Uncle Marcus showed up looking wet and old. My phone call had gotten to him. I didn’t have the energy to stand up for a hug, so he bent over and kissed my cheek.
“How’re you holding up?” he asked.
“Awesome,” I said sarcastically.
“Yeah.” He sat down kitty-corner from me. “I can imagine.” He rested his forearms on the table. “So, tell me what Keith said.”
“That he’s my half brother. Andy’s and mine. He said Daddy and Sara…you know.” I could not—absolutely could not—think about it. “I thought maybe he was just trying to piss me off. He’s so angry about getting burned. Not that I blame him.”
Uncle Marcus played with the saltshaker on the table, moving it back and forth with his fingertips. I tried to be patient, but he was getting on my nerves. And then the waitress, a girl named Georgia Ann who graduated from my high school a few years earlier, showed up at our table.
“Hey, Marcus. Maggie,” she said, opening her little notepad. “You must be fixin’ to graduate, huh, Maggie?”
“Soon.” I knew coming to a restaurant had been a bad idea, but it was too rainy to meet on the beach and Uncle Marcus didn’t want to talk at the station.
“I’ll have a beach dog and onion rings and iced tea.” Uncle Marcus got right to the point with her, although I didn’t see how his appetite could be all that great. “How about you, Maggie?” he asked.
“I’m not hungry,” I said.
“Bring her a sweet tea,” Uncle Marcus told Georgia Ann.
“Sure will,” she said, and I was relieved when she walked away.
Uncle Marcus started working on the saltshaker again. “I’ve decided to tell you everything,” he said, “because if I start…leaving parts out, I…” He leaned back in the chair and looked at the ceiling. “The thing is, your mother should hear all this first.”
“She doesn’t know?”
He shook his head. “And I was going to wait at least until after the hearing tomorrow, because she has enough on her mind. Is she in Raleigh?”
I nodded. “She might be on her way home by now.”
“Where’s Andy?”
“His team has a special practice today and he was getting a ride there. I’ll pick him up later.” I was getting antsy. “You can’t leave me hanging until after you tell Mom,” I said.
“Right. I know.” He gave the saltshaker a few more back-and-forth taps. “Well, it’s true,” he said simply. “I’m the only one who knows everything that happened, Mags. I never wanted Keith to find out. I sure never wanted you to find out.”
“How can Keith know, but nobody else?”
Georgia Ann brought our teas and tossed a couple of straws on the table. “Food’ll be up in a jiffy,” she said.
Uncle Marcus waited until she walked away again. “Well, he doesn’t know everything.” He unwrapped his straw and dropped it into his tea. I didn’t touch mine. “You know how your Dad died, right?”
“The whale.”
“Yes. And I know you’ve probably heard old-timers’ suspicions that I had something to do with it.”
I shook my head. No way.
“Well, some people thought that.”
“Is that why Reverend Bill is so weird about you?”
“Partially, yeah. And he didn’t like Jamie because Jamie’s brand of religion didn’t fit with his.”
“I don’t get why anyone would think you had something to do with Daddy dying, though.”
He poked his straw up and down in the tea. “Well, first of all, it wasn’t the right season for whales to be off the coast,” he said. “Plus Jamie and I didn’t always get along when we were young, so some people thought maybe I…that I killed him.”
“That’s totally ridiculous,” I said.
“You’re right. It is. We did have a fight on the boat, though, and that’s the part nobody knows about. Not Keith. Not anyone, except you and me.”
Georgia Ann showed up with his beach dog and onion rings. The smell of them turned my stomach.
“Y’all need anything else?” she asked.
“We’re fine,” Uncle Marcus said.
“You holler if you do now, hear?”
Uncle Marcus sipped his tea as she walked away. “While Jamie and I were on the boat,” he said, “he told me he was in love with Sara and wanted to divorce your mom so he could marry her.”
“No way,” I said.
