Too Far to Say Far Enough: A Novel (29 page)

The steady sarcasm was not in line with the shaking terror going on inside me. This man was far more menacing than the typical redneck wife-beater. His iron-gray eyes were as hard as fists, and his lower lip flattened over the upper one and held it like a vice. I’d seen a lot of hate in the last year and he personified it.

PleaseGodpleaseGodpleaseGod—

You’ve stood up to more professionally vicious men than this, Allison. Go …

“Are you thinking of adding me to the list of assault charges, Elgin?” I said.

His arm lashed out and slammed me aside. From the ground I could see both of his hands already shaped to fit Brenda’s neck.

“What did you tell her?” he screamed into her face.

“Nothing!”

“How else does she know my name, you—”

The profanity spewed upward as Elgin went down, buckling from the kick I delivered right behind his knees. I didn’t have another move planned as I scrambled up, but Kade was suddenly there with his foot planted in the middle of Elgin’s chest and his hand reaching under his jacket. I forced myself not to look around for Flannery and kept my eyes, and my prayers, on Kade. This wasn’t going to be a fair fight. Kade might be scrappy, but he was no match for this behemoth, in either size or rage.

“I told him I called the police,” I said.

“Great minds think alike,” Kade said. “I did too. Looks like you got double trouble coming up, buddy.”

Elgin shoved Kade’s leg out of the way and got to his feet. Kade, hand still inside his jacket, didn’t back down. If he was trying to make Elgin think he was carrying a gun, it seemed to be working.

“You better be off my property before I get back,” Elgin said, though how I had no idea, because his lower lip was almost to his nostrils.

With that he stormed back to the Mustang and came just short of breaking all the windows as he slammed the door and peeled out of the driveway. All I could think as he burned rubber in the opposite direction from the way Flannery had run was
ThankyouGodthankyouGodthankyouGod.

“Where is she?” I said to Kade.

“In the car. I parked it around the corner and a couple of blocks down. She promised she’d stay there.”

I nodded and turned to Brenda. She was no longer in a fetal position, but she was clearly shutting down. Although she shook head to toe, her eye was guarded and her chin tilted upward in a way that was all too familiar to me.

“You shouldn’t stay here, you and Flannery,” I said. “You can both come back with us to St. Augustine, and we’ll protect you until he’s locked up.”

“He’ll find us.”

“You don’t understand, Brenda. We can—”

“No, you can’t! No one can!”

This was just like my conversation with Flannery, and yet this woman was doing something her daughter hadn’t. She was backing toward her front door with a determination in her eyes she must have had to scrape the bottom to find.

“You take her with you,” Brenda said. “And don’t bring her back here until I call you.”

“Please,” I said.

“That’s the only way. Take her!”

“Okay.” I took a step closer but she put up her hands. “I’ll take her, but I’m going to need for you to sign the paperwork saying you give your permission for me to keep her with me.”

I stopped, because her gaze had left me and gone to Kade, who was just closing his phone.

“Who did you call?” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Did you call the police? Really?”

She didn’t give Kade a chance to answer. Stiff-arming us both, she backed to the steps and half-ran, half-crawled up them and into her house. I heard three deadbolts click into place, locking her away.

Kade smacked himself in the forehead. “I totally blew that.”

“She wasn’t going to sign anyway.” I nodded at his phone. “Did you call the police?”

“No. I took her picture. Maybe the broken nose will get us probable cause for an arrest warrant for her old man if she does decide to press charges.”

“Like that’s going to happen,” I said.

“Come on,” he said. “We better get back to Flannery.”

When we were almost to the corner I sneaked a glance at him. Despite the heat and the scene from
SmackDown
, he was impressively calm.

“You sure know how to bluff,” I said. “Flashing your wallet like a cop the other night. Acting like you were packing heat today.”

His eyes shifted away. “I
am
packing heat.”

I skidded at the end of someone’s driveway. “Are you
serious
?”

“I wasn’t going to use it. I just thought it might make a good visual aid in case we got into trouble.”

“I don’t even know where to put this. You have a permit, right?”

“Yes, I have a permit. And Nick Kent helped me pick it out and spent some time with me at the range. It’s a Glock, same as the kind he carries.”

I shuddered. “I don’t care what kind it is. I hate guns.”

“So do I,” he said. “The car’s about two blocks down.”

That gave me approximately two minutes to get back into Flannery mode and figure out what I could say to her. The few words I did come up with fled when Kade’s Mazda came into view, and there was no silhouette of Flannery in the backseat.

“Kade, she’s gone,” I said.

“Nah. She’s just doing what I told her to do.”

“Which was?”

“Lay low.”

Indeed, she was about as low as she could get behind the front seat with a beach towel over her head. The mixture of anger and disappointment and fear I could almost smell in the car was like a simmering bad stew.

Kade opened the rear door. “You okay?”

She gave him a deadpan look from the floor. “How could I possibly be okay?”

“All right—stupid question.”

“I don’t want to talk about this right now. Except to say one thing.”

I stuck in a hand to help her get herself untangled and onto the seat. “Go ahead,” I said.

“I knew I couldn’t trust her,” she said. “I can’t trust anybody.”

“Really? We’re taking you home with us, Flan. We’re not leaving you there.”

“But what’s going to happen now? Don’t you have to turn me over to DCF?”

“Have you seen me do that so far?” I said.

Then I held my breath. It was the best I could do without totally lying to her. If she pushed this any further, she’d have me against the wall.

“Whatever,” she said.

We rode all the way to the F. A. Café in silence, except for the occasional squeak of Kade’s hands gripping the steering wheel. Fortunately they couldn’t hear the tortured groans in my soul.

