The Wreck (11 page)

He knew he shouldn’t be surprised that
her mother’s intuition had kicked in. “I miss her.”

Mary Ann’s eyes went soft with emotion.
“Of course you do.”

“I’ve always missed her, but I haven’t
let myself dwell on it, you know? I had to stay focused on school and then
work. But lately I miss her more than ever. I don’t get why it’s happening
now.”

“Maybe it’s finally taking too much
energy to run from the past.”

“I haven’t been doing that,” he said
hotly.

“Sure you have.”

“What was I supposed to do?”

“There was nothing else you
could
do.”

“You’re confusing me.”

“When you left for school and said you
wouldn’t be back, we didn’t believe you. Dad gave you until Thanksgiving. I
said Christmas.”

“You must’ve been disappointed when you
were wrong.”

“No. We were amazed, Brian. You don’t
often see that kind of strength in someone so young.”

“It didn’t feel like strength. It felt
like cowardice.”

“Why would you say that?”

“I was wrong to leave her the way I did,
to walk away from her at the lowest point in her life. Leaving was easy.
Staying would’ve been the courageous thing.”

Mary Ann was incredulous. “How can you
say that? Leaving took everything you had and then some. Your courage was
awe-inspiring.”

“Really, Mom,” Brian said with disdain.
“That’s kind of overstating it a bit, isn’t it?”

“No, it’s not. You didn’t let losing Sam
and the others derail you. If that’s not courage, I don’t know what is. You
didn’t let what happened ruin your life.”

“Didn’t it, though?”

Her eyebrows knitted with confusion.

“My life is my job. When Saul forced me
to take a vacation, I panicked. Fortunately, my mom was up for hanging out with
me for a week. I have no idea what I’ll do with next week.”

“Brian,” she said, her eyes bright with
tears.

“I’ve been satisfied with living the way
I do for a long time. Why should I suddenly be so dissatisfied?”

“You’ve had your share of
disappointments.”

“You mean Beth and Jane?”

“To start with.”

“They didn’t disappoint me. By the time
Beth told me she’d met someone else, I was relieved.”

“She was so sweet. I wish you could’ve
made it work with her.”

“I didn’t love her. I married her because
I liked hanging out with her. She deserved more than that, and she found it
with Joe. I’m glad for her.”

“I
know
you didn’t love Jane,”
Mary Ann said with distaste.

“Jane and I had an understanding. We had
the same job, the same crazy hours, the same kind of ambition, and we were both
tired of being alone all the time.”

“You would’ve been better off alone.
There wasn’t an ounce of warmth in that woman.”

“I didn’t marry her for her warmth,”
Brian said with a lascivious grin.

“
Ugh
, don’t say any more.” Mary
Ann groaned. “So if you had an ‘understanding,’ what went wrong? Not that I was
heartbroken when you two broke up, but I’ve wondered what happened.”

“She changed the rules by wanting more.”

“And that didn’t disappoint you?”

“Not like you think it did. If you aren’t
in love, what does it matter?” He paused and then added, “You know what she
said to me before she left?”

“I have a feeling I’m not going to like
this…”

“She said being with me was like biting
into an Easter bunny, and instead of finding rich chocolate, you discover the
bunny’s hollow and the chocolate’s fake.”

“That’s
outrageous
!” Mary Ann
huffed. “You’re a kind, wonderful man who was far too good for the likes of
her.”

“She was right, Mom.” He looked out at
the ocean for several minutes. “Do you know that since I left home, I’ve never
told anyone, and I mean
anyone
, about what happened on May 19, 1995? Not
Beth, not Jane, not anyone.”

Startled, Mary Ann stared at him. “What
do you say about Sam?”

“That he died in a car accident.”

“Oh, Brian,” she said with a sigh. “No
wonder you’re so homesick. It’s all catching up to you.” For a long while they
were quiet as they watched the sky turn to vivid pinks and oranges. Finally she
said, “You know, sometimes you have to go back before you can go forward.”

“I’m beginning to think you might be
right.”

G
ood Golly Miss Molly’s was rocking and
rolling for a Monday morning. The coffee shop was right out of the 1950s with
its black-and-white-checkered floor, chrome stools, and tables topped in red,
yellow, and black Formica and tiny jukeboxes. With two waitresses out with the
stomach flu, Carly had twice as many tables as usual.

 Looking as fresh in her yellow
uniform dress as the bright spring day outside, Carly brought a full pot of
coffee around, stopping at a table where three guys she had known since
elementary school gathered on most weekday mornings if they were working in
town. Tony Russo, Luke McInnis, and Tommy Spellman worked for Tony’s father’s
construction company and always sat in Carly’s section.

“Crazy morning, Carly,” Tommy commented
as she refilled their coffee cups.

She rolled her eyes in agreement and
moved on to the next table. Returning the pot to the warmer, she pulled her pad
from her pocket and approached a table where an older couple was studying the
menu. An unwritten rule in the shop made it so Carly never waited on people she
didn’t know, but since they were shorthanded today, she had no choice.

With a friendly smile, she positioned her
pen over her pad, ready to take the couple’s order.

The man looked up at her with a scowl.
“Are you gonna just stand there, girl?” he asked gruffly.

Carly tapped her pen against her pad,
hoping to spur the man into giving his order and shutting his mouth.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Her heart began to beat hard. This didn’t
happen very often. She pointed to her throat.

“What kind of place hires a girl who
don’t talk?” he asked his wife in a booming voice.

Carly often encountered people who
assumed because she couldn’t talk, she couldn’t hear, either.

“That’s enough, Paul,” the wife said
sharply. To Carly, she said, “I’ll have a blueberry muffin and a coffee,
please.”

