Between Friends (13 page)

“Ali, what are you supposed to do? Follow her around every day? Come on.”

“You don’t understand, Cora.”

“Okay, well, help me. I’ll be Mom for the night.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. It was the closest we’d ever come to a head-on talk about our shared parentage. She was quiet for a long time, and I let the silence stand. I could take it; Ali had never been able to. I watched her while she looked for something to settle her gaze on.

“I’ll bring her back safely,” I promised.

She looked at me as though she doubted I’d bring her back at all, but then she raised her eyebrows and nodded curtly.

“All right,” she said, her voice perfectly calm, a touch of challenge in it. “Take her. You’re right. I need to talk to Benny, and Letty being there is just going to keep him angry all night.” She looked at her watch. “If y’all leave right this second you’ll have time to grab a few things from the house. You sure you want to do this?”

She had no idea how much. I wanted it even more than I wanted the tomatoes. When I first broached the subject, I had some vague idea that I wanted Letty to know me, to see me at my airborne best. But now, after recognizing my hair on her—albeit a better version of my hair—I realized that I wanted to see
her
in my world. I wanted to see Letty airborne, to see what else we had in common.

“Of course,” I said, trying to keep my eagerness out of my voice, and not succeeding entirely.

Ali stared hard at me for another moment, not breaking her gaze when she called Letty’s name. The storeroom door opened, and Letty poked her head out.

“What?” she asked, on guard, as if waiting for her next humiliation.

Ali finally looked away from me.

“You’re going to stay with Cora tonight. You have about twenty minutes before your father gets ho—”

But Letty was already out of sight. She burst back through the doorway with schoolbooks and folders in her hands. “Let’s go, let’s go,” she said, breathless.

I grabbed my keys. “See you, Al.”

“You’re welcome,” Ali yelled at her daughter as we ran through the front door.

Letty’s “Thanks, Mom!” was yelled back to a closing door, and I was doubtful that Ali heard it at all.

I gave the situation an appropriate sense of urgency and floored it all the way to Ali’s house, taking corners and curves hard enough that Letty held on to the dashboard. I was concerned for Letty, of course; I didn’t want her to have to deal with an angry Benny.

But I was just as concerned for myself. Benny and I had rarely had any open confrontations, but our relationship had always been tenuous, pulling Ali back and forth between us just as often as we gladly handed her off to each other.

I didn’t want to start that sort of psychological tug-of-war with Letty. Not now, not when it mattered so much.

I pulled up outside their house and stopped in the street. “Make it fast,” I said as Letty leaped out. She did. Within less than five minutes she was back in the car, a big cotton flowered bag gripped to her chest and her eyes scanning the street for Benny’s patrol car.

I pulled away and she sank low in the seat as we drove out of the neighborhood, but we didn’t pass him, and as we drew closer to my home the atmosphere in the car lightened considerably. I could practically hear her breathing easier.

“How did you do that?” she asked.

“What?”

“Get her to let me come over?”

“Oh, hey, I’m an old pro with your mom,” I said, brushing it off. I wasn’t going to talk to her about Ali’s own problems with Benny. That was up to Ali if she ever wanted to talk to Letty about it. “You can dump your stuff in the guest room, and then, you feel like going flying?”

“Seriously?” she asked.

I laughed at her incredulity, the shock of going from the certainty of a Saturday night filled with her father yelling at her to going flying.

“Seriously,” I confirmed.

And I felt, for the first time, what mothers must be reaching for when they have children to begin with. Letty practically glowed with love and appreciation for me, and it was more powerful than the gratitude of a friend, or the longing of a lover. It filled me like water, such deep and perfect satisfaction that I turned my head away from her rather than risk her seeing the rapture of it on my face.

I took my time closing. Benny hadn’t called when he got home as he sometimes did, asking me to pick up something to grill for dinner, or just to check in to see how the day had gone. At each half hour I envisioned what he was doing.

First half hour, getting showered and changed, then out to the birds, small chores around the house, maybe, and then he’d have opened the safe to go through all of Letty’s notes and her diary. The fact that he’d felt the need to put them in his safe made me even more uncomfortable than the fact that he’d taken them to begin with.

I pictured him girding himself, working out how he would confront her with whatever he found, quizzing . . . no, interrogating her, with me standing by, tacitly approving by my silence. But I’d had no practice with this particular Benny. Supposedly this Benny had been known to criminals, but he was not known to his family.

And despite the fact that I, too, was angry with Letty for lying, was frightened that I hadn’t known where she was and had believed her to be safe when she quite likely wasn’t, I didn’t believe that either of us had deserved Benny’s reaction to it.

I was almost an hour later closing than usual, and as I turned the lock on the back door I heard the store phone ringing. Confirming my certainty that it had been Benny, my cell phone rang as I was getting into the car. I didn’t answer.

What an odd feeling it was for me to be nervous driving home. I’d always looked forward to seeing Benny, even when he was in one of his down times. I knew that other women spent their lives feeling the way I was feeling now, and I’d always been grateful that I’d never felt it.

But the fear soon turned into something else. Much like in the truck out to Golden Gate the night before, I turned angry. And by the time I pulled into the driveway, not only was I furious for feeling forced into this nervousness and uncertainty, but I practically rushed to the door, ready to confront Benny for being overbearing and cruel.

But when I opened the door, he wasn’t waiting for us as I expected him to be. Instead, I found him in our bedroom, lying down, a cool, damp washcloth over his eyes.

“Hey,” I said softly, slowly approaching him. “Benny, are you okay?”

