Ties That Bind (4 page)

“Well, only when you
are
being one.”

“The world according to Sam Montgomery…”

“D-Ray, Lind Harris is a first-rate creep, and has been since junior high. He spent half of his time trying to cop a feel from girls who couldn’t stand him, and the other half jacking off to yearbook pictures of girls who couldn’t stand him.”

“You talk like a guy.”

“Comes from working with them all day, every day. Harris is the epitome of the nerdy creeper who becomes a cop purely as a power trip. You know they are out there. You see them every day.”

“Yeah, Harris is a creep, but he’s not a bad cop, from what I can see. And you’re holding junior-high shit against him. I mean, come on, get real, Sam. Aren’t we a little too old for that bitchy girl stuff?”

“If I grabbed your balls during a game of tag football, during a Mutual activity, wouldn’t you be pissed?”

“At fourteen? Hell no. The reaction would have been exactly the opposite. And besides, you don’t have balls.”

Sam sighed deeply. “I give up. I don’t like him. Never have, never will.”

“You’re such a girl.”

“Make up your mind.”

“Oh, I always knew you were a girl. I’ve known you for a really long time. You just think you have something to prove.”

The waitress. a petite, lithe redhead, young and nubile—barely out of high school—delivered their food. She looked familiar, Sam thought. She probably came from a family that Sam knew from some arena of Kanesville’s small-town life.

She stared at the girl as she walked away, trying to place her, knowing the reality was she did not want to look at her food or take the requisite bite she always forced upon herself. The girl wasn’t that familiar.

The greasy, starchy aroma assaulted Sam’s nostrils and made her stomach roil.

Sam stared down at the mountainous hamburger D-Ray would be eating as soon as he figured enough time had passed for him to reach over and grab the food she’d ordered. Why was she here? She wasn’t hungry. D-Ray was, of course. D-Ray was always hungry. In many ways.

Sam remembered back when her sister and D-Ray were an item, only behind closed doors of course, since Amy and Sam’s father didn’t approve of D-Ray’s mixed background and his lack of a male role model.

She was little then, eight years younger than D-Ray and Amy and seven years younger than Callie. A tagalong. That’s all she really remembered. D-Ray and Amy trying to ditch her and Callie covering for them.

Tall and solid, and dark-skinned year-round, D-Ray was a testament to his father’s Tongan heritage. D-Rey’s mother was a small, slight, blond woman with a bitter tongue and a smile like battery acid. Sam assumed that the mostly easygoing, laconic D-Ray took after his father, whom she had never met. D-Ray liked to say that his father, who had been brought over to Utah from the Tongan islands by the Mormons more than forty years before, had returned to his roots and was drinking mai tais and exchanging leis with local wahines somewhere in the Hawaiian Islands. That he was from Tonga made no difference to D-Ray. He didn’t know much about his heritage, but everyone knew about Hawaii. He’d grabbed ahold of that like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. The truth was, he had no idea where his father was. D-Ray’s teeth had been straightened by an orthodontist, his mother grumbling about how no son of hers was going to look like a common “native.”

Now he smiled a lot. But there was bitterness and anger hidden within.

“Remember when you and Amy had a thing?”

“What?”

“You know, weren’t you a couple?”

“We were kids.”

“Yeah, but you liked each other.”

“Like I said, we were kids.”

D-Ray stopped talking, tightened his lips, and pulled Sam’s plate toward him. He picked up the hamburger and took a huge bite. She knew this body language. He didn’t intend to say more, but this went deeper. Maybe he still felt something for her sister, who’d disappeared years ago—literally. Sam hadn’t heard from her in years. Her oldest sister, Susanna, wouldn’t discuss Amy, and their father acted like there had never been two girls named Callie and Amelia.

Sometimes Sam wondered if she was imagining things. Or lived in an alternate universe.

“Just for once, I’d like someone to tell me the truth,” she muttered.

“You can’t handle the truth,” D-Ray shot back—between bites—in his very worst Jack Nicholson impression.

Probably not.

Sam hated being one of those women who had “something to prove.” But it didn’t change the fact that she was, indeed, one of those women. It also didn’t help that her blond hair was immaculate, complete with platinum and dark brown highlights touched up every six weeks, or that she never left the house without makeup, even to work out or just get the mail. Others thought she was vain and shallow. She knew she was using her appearance like ceremonial war paint—fighting off the demons.

