Red Clover (14 page)

“You had Wayne at sixteen?”

“Well, I was seventeen by then. Anyway, my father was...well, we didn’t know where he was, and my mother drank a lot, so Frankie helped me through the whole thing, and after Mom died, I moved in with Frankie, and she’s helped me raise him.”

That explained something about Francine’s protective demeaner he had observed. Lee thought about having had the luxury of both parents, nannies, nursemaids, and tutors, and yet he still had a difficult time growing up. How on earth had she managed?

“That had to be hard to do,” he said. “Where was DeRam? He didn’t help you?”

“At the time, I thought we’d get married as soon as he found out I was pregnant. But, instead, the asshole booked it.”

“Booked it?”

“Vanished. He left the sheriff’s office for a while. I heard he was living in Wisconsin somewhere. Frankie convinced me I was better off without him.”

Neither of them spoke for a long moment. Lee hoped she would continue with the story, especially about how Travis came to be. He couldn’t imagine how DeRam could be Travis’s father too, not after what CJ had just told him.

“Anyway, eventually I got the job at Deer Bottom and found this house to rent, and I thought I was getting my life back together when the jerk shows up at my door one night.” She hesitated. “And he’d been drinking.”

Her demeanor told Lee she especially didn’t like talking about this part of her story.

“He told me all this stuff about how sorry he was for leaving me, that he still loved me and wanted to make a go of it. Be a real family. A whole lot of shit, that’s all it was, but I saw through it and told him no.”

“That must have taken some fortitude.”

“Some what?”

“Guts.”

“Yeah.” She paused. “But it didn’t work.” She spoke the next sentence in slow, tight words. “Bern doesn’t take no for an answer. He...forced himself on me.”

“What?”

“I was so scared. Little Wayne was in bed upstairs, and all I could think of was he would hear the commotion and come downstairs and see us. Afterwards, I ended up kicking Bern...well, where it hurts, and he left.”

“And then there was Travis?”

CJ bowed her head and responded with a nod.

Lee reached over and touched her arm.

“I didn’t like that guy the minute I laid eyes on him, but now... What exactly did he say to you back there?”

“He heard Travis’s name on the police radio and got to the hospital just in time to see us leave together.”

“What did he say to you?”

“He went in to see Travis and—”

“What did he say to you?”

“He said if he ever catches me with you again...”

“What?”

“You’ll get hurt.”

“He can’t make threats like that.”

“Well, he just did.”

“I caught him on my property, you know.”

“You did?”

Lee told her about the time the sheriff cuffed him and brought him into the station.

“Like
you
were trespassing on
his
property?”

“Something like that.”

“Asshole.”

“Let me ask you something, CJ. Is it common knowledge that he’s the father of your children?”

“I don’t know. Obviously, Frankie knows, but other than her, I never told anyone. I’ve always just told people that their father isn’t in the picture anymore. And he made it clear when I told him I was pregnant the first time that if I ever told anyone he was the father, I’d be sorry. But you know how gossip is.”

“Is his name on their birth certificates?”

“On Wayne’s, not on Travis’s.”

“Do they know?”

“No.”

“What else did he say to you in my car?”

She stared out the side window.

“Tell me everything, CJ. I need to know everything.”

“He said we belonged together, we could still make a good life together.”

“And you said what?”

“I told him to go to hell.”

“Anything else?”

CJ shook her head.

“What do you want to do?”

“Can you take me to work?”

“To get your car so you can go home, or are you going to finish your shift?”

“No, I’m going to go home. I’m too upset to work.”

Lee took her back to the inn and watched as she walked to her car. When he saw her pluck a white piece of paper from underneath her windshield wiper, he got out of his car and approached her.

“What does it say?”

She handed it to him.

DITCH THE RICH BOY

She shot him a guarded smile. “You didn’t tell me you were rich, Socrates.”

Lee smiled back. “You didn’t ask.”

