Keeping Secrets in Seattle - By Brooke Moss Page 0,82
and a snippet about each judge. Under the picture of the judge who’d pulled me under the stage, there was a paragraph detailing his talent agency in Austin, and how his favorite pastime was to go windsurfing with his wife and three sons. She said we weren’t going to ruin that man’s life just because he couldn’t help himself around me. She gave me a Valium and told me to go to sleep. The next morning, she put pancake makeup on my bruised cheek, sent me down to the auditorium, and I won the whole pageant.”
My mouth dropped open.
“By the time I went away to college and met your father, I’d pretty much gotten over it. Sure, I still got a little nervous when I was alone, and I carried a kitchen knife in my purse, but overall, I was okay.” She offered me a dainty smile.
I gaped at her. “Mom, carrying a kitchen knife in your purse doesn’t constitute okay.”
“Yes, but when your father and I got married and moved up here to Washington, I stopped thinking about it. Old news. Your father never even knew about it. When you came home that night, it all came back to me. The fear, the horror. I just wanted to help you pull yourself together. I handled it the same way my own mother handled it. She’d forced me to get over it, so…”
“So you expected me to get over it, too?”
My mom’s smile faltered. “I just assumed that we would clean you up, keep you home from school for a week or so until you felt better, and then you’d be back to normal.”
“What was normal?” I glared at her. “Once I left Cameron’s house, there was no more normal in my life!”
She flinched. “I didn’t know how to backtrack. I knew that if we called the police weeks and weeks later, that there would be no evidence left. Plus, I knew it would become something of a spectacle, and—”
I looked my mom dead in the eye. “Heaven forbid we create a spectacle.”
Her eyes filled. “I’m so sorry. It wasn’t that I didn’t want people to know. You told me that you’d flirted with that boy. And that you led him on. The other kids saw you. I was trying to save you the pain of trying to prove your innocence to people.”
“It made me sick to know that he was walking around free. To know that he got to keep going to Wallingford High like a normal kid while I got shipped off to Utah because I couldn’t function anymore.” I looked up at the ceiling when the tears came. I would not shed any more tears over this.
My mom dabbed her napkin at the corners of her eyes again. “I didn’t want people to judge you. You couldn’t avoid the Parkers forever. They were asking questions and wanted to know where you were. Nora was on the case, and she would have hit the roof if she knew what really happened.”
I sucked in a breath. “I wish we would have told them the truth.”
My mother took hold of my hands across the table. “I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t important enough to fight for. I wish I could do it over again. I wish I would’ve picked up that phone and called the police myself. Had I known all of the pain that was going to stem from that one night, I would have handled everything differently. Everything.”
“You have no idea what that means to me.” I squeezed her hand back. “I’m sorry, but I lost my appetite.”
She looked at her plate. “Looks like we wasted some perfectly good waffles. Gabe would be disappointed.”
“True.” My heart tugged at the mention of his name. I wondered where he was, or what he was doing.
My mother patted her frosted hair helmet. “Can I give you a ride home, darlin’?”
“What? Sure,” I answered, gazing out the window at the Parkers’ back deck. I searched the three people standing under the awning, out of the rain, for Gabe. He didn’t appear to be there.
I sighed. I was headed there next to see if Nora and Guthrie had heard from him this week.
My mom tilted her head to the side. “Did you hear from Gabe today?”
Squinting across my mother’s lawn and the Parkers’, I shook my head. “No.”
She stood up and began clearing the table. “Sounds like you two need to sit down and sort all of this out.”