give up the hope that sometime soon she was going to eat.
“Okay,” she said, her voice muffled.
See? He wanted to shout. See how normal we are?
He lingered for a moment, wanting so badly to have her look at him and smile. She gave him nothing but the cold chill of her silence.
Mac turned and caught sight of the glittery ladybug stickers that she had stuck on the plate of her light switch. She had gotten those stickers for her seventh birthday and put them all over the house. That was a million years ago. He had scraped those stickers off his car, the tractor, off the fridge, a couple of windows. He still had one on his alarm clock. He smiled as he touched them on his way out, those faded but still sparkling reminders of the girl she used to be.
A while later Mac parked the truck in front of Moore’s hardware store in the middle of downtown. The Main Street Café, where Rachel’s mom worked and Mac never ate for obvious reasons, stood next door, and the Dairy Dream ice cream parlor was a few doors down.
Maybe he’d get a pint of rocky road for later.
He smiled ruefully. He kept trying to get his daughter to gain some weight, but he was the only one whose pants were getting tighter.
“Hey, Mac!” Nick Weber, his insurance salesman, waved at him from where he sat with his family on one of the benches outside the Dairy Dream. “You got time next week to come down to the office, look over some of those papers?”
“No problem,” Mac shouted back, and Nick raised his vanilla cone in acknowledgement.
Mac was upping his insurance policies on everything. Fire. Life. Car. Everything was fragile in his life. Nothing was resistant to destruction, and if something happened to him or to the farm, he needed to be sure Amanda would be all right.
“Excuse me,” he murmured, squeezing between the few people standing in line at the movie theater.
The Royal had been standing for more than fifty years. He’d seen his first movie there—Bambi. He and Rachel had seen a million movies at the theater, though always through the back door without paying. And before she ran away, he and Amanda had seen their fair share there, too.
The cyclical way things worked in small towns appealed to him. He checked the marquee to see if the feature was something he could take Amanda to, but the Now Showing poster was for an R-rated movie.
Mac had never felt the way that Rachel did about this town. It had never been a trap for him. He’d always figured his life didn’t need much more than what this little town could offer him.
He’d tried to see the potholes and the bougainvillea and the families differently, as something bad, something to escape, the way Rachel had. But somehow it still all seemed right.
The scent of fried chicken led Mac to Ladd’s front door.
It didn’t matter how many times he walked in those doors, he never got tired of that smell. Ladd’s was right up there with the best smells in the world—sage on his mountain, his lemon grove after a rain, his daughter’s hair when she had been outside all day.
The sound of a girl laughing turned Mac’s head. Christie Alvarez stood with a group of high school boys. She was two years older than Amanda, but tried so hard to be a grown-up. Her black hair was pulled back in a sharp ponytail and heavy black eyeliner rimmed her eyes. Her shorts were far too tight and too short, and her belly, the last remnant of her baby fat, pushed out over the top.
He hardly recognized her. The last time he’d seen her at the courthouse she had been a scared little girl, dressed similarly to his daughter in a long skirt, tights and Mary Jane shoes. Both of them had worn their hair in braids. He remembered the sight of Amanda’s blond braid and Christie’s black one hanging down their backs as they’d stood in front of the judge, their hands locked together.
God, it seemed like yesterday that Christie had played with Barbie dolls with Amanda on the front deck. He had made that girl countless lunches of macaroni and cheese and now he watched as she took a drag of a cigarette.
He was doing the right thing trying to keep Amanda away from Christie. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl, but the very idea of his daughter dressed that way, looking at a boy with such shocking and resigned knowledge, made Mac sick.
Christie must have felt him watching her because she looked up at him with eyes like flat black stones. Empty. Cold. For a moment she appeared ashamed, a flush on her cheeks. But then she turned back to the boy she flirted with, as if Mac wasn’t there.
Mac’s instinct was to go over there, grab her and take her home to her mother. But who was he to judge? He was watching his own daughter fade away moment by moment.
Resigned, he pulled open the door to Ladd’s. Twenty minutes later, he walked back out, his hands filled with brown bags, their bottoms turning damp with grease. He passed in front of the window of the Main Street Café on his way to the truck.
Rachel’s mother, Eve, stood next to one of the window booths, taking an order. He shouldn’t have made that crack to Rachel about her mother. It wasn’t fair.
Eve, her long salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun, leaned away from the young couple in the booth to cough violently. He could practically hear her through the glass.
That’s the price of working for twenty years in the only place left where people could smoke unfiltered cigarettes and eat a blue-plate special.
Of course, in every memory he had of Eve she had a smoke of her own hanging from the corner of her mouth.
Eve didn’t look much like Rachel. Maybe she once had before her husband had gotten hold of her. For as long as Mac had known her, Eve had been rough and broad, her eyes a muddy, graceless brown, while Rachel’s had always been an intriguing blend of green and brown.
Mac started walking again. He couldn’t do this. It was one thing to have Rachel in his home and in his family, but he would be damned if he’d let her back into his head.
He didn’t think he could survive being abandoned by Rachel Filmore twice in one lifetime.
AMANDA STARED OUT HER window and counted her father’s steps up the hallway.
He didn’t even try to sneak past her room. He walked right down the middle of the hallway so every floorboard squeaked.
Three. Four. Five. The steps stopped, and after a minute, she heard her door creak open and could feel her father watching her. That’s what he did these days. He stared at her as if he expected her to go bonkers right in front of him. Maybe she should do it, just start screaming and pulling out her hair and lighting things on fire. That’d give him something to watch.
He took a step into the room and she almost stiffened. It felt as if there were two hands at her back. Pushing. Always pushing.
Leave me alone! The scream clawed at her throat, but she just sighed, like a sound sleeper. Her back was to him so she didn’t bother closing her eyes. She knew how to fake sleep. She’d done it enough.
“I love you, Amanda,” he whispered.
Then why did you have to screw everything up?
She bit
