Smoke Signals (14 page)

I couldn’t think of a thing to say to that.

Wordlessly, Tallie stared at me so long I thought I would melt under her assessment. She sighed. “You should tell me to hush up sometimes, you know. It’s all right. I know I talk too much, and I’m not letting you get a word in edgewise.”

“Not much for me to say.”

The hint of a smile curled up the corners of her lips, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I don’t believe that for a second. You’ve got a lot to say. Maybe you’re just not ready to say it. That’s all right. But when you’re ready, you just let me know I need to hush up and listen. I can do that. It won’t hurt my feelings any. Lord knows Hunter tells me to shut my yap all the time.”

I smiled and nodded, wishing our toenails would hurry up and dry so we could leave. With just the two of us, and nothing else going on but for us to talk, she was focusing in on me like a laser beam. I felt stripped bare under her attention, much as I was starting to feel with Razor every time he pried away one of my layers.

“Look, Tori,” Tallie said after a long silence. “I don’t know what’s happened to you. But I do know it looks like you could use a friend. I could use a few friends around here, too. When you’re ready, I hope you’ll let me be one.”

“But you don’t know—”

“I don’t know much of anything because I’ve talked over you almost nonstop since we first met. I do know you’ve got a lot going on in your head. I can see it in your eyes and in the hunch of your shoulders. It’s in the way you wrap your arms around that purse and hold it all tight to your chest. There’s a lot of hurt in there. I’m not going to lie to you and pretend I understand, because I don’t. I don’t have a clue what all you’ve been through. I’m just saying, if you want to talk, I’ll listen. And even if you don’t want to talk, we can still get together to go shopping and have frozen yogurt and get our nails done. There’s nothing worse than feeling alone, and I don’t want you to feel alone. Okay?”

I was on the verge of tears, but I knew that if I let one drop, I’d never be able to make them stop. Today had been too much. This whole
week
had been too much. So I nodded, because it was all I could do.

“Good.” She bent her knee and tried to touch one of her toenails to check for dryness, but with the size of her belly, there was no chance that would happen. “Okay. Help me out here. Check to see if yours are dry.”

I lifted my knee to my chest and touched the pad of my thumb to one of my toenails. “Dry.” The single word sounded as harsh and pained as my heart felt.

She grinned. “Then let’s get out of here and go to Black and Pink. We’ll get you everything you need to start dancing again.”

“But where will I dance?”

“Oh, honey.” Tallie spun her feet to the side of her chair and slipped into her flip-flops. “Don’t you worry about that. There’re lots of dance studios and whatnot around here.”

Ever since they’d informed me I’d been kicked out of my dance program, ballet had been the furthest thing from my mind. I’d been focused on finding a way to live, but dance might just be exactly what I needed. I nodded, and I actually smiled. I knew it was a real smile, too, because it caused an ache in facial muscles unaccustomed to being used in that way. How long had it been since I’d smiled? Or laughed? Too long.

Without a word, I toed on my flats and lowered the still-wet denim over my legs before grabbing my purse.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Ready.” For what, I couldn’t be sure. Change? The hope of something better, even if it was only for a brief moment in time?

I followed her out of the spa, ever so slightly lighter on my feet than I’d been when we entered.

“WHY IS IT
that my only son gets married, and instead of hearing about it from his own mouth, I find out through the local hockey grapevine?” Mom asked. At least she was laughing, not hurt or mad.

“I’m calling to tell you now,” I said sheepishly into the phone. It wasn’t that I’d wanted to keep my mother in the dark. There were things I needed to talk over with Mom while Tori wasn’t sitting there listening in, and almost every moment since we’d gotten married had been spent together, just the two of us. I could have called Mom earlier this morning, as soon as Tallie whisked Tori away to go shopping, but I’d spent that time on the Internet, trying to figure out as much as I could about immigration laws and what sort of uphill battle we would be facing.

It didn’t look good. At all.

At the moment, Tori was still out with Tallie, and it seemed like as good a time as any to fill Mom in on the latest developments, not to mention to get her take on what to do to help Tori through her sexual issues. Not that I had a good plan for how to broach that subject, but I figured it would come to me. Mom had always been easy to talk to about almost anything. She was an open book. We’d had some very serious and frank birds-and-the-bees types of conversations when I was still very young, and throughout my teens she had constantly checked to be sure I had an adequate supply of non-expired condoms available to me. Mom was no-holds-barred when it came to any discussion of sex. She told it how it was, and she didn’t have a filter.

She let out a snort-laugh, which I knew was from trying to keep her voice down at work. She had her own office, but the walls were thin and people might overhear. No one at her job would give her a hard time about taking a few minutes to talk to me on company time, but that didn’t mean they needed to know what we were discussing.

“A week later?” she asked. There was a definite eye roll included in that tone.

“Not quite a week yet.”

She chuckled. “I see how important I am to you.”

“Mom, you know you’re the most important person in the world to me.”

“Except maybe for your new wife…”

I started to contradict her but stopped before the words were fully formed. Would I put Tori before my mother? It was a thought that shook my foundation.

Because I wasn’t sure, but I was leaning toward Mom being right. Not surprising. Mom was always right. I hadn’t thought so for a few years in my teens, but as I’d gotten older, it was a truth I’d simply come to accept.

