with this vlog. I can’t let them keep saying whatever they want about me. I have to find out who killed him. Maybe finding justice . . . clearing my name . . . it might be the second chance I need.”
She nods, and it’s the polite one she gives Dad. “As long as you’re . . . safe.”
I’m pretty sure she means not in jail. “I already got one hundred thousand views.”
“Oh, I’m very aware,” she says. “Your father told me as the count went up and up.” She brushes a strand of my hair behind my ear and smooths the top of my head, which feels messy from the hat and sweat. “Remember what your father does . . . the people who are drawn to him.”
“What does that mean, Mom?”
“I don’t know if it’s your . . .” She pauses to purse her lips to the side. “Your target audience.”
I almost laugh at her using that term. “Anyone who will listen is my target audience. If Dez is willing to drag my name through the mud on camera, God only knows what she and Miller are saying behind my back.”
“Maybe if you give it more time?”
Ignoring things is my mother’s go-to survival instinct, but it’s not one of mine. “I have to fight back. They’re pouring on the gasoline.”
“You hold the matches,” Mom says. “Don’t play into their hands. Self-fulfilling prophesies still come true.”
I stare at the house looming ahead, the roof reflected in the pool. I spot a leaf near the edge and walk over, scooping it up and flicking it toward the grass.
“What does Lindy say?” Mom asks as I rejoin her. “She’s usually full of advice.”
“I don’t want to tell her,” I say about my older sister.
“She should know,” Mom says.
“I texted her that we need to talk,” I say. “She’ll reach out when she has time.”
Lindy is capital B Busy. She and her husband, Jesse, own a nice Rhode Island and Mexican fusion restaurant in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I visited after the births of both my nieces and once when Fitz was a baby, but it’s not enough. She and Jesse are here fairly often, because he’s close to his siblings and has several nieces and nephews for their girls to play with. Whenever I’ve hung out with his whole family, it’s been wonderful.
A stark contrast to our own. Not that she’s invited my dad, after the last time.
“I’m not going to no quinceañera,” my dad had said to my sister, grossly mispronouncing the word. Also, it was just a family get-together, not a party. He was being mean. At best.
“You will not be missed,” Lindy had said. “You should be used to that by now.”
Her retort makes me smile now because she’s never backed down when it comes to our dad. Something I have yet to learn.
Even when she was barely twenty, only a few years after the accident, she strode into our house, holding Jesse’s hand, to say she was pregnant, they were getting married, and they were moving the hell away from our family after she graduated from culinary school. Jesse was working his way through Johnson & Wales too.
“You gotta get away from Dad,” she said to me in that big-sister way. Her hand on her belly, boobs big, and hot boyfriend made fiancé. I’d never been so jealous of anyone in my life. I was happy for her, too, both those feelings usually present in our sister relationship.
“You should go see Lindy,” I say to Mom.
“We will soon.” She takes my arm into hers, patting as if I need soothing. And maybe I do.
Fitz is already slurping water inside. He makes an “ahhh” sound that punches me in the gut for not remembering his water bottle or sunscreen. Mom sets out toast and several jellies on her wrought iron table under the skylights of her breakfast area connected to the kitchen.
“Look at those,” I say, trying to snap myself out of this parent
guilt. “Your favorite.”
“I know.” Fitz adjusts his newsie hat but doesn’t take it off. “I’m so hungry after that long walk.”
Mom and I laugh because he’s got that grown-up tone in his little-boy voice.
She begins opening the jars of jam, and Fitz heads over to the sink without being asked and washes his hands.
I get this longing feeling deep in my stomach to be needed and yet am relieved I’m able to leave. “I’m going to check on Dad,” I say. Neither of them looks up.
Chapter 9
Leaving the sunny breakfast room off the kitchen, I cross through the dining room that’s never used anymore and the formal living room that’s only occupied during Christmas Eve. Then it’s down a dark hallway and past quiet rooms. One solitary lamp casts long shadows on the worn carpet.
