The Secret of You and Me - Melissa Lenhardt Page 0,40
I said it.
“Oh. Okay. So, this. Holding my hand, flirting with me is just a game with you? Another notch on your bedpost?”
“You were flirting with me. ‘I’m trying to seduce you with my cooking’? I have to admit, that’s a good line.”
“Yeah, well someone had to make the first move.”
“You’re good at that.”
“And you’re good at running away.”
“Am I?” I moved closer to her. “I’ve learned a lot since I left. We can have fun for a week or two, and I’ll leave, and you’ll get back to your perfect life.”
“Perfect life. Right.” Sophie stepped away. “You’ve made your point, Nora.”
“What was my point?”
“To make sure I know I have no right to ask you about your personal life. And, to humiliate me. Good job. Mission accomplished.”
She opened her car door and got in.
I kept her from closing the door. “Wait, wait, wait. I’m sorry. Let’s start over.”
“Is this third time’s the charm?”
I grimaced. “I’m a bitch. I’m sorry.”
She sighed and let her hands fall from the steering wheel. “Nora, I can’t do this. Forgive me or don’t forgive me. Be my friend or not. Forget everything else. I can’t handle a roller-coaster friendship.”
“I don’t want that either.”
“We can’t seem to see each other without fighting.”
“It’s going to take some time, for us to, um...”
“Trust each other?”
“Yeah. Maybe we should just leave well enough alone for now.”
She nodded slowly. “You’re probably right. Too much too soon.” Our eyes met for a long moment. I didn’t know how to tell her what I wanted without risking my heart, and why would she take the chance after how cruel I’d just been? Goddamn it, I was a master at self-destruction.
“Still come Friday,” Sophie said. “We can fake it for a couple of hours for Charlie’s sake.”
“Fake what?”
“A friendship. What else?”
She pulled the door closed so I had to step out of her way, as the truck with the glass pack muffler drove by again, shattering the air around me.
eleven
nora
One day when I was two years old, my mother left Mary and me with Emmadean to go to the grocery store. The skies to the west were darkening with the threat of rain, but when a frazzled mother of two toddlers under four years old needs a break and has a reliable sitter, a little rainstorm isn’t going to keep her in the house. She’d taken her time at the store, visiting with friends and going down every row, luxuriating in the time alone. The deluge came when she was in the bread aisle talking to Joyce Wyatt. They’d looked up at the store’s ceiling, hearing the drumming of the rain on the metallic roof. “Oh, darn,” my mom told Charlie’s mother, “we’re stuck.”
Mrs. Wyatt laughed with my mother, herself escaping from three rambunctious boys.
During a break in the deluge, my mother bid goodbye to Mrs. Wyatt at the front of the Brookshire Brothers. “Be careful!” Mrs. Wyatt called, knowing there was a low point in the road out to our house that flooded during gully washers. Almost immediately after Mrs. Wyatt waved my mother away, the skies opened up again.
My mom drove through the flooded road, eager to get back to her kids after nearly two hours away. At least, that’s the yarn Emmadean told us so often it had become as much a part of the story as the facts we knew. There was no way to know why my mom drove through the flooded road, but that she did wasn’t in doubt. Her car was swept down the flooded creek and into the fast-moving river. They didn’t find it until the water receded three days later.
I can’t say I’ve missed my mother. I don’t much remember her. Emmadean slipped into a surrogate mother role, allowing Ray to delegate all of the parenting duties to her. Except for discipline. Ray was a big one for discipline. But, love, affection, answering questions, teaching us about right and wrong, that was all Emmadean. And though taciturn, Dormer had the gentlest disposition of anyone I’d ever known. Ray might have paid the bills, but Emmadean and Dormer raised me.
I’d retreated to Emmadean’s when Ray kicked me out, and she spent the better part of my ten days there trying to repair the breach. I was a shell of myself, my emotions vacillating between mourning the loss of Sophie and fury at her betrayal, and Ray’s. Terror of Brenda Russell, her threat to have me arrested for rape, kept me in Emmadean’s guest room,