“It’s all right, Ray. I’ve always known that someday, someone else was going to step in line ahead of me. If and when you have kids of your own, there will probably be several someones in front of me. That’s how it works.”

“No matter what, you’re always going to be my one and only mom.”

There wasn’t a doubt in my mind she was smiling. It was almost audible. “You’d better believe it. So, tell me about her. How’d you meet? What’s she like? When are you bringing her to meet me?”

Probably better to ease her into it. “Well, her name’s Tori. She’s a ballerina.” All true.

“A ballerina? Like, a professional ballerina?”

“Not exactly.” Yet. That could change, though. Only now, I realized I had no idea if she was any good or not. I didn’t know the first thing about dance, and I hardly knew anything about my wife. “We met in Vegas while I was there for Babs’s wedding.”

“You just met her?” Her laugh was full this time, a big, familiar belly laugh that warmed me all the way to my toes. “Why doesn’t it surprise me that you got married on a whim? That’s my boy. Puts on blinders and jumps in without looking. For years, you’ve been dating all these girls, a new girl every time I talked to you, but you’d hardly ever let me meet any of them.”

“They weren’t
the one
, so why bother with having them meet you? All it would have accomplished is getting you to tell me how wrong for me they were, and then I’d feel like I was letting you down.” I couldn’t stand letting Mom down. Not after all she’d done to help me get ahead in life. I might as well stomp on her if that was how I went about repaying her for everything she’d sacrificed.

“You never could,” she said. “But Tori is really the one? And you knew it the instant you met?”

We have to be convincing
. If I took Greg’s words at face value, chances were high that there would be a lot of interviews of people in our lives, and that meant they would talk to Mom almost undoubtedly. So I bit down on the inside of my cheek and prepared to lie to my mother, even though it killed me to do so.

“Yeah. She’s the one. And I knew it right away.”

The first lie. Only, it didn’t exactly feel like I was lying. Was Tori the woman I was supposed to spend the rest of my life with? I honestly hadn’t thought about our relationship in those terms before now, which seemed insane considering the two of us had made the relatively permanent decision to get married. Even if I didn’t know the full extent of the law as far as getting Tori a green card through marriage, there was definitely a part of me that realized our union wouldn’t be a temporary situation. We couldn’t just marry for six months, wait for the paperwork to go through, and then get a quick divorce. Tori needed someone to stick around in her life. She needed me. Was that enough for her to be
the one
?

“How’d you know?” Mom demanded.

Well, hell. Without thinking, I spit out the first thing that came to mind. “I recognized a piece of you in her.”

“Didn’t anyone ever tell you that you’re not supposed to marry your mother? Someone should have mentioned that.”

“I think that would have been your job, Mom.”

“True. One more way I’ve failed you.”

“Stop that. You’ve never failed me.”

“I’m teasing you.”

“I know that.” Sarcasm ran in the family. “But she’s not you. There’re just some things about her that make me think of you.”

“Like what? Because I’m sure not a ballerina.”

It was now or never. “You ready for this?”

“Now you’re making me nervous. What, is she my age? Got saggy tits like mine? She’s a minor or something? You’re scaring me, Ray.”

“No saggy tits or underage brides,” I said, chortling.

“Then what? It can’t be so bad you’ve gotta warn me.”

“We met when she propositioned me.”

Silence.

“Mom?”

“She wanted you to be her John?”

“Yes.”

“She pegged you as a trick? And you married her?”

“Yes.”

“I think you need to tell me more, because I don’t care what kinds of things I’ve done in the past and what you were exposed to because of my choices, this isn’t making any kind of sense. You’re talking crazy talk, Ray, and I’m going to have to come down there and knock some sense into you.”

“I actually think it’d be a good idea for you to come down. Not to talk sense into me.”

“I said
knock
,
not
talk
.”

“No need for that, either. I just…I need help with her.”

“Because she’s trying to milk you for every freaking dime you’ve got! How the hell did you end up this naïve? You don’t marry a hooker. You just let her turn her trick—”

“Mom…”

She sighed. “Explain it. Please, for the love of God, explain it. And you’d better make it a good explanation, because my head is starting to pound.”

“I was going to be her first trick. She’d never done it before.”

“And why was she going to turn to that?” There wasn’t any judgment in her tone. Only curiosity. Maybe some concern.

“She didn’t have any other options left. She’s Russian—”

“Hold up. Tori is not a Russian name.”

“Viktoriya. I just call her Tori.”

“All right. Go on.”

“Her parents got messed up with the Russian Mafia.”

“Oh, good. It gets better.”

“Do you want me to tell you or not?”

“Sorry. I’m all ears.” The sounds of her pounding the keyboard of her computer reverberated through the phone. She was either working through my explanation or she was posting something to Facebook before hearing the full story. Either seemed plausible.

“Anyway, her dad sent her to a ballet school in the US on a student visa to get her away from them. Then they killed him and kidnapped her mother, and so she didn’t have anyone else. And that was when she got into porn.”

“Porn? Holy shit, Ray. I mean, I feel for her, but girls who get into porn…”

“You don’t have to tell me. I know.” Girls who got into porn didn’t come out unscathed. Did I ever know. “So that went okay for a while—as okay as working in porn could go, I suppose—but it was a violation of the school’s policy. They kicked her out of the program, which meant she lost her visa—”