Hissy Fit (17 page)

Supper at Daddy’s
looked like it would be what it usually was; quiet and uneventful. We talked about the car business, about the weather, and sports.

“Braves are gonna make it to the Series this year, shug,” he said, as we were putting the dishes in the dishwasher. “Gonna win the whole shootin’ match.”

“You say that every year,” I teased. “And they’ve only won it once. Don’t you ever give up?”

“Nope,” he said, handing me the salmon loaf pan. “They’ve got the talent and the desire. Anyway, I gotta believe in something. Might as well be the Braves.”

I dried the pan and put it carefully back in the bottom cupboard where it’s always been kept. All during dinner, all during the discussion of new model cars and APRs, and the Braves’ combined ERAs, it was on the tip of my tongue. Where is she? Where did my mother go? And why?

“You’re kinda quiet tonight,” Daddy said, wiping down the kitchen counter. He went to the refrigerator, got out a Budweiser, and held one up for me. I shook my head no.

“Something on your mind? Everything okay at work?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Thank God for Will Mahoney. If it weren’t for him, and Mulberry Hill, I might be ringing up groceries over at the Bi-Lo.”

Daddy took a sip of his beer and frowned. “Maybe I better have a heart-to-heart with Drew Jernigan. What happened between you and A.J., that was just too bad. But it wasn’t none of your fault.”

“I don’t think the Jernigans see it that way,” I said.

“Drew’s always been a stiff-necked SOB,” Daddy said. He paused.
“You know, I had to quit eatin’ breakfast at Ye Olde Colonial. It got so bad, I’d walk in, and he’d get up, throw some money down, and walk right out the door. Made everybody damn uncomfortable. So I just switched over to the Waffle House. I like their grits better anyway.”

“Daddy!” I hugged his neck. “Waffle House doesn’t have biscuits. And all your other friends are over at Ye Olde Colonial. I see them, every morning, when I go to work, sitting around that big table in the window.”

“Not all of ’em,” Daddy said, grinning despite himself. “Anyway, I was getting in a rut. Time to shake things up a little bit.”

I took the damp dishcloth and hung it on the towel rack rod on the back of the kitchen door, just like I did every Wednesday night after supper. “This is all my fault,” I said. “I should have just kept my mouth shut at the rehearsal dinner, and gone ahead with the wedding.”

“No ma’am!” Daddy said firmly. “You did the right thing calling it off. The only thing you could do.”

“It didn’t have to be so public,” I said. “That’s what’s got the Jernigans so worked up, I think. I humiliated them. And myself.”

I kissed Daddy’s cheek. He needed a shave. “And I embarrassed you and Gloria, and now they’re taking it out on all of us. I made a big old mess of everything.”

Daddy patted the top of my head awkwardly. “Don’t you worry about me, or Gloria. We’re grown up. And it’ll take a lot more than those stiff-necked Jernigans to run either one of us out of this town. You just take care of yourself. Like you been doing.”

“A.J. came to see me,” I said. “After he got back from France.”

Daddy frowned and started to say something. “He was kind of sweet,” I went on. “Telling me how much he missed me, and how sorry he was. He says—”

I bit my lip, wondering how much I should tell.

Daddy crossed his arms over his chest. “I wanna hear this!” he said.

“He says it was all Paige’s fault. He says he was drunk, and they were just messing around, and it got out of hand. And he claims it was the first and only time…they did something like that.”

“And you believed him?”

“I kicked him out of the shop. And I told him I didn’t believe him. But I just don’t know.” Tears started welling up in my eyes. “I loved him. And I know he loved me. I just know it. But if he loved me…how could he do something like that to me?”

Daddy sighed and handed me a dry dish towel. “Here. Come on now. What do you say we go for a drive? Huh? When’s the last time we went for a drive together?”

I mopped my face. “I don’t know. We used to go for drives all the time, didn’t we?”

He nodded, got the car keys, and I followed him out the door to the big hulking white Chevy Tahoe parked in the carport.

Daddy headed the Tahoe down the blacktop. He didn’t say where we were headed, but he didn’t have to.

On Sundays, after church, there isn’t much to do in a small town like Madison. When we got home from church, we’d change out of our good clothes. Mama would put a roast in the oven, and Daddy would putter around a little bit out in the garage, and then we’d go for our Sunday drive.

Daddy would have brought home a new model car for us to try out. The seats would have plastic over them, and there would be paper mats on the floor, and the new car smell would be stronger even than my mother’s Joy perfume.

