Tell Me Lies (4 page)

“No,” Em said. “It’s not a good time.”

“Well, then, I have
excellent
news about Jason Norris.”

They’d climbed into Mel’s tree house, the one she’d inherited from her older brother, and now Em leaned back on the old blue couch pillows they’d liberated from the family room and tried to decide whether or not to dump all her worries on her best friend. Mel looked like her mother— skinny, blonde, and freckle-cute—but she had a mind trained on Nintendo and every R-rated video in town. She’d be the best person in the world to talk to about the trouble at home. Em just wasn’t sure she wanted to talk about it. Talking might make it real.

“Dierdre White told me Richelle Tandy is
crazy
about him,” Mel went on, “but Jason is
definitely
not interested.”

Neither was Em at the moment. “He told me all girls have cooties.”

Mel sat up. “Well, see, that’s
great.
He’s
talking
to you. According to my mom, boys aren’t verbal, so if they do anything more than
grunt,
it’s a good sign.”

Em shook her head. “He also tried to chase me around the pool with a frog. Like I’d be afraid of a frog. He’s a mess.”

“Well, I think he’s
cute.”
Mel frowned at her. “Are you okay? Last week you thought he was cute, too.”

Em gave up. “There’s something really wrong at my house.”

“Your parents fighting?” Mel shrugged. “No big deal. Mine fight
all
the time.”

“They do?” Em was distracted for a moment, trying to imagine her uncle Howie yelling. It was hard to imagine Uncle Howie even talking back to Aunt Treva, but then it was hard to imagine anybody talking back to Aunt Treva.

Mel rummaged around in the old suitcase they’d swiped as a treasure chest and pulled out a crumpled pack of Oreos. “Sure. Last week it was about the grass.” She took a cookie and passed the package to Em. “Of course, they didn’t know I was listening.”

“The grass?” Em pushed her glasses back up the bridge of her nose to see the package better. No bugs. She took a cookie and bit into it. It was stale and soft, but it was a bugless Oreo in a tree house, so it was still pretty good. A breeze came up and blew through the window and even more through the cracks between the boards Three had nailed up in his early carpentry days. The cracks made it better. Anybody could nail boards close together; only Three would build in air conditioning.

Mel swallowed her Oreo. “Yeah, the grass.” She unscrewed the next crumbling cookie and licked at the icing. “Dad came home and said”— she made her voice deep and rocked her head from side to side—“ ‘Jesus, Treva, you don’t even teach during the summer and you expect me to cut the damn grass after all day at work,’ and Mom said”— Mel put a squeaky edge on her own contralto —“‘Jesus yourself, I’m not going to have a heart attack to cut the goddamn grass. You want it cut, you cut it.”

“Were they mad?” Em asked, fascinated.

“Nah.” Mel slumped down beside her on the cushions and crammed half of the Oreo in her mouth, talking around the black crumbs. “They get tired, and they bitch at each other, and then they say something dumb, and then they do it.”

Em blinked. “Oh.”

Mel nodded. “Like Mom says, ‘Okay, fine, I’ll cut the grass, but if I get all hot and sweaty, that’s it, ’cause I’m only getting hot and sweaty once tonight,‘ and Dad says, ’Well, maybe I can cut the grass later; why don’t we talk about it?‘ and Mom says, ’Well, I don’t know, that grass is getting pretty long,‘ and my dad grabs her hand and says, ’Step into my office and we’ll discuss it,‘ and my mom laughs and they go back to their room and do it.” She bit into the second half of her Oreo. “I tried to listen at the door after the grass fight, but Three caught me.”

Em grinned and relaxed. “What did he say?”

“He said that listening to stuff like that would stunt my growth and it would be my fault if I grew up to be a dwarf. Then he took me out for ice cream.”

Em sighed. “I love Three.”

“He can be your brother, too,” Mel offered. “So what are your mom and dad fighting about?”

Em put her half-eaten Oreo down. “They’re not. They don’t fight. They don’t even talk.” She thought hard for a minute. “I don’t think they even do it.”

Mel shook her head. “You don’t know that. They could be really sneaky and wait until you’re asleep. Your mom and dad are grown-ups. Mine are
immature.”
Her chin went up on the last sentence, and she looked so much like her mother that Em grinned again in spite of her worries. Then Mel, being Mel, went back to the problem at hand. “So if they don’t fight, what’s the problem?”

