“No, sir. I’m just—”
“Shut up and follow me.”
I thought of going limp, but I didn’t have the heart for it. I didn’t feel militant in that moment. I felt frightened. For myself. For my friends. And especially for Win. I followed the officer to the cars.
Chapter 35
KAYLA
2010
Daddy agrees to keep Rainie a couple of hours longer on Wednesday so I can do Ellie a favor: drive her mother to the doctor. Ellie has to take Buddy to his doctor at the same time, and Brenda has a dental emergency. I’m so grateful for Ellie’s help in finding Rainie yesterday that I would do anything for her.
Mrs. Hockley is not the dementia-addled woman I’d thought her to be. Yes, I have to help her down the porch steps and the walkway and into my car, and I have to buckle her seat belt for her, but she proceeds to give me accurate directions to her doctor’s office. She seems to have her wits about her.
“And call me Miss Pat,” she says, after the third time I call her Mrs. Hockley. It’s not exactly a friendly invitation. More of a command. I think Miss Pat had been a force to be reckoned with in her youth.
“Your hair looks very nice today,” I say, remembering how it looked—wispy and tired—when I first met her in the living room of the Hockley house. Today it’s smoother and a bit fuller.
“It’s my going-out wig,” she says, startling me with how easily she admits to wearing faux hair.
“Seriously? I wouldn’t have known.” I’m being honest.
“Brenda got it for me. She got me another one but I look like a dandelion in it.”
“Well, this one is really nice.”
“So you’re Reed’s daughter?” she asks after a pause.
“I am.”
She shakes her head. “Ellie missed the boat there.” She brushes a bit of lint from her navy-blue skirt. “Your daddy was a fine boy and she was a stupid girl to let him get away.”
“Oh, well,” I say lightly. “It’s hard to know what someone’s relationship is like from the outside.” I don’t bother to mention that I wouldn’t be here if Ellie and my father had stayed together.
“I don’t even know that girl.” She turns her head away from me to stare out the window.
“You mean Ellie?” I ask.
“Who else?” she says. “I don’t know her. She left at twenty and came back at sixty-five. What loving daughter does that?”
Oh boy, I think. I have a therapy session on my hands here.
“I guess it was hard to have her so far away for so long,” I say.
“It was like not having a daughter at all,” she says. “But frankly, there were many days I was glad of it.”
“Why is that?” I feel nosy, but I’m curious.
“That girl,” she says with disdain, as though those two words alone answer my question.
We’re both quiet for a moment. I’m waiting for more. And it comes.
“She brought us nothing but trouble and shame,” she says. “She put other people—perfect strangers—ahead of her own family.”
“She told me she was—and still is—a civil rights worker,” I say.
Miss Pat makes a dismissive motion with her arm. “She turned her back on us,” she says. “Cost us our friends. It wasn’t like it is today. You couldn’t imagine a Black president back then. Hard to imagine it now, frankly. No one approved of what she did. I could never get back my standing in Round Hill. She didn’t care who she hurt. I don’t know how she turned out so selfish.”
I’m having a bit of trouble following her. “Do you love her?” I ask the question, flat out.
“I love Brenda,” she says with great certainty and a nod of her head. “Brenda’s been a daughter to me. She visited me at least once a week while I was in that assisted-living cesspool Buddy stuck me in. And I do love my son,” she adds hurriedly, turning toward me. “Let me assure you of that. He had no choice but to put me someplace, what with his own illness. But Brenda is a real saint. She’s my true daughter.”
“I’m glad she’s been there for you,” I say.
We fall silent for a moment. She tells me to turn right, then left. It’s a shortcut, she says. I think about the night before, when I found some newspaper articles in a file marked “Hockley Street” in Jackson’s office. There was a lighthearted article about Hockley Street’s invasive kudzu, including a photograph of what looked like an almost perfect topiary of a dinosaur. There was an article about nineteen-year-old Buddy Hockley opening his car shop. There was one about Brenda’s husband’s death, how he was brought to the hospital by Brenda, Sheriff Byron Parks, and Danny Hockley, who must have been Ellie’s father.