I couldn’t wait for that to happen. The girls needed to be taken care of, and I couldn’t handle their schedule with my own during the week. I’d get no time for sleep between work and carting them to school.
“Thanks for the info. Sorry, I woke you.”
“No prob, Sparkles.”
I grimaced at the old nickname but said nothing to correct Crystal. Hanging up the call, I started searching my contact list for Logan Waite. Logan’s parents owned the local campground and several rental properties in the area. He did maintenance for his parents, so he would likely have information about the guy in the Pine Lake house.
The phone rang twice before he picked it up.
“Hello?”
“Logan, it’s Ruby McLean.”
“Hey Ruby,” he said in a warm voice. “That dryer still giving you trouble?”
Not since Gray had fixed it. “Uh no, thank you. I’m calling about one house on Pine Lake that your parent’s own.”
“You looking to move?”
“No.” I swallowed and forced the lump in my throat down. “Uh, can you tell me about the guy renting the house on Pine Lake?”
“Ruby I can’t—”
“I wouldn’t ask you to tell me anything you’re legally not allowed to. Except—” I swallowed again. “Except, he apparently has been seeing my mom, and I need to find her.”
Logan sighed. “Pearl will turn up when she’s ready.”
“Yeah, that’s usually the case. But this feels different. Could you at least call the guy and tell him I’m looking for her?”
“I—“
“If you don’t, I’ll just drive over there and ask him myself.”
“All right,” Logan said. I could hear shuffling in the background like he was moving about his house. “The guy is supposed to check out today. I’ll go over there now and check it out. Would that make you feel better?”
“Yes. And let me know as soon as you can, Logan.”
U
Gray
“Mom’s gone.”
“What?” I asked and turned from loading the last of the casserole containers into the cooler. “What do you mean gone?”
Ruby shrugged. “Just what I said. Crystal, her friend at the club, said she got her hooks into a high roller this week. She told me he was renting a place just outside of town, so I called the guy that maintains those properties.”
“What did he have to say?”
I grabbed a towel from the drawer and joined Ruby at the sink. Next to her was a massive stack of dishes that she’d used to cook the freezer meals. The trailer didn’t have a dishwasher, so everything was washed by hand. Ruby hated the task, but I secretly loved it. Not just because it meant I got to keep close to her, but because it felt soothing. It was the type of thing couples did.
“He said that he’d go check the house.” Ruby handed me a dish before continuing with her story. “He called back fifteen minutes later. Pissed. The place was empty and looked like a tornado had gone through it.”
“Shit ….”
“Yeah,” Ruby said. “I told him I’d help clean and pay for what I could.”
“Why?” I grabbed her wrist to stop her from obsessively scrubbing the dish in her hand. “You didn’t fuck up the house. You didn’t make the mess.”
Ruby looked up at me with an expression that looked too tired for her age. “This is what I do, Gray. Mom makes a mess, and I clean it up. She doesn’t—”
“Don’t,” I emphasized my command with a little squeeze on her wrist. “If you were about to make an excuse for an adult woman, I don’t want to hear it.”
Ruby covered my hand with hers. And even though our hands were damp from the dishes, my skin tingled at the contact.
“It’s just how we are,” Ruby said with a sad smile. “But thanks for the support. I just wish I knew what to do next.”
“We’ll figure it out together.” Ruby opened her mouth to argue, but I squeezed her wrist again. “Together.”
After we delivered every casserole and hot dish in the park, I drove to Ida’s house to drop off the girls so she could watch them while Ruby and I went to Pearl’s. Ida wanted to call the cops, but Ruby seemed to think there would be some major piece of information in the cabin that would lead us to Pearl. Years of experience taught me to be more cautious in situations like this, but Ida and I were letting her have her way.
For now.
“Drive north toward the lumberyard,” Ruby instructed once we were back in the truck. “She lives in a small cabin on Bullfrog Pond.”
I nodded and started driving in the direction she’d indicated. “Does she live there alone with the kids?”
“She doesn’t bring men home in front of the girls, if that’s what you’re asking. Mom may be a flake and self-involved, but she’s usually a really great mom to the little ones.”
The implication that Pearl had not been the greatest mom to Ruby hung in the air like a thick fog. Rather than continue down that rabbit hole, I asked, “Who takes care of the girls during the week?”
“Mom usually only works on the weekend. But there’s a lady in town, Mrs. Dwyer. She takes the girls overnight if mom works during the week.”
“How come she doesn’t take them on the weekend for you?”
“They’re my sisters, Gray.” Ruby turned and gave me a hard glare. “I want to spend time with them.”
“Of course you do,” I said. “I just meant why doesn’t she help you instead of Ida. Ida seemed so overwhelmed by them.”
Ruby snorted. “You actually think Ida needed your help that day?”
“Well, yeah. Why else would she call?”
Ruby burst into laughter. “Because she’s a master manipulator. Turn left on this road.”
I turned left and slowed down when the narrow road turned into nothing more than a dirt path. “What do you mean she’s a manipulator?”
