The Year Everything Changed (14 page)

“Better not let Daddy catch you staring at that picture like that.” The warning was spoken in a whisper, the voice soft, feminine, intoxicating.

I turned and saw the girl in the picture looking at me, a mischievous smile flashing from those amazing blue eyes. I stared, openly and longer than was polite, before I found a smile to give in return. I guessed her to be fifteen, maybe sixteen, close enough to my own age for me to fall instantly, passionately, irretrievably in love. If God ever decided my prayers were worth listening to, this was the woman I would marry one day. She was my future.

Her smile faded. I think the way I stared at her must have scared her some, but she didn’t look away. She knew, just as I did, that something special, maybe even a little magical, had happened between us.

They weren’t the kind of words I could say out loud when I was a month shy of my seventeenth birthday and wondering what I was going to use for money for the next two years while I laid pipe over land leased with promises. Promises I laid awake nights wondering if I could keep.

The tape ended. Lucy slipped the earphones off and glanced at Jessie. She waited to hear the strained pull of air into his lungs, but there was only silence. Sometime, somewhere during her journey into his past, he’d left her.

She reached for his hand. It was still warm. He hadn’t been gone long. She stood and brushed the hair from his forehead and kissed him good-bye. “If the fates had been kind, I would have been the girl in the painting,” she whispered. “And your daughters would have been mine. I’ll take care of them for you, Jessie.”

She wasn’t aware she was crying until she saw a tear land on his cheek. She squeezed his hand and tenderly kissed him on the lips—for the first and for the last time. “Save a place for me, dear friend.”

Chapter Twenty
Lucy

Lucy sat up straight and stretched her shoulders. She should go home. It was after midnight and she was exhausted. She’d come to the office to tie up loose ends after the funeral. Now everything was done; there was no reason to stay. But she couldn’t leave. Her office was the one place she still felt Jessie’s presence, as if he were purposely hanging around, trying to communicate to her that there was something left undone.

There was. The reading of the will. Lucy had hoped to take care of it after the funeral, saving Jessie’s daughters another trip to Sacramento. But they hadn’t come. Not one of them. There was a moment when she thought she’d spotted Elizabeth at the cemetery, but when she looked again, the woman had disappeared. Elizabeth was the only one Lucy knew for sure was even aware Jessie had died. She’d tried for three days to contact Christina and Ginger and only reached their answering machines. She’d left messages, but had yet to hear from them. Rachel’s secretary had told her Rachel wasn’t expected back from a business trip to Hong Kong for another week. Lucy asked for a return call that never came.

No one knew about Jessie’s daughters, so no one at the funeral looked to the family section and wondered at their absence. No one but Lucy. She had sense enough not to feel hurt. The anger she felt gave way to sorrow as she listened to Jessie’s tapes.

They would never know the man their father had been, never understand why he’d done what he had, never forgive him his trespasses. She could make copies of the tapes, but they wouldn’t listen. They clung to his abandonment of them like winning lottery tickets.

Lucy left her desk and went to the window. The street below was deserted, the traffic lights flashing from green to yellow to red with no one to heed them. “What should I do, Jessie? Is there a way to get them to listen? Is that why you humored me and made the tapes—because you wanted me to find a way?”

She stood there several minutes waiting, open to inspiration, eager for answers, for a solution. Nothing came. Finally, yielding to fatigue, she locked up and drove home.

The answer came in the middle of the night. There would be hell to pay if what she’d come up with was ever discovered, but she didn’t care. Unable to contain her excitement, Lucy got out of bed and went to work drafting an addendum to Jessie’s will. When she’d finished, she sat back and smiled.

“It’s done, Jessie,” she said softly, satisfied. “And damned if I don’t think you had a hand in this.”

Chapter Twenty-one
Christina

Christina handed the cab driver his fare and waved off the seventy cents in change. Five weeks since her last cab ride home from the airport. A lifetime ago.

The small patch of grass that passed for a front yard was all but dead, the flowers she’d planted along the porch, a brittle memory. The wheels on her suitcase bounced and skidded on the debris-laden concrete driveway. Two houses down she heard the Ramirez kids playing in their plastic pool in the backyard. Next to them the Chapman dog barked automatically, without purpose or enthusiasm.