12 | “I Kid You Not”

Lee tried to wrap his brain around CJ’s story about DeRam. Things like that didn’t happen in his family, or if they did, they weren’t discussed. No one in his family talked as openly as CJ did on any subject, and the more he came to know CJ, the more he thought that might be why he liked her. But not in a romantic way, at least he didn’t think so. Either way, he was now uncertain as to how much he should get to know her, for both his and her safety.

After dinner, when Lee went to the trunk of his car to remove the case of beer he had bought earlier, he discovered the shriveled plant he had uprooted from his property the previous month. Once inside, he retrieved a box of college textbooks from the back of his closet and pulled out a plant-identification guide that focused on root systems.

Nothing matched, but the deterioration of the specimen made it hard to tell. He wished Dr. Rad lived closer. He would know. He found it hard to believe his uncle had had anything to do with planting any kind of crop. But regardless of who had planted it, why would someone pick such a remote corner of the property?

* * *

With the end of the year fast approaching, Lee had to decide how he would spend Thanksgiving and Christmas. He was fairly sure he was expected to spend both holidays with his family in their Evanston home but felt this could be an opportune time to change those expectations. However, after careful consideration, and given the fact that he couldn’t come up with a reasonable excuse for not doing so, Lee decided to go home for Thanksgiving—but not stay overnight. It meant being on the road a long time for such a short visit—an hour and a half each way, assuming the roads were clear—but Lee felt the compromise was worth it.

His mother made his decision about where he would spend Christmas easier when she told Lee the family would be spending the holiday in their New York apartment that year. He explained to her that he would have a difficult time getting away, being in the throes of planning the new house, an explanation she seemed to rreadily accept.

* * *

Eager to proceed with plans for his house, Lee met his architect at the property and told him that he and Earl had talked about an A-frame.

“I like designing them, and it looks like you have the perfect setting for one here, but some people, women in particular, don’t like them.”

“Why not?”

“There’s usually just a ladder to the upstairs loft, which is normally the master bedroom. Women like stairs.”

“Hmm. Well, that wouldn’t bother me.”

“Why don’t you come back with me to my office, so we can talk about the scope of the project. Then I can price it out and draw up a contract.”

After three weeks, Lee had enough of a plan for Stonebugger to sign off on, which he did. The fifteen-hundred-square-foot two-story A-frame house was to be situated in the northwest corner of the property, with a large loft master bedroom and bathroom on the second floor that had expansive windows facing southeast, giving Lee the broadest view of his land. A combination living room and dining room, two small bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bath would occupy the first floor.

The house would be built on a slight rise adjacent to the narrow stream that ran through that corner of the property. Tall pines provided a perfect backdrop, the blank canvas he needed for landscaping the rest of the area surrounding the structure.

* * *

Anxious to tell someone about his house plans, Lee drove to Deer Bottom Inn. But once in the parking lot, he had half a mind to turn the car around and return home without going in. He vacillated between being mindful of DeRam’s stand and stay away from CJ and ignoring him. If he knew what CJ thought of him, it would help. If she thought of him as just some gawky misfit who didn’t have anyone else to talk to, he would have no problem backing away. But if what they had was a burgeoning friendship, something he particularly valued, then why should he let some jerk get between them? Okay, so the jerk happened to be the father of her kids, but still...

He walked in and saw CJ behind the bar. Luckily, there was one stool open at the counter, and he plopped himself down on it.

“What’s cookin’, Soc?”

“Not much, CJ. Not much.”

She flashed him one of her sideways smiles. “Then why do you have that shit-eatin’ grin on your face?”

She had set the tone for the conversation, so he felt safe in proceeding. He reached out for the beer that was sliding down the bar toward him. “When you have a spare minute, I want to show you something.”

CJ’s spare minute didn’t come until close to a half hour later. She wiped her hands on her apron and leaned up against the bar in front of him.

“So, whatcha got?”

Lee took out a reduced copy of the plans for the A-frame and watched her face as she flipped through the pages. “What do you think?”