“Gray, she’s been trying to marry me off since the day I turned twenty-one. She met you, a new-in-town eligible man, and she hatched a plan.”
My heart lifted in excitement that Ida thought I was a match for Ruby. “She was pretty exhausted-looking ….”
“Ida’s a better actress than Meryl Streep.”
I laughed. “Or maybe I’m just gullible.”
“That too,” Ruby agreed.
My headlights cut through the trees and landed on a tiny cabin that looked no bigger than a shoebox. The color of the cladding was impossible to describe, something between brown and gray and covered in a film of moss and lichen. A light was on just over the front door, but there were no other signs of life.
“Do you have a set of keys?” I asked.
Ruby shook her head. “She never locks the doors.”
The trees blocked most of the sunlight this far back from the main road, so I grabbed two flashlights from the glove compartment and gave one to Ruby. “I’ll follow your lead.”
The twitch of her eyebrow told me that surprised her. Did I really seem the type of asshole that didn’t trust her to know how to handle herself? I opened my mouth to ask her just that, but Ruby hopped out of the truck and started walking toward the tiny house before I could get the question fully formed.
“So, is this where you grew up?”
Ruby glanced back as she popped open the front door. “No. She got this place after she left town. I always lived with Uncle Adam.”
Once again, she was stingy with the details. I’d give anything for her to just elaborate more than a sentence or two. We’d been spending almost every weekend together for a while now, and I wasn’t any closer to knowing what made Ruby McLean tick.
I knew that her shampoo smelled like rosemary and mint, that she drank dark roast coffee at all hours of the day and night, and that she hummed old Joni Mitchell songs when she was concentrating. We h
ad spirited debates about the proper way to cook a steak, what the correct pronunciation of pecan was, and whether Garth Brooks or George Strait was the king of 90s country.
I told Ruby and the kids hundreds of stories from my childhood on a cattle ranch. I answered any and all questions I could about being raised by a single mom who ran the business her forefathers built from the ground up. I even gave insights into my time in the service. Ruby and her sisters knew more about me than my own family.
So why was this my first peek into Ruby’s past?
Chapter 15
Ruby
I could feel his unspoken questions swirling around me like mosquitos. In an effort to preserve some of my dignity, I’d done my best to ignore or evade Gray when he asked for more information. Even after his admission in the boat, I still felt embarrassment and shame when it came to my past.
Gray was quickly becoming a fixture in my life, but that didn’t mean I was ready for him to know everything about me. I especially didn’t want to bring him along with me on this search of Mom’s house, but he had refused to let me check it out on my own. After hearing his arguments, I’d been too much of a coward to stop him. So now, here I was in the tiny box of a house, Mom shared with my sisters, with the man that haunted my thoughts morning and night.
Fuck my life.
The last shreds of privacy would dissolve as soon as he saw the house. All the things I hated about having Pearl for a mother would be on full display. There would be no denying the kind of mom I had, or the lifestyle she lived. I stopped just inside the front door and took a long look around the cabin. Hoping it wasn’t as bad as I was expecting.
The main room was a living room slash kitchen, which remained the same since the Regan administration. Every available surface was Mom’s typical style of messy and disorganized without being too filthy. Dishes lay stacked next to the sink, but food had been scraped clean. Clothes littered the small recliner and footstool in the corner, but they appeared to be recently laundered.
I glanced out the corner of my eye to gauge Gray’s reaction. Nothing but passive interest showed on his expressive face. Did he not see the carton of Basic Light 100’s on the coffee table next to Rayleigh’s baby doll? Could he not smell the lingering miasma of knock-off designer perfume? What else would we find laying out for all to see? I prayed, to all the gods and deities I could think of, that my mother had not left her dance costumes out in plain sight in the one bedroom of the house.
“I don’t see any signs of a struggle or a break-in, do you?”
Gray’s voice startled me out of my jumble of nerves and embarrassment. He didn’t sound disgusted. He sounded normal. Could I be hearing things?
“Ruby, honey, you hear me?”
“Y-Yeah,” I said. My voice felt rough and strained from the effort it took not to show Gray every thought that pinged around in my brain. “The bedroom’s back there. I’ll check it out.”
“Let me go first,” he said. “Just in case.”
I wanted to argue, but he was already moving. With my heart in my throat, I watched as Gray approached the back corner room like something out of an episode of Law and Order. I’d grown so used to sweet and goofy Gray, the Gray that sang silly songs with the girls and was always up for a game or a tea party, that I’d forgotten his past as a soldier and a private security contractor. The change was startling but not unwelcome.
“It’s clear,” he called over his shoulder.
I rushed to join him at the door and flicked on the bedroom light. The unmade queen-sized bed was a mess of covers, quilts, pillows, and clothes. The dresser drawers were all partially pulled out, with clothes spilling everywhere. The tiny closet to my left had the door thrown open, and clothes were strewn about the floor like the furniture had vomited them out.
“Does anything look off?”
I couldn’t control a snort of laughter. “Even if it was, how could you tell in this mess?”
