Joey had her own share of guilt, too. Incredibly, she blamed herself for her mother being charged with Charles’s murder. After their neighbor called the police, and Ruby was finally arrested for child abuse, Joey had allowed the social worker to read her diaries, where she’d written about the night Charles was killed.
“You wanted your social worker to know, though, right?” Drew had asked her. They were sitting at the table by the window at Junior’s. “Was giving her your diaries your way of telling her, without actually having to tell her?”
“I don’t know that I was thinking about it that way,” Joey said. “As stupid as it sounds, I never wanted Ruby to go to prison. I just wanted to not live with her anymore. But in the end, she got the last laugh. Living with my aunt and uncle didn’t make my life better. All it did was make it a different kind of shitty. And there were many times when I wished I had just stayed with the devil I knew.”
Joey almost never talked about her years in Maple Sound.
Drew reaches for the last diary, and starts reading.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
After her mother’s arrest, Joey spent two nights in an emergency shelter with a dozen other kids. She slept on a bottom bunk, underneath a girl who talked （cried） in her sleep. When the social worker finally came back for her, Joey was relieved. All she wanted was to see her mother and make sure she was okay （not mad at her）。
But they weren’t going to see Ruby. They were going back to the apartment in Willow Park so Joey could pack her things.
The social worker （you can call me Deb） explained on the drive over that due to the child abuse charge, Joey would have to stay separated from her mother for a while. In the meantime, her aunt Flora and uncle Miguel in Maple Sound had agreed to take her in. Joey was surprised. She couldn’t imagine what sales pitch （witchcraft） the social worker had used on Tita Flora and Tito Micky, but it must have been some serious hocus pocus for her mother’s sister—and greatest enemy—to take in Ruby’s only child.
The apartment somehow seemed smaller and shabbier than it had been only two days before. Or perhaps Joey was just seeing it through the social worker’s eyes, which were full of compassion as she looked around, taking in the broken dishes, the cracked photo frames, and the busted lamp on the floor.
“Take your time,” Deborah said. “I know this must be difficult.”
Joey pulled Ruby’s old suitcase from the closet and began to fill it with what few clothes she owned. She took a few of her mother’s things as well. The hair dryer. The Mason Pearson hairbrush Ruby had splurged on after she got her first job in Canada. Her signature lipstick, MAC “Russian Red.”
Deborah lent her a second suitcase, which Joey filled with as many of her mother’s books as would fit. Danielle Steel, Judith Krantz, and Sidney Sheldon were Ruby’s favorite authors, as they all wrote dishy, sweeping sagas filled with drama, broken hearts, and angst. Joey read all the novels, too, and discussing them with her mother was always when she was happiest. It was the one thing they could do together that never resulted in a negative outcome.
Everything else in the apartment, Deborah told her, could remain until the end of the following month, when the unit would be put back on the rental market.
“But where will my mom go?” Joey asked. “After the trial?”
Deborah touched her shoulder. “It may be a long while before she comes home, honey.”
In every place she and Ruby had lived, Joey learned to find a secret hiding spot, a place where she could store things her mother wouldn’t find. One of those things was the necklace from Charles. Ruby had sold hers in a rage when Charles dumped her （for the third time）， and Joey, becoming familiar with the pattern, told her mother that she had lost her own necklace at the park. Except she hadn’t. She hid it, so Ruby wouldn’t sell hers, too.
“What are those?” Deborah asked when Joey pulled the necklace out of a loose floorboard near the radiator. She didn’t seem surprised that Joey had a secret hiding spot. She also wasn’t referring to the necklace. She was looking at the stack of small, pretty notebooks that were also in the floor.
“They’re my diaries,” Joey said. “I think I’m just going to leave them here.”
“That would be a shame. What do you write about?”
Joey shrugged. “Everything, I guess.” She picked them up. “Why, did you want to read them?”
“Would you like me to read them?”
Joey shrugged again.