Our destinations on these trips never varied. We’d take the old Rutledge Road, Highway 12, and turn right when we got to Rutledge. There was a gas station there that stayed open on Sundays, and Daddy would stop and get us all Cokes. Then we’d drive over to Hard Labor Creek State Park.

I would take little tiny sips of my Coke, wanting to save it for our picnic. Daddy would park in the shade, as far away from any other
cars as possible, and then we’d take our drinks and our sandwiches, and picnic around the old mill. If it was summertime, I’d change into my bathing suit and swim in the creek, and the two of them would sit in folding aluminum lawn chairs and watch me splashing around. Sometimes Daddy would swim with me, but Mama didn’t swim, and she didn’t like to mess up her hair, so she always stayed up in the grass, watching and calling for me not to go in any deeper.

I’d ride home wrapped in a big beach towel, and fall asleep to the sound of the two of them murmuring companionably up in the front seat.

I’ve driven past Hard Labor Creek Park hundreds of times since I’ve grown up, but to my knowledge, this was the first time I’d gone back since those Sunday drives.

A chain was stretched across the park entrance, and a sign said the park was closed after nine
P.M.

“We’ll see about that,” Daddy said. He got out of the car, went over to the chain, and fiddled with it until it unfastened.

“You lawbreaker!” I said, when he got back in the car. “Won’t somebody see us and kick us out?”

“Nah,” Daddy said. “I play golf with the park superintendent all the time. This late at night, and the Braves game over with? Little Joe’s asleep in the bed.”

Daddy steered the Tahoe into the park and toward the lake. “The old mill’s gone, you know,” he said after a while. “They tore it down when they put in the golf course.”

I looked out the window at the passing scenery. “It’s all changed,” I said.

“Lake’s still pretty,” he commented. “You used to love that lake. Back then, that was like the French Riviera to us.”

“I did love it,” I said, remembering. “Daddy? How come we stopped coming? After Mama left?”

He was quiet for a while. “Oh, shug. Everything changed. After she left, Sundays were different. I was still working Saturdays at the
lot, so Sunday was the only day I had to get the house straightened up, see about meals for the week, do all the things she used to do all week long. There just wasn’t enough time for something like a long drive to the park.”

Daddy laughed. “I never realized how hard that woman worked until she was gone, and I was left to do all the things she’d been doing all those years.”

I looked over at him. He had a funny half smile on his face.

“She made it look easy,” I said. “Even now, I still wonder what she did all day, but of course, I know she was keeping up with the house, and us, and…”

We parked under a pecan tree at the edge of the paved parking lot and got out. The grass was already wet with dew, so after a moment of hesitation, I slid out of my sandals and left them in the car.

We found a wooden picnic table facing the lake. “These are new too,” I said, sitting down facing the lake.

He sat down beside me. “She never complained,” he said suddenly. “We never fought. I thought we were the two happiest people in Madison.” He rubbed my arm. “Three happiest. You were happy, weren’t you, shug?”

I nodded.

“People keep things to themselves,” Daddy said. “Sometimes, when things aren’t good, instead of saying something, getting things stirred up, they just keep things to themselves, and keep going along, to get along. But that’s all wrong.”

He turned to me. “You don’t want to be married to a man you can’t believe in, do you?”

“What if I love him? What if I want to believe him? Should I give him another chance? That’s what I’ve been wondering. Should I have given A.J. another chance? People make mistakes.”

“Messing around with your best friend, when you’re getting married the next day, that’s more than just a mistake,” Daddy said. “That’s a character flaw. A big one, if you ask me.”

I dug my toes into the wet sand. “Gloria says all the Jernigans are like that. She says Drew and even Chub were runarounds in their day.”

“She shouldn’t have told you that,” Daddy said slowly.

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”

Daddy looked away. “There’s always been talk. I don’t like gossip. Never have. And after your mama left, well, I knew everybody in town was talking about us. Nothing I could do about it. But I’m not gonna be the one talking about the Jernigans.”

I leaned back with my elbows on the picnic table. I could hear the soft hooting of mourning doves, and frogs croaking over near the edge of the lake. The moon was nearly full, and its reflection seemed to fill the surface of the water.

“You talked about people keeping things to themselves,” I said, choosing my words carefully. “Does that include you?”

He nodded, waiting.

“Does it make you mad, still, that she left?”

“Sometimes. Does it still make you mad?”

I laughed. “Austin says I have abandonment issues. He says I’ll never have a good relationship with a man until I deal with my feelings about Mama. He says I need closure.”

Daddy slapped at a mosquito that had landed on his arm. “Did Austin go to psychiatry school before or after he was at florist’s school?”

