Someone Like You (30 page)

 

JOELY FELT LIKE the world as she knew it had been turned on its ear. A few hours ago she had stood there in front of the television mesmerized by the sight and sound of the father she’d never known, that beautiful godlike man with the burnt honey voice, and now he was standing there on the front porch. Older. Grayer. Not even close to being godlike. The man whose absence had colored every single day of her life until she left Idle Point for school and the world beyond.

I’m sorry, Cat,
she thought as she ran to the door,
but I can’t just let him go without finding out why he left us.

Mark was standing on the front porch, shoulders hunched, smoking a cigarette, while Robert Quigley talked on a cell phone.

Joely caught her father’s eye and smiled nervously. “Come in,” she said.

“She said it’s okay?”

“She’s giving us five minutes.”

His faded blue eyes swam with tears. “More than I deserve,” he said, tossing his cigarette into the bushes. “Five minutes it is.”

Quigley snapped shut his cell phone and fell into line behind Mark.

“Not this time,” Mark said, raising his hand between them. “You’ll get what I promised but not right now.”

“You owe me,” Quigley said. “You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for me.”

She closed the door on Quigley and flipped the lock.

“What was that all about?” she asked, inclining her head toward the front porch. “Did you make some kind of deal with him?”

“You can’t get without giving,” Mark said with a rueful smile. “He came to me with the news about Mimi. I owe him something, right?”

Not half as much as he owed his wife and children, but she doubted he would understand.

“He’s not getting any photos of Mimi in the hospital,” Joely said bluntly, “and we’re not giving interviews. Let’s get that straight right up front.”

He looked at her for what seemed like a very long time then shrugged his shoulders.

“So this is Kit-Cat’s house now,” Mark said, his eyes traveling the four corners of the room. “Your mother lived here when we first met.”

“No,” she corrected him. “You’re thinking of Grandma Fran’s house.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said. “I don’t have the memory I used to have.”

She looked at him for signs of irony and to her amazement found none.

“Would you like something to drink?” she asked. “I could make you some coffee.”

“Can’t drink coffee anymore.” He patted his chest with the flat of his right hand. “The ticker, you know?”

“I think Cat has decaf.”

“Don’t want to be any trouble. A beer would be good enough.”

“I’m sorry. Cat doesn’t have any beer in the fridge. I could pour you a glass of wine.”

He shook his head. “It’s late. Maybe I better stay clear.”

She was aware of the ticking clock, of Cat coiled with rage in the bedroom, of William thanking God he was getting out before her family screwed his daughter up, too.

Mark sat down on the sofa. She sat down in the chair across from him.

“So you’re my little Joely,” he said, nodding up and down as he looked at her. “You look like your mother.”

“No, I don’t,” she said. “Everyone always told me I looked like you.”

“Your mother,” he said again. “Same nose. Same eyes. You were a pretty baby. You grew up very nice.”

“Thank you.”

Is this it?
she thought.
First time in twenty-seven years, and this is the best we can do?

Clearly he felt no connection at all with her. He was polite and friendly, but she could have been Karen Porter sitting there or any other almost-thirty-year-old woman in town for all he knew or cared.

She almost cried with relief when William came back into the room. He didn’t say anything, just stood behind her chair. He had her back, and she appreciated it.

“How is your mother?” Mark asked.

“She had a stroke. Much of the damage is likely irreversible.”

“I want to see her.”

She was framing a cautious response when Cat’s “No!” resounded.

“Kit-Cat!” Mark struggled to his feet as his oldest child entered the room. “Look at you! All grown up.”

“I’m thirty-eight,” she said as she approached. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t you thirty-eight, too, when you went out to buy that guitar string?”

His brow furrowed. “Guitar string?”

Cat’s anger was incendiary. Joely could feel its heat across the room. She had never been more grateful for her sister’s antigun stance in her life.

“You know, Mark. Think back. That guitar string you went out to buy the day you walked out on us.”

“I—I don’t remember that.”

“I didn’t think you would.”

“You look good,” he said. “I didn’t know which way it would go with you, but you turned out fine.”

