“Great. Why don’t you help me out? Measure those sawhorses for me?”
“Sure. I can do that,” he said, hurrying over to the first sawhorse, as if afraid if he didn’t get there right away, it’d take off on him. “I can do that real good.”
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Fay told Neil as she came into the room. She hitched Mitchell higher on her hip. “Elijah was watching his favorite TV show and then Mitchell needed changing—” hearing his name, the baby grinned, showing his uncle his two lethal-looking top teeth “—and then we had to stop for gas—”
“Where’d you get gas?” Maddie asked, the question too casual and innocent to be either.
Fay turned toward her, as if shocked to find Maddie there. Shocked and a bit put out by what was a damned good question.
“Maddie,” Fay said with one of her sweet, guileless smiles. “Hello.”
Slipping her hands into her back pockets, Maddie sent her an answering grin that was more I-am-so-not-buying-your-innocent-act-so-don’t-even-try-it. “Where’d you stop for gas?”
“What does that matter?” Neil asked, as always, completely clueless as to what was going on in his sister’s life.
How could he be so blind? Even though he hadn’t been around, all it took was one look at Fay to see there was something wrong. She was nothing but a walking, talking, baby-carrying hot mess.
And that was being kind.
Her light blue shorts were wrinkled and bagged at the waist, and her shirt—dear Lord, her shirt—was some sort of explosion of brightly colored flowers in oranges, greens and pinks. She’d pulled her hard-to-tame curls back into a ponytail—probably because she thought people wouldn’t notice she hadn’t washed her hair recently. Wrong. All the style did was accentuate her slightly sunken cheeks and sickly pallor. Despite sleeping in, she still sported dark circles under her eyes, which were puffy and red-rimmed.
She’d been crying. Again.
Maddie felt like crying herself but that might just be the shirt causing her eyes to water.
“I went to the Quick Mart,” Fay told Maddie, her chin lifted. But her cheeks had some color thanks to a rising blush, and her shoulders slumped.
Maddie’s mouth tightened. “Which. One.”
As if sensing his mother’s distress, Mitchell laid his head on her shoulder. She patted his back but didn’t meet Maddie’s eyes. “On Mechanic Street.”
“Oh, honey,” Maddie said, her heart breaking for her friend, her brain screaming that she wasn’t doing Fay any favors by coddling her. “Why?”
Neil stepped between them, glanced from Maddie to Fay and back again. “Someone want to fill me in?”
Maddie held her best friend’s gaze, noted the pleading in Fay’s eyes. The questions.
Will you tell him? Will you take care of this? Take care of me?
She shouldn’t. Fay needed to step up. Or better yet, toughen up. It was as if she had a welcome-mat tattoo on her forehead, one begging people to walk all over her.
But Maddie couldn’t point any of that out. Even she wasn’t that big of a bitch.
“The girl Shane’s been screw—”
“Maddie,” Fay gasped, her eyes wide as she lunged toward Elijah as if to tackle him and cover his ears. The kid didn’t even notice, so engrossed was he in measuring the windowsill, his little face puckered in concentration. Realizing Maddie had stopped speaking, Fay straightened and switched Mitchell to her other hip. “We don’t even know if those horrible rumors are true.”
They might have a better idea if Fay grabbed Shane by the scruff of the neck and demanded to know if he was cheating on her with a nineteen-year-old with a penchant for cowboy boots, short shorts—at the same time, for the love of God—and other women’s husbands.
Maddie looked at Fay in pure exasperation. If she didn’t like Maddie’s word choice, why didn’t she tell Neil what was going on herself? Jeez. Try to do someone a favor and they jump on your back.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll rephrase. The girl—”
“Girl?” Neil asked.
“Girl. As in, not-old-enough-to-drink, still-lives-with-her-parents, uses-the-word-like-in-every-sentence girl Shane has allegedly been...seeing, works at the Quick Mart on Mechanic Street.”
He raised his eyebrows at Fay. “You confronted her?”
“Of course not,” she said, as if he’d wondered if she’d taken a baseball bat to the girl’s pinhead. Which would have been about as likely. Fay didn’t do confrontation. She excelled at avoidance. “I just...I wanted her to see us. I...” She swallowed visibly, her eyes welling with tears. She sniffed them back. “I thought if she saw me and the boys, we’d be more real to her. She’d realize