Carly sent her a grateful smile.

“Are you mocking me, girl?”

Rigid with shock, Carly felt heat creep
into her cheeks.

“Paul!”

From behind Carly, Luke McInnis said, “Is
there a problem here?”

“Mind your own damned business,” the man
snapped at Luke.

As she realized the shop had fallen
silent and all eyes were on her, Carly’s embarrassment kicked into overdrive.

Luke leaned down from his considerable
height until he was an inch from the man’s face. “No one talks to Carly like
that, do you hear me?”

Molly Hanson, the grandmotherly woman who
owned the shop, eased Carly aside. “I think you folks had better be moving
along,” she said in a bright singsong voice. Her eyes, however, were hard and
unyielding.

“Well,” the man huffed. “I don’t know
what kind of business you’re running here—”

“The kind where you’re not welcome.”

The wife got up, grabbed her purse and,
with an apologetic glance at Carly, walked out the door. Her husband pushed
past Molly and Luke on his way to the door.

After they were gone, Molly patted
Carly’s shoulder and went back to work behind the counter.

“Are you all right?” Luke asked Carly.
His dark hair was mussed from the ball cap he had worn earlier, his blue eyes
filled with concern.

Carly nodded. The other customers had
gone back to their meals, and the conversation level returned to normal.

“Are you sure?” Luke asked.

Carly forced a smile and nodded again. When
he began to walk away, she reached out to squeeze his arm.

He looked down at her hand and then up at
her eyes. “You’re welcome.”

Carly’s
shift ended at two. Still trying to shake off the ugly incident from earlier,
she left Miss Molly’s and walked slowly along Main Street, nodding hello to the
people who greeted her. Flower boxes full of colorful, fragrant blooms sat
outside the wide variety of shops that faced the town common. She climbed the
stairs to her second-floor apartment over Carson’s. On the small deck at the
top of the stairs, she noticed her impatiens needed water.

Inside her eclectically furnished
apartment, she peeled off the yellow dress, dropped it into the hamper, and
stretched out the aches and pains that came from spending eight hours on her
feet. Now that she was thirty-three, the aches and pains were more pronounced
and longer lasting than they used to be. She tugged her long hair free of the
ponytail she had worn to work, ran a brush through the riot of curls, and tamed
them into a new ponytail. Her sofa beckoned, but Carly resisted, changing into
denim shorts and an old T-shirt. She watered her geraniums and impatiens,
plucked a few blooms from another of her ceramic pots, and took them inside to
find a vase.

Grabbing her tote bag of gardening tools
and a bottle of water from the refrigerator, she set off down the stairs. As
much as she would love a nap, she couldn’t resist the warm spring day. She’d
had lots of time to be lazy in April when day after day of rain had kept her
inside on too many afternoons.

She wound her way through downtown and
took a right onto Tucker Road. It had taken her three years and multiple
attempts to return to the accident site. When she had finally worked up the
nerve to walk around that last bend in the road, she’d been appalled to find
the site overgrown with weeds that all but obscured the six crosses bearing the
faded names of her friends. That first time, she had also been surprised to
find no sign of the fire and vegetation almost completely masking the place
where her friends’ lives had come to such a horrifying end.

The white paint had been chipping from
crosses covered with slimy moss. Over the next month, Carly had made multiple
trips to the site, once carrying paint and brushes, another time bringing
clippers and a trash bag.

Today she was pleased that the
wildflowers she’d planted before the April rains had exploded into colorful
blooms. She pulled the weeds from around the crosses and trimmed back the
snapdragons and cosmos so they wouldn’t block the view of the crosses from the
road.

Maintaining this place had been
therapeutic for Carly. She saw it as something she could do for the friends she
had lost, a way to honor their memories. Only when she was here did she allow
herself to dwell on the events of that long-ago spring. She wondered what they
would all be doing if they had lived. Would Toby still be in the Navy? Would
Pete have ever honored the promise he had made to his parents to return from
his travels and go to college? Would Jenny work at the fancy new hair salon
that had opened downtown last year? Or would she have her own salon by now?

Carly wondered if she and Michelle might
have raised their children together, the way their mothers had raised them. She
suspected Sam would’ve followed his father into the police department and Sarah
might’ve been a doctor. Envisioning how their lives might be today was a source
of comfort to Carly since it allowed her to briefly entertain the fantasy that
they were out there living their lives somewhere. She didn’t spend a lot of
time wondering how her own life would have turned out, because she knew. She’d
be married to Brian, and they would have at least three children by now.

All over town last week and especially at
Miss Molly’s, people had been abuzz about his big win. Carly had recorded his
interview on TV and replayed it again and again. She had seen photos of him in
the newspaper over the years, but it had been so startling to hear the new
deeper timbre of his voice. He had matured into rugged good looks that reminded
her of his father as a younger man.

She was so proud of Brian. He’d done
exactly what he had set out to do and was obviously an amazing attorney. She
wasn’t surprised he had chosen to be a prosecutor. It was just like him to want
to help people, and public service
was
in his genes, after all.

When she finished pulling the weeds and
collected a few pieces of trash, Carly stepped back to take a critical look at
her work. She wished she could tell them all how much she loved and missed
them, but she suspected they knew. She liked to picture them together in
heaven, doing the same things they’d always done, going on like nothing had
ever happened. She knew what it felt like to be alone, so imagining her friends
still had each other took the edge off her sadness.

As she was getting ready to walk away,
one last piece of paper poking out of the wildflowers caught her eye. She
reached down to pick up a white scrap with vivid red words that said, “WHORES
AND ASSHOLES.” Shocked and repulsed, she quickly pushed the paper into the
trash bag. Who would leave such a thing here, of all places?