He didn’t raise the washcloth to look at me, he just shook his head, and I realized with a drop in my stomach that Benny had been crying. I sank to my knees beside the bed and pushed the washcloth up to his forehead.

“Sweetheart, what’s going on?” For the first time it crossed my mind that something was truly, terribly wrong with my husband. “What?”

He scrubbed the washcloth across his face and sat up, swinging his knees over the edge of the bed and holding his head in his hands.

“Oh, Ali,” he said, his voice gravelly, almost anguished. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just can’t get that kid out of my head.”

It took me a moment to figure out who he was talking about.

“Jasper?” I asked.

“Todd, yes, Todd Jasper,” he snapped at me, as if we’d been having a conversation about Todd Jasper all along.

“Can you talk to me?” I asked, feeling as anguished as he sounded. A certainty stole over me that something was going to change, something neither of us could prevent.

“I don’t know. Last month I started having dreams about him, nightmares . . . horrible things, you don’t even want to know, the house blowing up, what would have happened to him, to his body. And I thought once I went back to the street that I’d stop having them. But I haven’t. I—”

He broke off and slammed his fist down on the nightstand, making me jump. “Dammit,” he swore, and then he ran his hands down his face as though clearing cobwebs away.

“Benny, I didn’t know. Why wouldn’t you tell me?”

“They’re
dreams
, Ali, what was I going to say? Come crying to you like a child?” He looked over at the bedroom door and then back at me. “Where’s Letty?” he asked.

“I sent her home with Cora,” I said, no longer nervous about it. “I thought we needed to talk alone.”

His face darkened, and he rose from the edge of the bed. “You should have checked with me first. I tried to call. Where were you?”

“I must have been locking up,” I said. “Now, look, can we talk about these dreams?”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it. I know what I have to do, Ali. I have to get this family back on track. I’m going to take a shower,” he said, standing. “And then we’ll go pick her up.”

“No,” I said.

“Oh, yes,” he said, starting for the bathroom. It was as though the previous few minutes hadn’t even happened.

“No,” I said, more forcefully. “You and I are going to figure out what’s going on, tonight, together, and without Letty. She’s fine where she is.”

He turned around and strode toward me so quickly that I involuntarily backed up a step, but he reached past me and grabbed the stack of notes he’d piled on the nightstand in his hand. I hadn’t even noticed them when I walked in. They were all opened, pressed flat and neatly stacked.

“Letty is not fine,” he shouted. “Our daughter is a foul-mouthed little slut. I couldn’t help Todd Jasper, but I’ll be damned if I’m not going to do my duty by my own daughter.”

I gasped and tried to pull the notes out of his hand, but he held on, and I only succeeded at tearing several of them, leaving me with pieces in my hands. “What are you talking about? How can you say that?”

He threw them on the bed. “Read them,” he said, “and then you can tell me about how our daughter’s fine.”

And with that, he stalked off to the bathroom, leaving me clutching the torn paper. The bathroom door slammed, and I gathered the notes up and went to the living room, where I curled into a corner of the sofa and read them while the shower ran.

He was certainly right about “foul-mouthed.” The notes in her handwriting were filled with swear words, and the notes back to her, from her friends, were just as bad. But it was the sex talk that sickened me. Letty and her friends were not only explicit, but so casual as to appear offhand about their experiences.

But as I more carefully noted the names, I realized that Letty was rarely the instigator of these discussions, and I didn’t recognize the girls’ names, or sometimes just initials, on the notes. The ones to and from Emily were filled with just as many swear words, but the sex talk was limited to vague suppositions, and it was in these notes that Letty’s words rang most true.

The other notes, the ones to and from girls I didn’t know, seemed full of bravado more than anything else. But the ones that really surprised me were the ones from a boy, apparently Letty’s boyfriend, Seth.

Of course. Of course she had a boyfriend. That was who she went to the party with, and the girls from the notes were probably there, too. In fact, there was even a note about the party from Seth. Yes, the plan was there, to say she was staying at Emily’s, and to stay the night with Seth.

I felt sick. I’d never even heard his name before; he wasn’t one of the kids Letty had grown up with.

By the time Benny arrived in the living room, his wet hair slicked back, slipping his belt into his jeans, I was over my shock and prepared for how this was going to go. I remained seated, the notes refolded and in my purse this time.

“You ready?” he asked, hardly glancing at me.

“No,” I said. “We need to talk.”

“We need to talk to Letitia,” he said.

“No, I think we need to talk to each other first.” I motioned to the other side of the sofa. “Please sit down and talk to me.”

“Ali, get up and in the—”

“Okay, stop right there,” I said. “For the past two months you’ve been talking to me like an errant child, and I’m not going to stand for it. It’s not how we’ve ever run our relationship before and it’s not going to change now.”

“The way we’ve run our relationship before is the cause of this,” he said, not sitting down, but at least not still moving toward the door. “I have to get control back before it all falls apart.”

And, like Letty’s notes to her best childhood friend, Emily, this finally rang true. Control. That was what Benny had been after. He looked away, raising his fingers to his temples.

“Okay,” I said slowly, reasoning it out as I talked. “So you’re feeling out of control. What else is out of control, Benny? Me? Letty?”

“That’s going to change,” he said.

I stared at him, this man I first kissed when I was fifteen years old.

“You’ve been horrible to me and your daughter for weeks. You’ve changed jobs without discussing it with me; you’ve accused me of being a bad mother, a bad wife; you’ve refused to discuss having another baby, something I want more than anything and that you acted like you wanted for years; and you’ve got Letty too terrified to even come home. It seems to me that
you’re
the one out of control here, Benny.”