“I think he watches a lot of daytime television,” I admitted. “But even armchair psychiatrists get it right every once in a while. I really do want to know what happened to Mama. I need to know. Why did she leave us? Where did she go?”

“And why didn’t she send for you?” Daddy was looking right into my eyes.

My own eyes widened. “You knew?”

“About the suitcase under your bed? Yeah. I found it the one and only time I did any real spring cleaning at the house. I took it out
and opened it up. Found your little pajamas, your blue jeans and T-shirt, and your favorite Barbie doll. About broke my heart when I realized why you had it hidden under there.”

“I wanted to be ready,” I said softly. “I thought she’d pull up in the driveway in her Malibu one day, and honk the horn. And I’d look out the door, and there she’d be, hollerin’ ‘Come on Keeley, dollar waitin’ on a dime!’ And out the door I would go, because my suitcase was already packed.”

“Whatever happened to that suitcase?” he asked. “I kept checking, and after a couple years, it was gone.”

“I grew up some.” I put my hand on Daddy’s arm. “And I’d heard all the gossip. I knew she left with that man. Darvis Kane. I knew she’d broken not just my heart, but yours too. And I got so I hated her. I told myself if she ever did call or write, I wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t write back. And if she showed up, I’d tell her right to her face to go to hell.”

Daddy shook his head. “We been keeping things to ourselves for a long time, haven’t we, shug?”

“Oh yeah.”

“I remember the day I looked under your bed, and the suitcase was gone. That night was the first time I slept good after she left.”

“Why?”

“You were all I had left,” he said, looking away again. “And I thought the same thing as you. I thought she’d come back, take you away with her. And there’d be nothing left for me.”

I slid my hand down his arm and squeezed my father’s big, callused hand. He squeezed back.

We sat in the dark
at the picnic table, looking out at the lake, for a long time, until the bugs ran us off, back to the shelter of the Tahoe.

It seemed safe, somehow, to talk there, away from the house and memories of her.

“Gloria says you been asking a lot of questions about Jeanine,” Daddy said. “It kind of upset her.”

“I know. And I know the two of you were trying to protect me. You guys did a good job of raising me, Daddy. I’m not perfect, but I’m not as messed up as a lot of kids whose parents went through divorce and stuff. But I’m a big girl now, and there are things I need to know about her.”

“All right,” he said, his voice wary. “I’ll tell you as much as I can.”

I gulped. “Austin has been doing some research. Online. You can check state databases that way. He did some checking and he says it looks like you two never got a divorce. Is that right?”

“Research,” Daddy said, with a trace of annoyance in his voice. “He’s right. I never did get a divorce.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t know where she’d gone off to.”

“Did you even try to find out?”

For the first time he gave me a sharp look. And his voice was pinched, almost angry. “Hell yes, I tried. There was a police investigation, of course, after I reported her missing. At first they suspected maybe I’d done something to her. That’s how they think, when a married person goes missing. But after a while the sheriff gave up looking. I’d been at work at the car lot all day the day she left. About a dozen people vouched for me. And there was never any sign of foul
play or anything. And Darvis Kane was gone too. There was a lot of talk about that. He’d left a wife and little kids behind too. You know how that looked. Even still, I didn’t give up. I wanted to know why. And I wanted to be able to tell you something, even if it was that we were getting a divorce. So I hired a private detective. Spent thousands, chasing down dead ends. In the end I didn’t really find out any more than I knew the day she left.”

“Nothing? You mean she just disappeared?”

Daddy spread out his fingers on the steering wheel. The dull gold of the wedding band on his left hand shone softly in the moonlight. “Best I could find out. She just walked out, Keeley. And no, there wasn’t a note, nothing like that. Believe me, I looked and hunted. I tore the house apart, thinking maybe she’d left some little clue. But there was nothing.”

“Did she take a lot of stuff with her?”

Daddy winced. “An overnight bag was missing. She had lots of clothes, so I couldn’t be sure of what she might have taken with her. Her closet was full, so it wasn’t like she just cleaned it out and took off with everything she owned.”

“What about her car? The red Malibu?”

“That’s the only thing that detective did to earn his pay. He tracked it down through the VIN number. It turned up in a used car lot in Alabama. She’d sold it for eight hundred dollars cash.”

“What about Darvis Kane?”

Daddy’s face reddened. “If I could have found him, I believe I would have killed him. For months I kept my shotgun in the car. Eventually Gloria took it and kept it at her house for a long time. She knew what I was thinking. Always has. Even now, sometimes, I’ll be someplace like Atlanta, or Birmingham, and I’ll look over, and I’ll think I see him, walking down the street, or driving in the lane next to me.”