“Yours?”

“It will be. I’m having it built on my property in Harvard.”

“Pretty spiffy.”

“Thanks.”

“When do you start?”

“The contractor thinks he can start in June.”

“No kidding.”

“I kid you not.” He had heard Johnny Carson say that on the
Tonight Show
once and surprised himself at being able to actually fit it into a conversation.

CJ shot him a smirk before she went to wait on other customers.

* * *

Every time Lee opened the trunk of his car, the scraggly roots he had pulled up from the corner of his property reminded him he wanted to get them identified. He decided to pay Dr. Rad a visit after seeing his family on Easter.

The closer Lee got to his parent’s house on Easter morning, the more his stomach tensed up—like being seasick but without the sea. Everyone in his immediate family would be there for the noon meal, and at some point, he would have to tell them of his plans to build the A-frame. He practiced several possible speeches while he drove.

“Hi, everyone. Guess what. I’m building an A-frame house on the property Uncle Nelson left me. Isn’t that just grand?”

“You know that property Uncle Nelson left me? Oh...you didn’t know about that? Well, he left me a piece of property, and I decided to build a house on it.”

“Hey, you elitists I call my family. I’m gonna do something I’m sure you would never do in a million years because you would think it’s beneath you. And stupid. I’m going to build a fifteen-hundred-square-foot A-frame house on that land in Harvard, Illinois, that Uncle Nelson left me, in the middle of nowhere, and I’m going to live happily ever after in it. Now put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

As he pulled into the driveway, the sheer sight of their three-story brick Georgian-style mansion caused bile to rise up into his stomach. Inside were thirteen rooms that had been furnished by the best decorators money could buy, each one holding painful memories no amount of money could extinguish.

A maid let him into the house. The first person he saw was his mother who was fiddling with an elaborate orchid arrangement in the front foyer.

“They should have been more generous with the orchids for this arrangement. Have you lost weight, dear? You look painfully thin,” she asked Lee without looking up.

A flash of his father’s image appeared and then disappeared behind her in the hallway. Before Lee could say as much as hello to him, he was gone.

“No, Mother. In fact I think I’ve gained a few pounds.”
Thanks to beer and the wonderful junk food I’ve been getting at Deer Bottom.

“Why don’t you join the others in the front parlor. I’ll be there in a minute.”

He braced himself and entered the parlor. Nelson and his wife, Yvonne, were sitting on a French provincial sofa on one side of the enormous coffee table, with Bennett and his wife, Daphne, on the other. His father sat in one of the Queen Anne high-backed chairs. When his mother entered the room a minute later, she sat next to her husband. Lee suspected his brothers’ collective five children were being kept somewhere out of sight by a nanny or two. Everyone sipped ice tea. He listened while his brothers talked about their wonderful, successful lives as their parents beamed with pride.

“It’s just a small facility. They can accommodate a hundred cots,” said Bennett about his newest project, a shelter on the south side of Chicago in one of the poorest Hispanic neighborhoods.

“Perhaps we could work together, Bennett,” his mother chimed in. “As you know, I’m on the board of the Southside Food Depository. Why don’t you call me on Monday, and we’ll discuss it.”

“It may go down in history as one of the most lucrative mergers in the pharmaceutical industry,” said Nelson, talking about his latest project at work.

“And now we can buy that little summer cottage in Door County we’ve been eying,” said Yvonne. Lee pictured the size of the “little” summer cottage to which she was referring—probably five times the size of his soon-to-be main residence.

“Did we tell you Odessa was selected to represent her class at the regional math competition in Springfield?”

Of course she was. She’s a Winekoop.

After everyone had had a turn telling the others about their latest feats, all eyes turned to Lee, his father’s stare the most intense.

“I suppose you’re all wondering what I’ve been up to.”

He decided to dive in...headfirst.

“I’m building a house in the town of Harvard, Illinois.”

He waited for reaction...any reaction.

His mother broke the silence. “On Uncle Nelson’s property?”