Page 50 of Weight of Guilt

The phone started buzzing again, but Paige made no move to answer.

“My uncle loved your family, Wren,” Paige said. “Whatever went wrong between him and your daddy, his affection for you and your sisters never faded. He kept up with y’all. He knew Nora went into nursing. He knew you had a little boy. He even mentioned something about Marlowe having a motorcycle.”

Something turned over in Wren’s chest, and it took her a second to recognize it as anger. Sometimes it felt like every adult in her life had let her down after Christian disappeared. She and her sisters had to forge their own way. Thankfully, they’d had each other to depend on.

“He never called,” Wren murmured. “Not one time in ten years, Paige. Not at Christmas. Not when Mason was born.”

“No.” Paige frowned. “He got it in his head he wasn’t owed a place at that table anymore.”

“Why?”

“Because of your brother.”

Wren went still, not sure exactly what Paige meant.

“My uncle quit working the whole Southern Gospel scene after Christian disappeared,” Paige said. “People called him for years, and he wouldn’t even sit down with anyone to discuss the possibility of going back into that line of work. So he sold cars instead. He was good at it, and every single time I asked him why he gave up the music, he told me the same thing.”

“What was that?” Wren held her breath as she waited for the answer.

“He said he’s the one who talked your daddy into that life. Said your family never asked for any of it. Four kids in a van a hundred nights a year, and he’s the one who made the case for it. If you hadn’t been so popular, maybe Christian would have never gone missing.”

“It wasn’t his fault.” Wren’s voice sounded lame, even to her own ears.

“That’s what I told him too. He wouldn’t listen.”

Wren cleared her throat. She needed to change the subject. “When’s the funeral?”

“Thursday. Ten o’clock at Second Baptist. His own church isn’t big enough.” Paige blinked away a tear.

“How was he?” Wren leaned closer. “These last few weeks. Was he all right?”

“He was tired.” Paige said the words fast. “So tired, honey. I kept after him that it was his sugar, and he wouldn’t hear about a doctor.”

“He always was stubborn.”

“Yes, he was.” Paige’s eyes went up toward the ceiling. “And he loved complaining about the cost of gas. He’d carry on about it like somebody else was spending his money. I finally said, ‘Uncle Roy, you’re driving to Kingsport and back for a sandwich, what do you expect?’”

Wren kept her face where it was. “Was he? Driving to Kingsport?”

“Goodness, I have no idea where he was driving. I only said Kingsport to get a rise out of him.” Paige’s mouth tightened. “He’d say he was going out. That’s the only thing I ever got out of him. Out.”

“I guess that was unusual?” Nash spoke for the first time. “For him to drive so much?”

“It seems unusual to me.” She shrugged before continuing. “You know, until I moved in with him, he picked me up for church every Sunday of my life. For forty years, that man had the radio on before I ever got the door shut. Gospel station out of Newport, loud enough you couldn’t talk over it. These last few months when we drove to church, the radio would be off. Every time. And I’d say something about it, and he’d turn it on.”

“What does that mean?” Wren wasn’t sure she was following Paige’s reasoning.

“Over the years, I came to learn one thing,” Paige said. “My uncle turned the radio off when he was stressed.”

“So he’d been stressed lately . . .” Wren murmured.

The phone buzzed again. This time Paige pushed herself up out of the chair, one hand braced on the table, breathing harder than standing up called for.

“I guess I should double-check that. Excuse me a minute.”

Nash waited until Paige came back into the kitchen and got herself seated before he said anything.

He’d been thinking about the silent radio and the gas money for ten minutes. Something about it made him pause. People didn’t break their routines like that for no reason.