ago.
“What a dump,” Toni said, scowling at the passing scenery.
“Actually, it looks better than it did when I was here last,” Marisol said. In her memories, everything here was sepia-toned—the brown brick of the courthouse, the faded facades of storefronts and the yards of houses brown from winter’s frosts or summer’s drought. So it surprised her to recognize color all around her. Azaleas bloomed pink and lilac around the courthouse. New stores with bright striped awnings lined the streets.
She drove past the corner where the Dairy Freeze had once sat—now occupied by a bright yellow McDonald’s—and turned onto a wide, shady street. Her destination was halfway down, on the right. She blinked rapidly, cursing the tears that stung her eyes as she stared at the familiar white brick ranch house, with its narrow front porch and cracked concrete drive. Even the mailbox was the same, the paint faded over the years but still readable: Davies.
She pulled in front of the garage and shut off the engine. “This is it?” Toni asked. “It’s so tiny.”
Marisol laughed, a bitter attempt to avoid bursting into tears. “It’s little to you because you’re used to our huge house in Houston. But when I was a little girl, this seemed like a really big house.” Before Mercedes Luna had married Harlan Davies, she and Marisol had shared a one-bedroom apartment over a dry cleaner’s downtown. Marisol had stayed in bigger hotel rooms than the place where she’d spent the first eleven years of her life.
Toni shook her head, unimpressed by nostalgia, and shoved open her car door then climbed out.
Marisol sighed and got out as well. She refrained from looking around as she headed up the walk to the front door. The neighbors were probably already getting cricks in their necks, trying to see what was going on at the Davies’ house. The phone lines would be buzzing when they figured out who was back in town.
She dug in her purse for the key the lawyer had sent. Toni waited on the porch, slumped against the post, feigning boredom, though impatience radiated from her. No matter what she said, the girl was interested in this glimpse into her mother’s past—a past Marisol had never found reason to share with her.
She took a deep breath, bracing herself against the onslaught of memory, then turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door.
It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimness in the closed-up room, but in that time the scent of White Shoulders filled her. Her mother’s perfume. One breath and it was as if Mercedes were there in person, urging her daughter to shut the door and come inside. To make herself at home.
She groped for the light switch. A single yellow bulb glowed feebly overhead, revealing furniture draped in old sheets, and the same red-and-black patterned rug that had been bought new when Marisol was eleven.
Toni gingerly lifted one sheet. “You really lived here?” she asked.
Marisol nodded. She had not really wanted to come here, but told herself she had no choice. Staying here until she could sell the place seemed like the safest bet for her and her daughter. And she couldn’t deny a curiosity, a need to see what had become of this place she had left so long ago. An unvoiced hope that in death Mercedes might have left behind some clue as to what had really happened to tear them so irrevocably apart.
“I want to stay in your room,” Toni said, interrupting her mother’s reverie. Before Marisol could stop her, she hurried down the hall, opening doors as she went, looking in at the dusty furnishings of a guest room/-home office, bathroom and finally, at the end of the hall, Marisol’s girlhood room.
“Toni, no,” Marisol called, but too late. Toni had already opened the door and stood just inside it, staring.
Marisol came up behind her and stared too, at the white single bed with its pink puffy comforter. The pink curtains, faded by the sun, still hung in the window, and the pink fluffy rug still lay by the bed.
She took Toni’s shoulder and urged her gently over the threshold into the hall. “You don’t want to stay here,” she said. “We’ll fix up the guest room for you.”
“Why can’t I stay here?” Toni whirled on her, her face fixed in the stubborn pout Marisol recognized too well. “What’s in there you don’t want me to see?”
Marisol closed her eyes and breathed deeply through her nose—a technique she had read somewhere was calming, but she couldn’t tell that it made any difference now. She still felt as if she’d swallowed broken glass, as if there was no move she could make that didn’t hurt. “There’s nothing special here to see,” she said calmly, though a voice in her head screamed Liar! “It’s just a house. You can look at it later. Let’s unpack our things first.”
Toni blocked her mother’s passage down the hall, arms folded across her chest, mouth set in a stubborn scowl. Already she was taller than Marisol, having inherited her father’s height. “What was the deal with you and your mother, anyway? How come I never met her? How come she didn’t want you attending her funeral? Why do you always keep so many secrets?”
Not secrets, Marisol thought. Just things no one needs to talk about anymore. She wet her dry lips. “I didn’t get along with her husband. She chose him over me.” The truth, but only part of it.
“And that’s it? You let something like that keep you apart for what—twenty years?”
“About that.” She forced herself to look her daughter in the eye, to not flinch from that disdainful glare. It was so easy to judge at this age, when you were so sure of right and wrong. “I’m not proud of it. If I could go back and do things differently, I would. But I can’t. So now I have to live with it.”
Toni scowled at her, then pushed past, headed to the living room. Marisol followed her daughter and sank onto a sheet-covered sofa, her legs suddenly too weak to support her. Oh God, why had she come back here? True, she hadn’t seen any other choice. But everything felt wrong. There were too many bad memories in these walls, too much hurt to have to deal with. She looked around the room, at the shrouded shapes that were like so many ghosts, taunting her.
Toni slumped in the chair opposite. “So what do we do now?” she asked.
Marisol took a deep breath. “We’re going to do whatever we have to,” she said. That was how she’d lived her life. She’d done tougher things to survive before. She could do this. She could do anything as long as she knew it was only temporary.
S COTT R EDMOND LEANED against the door to his father’s office and watched his dad, attorney Jay Redmond, shuffle through stacks of folders. “I need to pick up my dry cleaning,” the old man muttered. “I know the claim slip is here somewhere.”
“Just tell Mr. Lee you lost it,” Scott said. “It’s not as if he hasn’t known you for years.” That was one good thing about living in a small town for years—everyone knew everything about you.
And that was the worst thing about living in a small town as well. Mess up even once and no one ever forgot it. Make a habit of screw-ups and it could take years to rebuild a reputation, something Scott was finding out the hard way.
Two years ago he’d been the top-selling real estate agent in town, riding the tail end of a housing boom that had brought wealthy investors from Houston, three hours to the north, to buy up old homes or build new ones on vacant land for weekend retreats. Scott had wined and dined these high rollers and become something of a roller himself. He’d
