though, all grown-up now, she could see why he hadn’t said anything to his little sister.
“Jerry Hegland.”
He frowned. “Who?”
She set her fork down. “You don’t know him?”
“The name is vaguely familiar.” He seemed to be searching his memory. “Wait. Something to do with the airport?”
“I don’t actually know.” But, yes, once Mom and she had gone out there to watch planes take off and land. Angel Butte Regional Airport wasn’t all that exciting, of course; at least in those days, aside from privately owned small planes, traffic had consisted of no more than a couple of flights a day to Portland and Seattle using turboprop commuter planes that carried something like fifteen or twenty passengers. Still, she remembered standing beside the runway as one of those planes tore by, gaining momentum and then lifting into the air. She had been amazed. Her family had never flown anywhere.
That had been one of the occasions when the nice man bought lunch for her and Mom, at the café in the airport terminal.
“Then how do you know him?” Colin asked.
“Mom.” She sounded like a crow. Harsh. “He and Mom...”
Her brother’s expression gradually changed with dawning horror. “He and Mom what?” he asked in a hard voice.
Cait was distantly aware that Nell’s mouth hung open. She’d had no idea what she was starting.
“They had an affair. Didn’t you know?” she begged.
“Hell, no!” He gave his head a shake. “I can’t believe— How did you know?”
“I always assumed... Wow.”
“Cait.”
“Don’t snap at me!”
Now they were glaring at each other.
Well, what difference did it make? she reasoned. Colin and Mom never talked anyway.
“I had no idea back then. I thought he was a friend of Mom’s. But when I was sixteen, I was rooting in her closet looking for something.” She’d been snotty, and Mom had taken away her cell phone in punishment. The minute Mom left for work the next day, Cait in a fury had dug through all of her mother’s dresser drawers, looked inside coat pockets in her closet, then taken down every box on the closet shelf. In the second one, she’d found a couple of photo albums and letters and been distracted from her search. She remembered sitting on the bed turning pages in the albums. Already her memories of her dad and her brother were fading. But here were Colin’s and her school photos, as well as lots of family snapshots. Mostly those weren’t all that great—people were squinting against the sun or looked posed and uncomfortable. There were first-day-of-school pictures, when Colin or she were stiff in their new clothes. And some of Dad laughing with his arm around one of them. She’d felt strange, seeing those.
She hadn’t paid much attention to the letters, beyond dumping them out on the bed so she could look at the loose photos. There had been a bundle tied in ribbon with handwriting she’d recognized as Nanna’s. But then she saw that a picture of a man she had recognized was bundled with a few notes that weren’t in envelopes.
“I found some notes he’d written Mom,” she said. “They were...um, kind of explicit. And then in one he was pleading with her to leave Dad. He said he’d take us, too. In the last one, he said, ‘Why won’t you call me? You’re wrong, whatever you think.’” She remembered it word for word. “It freaked me out. I guess Mom slept with him, but then she ditched him when he got serious about her. Which made me wonder if there hadn’t been other men, too.”
Colin hadn’t moved. “Mom?” he finally said in a low, dark voice.
Cait bobbed her head. “I always thought...”
His eyes focused on her.
“That you must know. I mean, you were older—”
“No. I had no idea. What does he look like?”
She did her best to describe the Jerry she remembered from back then and the one she’d encountered today.
“That son of a bitch,” he muttered.
“Maybe,” she said. “But it’s still mostly Mom I stumble over. I mean, she was married. She had us to think about.”
“You mean, she had you to think about,” he said, with less emotion than she suspected he really felt about being deserted by his own mother. But then his eyes narrowed. “Why would she have introduced you to him?”
“I guess sometimes they wanted to get together and she didn’t have any place to leave me. Or maybe they were playing family. I don’t know. I was a kid. I thought we ran into him by accident.” She told him about having lunch with the man, and the treat of getting to go practically out onto the runway to watch planes take off and land. “One time we had a picnic. I don’t remember where. We swam. I remember the water being really cold, but it was fun.” She shrugged. “All innocent, until I found out it wasn’t.”
“Goddamn it,” her brother said bitterly.
“Do you think Dad knew?”
Colin’s face was transformed by anger, his eyes the color of storm clouds. “I have no idea. I tried not to listen when they were screaming at each other.”
She nodded her understanding; sometimes she’d run to her room and pulled her pillow over her head. The yelling so often ended in crashes and grunts and sobbing. She hadn’t wanted to be anywhere near her parents then.
Right now, she was feeling something of the same choking sense of anxiety.
A muscle ticked beneath Colin’s eye. “I may have to meet this Hegland.”
She seemed to have quit breathing. “You look like Dad right now.”
“I don’t look anything like him,” he said in a low growl. But he did. He did. Dad’s face had always been so flushed when he lost his temper, worse when he’d had too much to drink, of course. Right now, dark color suffused Colin’s face and tendons stood out in his forearms. His hand had fisted around his bread knife.
Just like Daddy’s.
“Yes, you do.” She bent her head so she didn’t have to see him. Oh, God. This was what she’d felt every time Blake started to get mad.
“Colin, you’re scaring her,” Nell said softly. When Cait sneaked a worried peek, she saw that her sister-in-law had laid a hand on Colin’s arm. He’d turned his head and was looking at her.
After a minute, during which Cait didn’t dare move, he said, “Cait.” His voice was gruff but also somehow gentle. “I know what you saw back then, but I’m not like Dad. I’ve never wanted to be anything like him. I fought with him to keep you and Mom safe, but I’m not a violent man.”
She looked up to find him regarding her ruefully.
“Seeing you look scared of me,” he said, “that’s
