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“No. It wasn’t about the land anymore. I’ve been saving up for thirty years. I’ve saved a lot since your dad…Well. I’ve got nearly a hundred and twenty thousand now. I wanted you to have it.”
“In exchange for the land?” she demanded. Her muscles were aching now, her hands trembling. Not Joe, her mind insisted. Not Joe.
“I was going to give the land back to you! I don’t want it, not anymore. I was going to leave it to you in my will, and then you could sell it again, you see? I’d pay you for it now, while you need the money, and then you could have it back, Lori. I didn’t want it for myself, I swear.”
It actually made perfect sense. And yet it didn’t. “Why didn’t you just tell me your plan? Why do it behind my back?”And terrify me in the process,she left unsaid.
Joe threw one hand up in exasperation. “You wouldn’t have agreed to that in a million years. You’re too proud, always have been. Nothing like your mother. That woman would take help from a person before he’d even offered.”
He was staring into the fire now. Joe picked up a stick and poked thoughtfully at the edge of a charred log. “That time she wrote to me? She wanted money. She’d been gone so many years and it didn’t bother her at all, reappearing like a ghost.”
Her neck had tensed into a burning knot. Her broken hand remembered that it was supposed to hurt and started throbbing. “I thought she wanted to check up on me.”
Joe didn’t seem to hear her. “I wouldn’t send the money. I couldn’t do it. Despite everything, I never thought she’d leave you. It’s hard to see the truth sometimes, and I just didn’t want to see she was that bad of a mother.”
“Joe.” Lori stood. She wanted to leave. Run until she was so exhausted that her brain would cease to think. She could forgive Joe for wrecking her garage. She could. He’d had good intentions, despite being totally misguided. But there was something else in his voice now. Some deeper sorrow. An older memory.
“Joe,” she choked out. “You’re scaring me.”
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, the words scratchy with unshed tears. “I’m so sorry. She didn’t want to take you with us, and I couldn’t leave without you. So I stayed and she moved on, and good riddance to bad rubbish. I couldn’t have loved her after that anyway. What kind of woman could leave a little child behind?”
Lori clutched her broken arm to her chest. “Joe…” Oh,no.Oh, no. “Joe, did you…Were you with my mom before I was born?” The truth suddenly seemed obvious, but Joe’s brow furrowed with confusion. Looking up at her, he shook his head.
“No. That’s not it. I’m not your daddy, even if I wish I was. But I did love her. I’m ashamed to admit it, but I did. After they were married and you were born—” Joe’s shoulders slumped “—it seemed like she’d gotten what she wanted out of your dad. She was bored and pretty, and I was young and stupid. I’m so sorry.”
This is a motive,her brain was spelling out to her in slow and careful tones.A classic love triangle.Except that her mother had run off thirteen years before her dad had hit the asphalt of that parking lot.
Her foot slid back. She inched away. “I’m going to go now, Joe.”
He stood. “No.”
“Joe,” she pleaded. “I don’t want to hear this.”
“It’s been killing me for a long time now, Lori. This is my chance to tell you the truth.”
“No,” she begged him.
“She wrote to me. She’d been gone more than ten years, and here she just up and waltzes back in from out of the blue, looking for money. I wouldn’t give it to her. I wrote back and told her how amazing you’d turned out to be and how much she’d missed out on by being stupid and selfish. I guess that didn’t sit too well. She called me and told me she was going to tell your dad everything.”
Her tears were blinding her. Lori tried to wipe them from her eyes, but they kept coming back.
Joe hung his head. “I waited for the explosion. I knew if he found out, he’d ride me out of town on a rail. I’d have lost my best friend and I’d never have seen you again. I was scared to death, Lori, but nothing happened. She never called or wrote again. I thought it was over.”
Lori took a step back and stumbled over a clump of grass. With the cast on her wrist, she couldn’t catch herself in time, and landed hard on her butt. Joe rushed over and pulled her up and right into his arms.
“I’m sorry, Lori,” he whispered, and she began to sob. She cried for what he was saying and what it meant. She cried because she was scared of him, and yet she buried her face in his chest and sobbed while he held her.
“He was going to sell me the garage,” he explained. “We’d had a plan from the time your mama walked out. I was going to work for him, put in my time and then buy him out. He could retire then, buy his land and spend his days fishing. At some point we stopped talking about it, but I guess I just didn’t notice.”
Joe’s hands rubbed over her back in a soothing rhythm. “One day I heard he bought a piece of land off the bank. He kept putting me off when I asked him about it. Wouldn’t say a word when I tried to talk about buying the garage. I’d put twenty years into that place, and I wasn’t going to work as a damned mechanic until the day I died. He’d promised me, Lori. And all of a sudden he wouldn’t answer one damned question.”
Lori breathed in the scent of wood smoke on his clothes, tainted by the metallic stench of fresh fish. How many times had she smelled this exact combination on her father’s shirt? “Did you kill him?” she asked on a whisper. “Did you do it?”
His deep breath roared in her ear. “I’d been drinking. I drove past and saw his truck, and I was so pissed at him. I waited for him to come out. He’d been drinking, too. It didn’t take much to get us screaming at each other. I accused him of screwing me over and going back on a promise. I told him he was a goddamned liar and a greedy one at that. He just looked me up and down like I was trash. ‘Joe,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to have this discussion, but you won’t let it go. I’m not selling you the garage, because I’ll be damned if I’ll let you buy the roof you were fucking my wife under.’”
She pulled away. She had to.
Joe let her go. “She’d told him after all. I wasn’t mad. It wasn’t like that. I was scared. He was like a brother to me, and the thing with your mom seemed like a whole other lifetime. But I saw in his eyes that he’d finally decided he couldn’t live with it. You and your dad were my only family and I was full of terror and I panicked. I don’t even know why, Lori, I swear. I just saw that rock and I wanted to stop him from walking away.”
