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Pete closed his eyes and got a vision of Mary Rose’s pink lips and blue gaze, the defiant lift of her chin as she stared him down in the diner.
He sighed again. “Let’s just hope I can remember that little piece of wisdom when the time comes.”
CHAPTER TWO
AS FAR AS Mary Rose was concerned, dinner with her parents was an exercise in holding her tongue. And her temper. And her breath.
“The roast is delicious,” she told Kate after a bite.
“A bit rare, I think,” their mother commented. “Your father likes his meat well-done.”
Judging from his focused assault with knife and fork, Mary Rose thought John Bowdrey probably liked his roast just as he’d found it. Time for a change of subject. “The game looked pretty intense, Trace. Were you playing a particularly good team?”
Without taking his eyes off his plate, Kate’s son shrugged one shoulder. “I guess.” He was a handsome boy, tall and rangy, with his father’s blond hair cropped close. When Mary Rose had seen him last winter, he’d been the bright, enthusiastic kid she’d always known.
Then, the week after the annual family ski trip in January, Trace’s dad had moved out of the house and announced his intention to divorce Kate. Mary Rose would never have guessed, witnessing L. T. LaRue’s behavior in Colorado, that he had desertion on his mind.
In the months since, Trace had become sullen and uncooperative. His grades had plummeted from high A’s to barely passing. Worry over him, and over Kelsey’s rebellious attitude, had worn Kate to the bone. Mary Rose wasn’t sure her sister even realized the full extent of the problem. There had been a distinct tang of alcohol in the air around Kelsey at the soccer game this afternoon. The girl hadn’t been obviously drunk, and Mary Rose hoped that whiff of liquor had drifted from the friend trailing Kelsey. That would be the easy way out.
But she’d learned long ago that the easy way out rarely was. “It must be getting close to prom time. Are you going this year, Kelsey?”
Across the table, her niece shook her head, her blond hair gleaming with gold under the soft light of the chandelier. “It’s just a stupid dance.”
“It’s the most important dance of the year.” Frances Bowdrey pressed her napkin carefully to her lips, then gave her granddaughter a bright smile. “I can’t imagine why you wouldn’t want to go.”
When Kelsey didn’t answer, Kate did. “She’s only a sophomore, Mama. She’ll go next year.”
Their mother rarely took no for an answer. “Oh, I’m sure some nice junior boy would be happy to take such a pretty girl to the prom.”
Kelsey stared at her grandmother for a moment, her brown eyes wide and wild, her cheeks flushing deep red. Then she pushed sharply away from the table and, without a word, stalked out of the dining room. Her footsteps pounded up the staircase and along the upstairs hall, ending with the slam of her bedroom door.
Eyes round, eyebrows arched high, Frances looked at her older daughter. “What was that all about? Are you going to allow her to leave the table without being excused?”
“Mama…” Kate pressed her fingers to her lips for a second. “Surely you remember…Kelsey’s boyfriend Ryan broke up with her last week. He’s a junior. They would have gone to the prom together.”
Frances pursed her lips. “That’s no reason to be rude.”
“Of course it is.” Ice clanked on crystal as Mary Rose set her glass down a little too hard. “Being dumped is the world’s greatest tragedy for a fifteen-year-old.” She hadn’t liked the experience as an eighteen-year-old, with Pete Mitchell, either. And then there was Kate’s situation. “I should never have brought the subject up. I’m sorry, Katie.”
Her sister shook her head. “You didn’t know. I think I’d better try to talk to her. Please go on with your meal.”
Neither Trace nor his grandfather needed those instructions—judging from their unswerving attention to their plates, they hadn’t even heard the conversation. Mary Rose played with her mashed potatoes and listened as Kate climbed the stairs and walked down the hall. She heard a knock, but there was no sound of Kelsey’s door opening.
“Well.” Her mother buttered a small piece of biscuit and put it delicately in her mouth. After a sip of tea, she looked at Mary Rose. “Wouldn’t you rather come home with your father and me? I’m sure our house is more restful.”
Mary Rose had lost her appetite completely; she pushed her plate away and laid her napkin beside it. “I didn’t come to rest, Mother. I came to give Kate some help. That will be easier if I stay here.”
Trace put his fork down. “I’m going up to my room.”
Beside him, his grandmother put her hand on his arm. “The appropriate way to leave the table is to ask if you can be excused.”
The boy rolled his eyes. “Yeah. Whatever.”
But when he tried to stand, Frances kept hold of his wrist. “Trace LaRue. You will ask politely to be excused.” Watching resentment and temper flood into Trace’s brown gaze, Mary Rose wondered if her mother had pushed too far.
Then John Bowdrey looked up from his dinner. “Do as your grandmother says, Trace.” His stern tone would not be argued with.
Trace’s shoulders slumped. “Can I be excused? Please?”
Frances smiled and patted the back of his hand. “Of course, dear. Run and do your homework.”
Mary Rose wondered if her mother heard the boy’s snort as he left the dining room. “This might not be the best time for etiquette lessons, Mother. Trace and Kelsey have enough problems just handling their lives these days.”
“Etiquette makes even the worst situation easier.” Frances got to her feet. “Shall we clear the table?”