“I’m sorry, Mags. He did. And he told me he was Keith’s father.” He took a bite of an onion ring, the onion pulling from the batter. I tried to be patient while he chewed it.
“I never told anybody about that conversation, because I figured the secret would die with Jamie,” he said once he’d swallowed. “He’d been giving Sara money for child support, and once he died, that stopped, of course. I wished that he’d never told me, but he did, and I couldn’t sit back and watch Keith who was only what…six at the time? I couldn’t watch him grow up with nothing when I knew he was Jamie’s son, as well as my nephew. So, what I did was start a trust fund for him with forty thousand dollars of my own money.”
“Get out!”
“I wrote a letter about it to Sara and gave it to her with a check. Wrote something like, ‘This is Keith’s college fund. I know Jamie loved you and wanted to provide for you and Keith.’ I wanted to let her know that I knew. That I got that she was grieving, too, but wasn’t allowed to show it. I felt sorry for her.”
“What about for Mom?”
“I felt sorry for your mom, too,” he said, “but the thing was, she didn’t know the truth. As far as she was concerned, Jamie died her loving husband. Sara, on the other hand, had lost someone she had to pretend she was only friends with.”
“How can you sound so sympathetic about her?” I nearly shouted. “She’s Mom’s best friend, and she was…” I couldn’t even say it.
“I know it’s hard to understand, Mags. I was angry at first, too. Angry enough to fight with your father. People make mistakes, though. And their feelings change over time.”
I thought of Ben, trying to imagine my feelings for him changing. Impossible.
I took the wrapper off my straw so I’d have something to play with. I wadded the thin paper into a tiny ball and squeezed it between my fingertips. “So, I still don’t get why Keith is talking about this all of a sudden,” I said.
“Sara kept my letter,” Uncle Marcus said. “She stuck it with the account information someplace where Keith stumbled onto it. He found it the morning of the lock-in, which explains why he was so mean to Andy that night.”
“He said things about me being rich when I saw him at the hospital.”
“Well, you are rich. You live on a tidy inheritance from Jamie, plus his life insurance kept you and Andy and your mom going for quite a few years. Sara and Keith had very little, and even though I was thoroughly pissed at your father for what he did, I couldn’t let his son end up with nothing.”
I looked out the window at the sound. The rain had stopped, at least for now. “I always thought Daddy was perfect,” I said. “I don’t understand how he could do something like that. Cheat on Mom and his family that way.”
“You know, Mags, he was a great man in a lot of ways. A really good father. He had high standards for himself. I almost never heard him curse, not as an adult anyway. He stuck by your mom when she got pregnant with Andy even though she wasn’t much fun to be around. Neither was I,” he added quickly. “We were both drunks. I lived next door at the time and your mom and I drank together and were pretty bad for each other.”
I nodded. I knew Uncle Marcus was a recovering alcoholic like my mother, but I’d never imagined him and my mother getting drunk together. It was totally impossible to picture either of them drinking at all. Together? No way. My mother was such a cold fish around him. Suddenly, though, things started to make sense.
“Did Mom think…was she one of the people who thought you might have killed Daddy?” I whispered.
He nodded. ??
?I…” He hesitated. “I really liked your mom and she knew it. She thought that was motivation for me to…get rid of your father.”
“Oh, Uncle Marcus, that’s insane!”
“Damn straight.” He took a bite of his hot dog, washing it down with a swallow of tea. “So I guess the moral of the story is, we’re all fallible,” he said. “We all screw up at least once in our lives.”
Some of us were more fallible than others, I thought.
“Do you know about your Mom’s depression?” Uncle Marcus asked.
“Just that she says she medicated herself with alcohol.”
“Right,” Marcus said. “After you were born, your mom fell into what’s called a postpartum depression. Hormones out of whack, which sometimes happens to women after they have a baby. Anyway, we thought she was upset at being a mother or whatever. Your dad tried to help her, but she wouldn’t see a counselor or anything, and she wanted…they decided to separate for a while.”
“They separated? I didn’t know any of this.”