All those childhood feelings return, and it’s a mix of things both before and after. In the good years, few as they were, I remember a near-constant feeling of pride. As if a celebrity lived in our house. Actually, it was better than that because he wasn’t someone famous for Rhode Island, but my dad.
Before, Lou Worthington was a professor and respected CEO of the Poe Foundation he’d founded. But most of all, he was a personality. Great on camera, dynamite at a lectern, and highly quotable in the newspaper. Dad was everywhere because no one wanted to miss anything he said.
How many times did Mom call me and Lindy into the living room to watch Dad on the news? Or, on Sunday mornings, we’d sit at the dining room table as a family. Dad would read his latest op-ed from the Providence Daily and fire off questions.
I was only six, but I remember when he opened the Poe Foundation to send the best ideas from our small state into the world. Lindy and I were allowed to go to the big opening gala with the champagne-glass tower. I remember peeking around my mom’s dress and watching how Dad raised a glass with every donor. The room was intoxicated by Lou and his dazzling promises for the future.
Our home was the epicenter of funders being wined and dined with academics and state politicians. From breakfast, lunch, and dinner there were always voices filling every room. I remember feeling so important as I’d answer the door. There’d be a reporter from the local news or an author I recognized from a photo on a book jacket. They’d ask me about school or what I was reading.
It was an exciting place to grow up. Until it wasn’t.
The best explanation is still pretty awful: my dad accidently killed a kid with his car. Said another way, my dad was drunk and driving because nine-year-old me had nagged him into taking me to ballet.
After, Dad spent his “second career,” as he calls it, looking for anyone who would listen to him. He was known as smart and reasonable, but that’s not going to work after you accidently run over a Latino kid with your car and your lawyer implies since that kid wasn’t from your neighborhood, he was probably breaking into houses. The silent racism might get you out of jail time, but it’ll also get you kicked out of the Ivy League.
Then, they didn’t just force him out as CEO of the Poe Foundation. They wiped his name from the charter, as if he’d never existed.
There were no more conference keynotes. I remember him complaining he wasn’t even comped registration anymore. Then he was asked not to come. No grad students popping by with thesis outlines. No Providence Daily reporters calling for a quote.
No one clamoring for dinner invites. Phone calls and invitations ignored.
Dad did try to fight it. He took his payoff money from the Poe board and built that in-ground pool, which drew a few neighbors back to us. Those good days didn’t last long. A pool is only practical a couple of summer months in New England. There were so many other days to fill.
The house was unalterably quiet, which was louder than any voices that had come before. That’s not true. There would be the sound of a bottle opening. Tinging rattle of ice in the glass. Logically, I should have rejected booze. I watched what it did to my father. How it strained my mother and broke their marriage into a cohabitation. How it destroyed his relationship with my older sister.
Still, my anger toward him is tempered because I’m the real reason that awful day happened.
I could not change the past, but I could make my future bright. I marched back into the Poe Foundation with my Harvard degree and big ideas, ready to work harder than anyone else. To redeem us all and be a beaming light that would blind everyone to the past. Not that people really work that way. Not that any of us could ever forget or forgive.
Standing at the end of the dark hallway, I start to knock on Dad’s office door, but I hear his voice.
“Let me tell you a few things,” he calls out.
Peeking inside his study, I see Dad lean over his gigantic oak desk like an overstuffed grizzly bear. He’s in a fresh collared shirt, raising his arm and finger in the air. “Are you listening? Because I’ve got something to tell you.”
I freeze at the realization he’s not talking to me. He’s recording his web show. His so-called second career. When the world turned its back, my father had to settle for whoever would listen to his rants and imagined conspiracies.
At first, he found a decent niche. His book about “seeing the light” and shifting from a liberal New Englander to a “true independent,” whatever that means, sold pretty well. Going after President Clinton for eight years paid a few bills, but we relied mostly on my mother’s income doing yards on the cheap.
Dad sold more books to fringe publishers. Ranted through another couple of presidents. He hit his most recent stride with the wave of web radio shows, catering to the tinfoil-hat club, which seems to have decent numbers these days.