I wandered toward the bed, shoving clothes and other detritus out of my way with the toe of my sneaker. I could see a pair of mom’s favorite earrings, a necklace the girls got her for Christmas, and a stack of tabloid magazines on one bedside table. On another, there was an ashtray that was overflowing with butts, an empty glass, and an alarm clock.
I closed my eyes against another rush of anger and shame. Mom had smoked ever since I could remember. The only times she’d quit were when she was pregnant with the girls. For years, I’d been begging her to quit. I couldn’t stand the thought of my sisters inhaling her smoke, but Mom always claimed she didn’t do it anywhere near Brit and Ray. The evidence of how much second-hand smoke Mom subjected them to was almost more than I could handle.
“You okay?” Gray asked in a quiet voice.
I pulled a stuffed bunny from below a pile of clothes and hugged it close to my chest. A thousand thoughts were running through my mind and none of them were good. I hated that my sisters lived in this place. Hated I hadn’t done more to make it better. Hated my mother for being so careless. Hated her for being gone.
Mom always inspired the worst in me.
Gray shifted closer, and I could feel his indecision for several long moments before he pulled me into his side in a tight hug. The firm press of his body against mine proved to be my undoing.
“What if she’s dead?” I whispered in horror.
“Shh,” Grayson whispered and shifted so that he could pull me into a tighter hug. “Don’t borrow trouble, Ruby. We have no reason to think something’s happened to her.”
I dropped the bunny and snaked my arms around his middle, and just let go. Every pent-up piece of worry, hurt, and shame came pouring out of me. I tried to offer excuses and explanations at first, but it got too hard to talk through the tears. And since Gray didn’t seem to mind, I just stopped talking and let myself cry. Gray didn’t complain or ask me to hurry. He patiently held me and used his hands to stroke soothing paths from the top of my head to my waist.
It wasn’t long before the tears dried up and all I could do was make soft little shuddering noises of distress. Mom had been a stripper for as long as I could remember. When I was a kid, all the pretty costumes and the makeup looked fun and glamorous. But by the time I reached middle school, I realized what my mom did for a job wasn’t acceptable in “polite” company. Now I had to confront the fact that she was more likely to become a victim of violence because of the stigma stripping carried.
After I’d gotten over the worst of the crying, Grayson suggested we pack up the girls’ toys and clothes and regroup at my house. While he looked into the bedroom, I went to the kitchen to straighten up and deal with anything perishable. I didn’t miss the look he gave me just before I walked out of the room, and I hated that now there was something akin to pity on his face. It took him only a few moments to rejoin me in the main part of the cabin.
“When Mom told her parents about me, they demanded she get married to the father. She refused to name him, so they kicked her out,” I said when I felt his presence just behind me in the kitchen nook.
“Shit, Ruby, that’s awful.”
I nodded and scratched at a stain on the counter with my fingernail. “They’re very religious. The type of people that go to Mass twice a week, say their prayers in Latin, and demand complete obedience from their children. Having an unwed teenage mother as a child was just unacceptable to them. So they just wrote her out of their life and refused to speak to her. They’ve never spoken a word to me, and my grandfather used to be the janitor at my school.”
“I have some relations like that in my family too,” Gray replied and came to stand next to me in the tiny space between the sink and the fridge. He didn’t touch me, but his presence was enough to help calm my frayed nerves.
“Yeah, except I bet your grandparents weren’t the ones leading the shunning.”
He laughed, and the low rumble of his chuckle had the d
istressing ability to harden my nipples and send a shiver down my spine. “You’re right,” he agreed. “But that didn’t make it any easier for my ma, sister, or me to live in a small town in Texas for most of our lives. My great-aunt still calls my mom a soiled woman, and Ma’s the only one that pays for Nell’s assisted living.”
He was right. I didn’t corner the market on crappy families, and it was insensitive of me to wallow so much in my own issues. I wasn’t ready to accept and move on like Gray so obviously had, but I was starting to see the wisdom in his actions.
Gently, he put a hand on my shoulder and turned me, so I faced him. The pale light of the ancient light fixture cast his face in shadows, but I’d memorized every slope and plane long ago. Despite our surroundings and my worry for my mother, I felt arousal spread warm tendrils from my center out toward all of my extremities.
“Where did your mom go? After they kicked her out at fifteen? Who took her in?”
“My grandmother had a younger brother that lived in town. The family had shunned him for falling in love with a Lutheran girl, so he was sympathetic to Mom’s situation. His wife had died years before that, and he had this big beautiful old house in town. So he took us in and treated me like the daughter he’d never had.”
Grayson gave me a quick grin, and he reached up a hand to brush a piece of hair out of my eyes. “I’m glad you had someone like that in your life.”
Beneath the stench of stale cigarettes and bad perfume, there was the familiar scent of Gray’s cologne. I wanted to lean into his chest like I had before and bury my face in his shirt. Before, my breakdown had consumed me too much to appreciate being in his arms. And damn, if I didn’t want another chance to feel his embrace.
Instead of leaning into him like I wanted, I gave an embarrassed little shrug and said, “We better go pick up the kids before they destroy Ida’s house again.”
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