“He moved in with Sara and the man she was married to at the time, Steve. Steve was gone a lot in the service, and I guess your dad and Sara…comforted each other.”
“Oh, ick.” I cringed.
“Mags.” He covered my hand with his on the table. “Please, babe. Be an adult about this.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ll try. Where was I while he was living with Sara?”
“You were with him. Your mother could hardly take care of herself. Sara helped him with you. Even though I was angry with him at first, I think they really needed each other.”
“He was going to leave us, though,” I said. “Leave Andy and me.” I felt a tear roll down my cheek before I even knew I was crying.
“No, he planned to be there for all his children.” He covered my hand again. “You were his baby girl, Maggie. The person he was closest to. He adored you. He was both father and mother to you for your first three years.”
That explained so much. “I still feel so attached to him,” I admitted. “I think about him a lot. I remember him so well from when I was little, but I hardly remember Mom at all. Like she wasn’t there.”
“She wasn’t, really, but don’t blame her either, okay? She became a very good mother to you and Andy once she got sober, so there’s no use blaming her or Sara or your dad for any of this now. It’s in the past and everyone’s tried to move on.”
“If Keith told me,” I said, “he might tell Mom.” She wouldn’t be able to take it. I thought my father had been perfect, but Mom thought he walked on water. “You said she has no idea.”
“I know, and I’m going to tell her, but not yet. Not with the hearing tomorrow. So keep this between us for now.”
“What if Keith calls her?”
“I don’t think he can manage a phone right now.”
I remembered his bandaged arms, the metal rods sticking out of his fingers.
Uncle Marcus’s pager suddenly went off, and he was on his feet in an instant, wrapping his food in a napkin. “Gotta run, babe,” he said, dropping a ten dollar bill on the table. “You okay for now?”
I nodded, and watched him head for the door. Then I stood up to leave myself. I didn’t want to have to talk to Georgia Ann again.
My phone jangled on my hip when I got outside. A text message from Ben.
Had fite w/ D. She’s on rampage. Keep ur cool. ILU, B.
Chapter Forty-Five
Laurel
THE RAIN WAS COMING DOWN IN BUCKETS BY the time I left Raleigh and I knew I had a miserable drive ahead of me. It was after four, and I’d just hung up on Dennis. I couldn’t remember another time when I hung up on someone, but I was furious. I was starting to hate him, and that’s a bad way to feel about the man who holds your son’s life in his hands. First, it took him two hours to return my phone call when he knew I was trying to find someone to help us tomorrow at the bind over hearing. Second, even after I told him about my nearly two hour long meeting with the neurologist in Raleigh, he still didn’t think it was worth talking to the man himself.
“I told you, it’s an overused defense, Mrs. Lockwood,” he said. “It’s lost its punch.”
“Well, it hasn’t been overused in Andy’s case!” I shouted into my cell phone. “You’re not using it at all?”
“Once the case reaches the trial level, then the neurologist’s testimony could be helpful in negating intent.”
“But he’ll be in adult court by then!” That’s when I hung up. I knew I was going to start crying or cussing or both. Shartell didn’t seem to get it. Andy wouldn’t survive in jail. He simply wouldn’t.
I was still crying twenty minutes later when my cell phone rang. I hoped it was Shartell, having reconsidered, although I knew that was unlikely. I answered my phone.
“Hold on,” I said quickly into the mouthpiece. I put the phone on my lap and drove through the spiking rain to the shoulder of I-40. I picked up the phone again as I came to a stop.
“Hello?” I hoped it wasn’t obvious that I’d been crying.
“Laurel, this is Dawn.” Her voice sounded strange. Tight. Scaring me. I was afraid Keith had taken a turn for the worse and she was making the calls for Sara. The rain thrummed on my roof and I turned the volume up on the phone.
“Is everything okay?” I asked.
“That depends on your definition of okay,” she said. “Where are you? What’s that noise?”
“It’s rain. I’m driving back from Raleigh. What’s going on?”