“Sure.” Mary Rose wasn’t surprised when her father simply got to his feet and left the dining room without offering to help. Her mother had him well trained—domestic responsibilities were strictly female territory.
Kate had used her fine china for dinner, which meant hand washing all the plates and the sterling silverware that went with them. Trapped at the sink in Kate’s ivy-and-white kitchen, up to her wrists in suds, Mary Rose was held hostage to her mother’s commentary on the state of Kate’s life.
“I can’t imagine what she was thinking, letting L.T. leave like that.”
“He didn’t give her a choice, Mother. From what Kate says, I gather he announced he was moving out, picked up his bags and did just that.”
“She should have stopped him, for the children’s sake.”
Mary Rose blew her bangs off her forehead and scrubbed at a spot of gravy. “How would she have stopped him? Thrown herself in front of his car? Grabbed hold of his knees, weeping and pleading? Kate has some pride, for heaven’s sake.”
“There are ways to hold on to a man who wants to stray.” Frances Bowdrey’s voice was tight, low.
When Mary Rose turned to stare, all she could see was her mother’s straight back. “Mother? What—?”
Trace came into the kitchen. “Didn’t Mom say there was cake?”
His grandmother turned. “I believe she made a German chocolate cake. Have a seat in the dining room and we’ll bring in dessert and coffee.”
He shook his head. “I’ll just take a piece to my room.” Despite her repeated protests, he got a plate, cut a two-inch-thick slice and poured a glass of milk, then disappeared again.
Mary Rose followed her nephew down the hall. “Trace, is your mom still talking to Kelsey?”
“Never did. Kelse wouldn’t open the door. Kate’s in her own room.” Taking the stairs two at a time, he left her standing at the bottom.
“What a mess this is.” Frances spoke from just behind Mary Rose. “I think I’d better talk to Kate. She’s got to do something.”
“Mother…” Mary Rose put a hand on Frances’s arm to keep her from climbing the steps. “Dad’s waiting on his cake. Why don’t you fix his coffee and the two of you have dessert? I’ll talk to Kate.”
Obviously torn, the older woman glanced upstairs and then toward the living room, where her husband sat with the newspaper, his foot crossed over his knee, jiggling in a way they all knew well. “You’re right. But be sure to tell Kate I’ll call her tomorrow. There are things she needs to hear.”
I doubt that. But Mary Rose kept her skepticism to herself as she climbed the stairs.
WITH RELIEF, Kelsey heard Kate’s door open and shut, and the murmur of voices behind it. She’d been afraid Aunt Mary Rose was coming up to talk to her about this afternoon. About booze and teenagers and the evils thereof.
And she would really hate to have to tell her favorite aunt to go to hell, especially on her first night in the house.
She glanced at her backpack on the floor at the foot of her bed. She had two tests tomorrow, and a boatload of homework waited for her attention.
Tough shit. Rolling off the bed, Kelsey grabbed a pack of cigarettes from the bottom of her sweater drawer and stuck her head out into the hallway to be sure the coast was clear. A second later, she was closing Trace’s door quietly behind her.
“Ooh, cake.” She tossed him the cigarettes and snatched up the remains of his dessert. “You ate all the icing, jerk.”
“That’s the best part.” He lit a cigarette for each of them, passing hers over as he went to open the windows. “Was that Auntie M coming upstairs?”
Kelsey drew in a deep lungful of smoke. “Had to be. Grandmother wouldn’t be so quiet.”
“I wish she’d stay out of our business.”
“M?”
“Gran. Drives me crazy, the way she’s always giving me orders. How’d we get such a witch for a grandmother, anyway?”
“I take great comfort from the fact that she’s not really ours.” Kate had married their dad when Trace was a baby, after their real mother had disappeared. So the Bowdreys weren’t actually their grandparents at all, not by blood anyway.
“That’s right. We turn eighteen, we never have to see her again.”
“Hell of a long time to wait.”
“Tell me about it.”
They smoked together in peace for a few minutes. Trace’s room was at the back corner of the house above the screened porch, with windows on two walls and big trees blocking the outside view. Kate had let him paint the walls and ceiling black and put up wildly colored posters—not rock groups, but totally weird computer-generated artwork. Some of the posters glowed in the dark; Trace’s room was an eerie place to be with the lights out.
“I got Janine’s ID finished,” he said, rummaging through the papers piled deep beside his computer desk. “Looks good to me.”
He handed over a North Carolina driver’s license with a picture of her friend Janine Belks, currently a sophomore in high school, but recorded on the license as age twenty-two. Kelsey nodded. “You’ve got those holograms down cold. I don’t think the guys at the license bureau could tell the difference.”
“Just be sure you get the money before you give it to her, okay? I don’t like getting ripped off.”
“No problem.” Another long silence flowed past. “There’s a party Saturday night. Gray Hamilton’s folks are going up to Chapel Hill for the soccer game. He’s got the house to himself.” She blew a smoke ring, then grinned. “And a hundred of his closest friends.”
Trace shook his head. “Boring.”
“I suppose you can do better? Like playing computer games with Ren and Stimpy?”
