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“Because I’m inviting you to vent your anger, and I think you want to.”
“After all this time? It’s a little late.”
“Yesterday you said it hadn’t been long enough.”
He removed his hands from around the glass and rubbed his wet fingertips on the legs of his jeans. He frowned irritably at Bellamy, but she kept her expression calm and inquisitive.
He mouthed another curse, then said, “The girl I’d been making out with two days earlier was on a slab in the county morgue. Something like that sorta messes with your mind, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yes, I would.”
“I was trying to wrap my brain around Susan being killed by the tornado, when this Law & Order wannabe shows up and starts asking me what we’d argued about, when I’d last seen her, where was I when she was being choked to death.” Noticing Bellamy’s grimace, he pointed at her face. “Yeah. Like that. That’s how I felt.”
“I tried to capture those conflicting emotions in my book.”
“You described the scene real well, even down to leaving my old man out of it.”
“I omitted him because I didn’t have a sense of him.”
Dent barked a laugh. “Join the club. I lived with him, and I didn’t have a sense of him, either. For all practical purposes, the man was a fucking ghost.”
That struck her as odd phraseology. “Explain what you mean by that.”
“Why? Are you plotting another book?”
She slapped the tabletop as she came quickly to her feet. “Okay, don’t explain it. You’re the one who proposed we take this trudge down memory lane, not me. You can see yourself out.”
As she went past him, his arm shot out and encircled her waist, bringing her up short and close to him.
The contact startled her, making her breath catch. They held that pose for several moments, neither of them moving, then he relaxed his arm, dragging it away from her slowly, trailing his fingers over her rib cage. Softly he said, “Sit down.”
She swallowed and resumed breathing. “Are you going to act like a jerk?”
“Probably. But you wanted to hear this.” He nodded her toward the chair.
She returned to it, placed her hands primly in her lap, and looked at him expectantly. But after several seconds, he shrugged. “Well? Ask away.”
“I have to pull it out of you? You’re not going to volunteer anything?”
“What do you want to know?”
“What happened to your mother?”
The question caught him off guard, and she was glad it was he who seemed unbalanced for a moment. He looked away, shifted his position in the chair, rolled his shoulders in a defensive gesture. “I was told she died when I was a baby.”
She continued watching him, dozens of follow-up questions implied.
Finally, he said, “I never saw a death certificate. My old man never took me to visit a grave. We never commemorated her birthday or the day she died. There were no maternal grandparents. None of that. I don’t even know what she looked like because I was never shown a picture of her. It was like she’d never existed. So what I figure, she left me with him. Split. Vamoosed. He just didn’t have the guts to tell me.”
“Maybe he never came to terms with it himself.”
“I don’t know. It’s an unsolved mystery. Anytime I bugged him for information about her, he would say, ‘She died.’ End of discussion.”
“So it was just the two of you?”
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t call it cozy.”
“You speak of him in the past tense. He’s no longer living?”