The look she shot him was withering, but he didn’t flinch. “Your five minutes are up.”

“Come on now! You don’t mean that.”

She laughed out loud. “I can’t tell you how many nights I wasted lying awake wishing my father would come home, and now here you are, and all I can think of is how much I hate you.”

“You’re entitled.”

“Am I?” She laughed again. “Gee, thanks, Dad. I probably should have run it by you first, but then you weren’t here, were you?”

Cat’s explosion seemed to stiffen Mark’s spine. He stood a little taller and faced down his oldest daughter. “I want to see Mimi,” he said. “I know you think I don’t have the right, but she’s still my wife.”

“How would you know? She might have divorced your sorry ass a long time ago.”

“She didn’t.”

“How would you know?” This time it was Joely asking the question. “You haven’t talked to her since 1978. You can’t possibly know what’s been going on in her life.”

“Well, now,” said Mark Doyle, “that’s not entirely true.”

“What does that mean?” Cat demanded. “And don’t go telling me you were psychically connected.”

“We were in touch.”

Joely and Cat locked eyes.

“Bullshit,” Cat said. “I would have known.”

He looked so old, so worn, that for a second—just a second—Joely felt sorry for him. How much he had lost over the years. She wondered if he had a clue about all he had missed.

“You don’t know anything,” Mark said to Cat. “It’s a long story.”

“Even longer from my perspective,” she shot back.

“Let him talk,” Joely said. “I want to hear it all.”

“Go ahead,” Cat said, “then maybe we can tell you our story.”

He locked eyes with Cat, and his defiance surprised Joely. A touch of humility after a twenty-seven-year absence wouldn’t have been out of place.

“I hitched down to West Virginia,” he said, looking somewhere into the middle distance over Joely’s shoulder. “I’d heard about a fiddle player named Ben Carstairs who played with Woody. He was getting on in years, and I wanted to get him on tape and—” He grinned and dragged a huge, bony hand through his hair. “Hell, I wanted to play with him, too, before it was too late. I’d tried to get Mimi to come with me, but she wouldn’t leave you girls with anybody, and we both knew bringing you along wouldn’t work.”

“Why not?” Cat asked. “We had that big stupid van. You could’ve transported a Girl Scout troop in that thing.”

“We weren’t good at being parents,” he said without apology. “Some people are naturals at it but not us. We loved you, Kit-Cat, but once you showed up, it was never the same again between us. No!” He raised his hand to silence them. “I’m not blaming you. We made our own choices, that much is for sure.”

“Your warmth overwhelms me,” Cat said. “It’s so nice to know we were wanted.”

“It is what it is,” he said. “I can tell you the way it really was, or I can tell you the way I wish it had been. It’s up to you.”

“The truth,” Joely said. That was the only way they would ever be able to get past it once and for all.

He was a talker, Mark Doyle was. He jumped back into his narrative without stopping for breath. “Kids change things. Nobody will argue that. No matter how strong a marriage you think you have, when those babies start coming, you find out how little you know.”

“And how much you still want,” Cat said.

He met Cat’s eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I still wanted more from life. I wanted my wife. We had been together twenty-four hours a day from the moment we met, and I still couldn’t get enough of her. I resented the time she gave to you, and she hated me for leaving her behind when I hit the road.” He seemed to drift for a moment, then pulled himself back. “Your mother wasn’t like other people. I knew that when we met. She wasn’t tough like you girls are. She felt things too much. After you two arrived, she was a raw nerve. She would see something on the television or hear something on the radio, and next thing I knew, she’d have sunk so low it would take me weeks to pull her back up to the surface.” He looked from Cat to Joely. “By the time you came along, Joely, I had run out of energy. I couldn’t do it anymore. She swung high and she swung low, and that sweet spot in the middle just wasn’t there to balance us out.”

“Why didn’t you take her to see a doctor?” Joely asked.

“We saw lots of them,” Mark said, “but nothing helped.” His gaze hardened. “You took her to doctors, Cat. She still set fire to her house.”

“She had a stroke,” Cat retorted. “There was nothing anyone could do.”