He gave her the finger for calling his best friends by the names of cartoon freaks. “Beats getting trashed and passing out on the floor with a bunch of drunks tripping over you.”
“Gray’s house has twelve bedrooms. I plan on passing out on a bed in one of those.” Taking one last, long drag, Kelsey dropped the butt of her cigarette into a soda can on the windowsill. A tiny sizzle and a wisp of smoke proclaimed its demise. “Dad’s supposed to pick us up Saturday morning for breakfast.”
Her brother’s response was vulgar and totally appropriate.
“He’ll be pissed if you don’t show up again.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“No.” Kelsey sighed. “But I have no intention of enduring another meal with him and the Bimbo by myself. And if neither of us goes, he’ll stand downstairs and yell at Kate for an hour. She doesn’t deserve that.”
Trace stared at the poster plastered on the ceiling above his bed, the landscape on some planet out of a heroin addict’s nightmare. “I hate her.” Kelsey knew he meant the Bimbo, the secretary their dad would bring to breakfast. Not Kate. Kate was all the mother he’d ever had.
She gave him the only reason that might work. “If we cooperate, maybe he’ll think about coming home.”
He cocked an eye in her direction. “Bullshit.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll think about it.”
That would have to do. “’Night.” She crossed to the door, listening for sounds of someone out in the hallway.
“Kelse?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong with us? What else does he want?”
Kelsey rested her head against the panel and closed her eyes. “God only knows.” With a deep breath, she opened the door, stepped out and closed it behind her. “And She’s not telling.”
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Mary Rose nosed Kate’s Volvo into a long line of equally sensible, passenger-safe vehicles and waited her turn to pick up Kelsey and Trace from school. She had to smile, thinking of herself as a car-pool driver. If she and Pete had stayed married—if their baby had been born—this might have been a daily routine in her life. That little boy would have been ten this year. There might have been brothers and sisters…
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut against the futile, irrational urge to cry. What in the world was she thinking? Why had that long-ago tragedy suddenly reared its head?
Because of Pete, of course. Seeing him again had undone ten years’ worth of forgetting and resurrected a pain she really couldn’t afford to relive. Except for Trace and Kelsey, children played no part in her present and future plans. There were real advantages to a life without kids, and she enjoyed as many as came her way.
The car behind her beeped its horn, and she realized the line had moved up. Easing closer to the van ahead of her, she scanned the groups of kids hanging around outside the school building, hoping to spot Trace and Kelsey among them. Even after she reached the head of the queue, though, the LaRue kids were nowhere to be seen. When minutes passed and her passengers didn’t show, the security guard told her to move on. Mary Rose tried to protest, but the woman in the bright orange vest simply shook her head and waved with both arms in a gesture that said, clearly, “Get out of the way.”
Two additional trips through the line later, Trace and Kelsey still hadn’t appeared. Muttering a few choice words, Mary Rose drove to the student parking lot—nearly empty now—and left the Volvo there. She had no idea where in the building Trace and Kelsey might be. But when she found them…
The nearest entrance was one of the doors on the back of the gymnasium. Rounding the corner, Mary Rose stopped short at the sight of what looked to be battle lines drawn up in the narrow asphalt alley between the high gym walls and the chain-link fence marking the edge of school property. Seven or eight Hispanic boys on one side taunted the three white kids who stood backed up against that fence. The gibes were in English, but there were extra comments in Spanish, with mocking laughter and lewd gestures. After a moment, she realized that one of the outnumbered boys wore the brilliant yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d seen just this morning in the car on the way to school. Trace.
She started to call out, just as the fight exploded. One of Trace’s friends charged the other group and was sent sprawling on his back on the asphalt. When Trace bent to give him a hand up, he got a kick in the backside that sent him down on his face. And then there was a jumble of bodies, the sick sound of fists pounding against flesh, curses in English and Spanish.
Mary Rose headed back the way she had come, intending to summon help, but found the principal already running toward her, with Kelsey and another girl behind him. The sound of a siren in the distance heralded the approach of more assistance. For a dreadful second, she wondered if Pete would respond to the call, then decided with relief that the highway patrol would let the local police handle this kind of incident.
“Break it up! You hear me? Get back!” A big, heavy man, Mr. Floyd waded into the fight without any apparent concern for his own safety, jerking kids apart by the shirt collars. In another minute the police car arrived; between them, the three men separated the combatants and ended the fight.
“What’s this all about?” Mr. Floyd stared down at Trace and each of the other boys. “Who started it?”
But no matter how many times he asked the question, none of the kids would give an answer. Even after they were marched like a string of prisoners to the principal’s office and written up for violence on school grounds, no one offered an explanation.
“It wasn’t Trace’s fault,” Kelsey told Kate and Mary Rose later, after they got home. “Eric Hasty made a comment in class about a wrong answer Johnny Vasques gave. They’ve been sniping at each other all year long. And when Trace and Bo and Eric went outside at the end of gym class, Johnny and his friends were waiting for them. Trace was trapped. He didn’t have a choice.”
“You could have walked away,” Kate told her son as he sat at the kitchen table with an ice pack on the side of his face. “You didn’t have to fight.”
