Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,107

he accepted that? How could he have done that? All the time, she’d been right there, and their dad had gone on like nothing had happened. Driven onto that Deane Road land, probably. Driven right over her, like he hadn’t dumped that dirt on top of her and smoothed it over with the big teeth of some machine, deep in the night. Taken it back to the lot, parked it, and hung up the keys.

And gone home to tell their kids she’d left, because she didn’t love them enough.

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” he managed to go on, “because you know exactly who it was. It was the guy who’s sitting in jail right now. The guy who thought my mom and I wrecked his life and told us so, over and over again. The guy who finally killed her for it and covered her with dirt, when she always wanted things clean. When she worked so hard to make them beautiful. To plant flowers. To show me …” He could barely go on through the tightness in his chest, his throat. “Owls. She was a nurse. She felt sorry for him. Don’t you get it? She felt sorry for him, and she died for it.”

33

Visiting Hours

It was after dark by the time they left. Both Annabelle and Jennifer looked beyond exhausted when Harlan finally locked the door behind them. He put the house key into his pocket and wished he could throw it into the field instead. As far as he could, and that was a long way. Just let it be harvested with the sunflowers or plowed into the ground. Just let it disappear.

Annabelle said, “I don’t want to come back here,” her voice small and hollow in the cold starlight, and Harlan said, “I know.”

As for him, he was in some other space. The one you went into when you knew you’d lost the game, but you had to play your hardest to the end anyway, because there was no other choice. When you thought, I can have emotion later. Right now, I need to do this. Digging deep for your last bit of strength, focusing on getting every action exactly right, and feeling nothing. He’d seen Jennifer taking the family pictures off the wall, going through the bookcase and packing barely-remembered children’s books and old photo albums into a cardboard box, like somebody would want to remember any of this, and all he’d felt was cold.

At her quiet suggestion, he stopped at Dan’s Supermarket on the way over to the other house. He pushed the cart through brightly lit, chilly aisles with Annabelle beside him and Jennifer putting milk and eggs and bread into the cart, and remembered pushing a cart just like it right here for his mom, with somebody hanging onto the end and the youngest one in the basket. She’d talk about ingredients while they shopped, educating all of them in the most casual way on picking out vegetables, on calculating which size of cereal was the best deal, and teaching them the difference between what you wanted and what you needed. It was his mom who’d told him that the store brand was usually the exact same thing in simpler packaging, except when it wasn’t, and when it made sense to pay for better. She’d taught them how to look for the creamy yellow spot on a watermelon, and had made it a game to thump them all and listen for the deep, hollow sound that told you it was good. When they’d chosen their pumpkins for Halloween, she’d made it an occasion. She’d let them draw the faces on for her to carve out with the sharp knife, and when Halloween was over, she’d showed them how to roast the seeds.

Easter egg hunts on the damp grass, the excitement of finding that plastic egg amidst the tulips, and when he’d gotten old enough to hold back and let a little sister find it instead, how she’d noticed, and how she’d smiled. Like kindness mattered more than winning, exactly like Jennifer had said. The Christmas stockings that she’d sewn for them on the machine, with their names picked out in glitter, that always had the things inside that you knew they would, the ones you were looking forward to. A jar of bubbles. A Matchbox car. A roll of tape of your own. They always had a surprise, though, too, that was just for you. A tiny ceramic dog, one year, that he’d