“I’m calling because I think you need to know what your daughter’s up to.”
“Maggie?” I asked, as though I had more than one daughter.
“She’s having an affair with Ben. He’s been cheating on me with her.”
“Maggie?” I repeated.
“It’s been going on since they started coaching together.”
“Dawn, what makes you think—”
“Ben told me everything. He says he’s trying to end it with her, but he’s taking his sweet time about it.”
“Maggie doesn’t even date,” I said.
Dawn laughed. “They’re doing a lot more than dating, Laurel.”
I was quiet, thinking of the time I watched Maggie comfort Ben in the emergency room. “He’s…how old is he?”
“Twenty-eight. A mere eleven-year difference.”
“Did he start it?” I felt a rare emotion—an overwhelming need to protect my daughter. All my protectiveness had gone toward Andy; I’d had none left over for her. Quickly replacing that need, though, was rage. How dare he!
“Does it matter who started it?” Dawn asked. “Lord have mercy, Laurel! My boyfriend’s banging your teenaged daughter. Not only that, but she smokes dope with him.”
“I don’t believe that.” Maggie knew—I’d made sure both my kids knew—that substance abuse was out in our family. I had zero tolerance for it.
“Then you’re hiding your head in the sand.”
“I’ve got to get off the phone, Dawn. Sorry.” My hands shook as I clicked off that call and then speed-dialed Maggie’s cell phone.
“Did you have any luck?” she asked when she picked up.
“That’s not why I’m calling.” I ran my free hand around my steering wheel. “I just had a call from Dawn.”
Maggie’s silence told me all I needed to know.
“Oh, Maggie.” Disappointment welled up in my chest. “It’s true?”
“Mom, let me explain. It probably didn’t come out sounding too good from Dawn.”
“No, it sure didn’t. You’ve been lying to me all year. ‘Oh, I don’t want to date, Mom. I want to concentrate on studying, Mom.’ How could you lie to my face like that?”
“Because if I told you the truth, you wouldn’t let me see him.”
“Damn straight I wouldn’t! He’s twenty-eight and living with his girlfriend.”
“She’s not his girlfriend. And why does his age matter?”
??
?Because there’s a huge difference between seventeen and twenty-eight.”
“You always say how mature I am, so I don’t get what’s so shocking and terrible. I love him. He’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“You’re smarter than that,” I said. “Don’t you realize he’s taking advantage of you? He’s living with Dawn and has you on the side. Where’s the future in that?”
“He and Dawn are just housemates.”
“She seems to think they’re more than housemates.”
“Well, she’s wrong!”
“Everyone knows they’re a couple, for heaven’s sake.”
“He doesn’t love her. She’s just our cover.”
“Maggie!” I was shocked. “How dare you! If that’s true…how can you use someone like that?”
“They are not a couple!”
“Maggie—”
“I’m not going to let you ruin this for me!”
“Ruin what? Do you think he’s going to leave Dawn for you?”
“How many times do I have to tell you, he’s not with Dawn!”
“What kind of future do you expect to have with him?”
“A long one!” she yelled.
“I wouldn’t count on it. If he’s cheating on Dawn, he’ll cheat on you, too.”
“You’re not listening to me! If Dawn thinks he’s her boyfriend, she’s living in a fantasy world.”
“I’m afraid you’re the one living in a fantasy world, Maggie. She said he wants to end it with you.”
“She’s so full of it! I’m hanging up.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“We can talk about it later.”
“No, now!” I said. “We can talk about it now, because I want you to call him up and tell him it’s over.”
She laughed. “All of a sudden you want to be involved in my life after ignoring me for seventeen years?”
“Maggie!” One of my heartstrings broke. She’s upset, I told myself. She’s just trying to hurt you. “Never mind,” I said. “I’ll call him myself.”
“No!”
“He’s probably had any number of lovers,” I thought out loud. “Do you realize that? He could have a venereal disease, for all you know. You could get pregnant.”