The Davis Years (Indigo) (5 page)

***

Jemma sat up in bed that night, having given up on sleep. Being in the Bradens’ house earlier, having dinner with a real family, and one she knew so well, brought back hard memories of her own family. Contrasted with the Bradens, the Jenkinses had always seemed the epitome of dysfunction.

Jemma felt her way to the kitchen, and by that time her eyes had adjusted to the dark enough for her to be able to see by the shaft of moonlight coming in the window over the kitchen sink. She grabbed a glass from the dish drying rack and filled it with water.

Lynette sure knew how to run a household—into the ground. The only thing she was really good at was making rules for Jemma. Lynette had been the epitome of “do as I say and don’t you dare do as I do.” Lynette had been especially hard on Jemma when it came to boys. And she’d found out from their nosy neighbor that Jemma had snuck Emily Rose and Wendell over one night while she was out clubbing. That had only happened once. Even though Jemma and Wendell had just been friends and absolutely nothing was going on, Lynette had of course assumed the worst.

Lynette’s assumption had led to the first and one of the few times she’d hit Jemma. Lynette yelled and screamed all the time, but hitting was rare. At least until she met Smooth. She lost her temper more often and with increasingly violent results after she met him.

The thing that had finally landed that man behind bars was the thing he’d used to destroy her mother. He’d been convicted of drug conspiracy. They hadn’t been able to get him on anything else because of issues with the evidence. But at least they got him on that.

The day after Wendell and Em Rose had come over to watch movies, Jemma worried that somehow Lynette would know. She’d dropped things all day and stammered when she talked to Lynette, but other than that, things had been normal. Still, Jemma was tense.

Then her mother followed her into the kitchen when she went to clean up the dinner dishes. Her heart sank. Lynette hardly ever followed her into the kitchen after dinner.

“Had a boy over here last night, didn’t you,” Lynette said so close to her ear that Jemma jumped. There was no way that was a question, although it had been phrased as one.

She gasped, putting her hand over her heart. “Mom, you startled me,” Jemma said, her mind racing, searching for an answer to give Lynette.

“Thought you was slick.” Lynette sneered as if Jemma hadn’t said a word. She took a cigarette out of the pack and tossed the pack onto the kitchen table. Jemma hated cigarette smoke.

“I want to know why there was a boy here last night. When you was s’posed to be watching ’Monte. What kind of example is that for him?”

Hypocrite!
Jemma screamed in her head. But she took a deep breath. That kind of attitude would get her nowhere good with Lynette.

“Um, all I was doing was watching TV,” Jemma said.

“With a boy all up on you.” Lynette blew cigarette smoke directly into Jemma’s face. “Don’t you lie to me. Junie saw him sneaking and creeping back and forth through the woods.” Lynette’s voice was calm. Too calm.

Junie. One of Lynette’s friends. Of course, that woman hadn’t had anything better to do than spy on Jemma. She thought they’d been careful, but apparently they hadn’t been careful enough.

Lynette was harder on Jemma about boys than anything else. The one time Jemma had asked Lynette about sex, Lynette had told her that she could catch AIDS just from kissing a boy and she didn’t want to know what could happen if she did more. Jemma vaguely remembered horror stories involving elements of leprosy and Ebola. Lynette had also told Jemma that she wasn’t getting an HPV shot “so she could go running around, lifting her skirt up all the time.” Whereas other parents might ask their children if they had a boyfriend or girlfriend, Lynette gave Jemma the evil eye and told her that “she better not be talking to none of that little trash out there.”

“What you doing bringing boys in my house?” Lynette said. She had Jemma backed up against the sink.

“We were watching TV. That’s it. I promise.” Jemma cringed as the glowing cigarette butt came near her arm. Lynette had never touched her in anger, but Jemma knew she was really pissed. Lynette ground the butt out on the side of the sink. She was afraid to bring up the fact that Emily Rose had been there, too. Lynette would have probably considered that back talking.

