A Thread of Truth (16 page)

“What is it?” I asked as I took the sweater from Charlie and draped it over my arm. “What's wrong?”

“Ivy was served with divorce papers. He's suing for full custody of the children.”

Franklin sighed heavily. “Well, we expected that. I was hoping he'd be more reasonable, but after what Ivy's told me about her ex-husband and how vindictive he can be, that's really no surprise.”

“But there's more,” Charlie said. “And none of it good. Margot wouldn't tell me much on the phone, just said that she needed you all to come back to the shop as soon as you could.”

“All right,” I said, and rose up to kiss Charlie good-bye. “I'll call you later and let you know what's going on.”

“What are you talking about? I'm coming with you. I care about Ivy and those children as much as anyone else, don't I? You think I'm going to stand around and let that eejit husband of hers take those children from her? Not a chance! Hurry along. I'll be right behind you.”

Franklin, Abigail, and I headed for the door.

Charlie bellowed, “Gina!”

She left the table she'd been clearing and trotted up toward the front of the restaurant. “Yeah, Charlie?”

“Get me some plastic to cover up those tomatoes so I can take them with me to the quilt shop. You're in charge while I'm gone.”

“Okay, Charlie.”

“And Gina? Ask Maurice to make up a tray of mozzarella and some olives. And wrap up a loaf of the good bread too, while you're at it. The Pullman loaf. Make it two. And a crock of butter. If you're going toe-to-toe with trouble, it's better to not do so on an empty stomach.”

T
his couldn't have happened at a worse time but, then again, that shouldn't have surprised me. Hodge was always so good at knowing how to strike at the most vulnerable place and time, and in a manner that would cause maximum damage.

Friday afternoons were always busy. And on a beautiful summer day like this, we have even more customers than usual. The one saving grace was that there were no episodes of
Quintessential Quilting
included on the Friday television schedule. There would be no airing of the promotional video, no mentions of Cobbled Court Quilts on national television and thus, no influx of telephone calls asking for directions to the shop, or how to spell our Internet address, or how they could get tickets to the show.

All we had to deal with today was the usual customer traffic and the fulfilling of what had become the normal glut of online orders ever since Mary Dell Templeton had set out to make Cobbled Court Quilts a household name. There was more than enough to keep us busy even on a slow day, which this wasn't.

After she'd gotten off the phone with Charlie, Margot went up to the workroom and asked everyone who was working on order fulfillment to go downstairs because she needed the space for a meeting. She asked Gayle to be in charge of the register while Jeni and Karen helped customers and cut yardage.

“I feel terrible about this,” I said to Margot as I helped her place chairs around the workroom table for Evelyn and the others who were walking over from the Grill. Garrett was at the bank making a deposit, but would return shortly.

“Why do we have to do this now? During business hours? Why can't we just stick with our original plan and do this at the quilt-circle meeting? And why do we have to include everybody—Franklin and Garrett? Charlie, too?”

“Because they're all your friends and they all care about you. And because many hands make light work. Lighter work, anyway.” She shrugged. “Nothing about this is going to be easy, but it'll be easier if we draw on the talent and experience of everyone. When Evelyn was going through her breast cancer diagnosis and treatment, we all worked together to help her get through it. That's what we should do now.”

She shoved the last chair in under the table. Its metal legs made a scraping sound against the wooden floor that made me wince, further jangling my already jangled nerves.

“And as far as why now…We've got to get on top of this thing right away. Especially for Franklin's sake. It's Friday afternoon. In a few hours his office staff will be leaving, some for the weekend and some to begin their vacations.

“Franklin's got to know the whole truth about what is going on here before the close of business today. That way, if he needs to ask some of his associates to cancel their plans, he can do that before they leave town.”

Great, I thought. Now on top of everything else, I could feel bad about being the reason people had to cancel their vacations.

Margot looked at me and squeezed my shoulder. “Cheer up. I know this isn't easy for you, but this is the best way to handle this. Just get it out and get it over with. We've been over and over this, haven't we?”

“I know. I know,” I snapped irritably. “The truth will set me free.”

“Everything is going to be fine. Trust me. I'm going to run down to the break room and put some water on for tea. Can I bring you a cup?”

“Sure,” I said more gently. “Tea would be great. Thanks.”