“They don’t do
anything.”
Em thought hard, trying to come up with a reason that would make Mel understand. “Dad bowls a lot and messes with the yard and goes out to work. And Mom works around the house and does her school stuff to get ready for when it starts, and talks to my grandma and your mom, and goes to visit my crazy great-grandma in the nursing home. But they don’t do stuff together.” She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose and frowned at Mel. “I know it doesn’t sound bad, but it is. There’s something wrong. And my mom is really upset today. I don’t know why, but she’s acting really unhappy.”

Mel sat up. “So they don’t, like, hug each other, and make jokes, and pretend to have fights and then laugh, and stuff like that?”

Em tried to imagine her parents doing any of those things. It sounded so wonderful, to have parents that laughed, but she couldn’t picture it. Her mom laughed with her and with her aunt Treva, but she couldn’t remember her laughing with her dad. She couldn’t remember her dad laughing at all. “No,” she said. “No, they never do.”

Mel’s face looked sober. “Maybe they’re getting a divorce.”

“No!” Em
pushed the Oreo package away, sick to her stomach. “No, they aren’t. They don’t fight. Ever. They never fight. They’re not getting a divorce.”

“You could live here,” Mel offered. “My mom loves you and so does my dad. You could be my sister.”

“They’re not getting a divorce,” Em said.

Mel slumped back on the pillows again and stared into space, thinking hard. Em watched, pinning all her hopes on Mel, telling herself that Mel was the idea person in their friendship, that everything would be okay when Mel came up with something.

“We could spy on them,” Mel finally offered.

“No,” Em said. Mel was the idea person, but sometimes her ideas were really bad, which was why Em got final say. Mel gave up the spy idea and thought again.

“I’ve got it.” She sat up. “You come spend tonight with me, and that’ll give them some time alone. That’s what my mom says saves their marriage sometimes. She dumps me on my grandma, and once when she didn’t know I was listening, she said, ‘Thanks, Irma, this is going to save your son’s marriage.’ ”

“I’ve spent the night with you before,” Em pointed out. “I do it all the time.”

“Since you started feeling bad about them?” Mel asked.

Em thought back on it. The bad stuff had started last week. They never talked or laughed, but it hadn’t bothered her until last week when everything seemed colder and tense. And it hadn’t really, really bothered her until today. Until she saw her mom’s face when she’d come in from the car. “No,” she told Mel. “Not since then.”

Mel rolled to her feet and headed for the ladder. “Come on. Let’s go
ask
.”

“Sure we are.” Treva sat down across from her, happy with her plan. “We’ll find stuff that’ll tell us what’s going on. Letters and things.”

“Letters?” Maddie looked at her in disbelief. “Brent won’t take a phone message, and you’re going to look for love letters?”

“Well, whatever. Is he going to be home tonight?”

Maddie tried to remember what day it was. Thursday. “No. He’s bowling with his dad.”

Treva brightened, and Maddie felt wary. Treva was too peppy about the whole catastrophe. “That’s great. We can search tonight. And I have another idea.” Treva leaned forward. “I think you should cheat on him and get even. I even know who you can do it with. Remember that hoody guy who followed you around senior year? He was always fighting somebody. And he was cute in an unstable kind of way. Remember?”

“No.” Maddie glared at Treva, a move that had no effect on her whatsoever.

“Sure you do. He had those great eyes and that big old car with a backseat the size of your family room.” Treva paused for effect. “C. L. Sturgis.”

Maddie put her chin in her hand and tried to look uninterested. “Vaguely. I remember him vaguely.”

“Well, I saw him with Sheila Bankhead this morning in front of the police station. And he’s looking
much
better. The hoody part’s gone. Of course, he still looks unstable, but at thirty-eight that’s exciting.”

“Seven.”

“What?”

“He’s thirty-seven. He’s a year younger than us. What does C. L. Sturgis have to do with my divorcing Brent?” There. It was easier saying it that time.

“I told you. Pay Brent back first by having an affair of your own. With C. L. Sturgis.”

“Have sex with C. L. Sturgis?” Maddie began to laugh and just kept on going.

Treva was patient, but she finally broke in. “Why not?”

Maddie stopped laughing and met her eyes. “Because I never make the same mistake twice, that’s why.”

“You had sex with C. L. Sturgis?”

The back door slammed. Mel stomped in and yelled, “Mom? Can we—”

“Out!”
Treva said without turning around, and waited until the door slammed again before she leaned across the table to Maddie and said, “You had sex with C. L. Sturgis?
And you didn’t tell me?”

“It never came up.” Maddie rubbed her forehead and tried not to think too much about that night, laughing and warm in the backseat with C.L. It had been a mistake then and it would be a mistake now.