“He was married to Paige’s Aunt Lisa, wasn’t he?”

“That’s right.”

“Did she ever hear from him over the years?”

“Lisa Kane never would talk to me. Not after the first few days, when it got apparent they’d taken off together. She went around town saying some pretty ugly things about Jeanine. Gloria went out to that trailer of hers, tried to talk to her, but she ran Gloria off. She moved over to Athens to stay with another sister, and after that, I don’t know what happened to her.”

“You think Mama ran away with Darvis Kane, don’t you?”

He held his hands palms up, examining them, like he was searching for a clue there.

“I didn’t know what else to think.”

“Did you have any idea she was…seeing somebody else?”

“Not at the time.”

“What about later?”

“Later on, Gloria admitted to me that she’d heard some talk about Jeanine. That she was running with a fast crowd. At the time she didn’t want to believe it. Your mama was like a little sister to your aunt.”

“And there was never any sign? That she was unhappy? Or wanted out?”

“She seemed…restless. She’d go for long drives. Some days she’d leave you with a baby-sitter and just drive around. Said she just wanted some time for herself. She was so young, when we got married, and then when she had you. It was different for me. I’d been in the army, college, seen a little bit of the world. I always knew I’d come back home, start a business and a family. Your mama, I guess she was just finding out who she was, and what she wanted.”

“And what she didn’t want,” I said, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

He ruffled my hair. “Don’t you ever think that. She always wanted you. Always. The day she found out she was pregnant? She drove over to Atlanta, I forget which mall, and bought a bunch of maternity clothes. Had to pin the britches together, they were so
big, but she was so proud and excited to be pregnant, she couldn’t wait to have everybody know we were having a baby.”

“Then why’d she leave me?”

“I wish I knew,” he said. “I’d give anything if I could tell you, but I can’t. She was good at covering things up. As good as me, it turns out.”

“I used to wonder if she was dead,” I said flatly. “Sometimes I hoped it. Because that would mean she hadn’t meant to leave me.”

He looked shocked.

“As far as we can find out, she’s not dead, though. Austin did a computer search on that too. There hasn’t been a death certificate issued to anybody with her name or date of birth.”

“Computers can do all that?” he asked.

“And more. If I had Darvis Kane’s date of birth or Social Security number, we could do a search on him. Find out if he’s still alive. Maybe even where he is right now.”

And Jeanine, I thought. We could find out if she was still with Darvis Kane. But I didn’t say it. As it turned out, I didn’t have to.

He turned the wedding band around and around while he thought about it. “Some things, maybe, are better left alone,” he said finally.

“For you. But not for me.”

He nodded. “All right. If you’re sure you want to do this, I won’t stand in your way. All the old Murdock Motors files are down in the basement at home. You can look through them, see if you can find Kane’s personnel file. It oughta have what you’re looking for.”

“Thank you.”

“But I don’t want to know anything about that man. Nothing. You hear? I believe you when you say you need answers. I don’t understand it, not really, but I believe it. I’ve got all the answers I need. I’ve made peace with this, and I don’t want it all plowed up again. You do what you have to, Keeley. But leave me out of it.”

I said okay. What else could I say? But I didn’t believe him. He needed to know, just as much as I did.

We were almost back to the house when it occurred to me that there were a dozen more questions I needed to ask him. But it was too late. His mood had changed. As soon as he started the Tahoe’s engine and turned the car away from the park, he’d made just as determined a turn away from our painful past. Cars sped past us on the blacktop. He fiddled with the radio dial, trying to find the rest of the late-night baseball scores from the coast. His jaw was clenched, and he held the steering wheel with such tension, I thought he would wrench it off the dashboard. I’d stirred up something in my father tonight, emotions I’d forgotten he possessed. Later, I told myself. There will be time for more talks later.

He turned into the driveway and shut off the Tahoe’s engine. “Quite a night,” he said, giving me a rueful smile.

“I guess you didn’t know you’d be playing twenty questions when you asked me over for salmon loaf,” I said. “Maybe next week I’ll have to cook for myself.”

“Never,” he said quickly. “You’re my best girl. Besides, who else would eat my cooking?”

I got out of the car and fumbled in my purse for my own car keys.

He unlocked the back door and stood there for a minute, looking back at me.

“You going right home? Or do you want to go down to the basement and poke around, before I lock up for the night?”

I blinked. After he’d made it clear just how reluctant he was to talk about Darvis Kane, I’d already started planning to look through the files while he was at work in the afternoon. Now here he was, inviting me in, pain or no pain.

“It’s been a long night,” I said finally. “There’s no rush.”