No one really knew why the funky little joint on Anastasia Island was called the F. A. Café. I was told it stood for First Attempt, since so many surfers made their initial try at the sport on the tame waves of St. Augustine Beach. The name didn’t quite fit my situation when we joined the HOGs there. I was way beyond my first attempt to deal with Flannery. More like the fifteenth, and at that point I had no idea what my next one was going to be.

Still, if a person was feeling bummed, this was the place to come to. It was no bigger than my side porch and was dotted with brightly colored fish-shaped tables. There was just plain stuff attached to every vertical surface: old license plates, almost-funny signs, bumper stickers supporting a myriad of causes, some of them contradicting all the others. It was like the proprietors hung up anything anyone wanted them to, even in the restrooms. It was possible to learn The Redneck Ten Commandments while sitting on the john.

The HOGs were there, Rex, Ulysses, and Stan among them, and of course Chief, who was in the farthest corner from the door. Leighanne and Nita had obviously just arrived, fresh from the NA retreat and ready to be brought up to speed on the ride they’d missed. Desmond sent them all rocking as he plowed through to get to Flannery. He gave her no choice but to hug him back when he threw his lanky arms around her. I couldn’t hear it, but I could see her shoulders shake as she started to cry.

“Should we do something?” Kade said close to my ear.

I shook my head. “Whatever it is, I think Desmond can do it better at this point.”

Desmond took Flannery to the far end of the counter that ran along the front window and Kade started the trek to the back counter to get us drinks. I tried to make a beeline for Chief, but Leighanne and Nita got to me before I could get past the first table.

“This can’t be good,” I said to them.

I tried as I always did not to stare directly into the cleavage that habitually peeked from Leighanne’s T-shirts. Nita grabbed my hand and cradled it. She was wonderfully Hispanic and touchy and warm.

“It
is
good,” she said.

“Don’t tell me Rochelle actually spoke during the retreat.”

“She did.” Leighanne tucked a curve of her silvery bob behind her ear. “I gotta tell you, she and Gigi both are way further down the recovery road than any of the other newbies that were there.”

“Really.”

Nita squeezed my hand. “And someone has said she’ll be their sponsor.”

“Seriously?”

“They both liked her and she said yes.”

“And she knows their history?”

“Oh, yeah,” Leighanne said. “I think Gigi told her more than she really wanted to know. Rochelle, not so much, but the sponsor gets it.”

“The woman’s an angel from heaven,” I said.

Nita stopped massaging. “We can’t give you a name or anything, but you would like her.”

“Really, thanks,” I said to them. I was oddly close to tears. “We need this right now.”

Nita’s eyes immediately drooped. “We heard about Sherry. Any word from her?”

“Not that I know of. In fact, I need to call the house.”

I pulled out my phone and they took the cue. Once they’d melted into a conversation with Rex and Ulysses, I tried again to head for Chief.

“Hey, Allison!”

Oh, for Pete’s sake.

I turned to look at Stan—Stan the Man—who was standing in the middle of the room, pointing his finger at me.

“
What
?”
I said.

“What’s with you ditching us and going off doing your own thing?”

“When did I ditch you?” I said, still trying to inch my way between two stools to get to the back.

“Today. We had one he—wait, sorry—one heck of a ride. Do I hear an amen to that?”

Several renditions of “amen” went up with the glasses being raised. Kade got there in time to stick a 7-Up in my hand.

“Did we go far?” Stan shouted.

“Yes!”

“Did we go far enough?”

“No!”

“And why is that?” Stan cupped his hand around his ear and squinted.

“Because we’ve come too far to say far enough!”

They went back to toasting each other over the pound of Grand Funk Railroad somebody turned up. I just stood there, stunned. All I could hear was—

Isn’t that what I’ve been trying to tell you?

“Hey, Allison.”

I jumped at Leighanne’s touch.

“Who’s the new girl?”

I followed her gaze to Flannery, who had stopped crying and was listening with her eyes as Desmond talked with his hands. It hadn’t even dawned on me that someone might ask questions about her here.

“She looks young,” Leighanne said.

“Mmm. She’s younger than most.”

“She doesn’t look like an addict.”

“She’s not.”

Someone jostled my elbow. “We have not clinked our glass.”

I smiled at Rex, our HOG chapter president. He was the diametrical opposite of the stereotypical motorcycle dude, and that included his impeccable manners. I lightly touched my glass to his.

“What are we talking about?” Stan said.

His
manners on the other hand were right up there with the Hell’s Angels. Right now his grinning blue eyes were several inches into my personal space.

“The new Sister,” Leighanne said, gesturing toward Flannery.

“Yeah, what is she, about eighteen?”

“She’s working on her high school diploma,” I said. Okay, blurted. That was an Allison cover-up. The rest came from Somewhere Else. “We need some tutors. Anybody want to volunteer to share his expertise?”

At that precise moment the song ended, all conversations halted, and Chief looked directly at me from his corner of the café. It was a perfect storm.

“I would love to help,” Nita said. “English is not my first language, but I have studied the grammar until, ugh, I am cross-eyed.” She proved that and laughed.

“You’re on,” I said.

There were two more takers before Chief started toward me. If I’d known that was all it took I’d have done it sooner, although, in truth, that idea hadn’t come from me. Only because I believed it came from God did I not declare myself insane. Still, it could mean more protection for Flannery, even if people didn’t know that’s what they were doing.

My phone vibrated in my hand. It was Liz, and I had to answer it. Finger in my ear, I said hello and slipped out the door.

“How did it go?” she said.

“Uh, down the tubes,” I said.

I told her the story as I leaned on the splintered porch railing and looked out over the sea of Harleys still shiny in the fading sun.

“Are y’all o
kay
?” she said. “I mean, you’re not hurt, right?”