“His family threatened and cried and prayed until they were hoarse,” Star continued, “trying to get him to leave me, but he was steadfast. He asked me to marry him, and I did. We eloped one weekend when I was four months pregnant. I stopped using drugs as soon as I saw that positive pregnancy test, just quit cold turkey. I loved your daddy, and I loved you, even when you were no bigger than a kidney bean. So we lived together on the ranch while my belly grew big as a watermelon.”
Star stopped and took a sip of tea.
“And then I had you,” she said simply. “And you were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life. We both adored you. We thought the sun rose and set on your face, Georgia May. You were all the best parts of us both, put together in one perfect little girl.” She smiled softly at the memory. Georgia glanced at Buck and was surprised to find him looking at Star. There was an expression on his weathered face she’d never seen before, a tenderness and a sadness that surprised her. He caught her eye and cleared his throat, taking a big gulp of coffee and looking away.
“For a while after you were born, I managed okay,” Star said. “We kept Buck’s family at bay best we could, although they tried to meddle in anything they could. They were worried sick about him and about you. They’d found out about my gift by then and labeled me a witch. They thought I was usingblack magic on your daddy. It was the only way they could understand why he’d be with someone like me.”
“Now that isn’t quite fair,” Buck protested. “They had concerns, and they were worried about you. And they had good reason to be, as it turns out.” He crossed his arms and leaned back in the chair. Star pressed her lips together, but she did not contradict him.
“We did all right for a couple of years, but when you were three or four, the cracks started showing through,” she continued. “Buck wanted me to fit into the community more. I didn’t, and I couldn’t. There was no place for a woman like me. We... fought a lot.” She glanced at Buck, who was staring down at his coffee cup silently.
He nodded. “We fought like feral dogs,” he confirmed ruefully.
“His family still hated me and tried to undermine me any way they could. They knew what I was, a broken girl trying to fit somewhere she didn’t, and they weren’t wrong.” Star frowned. “This is the part that’s hard for me to say,” she admitted. “I loved being your mama, but the life I was living in Texas started feeling suffocating. Every time I had to go to town for diapers or groceries, I’d panic. I wasn’t sleeping, wasn’t eating. It felt like the walls were closing in. I wasn’t cut out for ranch life, for the heat and the isolation and the dust. I tried, but everything I did turned out wrong. I was struggling. Nowadays they’d probably diagnose me with some sort of severe depression and PTSD from the trauma I’d endured before I met your daddy, but I didn’t know enough to call it that back then, and there wasn’t anyone that could help me. Buck did the best he knew how, but he’s a man who knows how to sledgehammer problems out of his way. He had no idea what to do with a fragile, depressed woman he could not fix.”
Buck made a noise. Georgia expected him to protest, but he only commented. “I tried my best, but nothing seemed to help.” He shifted heavily in his seat. “I didn’t know what to do.”
Star took a deep breath. “It was a miserable time. I was trying so hard to be a good mom to you, to be enough for Buck, but I never seemed to quite measure up. And then I made a terrible choice, one that destroyed our family.”
32
Star grew quietfor a moment, and Georgia was afraid she would stop the story. “What happened?” she prompted.
Star looked down at her hands on the table. “I started using again,” she admitted. “Heroin this time.” She closed her eyes, seeming to shrink in upon herself in shame. “There was a man in town who could get it for me. He worked at the meat counter in the grocery store, so it was easy to hide our deals. I’d order a few slices of bologna, and he’d slip it to me in the brown paper wrapping. I told myself I was doing it so I could cope, and in a way that was true. It was a bad way to cope, but the only way I knew.” She swallowed hard. “I kept it hidden as best I could for almost a year, but sins and secrets don’t stay hidden long.” Star stopped and looked pained.
“Who found out?” Georgia asked. She was on the edge of her seat. It felt like watching a car accident in slow motion, the mounting sense of horror as you see things go terribly wrong. But she didn’t feel like a spectator. She was watching the events unfold, knowing that what was about to happen was going to hurt her terribly too.
Star shook her head. “I can’t tell this part,” she whispered hoarsely. “You tell it, Buck.” Her hands were clenched around her mug so hard her knuckles were white.
Buck cleared his throat. “For a while I’d suspected she was using again, but it took me some time to confirm my suspicions. When I finally found out what she was doing, I confronted her.She swore she’d stop, but then a month later she started back up. It became a cycle. We hid it from everyone, trying to make things work, but we were in a bad way.” He took a swig of coffee and set the cup down hard on the table. At the sound, Pollen raised her head and uttered a concerned woof.