Today’s tragedy did not help her status.

D-Ray ate and Sam watched.

“Well, hello, Sammy,” trilled a familiar voice.

Sam looked up, and her stomach lurched just a little. “Hello, Sister Miller,” she answered dutifully as the blue-haired maven of her old ward—and neighborhood—tottered up to the table. The familiar pangs of humiliation roiled through Sam’s already rebelling stomach. This woman knew all Sam’s family’s secrets. No skeleton in any Montgomery closet was hidden from Eliza Miller, whose husband had been ward bishop the year Sam’s family imploded.

“Well, I swear you are just skin and bones! You need to put some meat on. Are you ill? How is that nice exciting job going? I hear you had a horrible case today, just horrible. Are you okay?” Sister Miller asked without pausing for breath, patting Sam’s hand with her dry, wrinkled one.

Thankfully, Sam didn’t have time to answer.

“Mom?” It was one of the Miller children—Carly or Karen or Christy; Sam could never keep them straight, especially now they were grown. “We really need to get you home so you can watch your show before bedtime.”

“Bedtime,” Sister Miller said with a sigh. “The indignity. I used to tell
her
when it was bedtime.” She jabbed a bony finger at her daughter, who frowned, even while bouncing a baby on her hip. “Did you say hi to Sammy, Karen? You remember Sammy Montgomery. They lived just down the street from us. In fact, her parents still live in the same house.”

“I remember,” Karen said. She didn’t say hello. She just glared for a moment, her face round and pudgy, her eyes tired, and wrinkles lining her face. She wore ill-fitting capris and a modest floral top, neither of which hid the “baby weight” she was undoubtedly still trying to get rid of. Her hair was slightly unkempt, not helped by the baby who kept yanking at it.

Karen gave Sam another angry look, then turned on her heel and headed to the door, her mother left sighing and shuffling after her.

I’m still the pariah, even after all these years.

Sam supposed she couldn’t blame Karen for her disdain. In the back of Sam’s mind she had a vague memory of holding the vain childhood-Karen’s beloved curly brown locks over the toilet in the girls’ bathroom at the wardhouse and threatening to flush—all sparked by a comment about Sam’s unruly, uncombed short hair and faded hand-me-down dress.

But back then those sorts of comments had been commonplace. When Sam was six, her big sister Callie hung herself. In the wake of the tragedy that changed all of their lives forever, the mother who would have combed Sam’s hair and made sure she fit in with the other girls became a shell, leaving Sam and her sisters to fend for themselves. The result was general chaos—and lots of teasing.

Sam watched Karen’s broad backside as she walked out the door, and it made her smile. Then frown, as she realized how petty she was being. Karen hadn’t aged well, but in her youth she had always been immaculate and pristine, as was befitting a bishop’s daughter. Of course, two of the Miller girls had gotten pregnant in high school and ended up in adulthood a lot earlier than planned. Sam didn’t remember if Karen was one of the two Miller girls who “married young,” but it gave her a certain satisfaction in knowing that she looked better now—the tables had turned.

As a child, she’d spent years defending her family with her fists and her words. Grown-ups in the ward tended to “cut her slack,” but the kids became her bitter enemies. Sam preferred the hatred. She could barely tolerate the pity that oozed from the pores of their parents.

People like Sister Miller, to whom she now waved a grateful good-bye.

She turned back to find D-Ray finishing the soup—since he had quickly downed the hamburger.

“I am not eating with you anymore,” she said crossly.

“You wouldn’t eat it anyway,” he said, flashing his enigmatic grin, teeth white and straight.

SIX

“Hi, Momma,” Sam said as she walked into the kitchen of her childhood home. Her mother only stared vacantly out the window next to the table, watching something fascinating—something so enthralling that she couldn’t even be bothered to notice her youngest daughter standing next to her.

When would the hope die? The hope that she would respond, in some way, any way. Probably never, as long as that ragamuffin little girl still existed inside her.

“So, did you have a good day?” Sam asked. “Mine wasn’t great. Had to go on a death call. Stake President Malone’s son. Really sad case. He was only seventeen.”

Her mother didn’t move her eyes from the invisible panorama. Her lips were slightly parted, her eyes mostly unfocused.

