Grave Secret - Charlaine Harris [25]
We enjoyed a few rounds together, and then we went back to our sisters, who were already arguing about who was doing the best. Tolliver took Mariella and I took Gracie, and we got them away from the wall and went around with them, slowly and carefully. I couldn’t stop Gracie from falling once, and another time she took me down with her, but she was improving by the time we called it quits. Mariella, who’d played basketball at one of the after-school clubs for kids, had fared a lot better, and she was inclined to brag about it until Tolliver cut her short.
We were coming off the floor, laughing, when I realized someone was watching us: a gray-haired man about five foot eleven, pumped up and muscular. My eyes passed over him once, and then came back to his face. I knew him. I looked right into his dark eyes.
“Hello, Dad,” Tolliver said.
Five
OUR sisters shrunk closer to us, their eyes fixed on their biological father with—at least on Gracie’s part—a mixture of loathing and longing. Mariella seemed more hostile. Her little hands had clenched into fists.
He wasn’t my father. My feelings were relatively unmixed. “Matthew,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
He’d been looking at Tolliver and Mariella, his eyes avid. He glanced at me briefly, without affection. Gracie shrunk behind me. “I wanted to see my kids,” he said. “All of them.”
There was a long moment of silence. I digested the fact that his voice was clear: no slurring, coherent. Maybe he wasn’t using, as he’d told Mark; though I knew it was only a matter of time before he reverted to his old ways.
“But we don’t want to see you,” Tolliver said, keeping his voice carefully hushed. We drew aside, to get out of the way of other skaters. “We didn’t answer the feelers you put out through Mark. I didn’t answer your letters. I’m willing to bet Iona hasn’t given you permission to see the girls, and she’s their legal mom now. Hank’s their legal dad.”
“But I’m their real father,” Matthew said.
“You gave them up,” I reminded him, giving each word a lot of weight.
“There was a lot of pressure.” He reached out as if he wanted to stroke Mariella’s hair, but she flinched back, still gripping her brother’s hand as if she would lose him if she let go.
The rink wasn’t really crowded, but people had begun to cast sideways glances at our tense little group. I didn’t give a damn about the spectators, but the last thing I wanted was any confrontation, physical or verbal, in front of the girls.
“You need to leave,” I said. “We’re taking the girls back to their home right now. You’ve ruined our good time. Don’t make it any worse.”
“I want to see my children,” he said again.
“You’re looking at ’em. You’ve seen them. Now go.”
“I’m only leaving because of the little ones,” he said, nodding toward Mariella and Gracie, who were confused and miserable. “I’ll see you again soon, Tolliver.” And he turned on his heel and left the rink.
“He followed us,” I said stupidly.
“I guess he was waiting somewhere around Iona’s house,” Tolliver said. We stared at each other, silently postponing more discussion. Simultaneously, we took deep breaths. It would have been funny if we hadn’t been so jangled.
“Well,” I said to my sisters, trying to sound brisk and upbeat, “I’m glad that’s over. We’ll talk to your mom about this, okay, tell her all about it? It won’t happen again. We had a good time until this happened, right?” I sounded like an idiot, but at least the girls began stirring, removing their skates. They stopped looking quite so much like deer in headlights.
Our sisters were subdued on the ride back to their house—no big surprise there—and they scrambled out of our car and into the door under the carport as if they were afraid of snipers. Tolliver and I followed more slowly, not eager to relate what had happened to Iona and Hank—though it was no fault of ours.
We weren’t too surprised to find our aunt and uncle