Treva was still marveling. “This is amazing. I didn’t think you could keep a secret from me for twenty minutes, let alone twenty years. And your mother never found out?”

“No, thank God.” Maddie sat up straighter, galvanized by the thought. “I never told anybody. Can you imagine what would have happened if that got out? I never told
anybody.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t, either,” Treva said. “That must have taken some self-control.”

“I never thought about that,” Maddie said, surprised. “That was pretty sweet of him.” She tried to remember what she had thought about. “I worried myself sick about it for a couple of weeks, but nobody said anything, and I got my period, and there was a lot going on. It was near the end of senior year, and right after it happened you and Howie got married and there was that flap, and then there was graduation, and everything happened at once. And then I left for college, and the next year he graduated and left town forever, and I sort of forgot until he turned up today. He said he wanted to talk to Brent.”

“Brent? What about?”

Maddie blinked at her. “You know, I didn’t ask. I didn’t care.” She drew a deep breath and asked the question she’d been dreading. “Treva, you’ve got to tell me. Does everybody know about this already? Am I the last to find out? Because I don’t think I can—”

Em stuck her head in through the back door, and Maddie cracked her face into a smile. “Hi, baby.”

“Hi.” Em came in and leaned on the table, and Maddie could see the tension in her face. “Aunt Treva, can I come stay at your house tonight? Mel and I need to compare our school lists so we can share some things and save you money.”

“How thrifty of you,” Treva told her without taking her eyes off Maddie. “Of course you can stay.”

“Cool.” Em slipped out the door again, and they heard her yell, “Hey, Mel!”

“Are you okay with that?” Maddie said. “Were you going out tonight? I don’t want to dump her on you.”

“Forget that,” Treva said. “You need time alone to scream at Brent. Three can sit them if I can’t. They’re the least of our problems.”

Maddie slumped back. “Em’s the most of mine. I’m having nightmares about what happens when she finds out what everybody knows.”

“I don’t know what everybody knows. I only know what I know, and to answer your question, I didn’t know about this.” Treva put her hand over Maddie’s. “Forget Em for a minute. What do you want? If Em weren’t in the picture, what would you want?”

“I think I’d leave him,” Maddie said. “Except then there’s my mother, having to face the town with the first Martindale divorce. And his parents coming after me. And Brent isn’t going to take a divorce sitting down, he fought like hell the last time. And—”

Treva tightened her hand. “Will you forget everybody else for a minute? What do
you
want?”

Maddie blinked at her. “I don’t know.” She tried to push away the guilt of not thinking about everybody else first. “I think I’d like to be on my own. In fact, I think I’d love it. Just doing what I want, not worrying about what the neighbors think—that would be wonderful.” She sat back, and Treva’s hand slipped away. “You know my naked-in-front-of-the-bank fantasy? I have another one, about being alone on a desert island with a lot of chocolate and books. Just me and Esther Price Hand-dipped Nuts and Caramels and the complete works of everybody. No neighbors.”

“I have that one, too,” Treva said. “It used to be a lot of chocolate and Harrison Ford. And then one day I thought,
Why is Harrison here? If he wasn’t, I wouldn’t have to do these damn sit-ups.”

“I’d just like the aloneness of it,” Maddie said. “Nobody to keep happy. Nobody to feel guilty about. Just me forever.”

“Forever?” Treva lifted an eyebrow. “Two weeks, maybe, but then I’d want my family back. Even Howie, even if he is a guy.”

“I’d like forever,” Maddie said, and then she straightened in her chair. “Except I wouldn’t because I’d die without Em. And it’s a fantasy. I have to live in this town, and my mother deserves me taking care of her, and Em definitely deserves me taking care of her, and I was the one who promised Brent I’d be there for better or worse, so forget the desert island.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what I want. I think I’d better just concentrate on what I can have.”

“You can have a divorce,” Treva said. “Leave him.”

“What if he isn’t cheating?” Maddie said. “What if there’s an explanation? There might be. It’s possible.”

Treva rolled her eyes. “Fine. Then talk to him. But
do it.”

Talk to him. Say,
Brent I’m going to leave you.
Say,
I’m taking Em and leaving you.
Five years disappeared with blinding speed. She’d been here before and it had been horrible. Maddie felt her eyes grow hot and steeled herself. She was not going to cry. She was not going to sit in her best friend’s kitchen and be pathetic. She stood up, needing to escape before the tears came. “Right. I know you’re right. I do. But I have to go now.”

“All right.” Treva sat back. “Sure. Later. Whatever you want. Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Just peachy,” Maddie said, and went to get her daughter.