“Hmph,” was all Lynette said. She then backed away, calling over her shoulder, “Come with me.”

Jemma reluctantly followed Lynette into living room. Lynette sat on one end of the couch and she sat on the opposite end.

“I know I don’t always do right by y’all, you, your sister, your brother. But I’ve been all alone and it’s hard.” Lynette’s tone changed. She was talking to Jemma for once and not talking at her or through her.

“I know, Mom.”

“No, you don’t, girl. These men out here ain’t after love. I figured that out too late. Things went real wrong for me real fast. And you know me and your grandmamma couldn’t get along. I didn’t know what else to do but get in more and more trouble, I guess. Never finished school. Never did anything. I don’t want that for y’all. Never did. And Jemma, you can be something more than what I was,” Lynette said. “What I am.”

Jemma sat back on the couch, shocked at this rare glimpse of Lynette as a person. This person almost made her feel like she had a mother. She was caught off guard. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have been lulled into a false sense of security.

“I’m not gonna do anything stupid. Wendell is just a friend. Really,” Jemma said, thinking her mom had no idea how true that was.

“Wendell. Huh. What kind of name is that?” Her mom laughed. Jemma laughed, too, mainly because she was laughing. “Don’t you ever let that happen again,” her mom said, an edge coming back into her tone.

“No, ma’am,” Jemma said.

“I do try to do right by you girls.” Her mom sighed, dropping her head into her hands. “You and your sister. It’s different for girls, you know. Always will be.”

“I just wish it didn’t have to be this hard. Sometimes—sometimes I feel like I have to be a mom to everyone here. Including you.” Jemma didn’t know what made her say that. Maybe she thought they were having a breakthrough moment. Like on the talk shows. She should have remembered that TV was a fantasy world.

“What did you say?” Lynette stood.

“I just meant—”

“Don’t you ever sass me.” And quick, before Jemma ever saw the hand coming, she was slapped across the mouth. Jemma’s hands flew to her face. Tears filled her eyes. The fact that Lynette hit her hurt her much more than the stinging of the slap. She ran out of the room. Lynette followed, cussing her the whole way. Jemma tried to shut her bedroom door and Lynette shoved it open.

“Mo—”

“I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. Disrespecting me. Lying all the time. Think you grown, huh? Who keeps this roof over your head?”

Uncle Sam and myself
, she thought. Aloud she screeched, “I’m sorry!”

“You don’t know sorry yet.” Lynette threw things around the room as she spoke. “And clean this room up sometime.”

Jemma’s hand strayed to the spot near her mouth where Lynette had hit her and she thought about something her aunt—with whom she’d lived in South Carolina—had once said during one of the few conversations she and Jemma had about Lynette.

“Lynette? Well, I think the bitterness ate that woman right on up,” her aunt had said. Was that what had made Lynette so awful? Jemma didn’t want to end up like that. That was another reason why she had to be over it. She wouldn’t let the bitterness swallow her whole. No bitterness, no fear, none of it would be allowed to hold her back.

Jemma thought back to the night when she told Davis about Lynette hitting her. How his hands had felt over hers. The comfort in his voice. Then, the way he’d shared his own secret with her—that sometimes his dad had knocked him around when he was drunk before Davis got old enough to hit back. And after that, his dad only messed with him occasionally and only then until he was reminded that Davis was stronger, faster, and his youth had grown from a disadvantage into a weapon.

That night, she’d thought something would change between them. That there would be a bond between them that wouldn’t allow Davis to pull away from her anymore. But she’d been wrong. Davis had gone right back to ignoring her whenever it wasn’t just the two of them. And her heart had continued breaking for him. Best to let that memory and everything associated with it go. Too bad she wasn’t as sure she could do that as she’d been a few days ago.

