“I know, but you know how mothers get on your nerves.”
There’s that ordinary thing, that something a person says that makes you know that you’re not like everybody else. “I never knew my mom.”
Her eyes are suddenly shiny. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“How could you know?” I shake my head. “I grew up in foster homes.”
“That’s right. I think Meadow said that yesterday.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why? I mean, why was she talking about me?”
“Her theory is that my dad needed to rescue people. Women.” She moves her jaw, back and forth, tension and unspoken words in her mouth. “You, Meadow, that crazy woman Christy who broke up their marriage and then took off.” She shrugs a little. “Meadow said you’d grown up in foster care.”
It makes me feel weirdly revealed. “I didn’t really need anybody to rescue me, though. I rescued myself a long time ago.”
“That’s what I told her. You don’t seem like a person in need of rescue.”
“Meadow, either, really, at least not now.” I think of all I’ve been digging into. “Do you know anything about her childhood? Rory’s dad, any of that?”
“Nothing. It’s always been completely off-limits.” She glances at the clock. “I have to go to the doctor. I’ll see you later.”
“I have a shift at four, so probably a lot later. Or at least I hope so. I’d like to make some money.”
“Okay. Lock up when you go.”
“Thanks.” There’s something about the tilt of her head that makes me say impulsively, “Do you want company? I don’t want to be weird but I’m happy to go along.”
She seems very young when she twists her mouth and nods. “If you wouldn’t mind?”
“Not at all. Let me turn off the computer.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
Meadow
Unable to sleep, I tie on my shoes and go to the fields. The smell of smoke is in the air, thick and threatening, but I can’t see any fire glow anywhere close by. When I went to bed, it had still been burning fiercely in the barely accessible high forests. A long way from here, even if it doesn’t smell like it.
Still, it adds a layer to my restlessness. Elvis and I putter outside beneath the cloudy skies. A hush covers the night, and it adds to the sense of expectation, of worry. What’s coming?
I walk the rows of the herb garden, taking refuge. It’s been my habit since I was a girl, growing things in a hot, baked patch of ground behind the small house we lived in. My mom loved flowers and taught me how to plant seeds and water them, how to thin them to give each one room to grow. It turned out I had a flair for it, or maybe we just learn easily when we’re young. I loved everything about that patch of life in the middle of the dry, hot stretch of yards all around us. We grew corn because I thought it would be cool, and it was amazing to harvest it at the end of the summer and peel it and cook it and eat it with butter.
And we grew herbs. They thrived in all that sun. Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme, like the song. Dill and chives, which bloomed in wild purple profusion in the spring. She grew a large crop of traditional medicinals, as well, and used some for mild illnesses, like chamomile for trouble sleeping, and mint for stomachaches. Raspberry leaf tea for pregnant women.
Brushing my fingers along the tops of the plants in my own garden, decades later, I wonder how a woman who was so nurturing could have loved a man so selfish. Her life had been hard before my stepfather arrived in it, and his income alone made our lives better. He drove a truck, long haul up and down the West Coast, and made good money. He was also not home a lot, which gave us plenty of space without him.
The first time he raped me, I was fourteen. My mother had been dead for barely a month, killed when a boy in a big truck ran a red light out of confusion. He wasn’t drunk or high. He was sixteen years old and had only had his license for a few months, and he was devastated. He hadn’t even been speeding. It was just a brutal accident, his truck crushing her little car and killing her on impact.
She’d always been a buffering presence in that house, but after she died, there was no place to hide, nowhere to escape. I’d always kept my distance from him, always aware that he watched me too closely, that he made jokes about my breasts or my bottom. He came too close, crowded me in the kitchen or the hallways, rubbing past me very slowly. I don’t know if my mother knew. I like to think she didn’t, that he was slick and made sure she didn’t realize.