be interested. I was willing to dispel the angry atmosphere that had made my sisters so unhappy. I made myself smile at my aunt to show a decent anticipation.
"Hank and I are gonna have a baby," Iona said. "The girls will have a little brother or sister."
After a long moment of intense struggle not to blurt out, "After all these years?" I managed to say, "Oh, what great news! Girls, aren't you excited?"
Tolliver's hand found mine under the table and gripped it hard. We'd never considered that Iona and Hank might have a baby of their own, and, speaking for myself, I'd never been curious about why they didn't have any. In fact, I'd just regarded the two as inconvenient irritants who got in our way when we wanted to see our sisters. However, they were mighty convenient when it came to doing the day-to-day care for those two little girls, who were no walk in the park to deal with.
In a flash of clarity, I realized all this, and I knew we couldn't possibly interfere with Iona and Hank's relationship with the girls now. I looked into Mariella's face and saw the uncertainty there. Neither she nor Gracie needed any other problems to handle at the moment. The girls were trying to feel happy about the baby, but they'd been thrown for a serious loop.
I could sympathize.
Chapter Two
AT the Texas Roadhouse the next night, we'd already put our name on the list for a table when Mark arrived. Mark looks like he's Tolliver's brother, all right; they have the same cheekbones, the same chin, the same brown eyes. But Mark is shorter, thicker, and (an observation I have kept to myself) not nearly as smart as Tolliver.
I had so many great memories of Mark, though, that I knew I'd always be fond of him. Mark had done his best to protect all of us from our parents. Not that our parents had always intended to hurt us... but they were addicts. Addicts forget to be parents. They forget to be married. They're only addicted.
Mark had suffered a lot because he had more memories of his dad when his dad was a real person than Tolliver did. Mark remembered a father who'd taken him fishing and hunting, a father who'd gone to teacher conferences and football games and helped him with his arithmetic. Tolliver had told me that he remembered that passage in his own life a little, but the last few years in the trailer had overlaid most of that memory until the hurt had extinguished the flame that kept it alive.
Mark had recently become a manager at JCPenney, and he was wearing navy slacks, a striped shirt, and a pinned-on name tag. When I spotted him entering the restaurant, he looked tired, but his face lit up when he noticed us. Mark had clipped his hair very short and shaved off his mustache, and the cleaner look made him seem older and more confident, somehow.
Tolliver and his brother went through the guy greeting ritual, thumping each other on the back, saying "Hey, man!" a number of times. I got a more restrained hug. Just at the right moment, we got a buzz to tell us we could be seated. When we were in a booth and supplied with menus, I asked Mark how his job was going.
"We didn't do as well as we should this Christmas," he said seriously. I noticed how white and even his teeth were, and I felt a stab of resentment on his brother's behalf. Mark had been old enough to get his teeth aligned, unlike Tolliver. By the time Tolliver should have been getting his middle-class-American-teen complement of braces and acne medicine, our parents had started their downward spiral together. I shook off that unworthy twinge of resentment. Mark had just been lucky, on that count. "Our sales weren't as high as they should've been, and we're going to have to scramble this spring," he said.
"So what do you think happened?" Tolliver asked, as if he gave a rat's ass why the store wasn't performing as well as it ought to have.
Mark rambled on about the store and his responsibilities, and I tried to show a decent interest. This was a better job than his previous position managing a restaurant; at least, the hours were better. Mark had put himself through two years of junior college, and he'd taken night classes since then. Eventually, he'd earn a degree. I had to admire