The View from Alameda Island - Robyn Carr Page 0,58

by laying low, keeping peace by being quiet, flying under the radar.

“Oh, this has to stop!” she said, drawing the attention of both of her daughters.

“We’re not fighting,” Cassie said. “We’re not going to fight, I promise. But I’m not accepting this attitude that Daddy is difficult and that’s okay. He passed difficult when I was two.”

“Not you two,” Lauren said. “Me. This will stop with me. I am done pretending. And I’m not going to be controlled or manipulated anymore. I’m finished with protecting him. And I won’t be controlled and manipulated by you two, either...”

“Protecting him? You called the police and put him in jail!” Lacey accused.

“I didn’t,” Lauren said calmly. “I called for help and the police put him in jail. I wasn’t even asked to press charges and won’t be asked to testify against him. I was warned it will probably be a misdemeanor first offense or dismissed, but it’s not my case to pursue. He did it to himself. There are consequences when you assault people, when you hurt people. I stayed with him for all the wrong reasons and look what it got me.”

“She did it for us, you dumb-ass,” Cassie said.

“You two fight it out or work it out, I really don’t care. My sister is coming over in about an hour and I’m going to get a shower.”

“What about these flowers?” Lacey asked. “They’re from Dad.”

Lauren looked as though she’d been hit by a truck. Lacey checked on her dad.

“You can have them,” Lauren said. “Or throw them in the trash.”

With that, she left them and closed her bedroom door.

* * *

Lauren stood under the spray of the shower for a long time, thinking. The blow-dryer and the circular brush hurt when she touched certain places, but she got the job done. Her lip was disfigured and she was bruised, but she tried a little makeup. Not for Beth. For herself.

She didn’t hear the girls fighting. Maybe they were talking. Maybe Lacey had left and it was just Cassidy. Yes, they were like Lauren and Beth had been. Lauren and Beth had fought like tigers when they were young.

But Lauren and Beth had forged a truce after Lauren was married and they learned to tiptoe around the subject of her pathetically dismal decision to marry an egomaniac. Beth was Lauren’s biggest champion now. Maybe, down the road, if Lacey matured a little, Cassie and Lacey would become close. Time would tell.

Lauren didn’t think of her childhood as bad but she was well aware of the difficult parts. Her mother always worked. Always. Lauren and Beth spent a lot of time with their grandparents, sometimes with friends and neighbors, and when they were finally old enough, alone. They were fed and clothed, but there wasn’t money for extras and they learned to help with all the household chores when they were very young. Grandma and Grandpa lived a few houses away so there was always someone they could rely on but poor Honey was constantly on the run to her first job, second job or somewhat later, night classes. It was not surprising that their mother was seldom cheerful.

There were things Lauren was able to do with her children that Honey couldn’t—like playing games, helping with homework and reading together. In adolescence, when kids were sometimes cruel and always competitive, Lauren and Beth relied on their own part-time jobs to buy clothes or go out with friends. They didn’t have the use of a car. Once in a blue moon they could talk Grandpa out of his. And while both of them achieved partial scholarships, college was brutally hard—they worked their way through and of course they had to live at home.

By the time Lauren graduated from college, Honey Verona had achieved her own degree, but hers came through years and years of part-time school. Honey had worked job after job, leaving one job for the next if the pay was higher. She worked in a library, nursing home, self-serve gas station, convenience store, as a secretary on a military base and even in a police department motor pool, washing and cleaning cars. When Lauren was twenty-two, Honey had a degree with a teaching certificate and taught freshman English. But she also started working at an upscale cosmetic counter at a department store—two nights a week and weekends.

That job was perfect for her. She looked amazingly young and fit until the day she died. When she retired from teaching just two years before