The Neighbor - Lisa Gardner [30]
“What d’you think your PO will say?” Wendell asks now, eyes narrowing.
“Not much to report.”
“You went to work today?” Mrs. Brenda Jane inquires.
“Yes.”
“No drinking, no drugs, no Internet?”
“I work. I walk. I’m keeping my nose clean.”
“Then you should be fine. Of course, you have the right to a lawyer, so if you start to feel uncomfortable, you should ask for one.”
“I think the husband did it,” I hear myself say. No good reason. Just that whole rationalization thing again. See, I’m not the monster. He is.
My group goes to bat for me, nodding their heads. “Yep, yep,” several reply. “Ain’t it always the husband?”
Wendell still has that smirk on his face. “It’s not like she’s fourteen—” he starts.
“Wendell,” Mrs. Brenda Jane interrupts.
He feigns innocence. “I’m just saying it’s not like she’s a beautiful jail-bait blonde.”
“Mr. Harrington—”
Wendell puts up a meaty hand, finally acknowledging defeat. But then, at the last minute, he turns back to me and finally has something useful to say.
“Hey, kid, you’re still working at the neighborhood chop shop, right? Hope for your sake the missing woman didn’t get her car serviced there.”
In that instant, I can picture Sandra Jones perfectly, standing in front of the industrial gray counter, long blonde hair tucked behind her ears, smiling as she hands over her keys to Vito: “Sure, we can pick it up at five….”
I realize for the second time in my life that I will not be going home again.
| CHAPTER EIGHT |
What makes a family?
It is a question I have pondered most of my life. I grew up in the typical Southern clan. I had a stay-at-home mom, famous for her meticulously groomed appearance and award-winning rose garden. I had the highly respected father who’d founded his own law firm and worked hard to provide for his two “lovely ladies.” I had two dozen cousins, a passel of aunts and uncles. Enough relatives that the annual family reunions, hosted at my parents’ sprawling home with its acres of green lawn and its wraparound front porch, were less a summer barbecue, and more a three-ring circus.
I spent the first fifteen years of my life smiling obediently as fat aunts pinched my cheeks and told me how much I resembled my mother. I turned in my homework on time so teachers could pat my head and tell me how I made my father proud. I went to church, I babysat my neighbors’ children, I worked after school at the local store, and I smiled and smiled and smiled until my cheeks hurt.
Then I went home, collected the empty gin bottles off the hardwood floors, and pretended I didn’t hear my mama’s drunken taunt from down the hall, “I know something you don’t know. I know something you don’t know….”
When I was two years old, my mama made me eat a lightbulb so she could take me to the doctor and tell him what a naughty girl I was. When I was four, she made me put my thumb in a doorjamb and hold it there while she slammed the door shut, so she could show the doctor how reckless I was. When I was six, she fed me bleach so the doctors could understand just how terrible it was to be my mother.
My mama hurt me, time and time again, and no one ever stopped her. Did that make us family?
My father suspected, but never asked, even as his drunken wife chased him around the house with knives. Did that make us family?
I knew my mama was actively hurting me and hoping to hurt my father, but I never told. Did that make us family?
My father loved her. Even at a young age, I got that. No matter what Mama did, Papa stood beside her. That was marriage, he told me. And she wasn’t always like this, he would add. As if once my mama had been sane, and having been sane once, maybe she could be sane again.
So we would go about our routine, starting each evening