Thursday morning, Jemma decided to break in her newest pair of running shoes some more. She tried to be careful with her money most of the time, especially since she was used to not having much of it—she could almost hear Lynette’s voice snapping in her ear and demanding her paycheck—but new running gear was her weakness. Especially shoes. She often broke down and bought new ones whenever she ran across a pair she liked even if she hadn’t run out of mileage on her current ones.

Later that day, she would meet Emily Rose at the party store in Fredericksburg to pick up some last-minute things for the reception. But she didn’t have to be there until noon. So early that morning she decided to go for a run and then make Mary breakfast. She wanted it to be ready when Mary got home from her shift at the Gas and Go. Since there were no running trails nearby, she’d run a few miles down the road from Mary’s house and turned back.

Jemma stared at the endless expanse of trees on either side of the road. She concentrated on the sound of her even breathing and the soles of her shoes hitting the gravel that covered the road’s shoulder. Those simple rhythms always comforted her, and she needed to be soothed at the moment.

Unfortunately, thoughts of Davis crept up on her yet again. He’d been her entire world, and then he’d made her universe black. She’d given him the power to do that, that was her fault, but she’d never give it to him again. That didn’t change the fact that she could still feel his pulse under her fingertips from when she’d grabbed his wrist in the parking lot. She glanced down at her fingers. She half expected them to be glowing red where they’d touched his skin.

The time they’d been almost friends in high school had started up because of Davis’s idiot clique. They’d pulled a particularly horrible prank on her one day at lunch. It ended with gravy on the seat of Jemma’s jeans. Out of the group, Davis had always been nicest to her. After school that day, Davis had come to the gas station during her shift to apologize for what his friends had done. They’d talked more than they ever had before. Everybody knew about Lynette, and eventually the conversation had made its way there. He knew enough even if he didn’t know the whole story. He’d told her that they had more in common than she thought.

Soon after that, he started visiting the store at least once a week. Then, he gave her rides home from work some nights. She made him stop at the gate to the apartment complex so Lynette wouldn’t know. Lynette was usually passed out by the time she got home, but she could never be too careful when it came to that woman. Jemma wasn’t in the business of poking angry bears with sharpened sticks.

Over the weeks they spent together, he told her about his alcoholic dad and how his mother had left town when he was four. Soon after, the rides home started including detours to the parking lot of an abandoned building on the edge of town. And then talking turned into kissing. Before she knew it, she was in love, although she knew such a thing could only end badly. And it had. With him dating Tara.

Right when Smooth wrecked everything, Davis told her they could never be together. And she was supposed to forget that later when he allegedly changed his mind and said he loved her? She’d been a fool, but not a big enough one to buy that story. He’d probably done it out of pity for her after her mom and brother died. Not that it mattered anymore. Whatever she and Davis had done, whatever quasi-friendship they’d shared, that was the past. She’d moved on to South Carolina where she’d had school and work and an okay sort of life.

She was supposed to be renewed. Successful. She needed to start acting like it again. It was as if she’d forgotten how as soon as she’d gotten back to Derring. Enough of that.

But there was another problem with being back in Derring. That problem was the other reason she’d come home.

She slowed to a walk as she entered Mary’s driveway.

Jemma had bought her train ticket to Jacksonville at the same time she bought one to Derring. She’d scheduled her departure date for the day after her interview with the parole board. She wanted to be out of town before Smooth’s interview with the parole examiner.

The parole board had notified her of his upcoming hearing because she’d signed up to receive notice of changes in his parole status. Any concerned citizen could do it, and she’d felt she qualified since she was the daughter of his dead girlfriend. She’d seen and heard a lot of things back then and felt like she definitely had something to say that the board needed to hear. In fact, she’d been called to testify against him at his trial based on things she’d seen and some of the things he’d said to her. She hadn’t seen him since the day of his sentencing hearing.

She remembered the day she’d gone to the mail room near her dorm and found the other letter in her mailbox. Every time she thought of that day, she went cold all over again, but it was especially bad now that she was back in Derring, so close to that apartment and the graves she hadn’t visited since the funeral.