It wasn’t even noon yet and one of the signs on the savings and loan buildings they’d passed on the way in from the airport had said it was a hundred and five degrees. It would be a hundred and fifteen by five and likely wouldn’t drop below eighty that night. She said a quick, silent prayer that the air conditioning still worked. Someday she was going to live somewhere that didn’t need air conditioning—in a house on the side of a hill facing the ocean.

Someday she was going to do a lot of things and have a lot of things that she didn’t have now. She hadn’t come back to Tucson because she’d wanted to, she’d simply had to get away and there was nowhere else to go. After five weeks of confinement with her mother while her broken jaw healed and the bruising faded, listening to everything that was wrong with her life and why she should move back to Mexico, hell had more appeal. The doctor had tried to talk her into staying another three weeks, at least until her jaw was unwired, but when Christina burst into tears and mumbled something unintelligible about losing her job if she didn’t get home, he gave in and let her go. It was one of her finest acting moments.

She stepped on the porch and stuck her hand into her purse to dig for her keys. She was still searching through lotions, fingernail files, a sunglasses case, and the emergency suction bulb her mother had insisted she carry in case she got sick on the plane when she looked past the dusty screen and spotted a note taped to the front door.

Her first thought was that it was a final parting shot from Randy, but she knew from friends that he’d left town a week after the police released him and the note looked relatively new.

Christina opened the screen to get a better look. It was from the landlord—an eviction notice stating the rent hadn’t been paid in three months. The seven days she’d been given to pay what was due had passed five days ago. Now she had one day to vacate before an officer of the court came to do it for her.

Panic pressed a cold hand to her shoulder. How could this be? She’d always paid their rent on time. She’d been counting on that goodwill to see her through until she was working again.

And then it hit.
Randy
—the low-life, no-good bastard must have been siphoning the household money for months. No wonder he’d offered to take over paying the bills. How could she have been so goddamned stupid to believe that he was doing it to give her a break? Christina shoved the notice into her purse and unlocked the door.

A wave of stagnant hot air greeted her. The blinds and curtains had been drawn, the only light coming from the open door. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark, seeking familiar objects. There weren’t any; just mail littering the floor under the slot beside the door. Ten seconds ago she’d wondered what she would do with the furniture, how she could get it moved, where she would store it until she found another place to live. She should have known Randy would take care of that for her, too. Anything worth keeping, anything of any value, was gone—including the bookshelves and the boxes that held everything to do with the movie.

Except the phone. He’d left it in the middle of the room, the message light blinking. Obviously he’d paid the phone bill—she reached for the light switch—and the Tucson Electric Power Company bill. Or they were simply slower cutting her off than her landlord.

Randy had moved quickly, stripping the house, undoubtedly selling what he could, trashing what he couldn’t, making sure there was nothing left for her to recover. She considered and rejected the idea of calling the police. Even though the furniture had been hers, it had come from flea markets and garage sales, paid for by working extra shifts at the restaurant while Randy was at their rented studio with Shawn doing the sound dubbing. A petty theft charge wouldn’t be worth the effort.

Her gaze settled on the flashing red light on the answering machine. Why leave the phone?

Because he’d left her a message
. He wanted the last word and knew she couldn’t resist listening. Well, screw him. If he had something he wanted her to hear, he could damn well tell her in person when she tracked him down to get their movie back. He might get away with breaking her jaw and taking her furniture, but no way in hell was she going to let him get away with stealing their movie. Christina picked up the phone and yanked the cord from the wall.

Curiosity more than hope sent her through the rest of the house. She wasn’t surprised to see her file boxes dumped and crushed, the papers littering the floor, her clothes in a pile in the middle of the room, glossy red paint sprayed in an X pattern over the top. Only a pair of jeans, a white shirt, some underwear, and her stuffed bear survived. Which didn’t matter. She’d lost so much weight drinking her meals through a straw, none of her old clothes would fit. She’d make do with what her mother bought before putting her on the plane for Tucson. Gathering the clothing along with the papers—everything from school records to payroll stubs to paper clips to receipts from the movie that she’d meticulously cataloged and saved since moving to Arizona—she stuffed it all into her suitcase.

Now all she had to do was figure out who she could ask to put her up for a couple of weeks and how, with her mouth wired closed, she was going to get a job to pay them back.

Christina stared at the foot-high stack of mail, trying to decide whether to take the time to go through it now or stuff it in her suitcase and take it with her. Figuring—hoping—that most of it was junk mail and not worth the effort, she sat down cross-legged and began sorting.

