Promises to Keep - Ann Tatlock [35]
“My mom made me eat some lunch before I came.”
“You want some ice cream?”
I shook my head, sat down on the bench. “Naw. I don’t think so.”
“You sick or something?”
“I don’t know. I don’t feel so good.”
“What’s the matter?”
I shrugged. “Just a sore throat.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t have come.”
“I wanted to.”
She looked at me a moment, put her lips to the straw. Her cheeks caved in as she sipped. “Well, I’m glad you came. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“Well, I don’t know. Anything. That’s what friends do, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I guess so.”
“So.” She took another long sip while she looked out over the street. “How come you moved here all the way from Minnesota?”
I rolled my eyes toward the sky as I thought about how to answer. I thought for so long my new friend grew impatient. “Never mind,” she said. “Forget I asked, if you don’t want to tell me.”
Drawing in a deep breath, I let it out quickly with the words, “Listen, Mara, I’ll tell you why, but you have to swear never to tell anyone else.”
Mara frowned, cocked her head at me. “All right. I swear.”
For a moment our gazes met. Something told me I could trust the person behind those big brown eyes. I shifted my focus to the street and said quietly, “My parents split up. My grandpa lives here, so he helped us move down. Mom wanted to get away from Daddy.”
Mara nodded as she went on sipping her drink. Finally she said, “What’s so bad about it that you have to keep it a secret? Lots of kids’ parents get divorced.”
I shrugged, made a small taut line of my mouth.
Mara said, “There’s more, isn’t there?”
I nodded.
“I bet your daddy was a drunk.”
Wide-eyed, I heard myself whisper, “How did you know?”
“Why else would a woman want to get away from a man?”
We didn’t say anything for a long while. I listened as Mara slurped up the last drops of her soda. Then she said, “Did he ever beat her?”
I froze, every muscle in my body stiff as ice. How to answer? How to tell someone I hardly knew that my daddy had hit my mother more times than I could remember? It was a part of him that I wanted to forget, a part of him that I wanted to seal up behind a brick wall, so it couldn’t escape and I wouldn’t have to see it anymore. I swallowed the truth and shook my head. “No,” I lied. “He never hit my mom.”
“You were lucky then,” she said. “Lots of men, once they get real drunk, they end up taking it out on their wife and kids.”
“Yeah, well, not my daddy. He was always pretty good to us. He’d do a lot of fun stuff with me – you know, take me places, buy me things, stuff like that.”
“Uh-huh.” She sounded like she didn’t quite believe me. “So your mama just got tired of the drinking.”
“Yeah.”
“He couldn’t quit?”
I had to think a minute. “I don’t think he ever tried.”
“Not even when your mama left him? Sometimes a man will straighten up once his woman works up the courage to leave.”
I shrugged. “If he’s trying to quit, I don’t know about it. We haven’t been gone all that long, but we don’t hear anything from Daddy.”
“He doesn’t have visiting rights?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then you’ll never see him again.”
I wanted to tell Mara that I thought I had seen him, that I’d spotted someone in Mills River who wore a fishing hat just like his and maybe it was him, though I couldn’t be sure. I said, “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll see him someday.”
“Yeah,” Mara said. “Maybe.”
“Well, you’re lucky. Your mom and dad are still together.”
Mara’s eyes grew small at that, and she lifted her hand to the locket that hung around her neck. She didn’t say anything.
“You got any brothers and sisters?” I asked.
“A whole slew of them,” Mara said. She fingered the locket for a moment before tucking it under her shirt. “They’re all a lot older than me. My mom and dad, they’re grandparents already. They were grandparents before I was born.”
I nodded. “I thought you might be a whoopsie.”
“A whoopsie?” she echoed. “What’s that?”
“That’s what Daddy called a kid whose parents weren’t trying to have any