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I looked toward the head of the table and met her eyes. “It’s wonderful, Diane. Thank you again for having me over tonight.”
Her eyes went briefly to Ward, signaling why my invitation had been issued. “You don’t seem to be eating much. Are you dieting again?”
“Sissy doesn’t need to lose weight,” Valerie said. “She’s an athlete.”
“She’s a part-time cheerleader,” her mother-in-law corrected, and we went back to our plates. They ate and I forced in several more forkfuls that sat like lead in my stomach. Valerie’s defense of me had redirected the critical attention to her and while that was unfortunate on her account, I felt a lot of relief. But like all the visits we spent with Ward’s grandma, the best part of it was when she closed the front door behind us.
“It was great to see you, Sissy,” Valerie said in the driveway, and I responded with the same. “Ward, we’ll meet you bright and early tomorrow to open the marina, right?”
“Yeah,” he said offhandedly.
“We’ll put on the Woodsmen game in the office so we can see you dance,” she told me and smiled. We all headed toward our cars and I waved as Valerie and Kevin drove off, leaving me alone with their son.
“I’m counting down the games until the season is over,” Ward told me. “You’re almost done with that shit.” He’d been starting to pressure me harder to leave before the season was done, too, but I’d managed to ignore it. “I’ve never wished for the Woodsmen to lose before now. If they suck, you won’t have to go to Texas for the championship game.”
“Don’t say that too loud in front of your grandma.” She was a witch, but she was also a big football fan.
His eyes were off in the distance, surveying her cherry orchards. “You know this house and this land are going to be mine. We’ll live here someday.”
I thought of Laurel Lake. You could hardly see it anymore, but I liked being on the water. “Someday.”
“It’s sooner than you think,” he told me. He glanced back at the house, where a shadow moved at the front window. “She’s trying to watch us but she can’t see too much.” He yanked me behind a big branch of the white pine tree that Diane had planted in her yard, the one she called the Memorial Tree. According to Ward’s dad, she’d planted it the day after her husband had left them all and she’d carefully tended it in his absence. It served as a shrine to the man who’d abandoned her and their son, which I’d always found kind of strange.
But even with the big branch as a shield, she was right there and I was sure her eyes were on us. “Ward, come on. It’s your grandma,” I whispered. He was gripping my breast and his mouth was on my neck. “Ouch!” He’d squeezed too hard.
“Come back to my place.” He pushed his hips against me and I knew what he wanted.
“I can’t tonight because I have to get up so early to go to the stadium. Please, she can see what you’re doing.”
Ward shoved me away from himself and I stumbled. The curtain at the front window twitched and he glanced at it again. No matter if he said he didn’t care and no matter how much his grandma would pin the blame on me for his behavior, he wasn’t really going to act out in front of her. She’d deflected a lot of what he’d done last winter by saying that it was my fault, but she had still been very angry at him—and her anger was scary. She’d let him know that she didn’t want their family getting mixed up with the police, and he couldn’t risk getting on her bad side. Not when he expected to receive the house and the orchards, after all.
All he said was, “Don’t be a bitch. Watch yourself.” Then he put his face close to mine and raised his eyebrows. “What? What do you have to say about that?”
So much that it was difficult to keep the words back, but I knew better. “Nothing,” I answered. He watched me get into my car and we drove together, me following behind, until he made a right and I turned left onto a smaller road to head home. I went along for another mile or so, watching to make sure he wasn’t following, before I pulled off into a turnout.
The sun wouldn’t set for another hour but I would still need the light from my phone. I also spread a towel on the dirt before I got down under the car and I used the flashlight to look for the little tracker that Ward had attached. I’d watched him do it, so I knew generally where it was. He’d wanted me to know about it so I would be aware that even if we weren’t together, he would be watching.
It wasn’t hard to extract the little device. I pulled it out from the rear wheel well and looked at the black rectangle in my hand. A little green light showed that it was functioning, so I turned it over and saw an on/off switch and how the batteries went in. I looked at it for another moment, then I flicked that switch into the other position. I opened the small case and jerked out the battery pack, too, and then I hunted for my lunch box in the trunk, found some aluminum foil, and wrapped all the parts in that, to be certain. I got back into the car and powered off my phone and put it in the foil too, and then, with my hands shaking, I drove home.
The next day in the locker room, Mia eyed me up and down. “You look tired, Sissy,” she told me. She was one of my sister’s best friends and was not my biggest fan, not since the disaster of a wedding speech.
“If that’s your way of telling me that I actually look awful, then I don’t want to hear it,” I answered. Her mouth fell open in surprise, but I wasn’t in the mood for her criticism.
“There’s no reason to be a bitch,” she informed me and I was done with hearing that word.
“I’m not a bitch. Saying what you want, telling people to stop being rude to you, that’s not being a bitch.”
She stared at me. “Sissy, are you crying?” Now she sounded concerned. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that you looked bad, I meant that you really seem like you haven’t gotten enough sleep.” She offered me a towel and I wiped under my eyes, trying to preserve the makeup. As Aubin always said, crying didn’t do anything but ruin it.
“I’m ok,” I told Mia. “Thank you for the towel.” She was totally right that I hadn’t gotten enough sleep, because I’d been up almost the entire night before. First, my dad had been gone—disappeared again, which meant that I’d been alone. I’d sat and waited for Ward to show up. He’d be furious that I’d wrecked his tracking device and that he couldn’t use my phone to look for me, either. I’d been imagining all the things he would do and I knew that it would have been like last winter. We’d gotten into a terrible fight after I’d found out that he’d slept with the sister of one of his friends. That situation had started out with me crying and had ended with him getting arrested for fighting with someone else in a bar in Detroit.
“Sissy?”
I jumped and looked up at Danni. “Hi. I’m fine, all good.”
“Mia was a little worried.”
“No, I can fix my mascara and I’m great.”
