The Secrets of Lake Road - Karen Katchur Page 0,48

his baby when she had been certain it had been conceived out of love? She had owed it to him, to herself, to see the pregnancy through.

Gram had shouted, cursed, and stomped her feet. “How could you do this? What were you thinking? What will people think? My God, do you even know who the father is?”

Jo had handled Gram’s outrage with more ease than she had thought possible. Mostly because Gram hadn’t asked anything that Jo hadn’t asked herself. She could’ve taken the anger, the name-calling, the judgmental glares from Gram. It had been what Jo had expected from her. Gram was what Jo considered a “good girl,” never having said or done anything to raise an eyebrow.

And Jo had known how to fight back against Gram’s accusations, her old-school ways and beliefs about how a woman should conduct herself, about how she should understand her place in society, in a man’s world. Jo was from a different generation, one that didn’t care what men, or really anyone, thought, one that empowered women to be as outspoken as they wanted to be, to own their sexuality. She had wanted to be the one to define the person she would become. She had been free, and yet she had been reckless with that freedom. She had felt as though she had thrown it all away.

But after all the bickering and tough talk, it hadn’t been Gram’s reaction that had tortured Jo. It had been Pop’s. What she had remembered most whenever she thought back to that time was the look of betrayal in his eyes. His faith in her had been shattered. He had said she was no longer his little girl, the girl he had thought he had known and loved. His opinion of his only daughter had changed for the worse. And she hadn’t known how to tell him that she had let herself down too. That she had known all her dreams of getting out, living her own life, being free, were over. What she had needed from him was his support, for him to accept she had made a mistake, and that she loved her baby too much to ever turn back.

Gram closed the photo album and put it to the side, along with the memories it had conjured. They sat in silence until Jo slapped the tops of her legs and looked around.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gram said, and smoothed a white curl from her forehead. “It was just time to clean out the back closets and underneath the porch. No one’s touched the stuff in years.”

“Well,” she said, feeling the day slipping through her hands, knowing she would now stay and help sort through boxes. Seeing Gram tired, the way she was hunched over on the floor, and the moistness in her eyes when she had paged through the photo album, loosened something inside Jo. The compassion had been absent between them for such a long time, but Jo had a sudden urge to tell Gram she was sorry for all the terrible ways she had disappointed her. The words were there on her tongue, and yet she couldn’t force them out. She never could say what was in her heart. So instead she said, “Where do you want me to start?”

For the next few hours Jo pulled boxes of old records, books, and photo albums from the closet. She crawled underneath the porch and dragged broken beach chairs and torn umbrellas to the trash. All the while Gram did the sorting, keeping more than she had intended. Maybe it wasn’t the right time after all.

Jo tossed the last of a bent plastic chair onto the junk pile in the yard. She was dirty and hot under the glaring sun. She brushed her hands on her shorts and smoothed her tousled hair. What she wouldn’t give to jump into the cool lake water. The thought brought her full circle to Sara and her mother and the bones.

She rushed back into the cabin, letting the screen door slam behind her. “Let’s call it quits,” she said to Gram. She figured she had hauled enough trash for one day, and Gram should rest.

“But we’re not done,” Gram said.

I am, Jo thought, and left to go jump into the shower.

* * *

Within minutes Jo slipped into a clean T-shirt and shorts and made her way onto Lake Road, stopping once to remove a pebble from