I sat down at the head of the table and stared at the pile of documents and the letter from Hodge's attorney that topped the stack. I picked up the letter and read it again, still not quite able to believe that somebody could have written those words in reference to me.

The truth will set you free. I sure hoped Margot was right because embracing the truth was clearly not a philosophy that Hodge was subscribing to.

I read the second-to-last paragraph again. How could he tell such lies about me? Sure, I'd done a lot of things I wasn't proud of, but nothing as bad as this. How could he say such things about the mother of his children? As much as he wanted to hurt me, hadn't he ever stopped to think what effect this might have on our kids?

Disgusted, I tossed the letter back on the pile with the other papers.

At least there was one good thing about all this. Up until this afternoon, I'd been nervous about dissolving into tears when I told my story. No danger of that now. I was too mad to cry.

But still, there was something pathetically, inexpressibly sad about this whole thing. Once, half a lifetime before, Hodge had said he loved me. How in the world had it come to this? Exploitation and escape? Lawyers and lies? Where had it all begun?

Not with Hodge. Before that. A long time before.

 

I was a daddy's girl.

My father was older than my mother by nearly twenty years. She was from West Virginia, a poor girl. Daddy met her on the one and only business trip he'd ever taken, back when the mill owners were trying to get on the good side of labor and agreed to pay Daddy's way to a conference. He'd have been dressed in his best for something like that. Maybe when Mother met him she thought he was a richer man than he was, her ticket out of poverty, and maybe when she saw our two-bedroom house in the poor part of town and woke up with a husband who wore overalls to work, she decided she'd made a mistake. I don't know. We never talked about it.

And I don't know if any of that was the source of their trouble and the reason I was their only child or if they'd have been just as unhappy together had they been the same age and living comfortably in a white-collar world, but the point is, they weren't happy.

And a part of me liked it that way.

I had Daddy all to myself. He thought I was the most beautiful girl in the world. I thought he hung the moon and stars. What's more, I thought he'd hung them for me alone.

We were two halves of the same coin, my father and I, complementary and complete. My mother didn't enter into the equation much.

She kept the house clean, made indifferent meals, and reminded me to brush my teeth, but I don't remember her smiling at me or talking to me beyond issuing directives concerning the basics and necessaries of daily life. But I didn't care about her. I had Daddy.

He and Mother almost never talked and if they did, I was quick to interrupt, to search out a week-old cut on my finger which I would insist my father kiss and make better, or start doing summersaults across the shag carpet and crying out for Daddy to “Look at me! Look at me!”

And he always did.

I was the one whose name he called when he came in the door from work at the end of the day. I was the one he read the funny papers to on Saturday morning, and mine was the opinion he sought out when trying to decide if this tie went with that shirt when he dressed for church on Sunday morning. Mother never went to church—it was just Daddy and me, so of course I loved going, but not because it was church. We could have gone to the dog track every Sunday, for all I cared. The part that mattered was that it was just Daddy and me getting in the car together and leaving together. I got to sit up front in the seat that would have been Mother's if she'd come along.

That's how selfish I was about him.

Sundays were my favorite day and Mondays my least, because it was the farthest away from Sunday.

Daddy left for his job at the mill very early, before I was even awake, so at breakfast it was just Mother and me.

She would bring me a plate of eggs or a bowl of cereal and then sit at the table drinking coffee with two sugars. After a while she would ask if I had my homework done and I'd say yes. Then, after another while, she'd look at her wristwatch and say that the bus was due, so I'd get up from the table and go. She'd get up as well, stand and stare out the window toward the street, but she never waved at me. When the bus pulled away, she'd still be standing at the window, looking out. I don't know how long she stayed there after I was gone, but I have a feeling it was a long time.

When I came home from school, she was always sitting on the sofa with her legs curled underneath her, twirling a length of her hair into a curl around her index finger, reading. She wouldn't look up from her reading when I entered the room; she'd just tell me to hang up my coat and then would answer my question about what was for dinner. That was pretty much the extent of our conversation until my father came home from work and my real life began.

But one day, when I was eight, a water main broke in town. The bathrooms and drinking fountains in my elementary school wouldn't work, so they sent everyone home three hours early.

My mother wasn't expecting me and I was very quiet when I climbed the wooden porch steps to our front door, wanting to catch her by surprise, I think, wondering if I'd find her at her usual outpost on the sofa or if, for once, perhaps doing something else.

It was something else.