“Please don’t talk about things like that around your mother, Samantha,” her father said, coming into the kitchen dressed in his “yardies,” clothes he used to work outside, tending to his vegetable garden and fruit trees. He leaned down and kissed her mother on the cheek. There was no response. Not even a flinch.

“So, did you drop by for dinner? I’m afraid we haven’t made anything. We’re not very hungry tonight.”

“No, Dad, just checking in. How’s it going? How’s Mom doing?”

Sam didn’t want to tell him that watching Jeremiah Malone’s mother descend into a dark madness propelled by grief—a pathway the woman had been traveling long before today—had brought to mind her own mother and her less-than-sound mental condition.

“Well, we went to see Dr. Call yesterday, didn’t we, Ruthie? And he says her blood pressure is okay and her heart sounds good. He encouraged me to get her walking more, but you know what that’s like. She doesn’t much care for exercise, do you, Ruthie?”

Sam’s father had used this pattern of speech for a long time, asking her mother questions as though any moment she was going to look him squarely in the eye and answer, “Yes, Gordon, I really don’t like exercise.”

But Ruthie Montgomery never did reply.

More than one doctor had suggested hospitalization and commitment. Sam’s father refused. Instead, he pretended as though her mother had an extended case of laryngitis, as though she didn’t require around-the-clock care and wear an adult diaper.

Sam’s father looked gaunt and troubled. He had for as long as Sam could remember, but age and fatigue were setting in, his shoulders more rounded, his walk slower, his feet closer to the floor. As though any moment now he would just begin to shuffle his way out of this world. Would that change if her mother finally woke up and answered?

That was the real reason Sam was here tonight, late, after an exhausting day. Actually, “exhausting” did not do it justice. The weariness filled her bones, and she pulled out a kitchen chair and sat heavily.

“She doesn’t hear us, Dad. She didn’t hear your question, and she didn’t hear my story about my day. I might as well have told her that I ate my cereal with Mountain Dew this morning.”

“You don’t know that, Sam. No one has ever proven she doesn’t hear you.”

She sighed and decided to ignore the obvious, just like he had been doing for years. “Do you want me to make you some dinner?”

“Oh no, we just ate. Like I said, we’re not very hungry tonight.”

Sam knew that “just ate” probably referred to some scrambled eggs that morning. Her father’s thin frame attested to the fact that he was no longer capable of caring for her mother, let alone himself—although he had taken on thinking and speaking for her long ago. But he wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t let go, perhaps for the same reasons she no longer existed. She was his link to the past. All they had left were the memories—and each other.

He wouldn’t even leave her, except for brief periods once a week, when the sisters from the ward would come “visit” with Ruthie while Sam’s father went to the Golden Age Senior Center. There he took classes on fly tying, computers, or dancing—all things he would never do or use.

“Would you like some chamomile tea, Sam?” He puttered around the kitchen, his old short-sleeved work shirt too big for his constantly shrinking frame. Sam watched as he poured water into two mugs, then heated them in the microwave. His hands were calm and steady and showed no signs of the palsy affecting many others of his generation. His full head of silver hair also made him look younger than he was, but his face was a dead giveaway. Lines and wrinkles and heaviness to the jowls spoke of a long and rough life. The only place he didn’t have excess wrinkles was around his lips, because he rarely smiled. And why would he?

Sam tried to remember a time when her father had been happy, smiling and laughing, and was surprised to discover she had no such memory. She thought of him as gentle but definitely dour.

When the microwave beeped, he pulled the mugs out by the handles and set them on the counter. He opened a cupboard and peered inside but didn’t appear to find what he was looking for. “I’ve been making chamomile tea for your mother every night. It calms her. Helps her get a good night’s sleep, doesn’t it, Ruthie? And there’s no caffeine in it, you know. It’s herb tea. Not against the Word of Wisdom. Now I know I just bought some when I went to the store two days ago. What happened to it?”

The LDS Church had a strict code against “hot drinks,” including tea and coffee. Over the years, that had been interpreted to mean drinks containing caffeine. It certainly never covered hot chocolate, which was served at any Mormon function in the winter. Sam had long ago learned the interpretation depended on the person interpreting. For her father, that was always the prophets, and her father would never do anything that went against the teachings of the Mormon prophets. Since they had decided the evil in hot drinks was caffeine, or so he believed, he had been steadfast in his rule against it. Herbal tea was something totally different.