There were two letters from agents she’d queried in L.A., both form rejections, several past due notices from various utilities, and a request for a donation from the University of Arizona Alumni Association. “Someday, when I’m rich,” she promised, acknowledging her loyalty and love of the school she’d attended on a whim. Eager to leave home, she’d applied to U of A because that was where her best friend wanted to go. Then the friend was caught in a drug bust six months into their freshman year and sent home. Alone and bored, Christina wandered into an audition for a school play. She was hooked. She changed her business major to theater the next semester and never looked back.

Stuck between an ad for a new grocery store opening in the neighborhood and the telephone bill was a letter from her father’s attorney. A chill traveled her spine. Whatever was inside couldn’t be good. If Jessie had gone into remission or wanted to see her again or just wanted to know if she was thinking about seeing him again, he would have called.

She glanced at the telephone still sitting in the corner where she’d thrown it. Torn between fear and a need to know, hesitantly, reluctantly, she plugged it in, rewound the tape, and hit the play button. As she’d suspected, the first voice she heard was Randy’s. She fast-forwarded through his message and three from the restaurant where she’d worked, the last one telling her she was fired. Calls from several friends, both hers and Randy’s, followed. She was almost to the end when she heard a woman’s voice she didn’t recognize and stopped to listen.

“—peacefully. The funeral is this Saturday. The governor’s office requested we wait until he was back from Washington, and I wanted to give you and your sisters enough time to make arrangements to be here. I’m afraid it’s going to be a bigger production than your father wanted, but he never had any real sense of how beloved he was in this community.” Fatigue rode her words like a dark horseman.

“If you have any questions or need help with your arrangements, I’ve told my assistant to do whatever she can to aid you. I’m going to be out of the office between now and the funeral, but if you need to talk to me personally, my assistant will tell you how to reach me. Or you can leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

“I’ve reserved the front pew at the church for close friends and family. If I don’t hear from you before—” The tape ended and began to rewind.

Christina flashed back to the messages she’d deleted on her cell because she didn’t recognize the number.

How could her father be dead? He’d looked tired when she’d seen him, not weeks from dying. She’d only been gone a little over a month.

She’d told her mother she was going to see her father again, as soon as her jaw was unwired and she could put the money together to get back to Sacramento. She’d never seen her mother so angry. Didn’t Christina realize what a slap in the face it was to Enrique, the man who had raised her as his own child? What would the rest of the family say if they found out? It would bring up everything Carmen had worked so hard to overcome. She would be gossiped about, embarrassed, shamed all over again. Christina was ungrateful, she was selfish, she had no loyalty to the family that had sacrificed everything for her.

Christina brought her knees to her chin and stared at the sliver of light escaping the drawn blinds. The one person she had once believed loved her without reservation was gone. She had a hundred questions that would never be answered. A thousand.

At least she could tell him good-bye. It was Thursday. That gave her a day and a half to get to Sacramento. She reached for her purse and dug for her wallet. Eighty-six dollars and twenty-three cents. Even a bus ticket would cost more than that. She had a final paycheck coming from Lansky’s, enough to get her to Sacramento but not back. She didn’t care. There was nothing to come back to. She’d go to L.A. Finally.

She opened the letter.

Dear Ms. Alvarado,

As I’m sure you are aware by now, your father passed away a week and a half ago.

She was too late.

There were several business dealings I had hoped to go over with you and your sisters after the funeral, but since none of you were present, it will have to be done at my office. I have reserved Monday, the fifteenth, at three o’clock in the afternoon for this meeting. It is critical that you keep this appointment. If for any reason you cannot attend, please let me know immediately, and I will attempt to make other arrangements.

Sincerely,

Lucy Hargreaves

None of them had been there? Out of four daughters not one had cared enough to say good-bye?

She grabbed a handful of mail and flung it across the room. How could Jessie come back into her life and not give her more time to know whether to love or hate him, to know whether her memories of him were real and not something she’d imagined? Those fragile memories were the soft, warm, safe corners of her childhood, the place where she’d gone whenever she felt she wasn’t pretty enough or smart enough or good enough. Always her father had been there to tell her she was wrong.

And now he was gone, dead to her twice.

She was tired. Too tired to deal with it anymore. She took her bear back out of her suitcase, tucked it under her head, and curled up in the middle of the empty room, her heart as tattered as the sisal rug that dug into her skin.