The house was quiet when I entered. The couch was unoccupied. No smell of food cooking came from the kitchen. But my parents' bedroom door was open and there were soft, pleading sounds coming from inside.

I tiptoed toward the sound and looked inside, saw the back of a man's head, and naked shoulders, and angled twin peaks that were my mother's legs and bent knees spread far apart under the covers, the long, blanketed body of the man moving between them, and my mother's neck arching back and up, and her eyes shut tight, and her lipsticked lips an open
O
.

And I hated her.

I did not understand then what my mother was doing, but I knew it was wrong.

Quietly, on tiptoe, I backed away from the door, paused to lean against a kitchen chair, and slipped off my shoes to muffle the sound of my feet even more. Then, still backing away to make sure I wasn't seen, I slipped out the front door and went to sit across the street, hiding under the drapery of a neighbor's newly blossoming forsythia bush, watching until our two-doors-down neighbor, Pete, opened my front door, looked left and right, then walked across the yards to his own door, casually lighting a cigarette as he did.

I stayed under the bush for another hour, until my usual arrival time. I then went through the door, hung up my coat without asking about dinner, and went into my bedroom to wait.

And when my father came home from work, I told him everything.

 

I don't remember the fight in detail. From inside my bedroom, I couldn't make out the words that were being said, only that they were yelling at each other. Until that day, my parents' unhappiness in their marriage was manifested in long silences and averted eyes, not heated battle. The sound of their raised voices frightened me. I wished I had kept my mother's secret.

I heard a heavy thud, like the sound that the logs made when Daddy would bring them in from the woodpile and drop them near the hearth, then nothing, then screaming. My mother's voice screaming.

I ran out of my room and into the kitchen. Daddy was lying on the floor, his eyes wide open and fixed on the ceiling. There was a little foam of spittle clinging to his lower lip and a dark, wet spot on the front of his slacks. The room smelled of urine. My mother was on her knees, bent over him, pushing on his chest and screaming, “Oh, God!” over and over.

After a while, she collapsed on top of him.

I watched from the doorway with dry eyes. Afraid, but not understanding.

After a while, my mother raised herself back onto her knees and looked at me with angry, red-rimmed eyes.

“Look what you've done now,” she said. “He's dead. Do you see that? What are we supposed to do now? He's dead and you're the one who killed him.”

I ran from the house, down the street, and into the woods, then ran between our neighborhood and the rail tracks. I climbed a tree, hid high in the branches, and wouldn't come down even when I heard my mother calling for me.

It was Pete who found the tree. He tried to talk me down, but I wouldn't budge, so he climbed up and hauled me down.

I didn't want anyone to see me. I didn't want them to know. I was so afraid that, if I came home, my mother would tell everyone what I'd done. But she didn't. Though I'd given away her secret, she kept mine. She never spoke of it again. Until today, neither have I. I'm so ashamed.

My father and I loved each other too much and I killed him. In the end, I killed everything.

The rest, you already know. Part of it, anyway; the parts I've been willing to talk about.

Mother married Pete. She wasn't any happier with him than she'd been with Daddy. Pete was a drinker, and before long, Mother was, too. Unlike the silent disdain she'd shown my father, her marriage to Pete was one big, drunken fight, very loud and very physical. After one of those battles, Mother got in her car, crashed it, and died.

With nowhere else to go, and still a sophomore in high school, I stayed on with my stepfather. He drank as much as he always had, but I was used to that. As time went on, he started hitting me. I wasn't used to that. One night, I woke to find Pete in my bed, crawling his hand up under my pajama top. I fought him off, bloodying his nose and making him curse me.

The next day, I ran away.

I ended up in the city. At first I did all right. I had some money saved. I found a cheap bed in a youth hostel, but it wasn't long before I was broke. I tried to get jobs, but there wasn't too much available for a high-school dropout. Certainly nothing that paid enough for food and rent. I ended up living on the streets, working when I could, panhandling when I couldn't.

When the weather turned cold it got harder, so hard that I thought about going home, but I didn't have enough money for a train ticket and even if I had, I doubt I'd have gone back. I knew what was waiting for me there.

One day, when I was truly at the end of my rope, had gone two days without eating, I found a newspaper somebody had left at a bus stop and I started reading it. There was a classified ad for a coat check girl that promised to pay good money and said no experience was needed. I knew the street, but didn't recognize the address. I walked three miles to get there.