“Hannah suspected something was wrong,” Buck continued. “She started dropping by, staying to watch you for the afternoon at least once a week so your mama could rest. By that point, Star wasn’t taking very good care of herself or sometimes of you. Often I’d come home at the end of a long day out on the land to find the stove cold and the refrigerator almost empty. Once or twice, I found Star passed out sleeping in bed and you were playing outside alone.” He paused, his brow furrowed. “I knew Star needed help, but I didn’t know how to fix her, and I didn’t want to admit it to my family because they were so against Star. We fought a lot, your mom and I. I’d confront her and she’d swear she’d change, and I’d give her another chance, except the chances always ended the same way. I didn’t understand much about addiction, about the cycles and the lying and the trying to do better but failing. I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just stop.”
“I tried,” Star interrupted, her voice hoarse. “I tried so hard. I wanted to stop, but I couldn’t. I’d get clean for a few days or weeks, sometimes a month or more, but I always slipped up again. I hated myself for what I was doing to Buck and how I was failing you, Georgia. But I couldn’t seem to stop.”
“What happened then?” Georgia asked. She had a funny flutter of apprehension down low in her belly, a whisper of a memory, something she couldn’t quite recall.
“One day you disappeared,” Buck said bluntly.
Star made a little grunt, like someone had just punched herin the stomach. Pollen poked her head up from under the table, then laid it in Star’s lap, shifting her eyebrows in concern.
“It was August. You had turned five a few months before. I remember it was about noon when Hannah came and found me up at the north field,” Buck said, his expression grave. “I’ve never seen anyone look like that, before or since. She was white-faced and terrified. Immediately, I knew something terrible had happened. She said she’d come over to check on you, and found Star passed out on the couch, the TV turned to that cooking show you two liked to watch together, but you were gone. Vanished.” He shook his head, blowing out a long breath. “We didn’t know where you were or how long you’d been gone. It took us two hours to find you. Those two hours were the worst of my life, Georgia May. We gathered the ranch hands and called the neighbors and formed a search party. The neighbors brought their hound dogs. We even called the sheriff. We all knew what can happen to a child lost out in the wilderness in the summer heat in Texas.” He reached out and took a big gulp of coffee. “It still gives me nightmares just thinking about what might have happened to you, what nearly did happen to you.”
Georgia was both horrified and fascinated. She had a vague memory of walking alone down an empty road, of being thirsty and hot and feeling a little scared. She remembered carrying the little rainbow purse Star had knit for her and singing to herself to keep up her courage.
“I was going to the grocery store,” she said suddenly. “I remember we were watching Julia Child on TV. She was making floating islands. I wanted to make them, but we were out of sugar. So I took my pocket money and decided to walk to the store. I was going to buy sugar.”
“You didn’t have any idea the store was twelve miles away,”Buck confirmed. “And when we found you, you were headed in the wrong direction. You’d turned left instead of right out of the ranch driveway, away from town. You’d made it a couple of miles into the middle of nowhere.
Georgia was silent, trying to recall the rest of the memory. It was lost in time. “What happened? Who found me?” she asked.
“I did,” Buck said simply. “I’ve never been more glad to see anything in my life than when I caught sight of your bright pigtails on that empty stretch of road. You were dusty and thirsty and sunburned, but you were alive.”
Georgia looked from Buck to Star. “And then what happened?”
“That was the last straw,” Buck said heavily. “When we got you home, I told the sheriff that Star had just dozed off, that she’d been feeling poorly, but I knew something had to be done. I covered it up because I didn’t want the gossip and the shame that a scandal would cause our family, but I knew this was the end. We could have lost you. Dehydration, heatstroke, snakes, or someone coming along that stretch of road with bad intentions.” He shuddered. “After everyone left, Hannah got you clean, fed, and tucked into bed, then she confronted me and demanded I tell her what was going on. When I did, she turned the house upside down...”
“Until she found my stash,” Star admitted, breaking into the story. “Then she and your daddy confronted me. I confessed everything and begged for forgiveness, but this time was different. I felt so ashamed. I loved you, but I wasn’t capable of being a good mother to you. I knew it. I was so full of hurt and so broken that I couldn’t care for anyone else. I couldn’t even take care of myself.” Star glanced at Buck. “Your daddy is a good man, but he can be a hard man, as you know. His integrity islike iron, strong and unyielding. Hannah was like that but even harder. I begged for their forgiveness, and for the first time... Buck said no.”
