he asked?”
Kate squeezed her eyes shut. “I think I would have to.” Tears crept out from underneath her lashes. “I don’t know what to pray for anymore. Whether to pray that L.T. comes home, for Trace’s and Kelsey’s sakes. Or…or to pray that he stays gone. For mine.”
Mary Rose leaned over to put her arms around her sister. And she wondered whether there was even one man on the entire planet worth the suffering he inevitably caused.
SUNDAY DINNER was a command performance for the Mitchell family. Pete and his brothers were expected to appear in time for the 11:00 a.m. service at Third Baptist Church and then to show up at the front door of the house they’d grown up in not more than thirty minutes after the closing hymn. Fortunately, their mother’s way with oven-fried chicken and angel biscuits made the effort more than worthwhile.
“I took delivery on some engine parts this week shipped by your company.” Pete handed the mashed potatoes to his older brother, a driver for one of the national courier services. “The box was beat up all to pieces. What’s with you guys these days? Playing dropkick with the merchandise in your free time?”
Rick plopped a mound of potatoes next to the chicken on his plate. “What free time? I’m working overtime every night just to get the stuff out there. Talk to the guys at the airport. They’re the ones who mangle the shipments. They put in their scheduled hours, watching the clock instead of their work, then head on home.”
“So few people understand the meaning of responsibility these days.” Denise Mitchell got up to refill her sons’ iced tea glasses. “If the work can’t be done in the time they’re required to be at the job, they just don’t finish. The younger teachers are especially guilty. That bell rings at three o’clock, they’re walking out the door, without even taking papers home to grade.”
Still shaking her head, she went back to her seat at the head of the table. “And the way some parents send their children to school is shameful. I had a boy in just yesterday running a temperature of one hundred and two. He said he’d been sick all night but his mama made him come to school anyway.”
Pete grinned. “Did you call her and give her a piece of your mind?”
“I did. But she couldn’t leave her job, she said.” Denise sniffed in disbelief. “That poor little boy lay on a cot in my clinic until after two o’clock when she finally got there. I’m still thinking about calling Child Protective Services. We’ll be lucky if a flu epidemic doesn’t strike the whole school.”
“She might be a single mom.” Pete’s oldest brother, Jerry, sat across the table. “Maybe she couldn’t stay home because she’d lose her job and that’s the only income the family has. Some women have tough choices like that to make.”
Their mother sat up even straighter in her chair. “I had those choices to make, if you’ll remember. After your dad died, I didn’t have anybody helping me raise you three, with money or anything else. Yet I never sent you to school sick.”
Jerry gave her an apologetic smile. “But not every woman is supermom. You’ve got special powers.”
“Sometimes even two parents aren’t enough to keep kids out of trouble,” Rick said. “I heard at church this morning that the cops raided a big party last night, arrested the whole bunch.”
Pete looked up from his plate. “Were they fighting? I swear, if any of the REWARDS kids were involved, I’m gonna take some skin off their hides.”
“Nah, this was the right side of the tracks, up on The Hill.” As opposed to the “wrong side,” Pete understood, where the kids in his rehabilitation program came from. “The beautiful people’s kids were drinking, getting crazy. Some of them went out cruising, got picked up for driving drunk. There were some private mailboxes knocked down, cars vandalized. The cops found grass in the house. Er…marijuana,” he corrected himself with a glance at their mom’s frown.
Jerry shook his head. “Makes you question what the people with all that money have in their heads for brains, that they can’t raise their kids right, keep ’em out of trouble.”
Pete wondered if Kelsey and Trace had been at the party. He could imagine how upset Mary Rose would be if her niece and nephew were arrested. She’d been worried about them yesterday, obviously caring about the trouble they were having with their parents’ divorce. Years ago, he’d been surprised at how real she was, how easy for a guy from the other side of town to tell his dreams to. To live his dreams with.
Not. Maybe if they’d been left alone, if the baby had lived, if they’d had a chance to work on building a marriage…
Regret stabbed him, stronger than anything he’d felt in a long time. Having Mary Rose in town was beginning to look like a recipe for the kind of remembering he really didn’t like to do.
“Earth to Pete.” A booted toe kicked his foot under the table. “Pass the gravy.”
He looked blankly at Jerry. “What?”
“Gravy, man. You deaf?”
Pete reached for the gravy boat. “Nah.”
Dumb, maybe. He thought about Mary Rose in her pink shirt and tight jeans, and sighed silently.
Really, really dumb.
STARING OUT her window on Sunday afternoon, Kelsey watched her father slam the door to his SUV and stride up the front walk. Seeing him two days in a row had to be a recent record.
She’d begged Kate not to call him, but that had been a waste of breath. At least he’d left the Bimbo at home. And that was the only good thing she could say about the afternoon ahead of them all.
The bell didn’t ring, but she heard the front door slam shut. He must’ve walked in without even knocking.
His voice came up the stairs as loudly as if he stood just outside her bedroom. “Kelsey Ann LaRue, Trace Lawrence LaRue, y’all get yourselves down here right this minute.” He waited five seconds. “Don’t make me come up there. You’re not too old for me to take my belt to you.”
She remembered her last encounter with that belt all too clearly. Ignoring the pitch and twist of her stomach, Kelsey eased off the bed and walked slowly to open the door. Trace looked at her from down the hall, his face white with a combination of hangover and nerves. He hated it when their dad yelled.
“Come on.” She tilted her head toward the stairs. “Let’s get this over with.”
Kate waited for them at the bottom of the steps, trying to smile but looking every bit as nervous as Kelsey felt. She’d never been arrested before, never done anything quite this bad. There was no telling what her dad would do about it.
He was staring out the French doors into the side yard, but as they stepped into the living room, he whipped around to face them. “Have you lost what brains you ever had? Bad enough you were drinking, but to get in a car and go knocking down mailboxes…In one of my neighborhoods, no less. What kind of stupid is that?”
Kelsey shrugged one shoulder. At the time, it had seemed immensely funny to knock over mailboxes that her dad’s company had set up. Now she didn’t have an answer.
“Don’t give me that sullen face, young lady. You’re gonna explain this