He nodded as if it all made sense on some cosmic level only he understood. “You want to know why I left? Hell, I’ve been asking myself that all the way up here. Joely still wasn’t sleeping through the night, and our tempers were frayed. I figured I’d go down to West Virginia to see Ben Carstairs, give us both a little breathing room. Maybe when I came back, things would be better.”

“You fought a lot,” Cat said. “I used to lie awake in bed with my hands over Joely’s ears so she didn’t have to hear it.”

“I’m not going to lie to you. We were in bad shape but, may God strike me dead, swear on Woody’s grave, I was coming back home again. A few weeks is all. Just a few weeks.”

“Fifty-two weeks a year for twenty-seven years,” Cat said. “You’re the scientist, Joely. You do the math for him.”

“Why didn’t you come back?” Joely asked. “Did you fall in love with somebody else? Did you start another family?”

“Nope, nothing like that.” He narrowed his eyes at them. “You sure your mother never told you any of this?”

They both shook their heads.

He exhaled loudly but went on. “I went to jail. Now I’m not proud of it, but somebody’d picked my pocket outside of Baltimore, and I didn’t have two cents to rub together. When we got to West Virginia, I had to find some way to get money. Hell, I was so broke I couldn’t even call Mimi and ask her to wire me some. So I did the only thing I could think of: I robbed a convenience store. Got fifty-six dollars and ended up with fifty-six weeks in the county jail with time off for reasonably good behavior.”

“And Mimi knew about this?” Cat asked in a dazed voice. “She knew you were in jail?”

“She knew,” he said. “She wrote to me every week while I was in, and I wrote back as often as I was able. I’ll bet she still has those letters, too.”

“If she did, they’re probably gone,” Cat said with more than a touch of malice. “There was a fire at Grandma Fran’s the other day.”

Of course he already knew that. He knew the whole story, or he wouldn’t be there, looking to feed off the bones of Mimi’s love for him.

“Okay,” Cat said, “so you did time in a county jail. Why didn’t you come home after you got out?”

“She’d moved back up here by then. Living with Fran in that old sand trap. I told her it was the perfect chance for us to start over. Fran loved you girls. She did a damn better job mothering you two than Mimi and I ever could. Mimi could come down and live with me in the mountains while I collected the old songs, and Franny would bring you two up. Hell, she couldn’t do any worse than we were doing. You deserved a hell of a lot better than anything we could do.”

“You don’t have a clue,” Cat said softly. “Not even a small one.”

“I asked her more than once to come to me, but she wouldn’t leave you girls.”

“Easy for you to say now that Mimi’s in a coma and can’t tell us that you’re lying.”

“Your mother saved everything,” he said. “She’ll have those letters. Mark my words, they’re somewhere in that house.”

“You really did cover all your bases,” Joely snapped. “Cat told you about the house fire.”

He waved a hand in the air, and she was struck by the same long fingers and large hands, the same elegant grace she had seen earlier that evening on TV. “She had a fireproof strongbox.”

“I never saw one,” Cat said, “and I know her house inside out.”

“It’s there,” he said. “I guarantee it.”

“That’s why you came back now,” Joely said. “It has nothing to do with Mimi or with us. You want something from that strongbox.”

“I came here to see your mother.”

“You wasted your time,” Cat said. “I’m not letting you anywhere near Mimi.”

“She’s my wife, Kit-Cat. It’s my right.”

Cat stared at him with disdain. “I’d say your rights as a husband ended around 1978.”

“Not everyone is as strong as you girls are,” he said. “I did the best I could.”

“You did nothing,” Cat shot back. “You left when things got tough, and you didn’t come back.”

“I sent money in the beginning.”

“From jail?” Joely asked. “Come on, Mark. Can’t you keep your story straight?”

“After I got out, Joely. I sent Mimi money for a couple years.”

“And then what?” Joely persisted. “You got bored. You decided you’d given us enough. You didn’t care. You never tried to see us or talk to us. I don’t get that. Didn’t you ever wonder?”

“It was easier not to,” he said with almost breathtaking honesty. “After awhile I got to like my life. They’re good people down there in the mountains. They made a place for me.”