“Listen up, Lou Crew. They don’t have a damn thing on my daughter,” he says with theatrical flair. Not for the first time, I think he would’ve made a great Barnum or Bailey. “That professor had her out for a drink. She heads home to her husband and my beautiful grandson. She accidently leaves her wallet. That professor takes it. Maybe he’s giving it back, and maybe he’s not—we’ll never know. Then he gets jumped by thugs in an alley. That’s what happened.”
He looks in my direction, and his eyes light up.
“My daughter has joined us.” He waves me over. “Juliet, honey, the Lou Crew are loving your videos. Your pursuit of the truth. Finding justice. Come say hi. Hurry, we’re live.”
I mouth “No,” but he shoots me a sharp look despite his wide grin.
“Here she comes,” he says as I reluctantly cross the room. He rolls a chair next to him. “Right here, sweetie.”
After I smooth my hair, I wipe under my eyes in case sweat has given me raccoon eyes. “Thanks, Dad,” I say quickly, adjusting to the computer screens front and center.
The small webcam blinks a red light, and on one computer screen are our faces. There’s a level at the bottom of another screen showing the audio is working and another box with comments popping up. The live-viewer count is almost forty thousand, which is much more than I expected. “Hello, Lou Crew. I’m Juliet Worthington-Smith.”
“Oh, honey, they know who you are.” He pauses to laugh. “Now, first thing we gotta talk about is that Poe Foundation press conference. What crawled up that woman’s you-know-what?”
I see LOL comments flood his screen, and of the answers, “butt” appears the nicest response. “She was upset,” I say.
“Right? And her face!” He makes a weird frozen mad face before laughing with the flurry of LOLs popping up. “But then, that woman accuses you. It’s an outrage. I’ll tell you what else. There was a word I wanted to say. It rhymes with snitch.”
He laughs again, and LOLs are mixed with “bitch” comments. Even though it’s pretty awful to call a widow that word, it also feels kind of good to have someone—well, forty thousand anonymous strangers, I guess—on my side.
“Back in my day,” he begins, his tone both condescending and wistful, “when I ran that place, I’d never have let that happen.”
I start to argue with him but
realize that’s not the point. I’ve never been on his show. In fact, I’ve hardly watched. I’m glad he has it, but it’s usually a lot of conspiracy theories or complaining about Rhode Island or national politics. “It was upsetting,” I say, pushing for sympathy over making Dad look like a jackass. “But I won’t let Dez or anyone stop me from my own investigation.”
“Damn straight,” he says. “Now, tell the Lou Crew the latest.”
“I’m . . . interviewing witnesses,” I explain, not mentioning who or where. “I’ll try to have a new video posted soon.”
“The sooner, the better,” Dad says and shifts in his chair so he’s right at the center of the screen. “The police have missed things. I guarantee you that.” He waggles his finger, as if I’m onto something. “They think they can take our rights away. It’s outrageous and, honestly, un-American.”
His words are comforting, as are the comments popping up to support me. “I’m going to find the real killer,” I say. “I won’t stop until we know the truth. It’s justice for Dr. Castle and justice for me.”
Dad nods, pride in his gaze. “You keep at it, honey. The second you let them take control, it’s all over. They don’t care about the truth. They don’t care about justice. These crooked cops and the whiny widow are as bad as all the politicians.”
None of it really makes sense, but the anger feels good. Outrage is such a comfortable perch—lobbing criticism at enemies unseen while feeling sorry for myself.
A few more minutes of rants, and it’s time to sign off to the Lou Crew. Dad makes an L with his left hand’s pointer finger and thumb. “Loyal,” he says, then makes an L with his right. “Lou Crew.” He puts them together to make a W. “Watch, my friends. Watch them. Watch and protect. We are the watchers! Lou out!”
I explained to him once that an L with his thumb and pointer finger meant loser, but he wasn’t interested. He wanted a signature sign-off. People post pictures with their Ls together in a W shape, showing they’re loyal Lou Crew watchers.
For the Best Page 6
