After the Rain Page 5

  Suzanne squinted, the sun nearly blinding her.

  Lucinda slipped off her sunglasses. “It just seems to me that there’s a reason you’re wanting to lie low for a while.” She smiled warmly. “Anybody who comes to Walton without knowing somebody to visit must be here as a last resort.” Lucinda winked, her false eyelashes waving at Suzanne like small birds.

  When Suzanne didn’t say anything, Lucinda asked again, “So, have you always been alone?”

  With a brief pause, Suzanne nodded. “Pretty much. I have a mother, but I haven’t seen her since I was fourteen. Since then it’s been just me.”

  Lucinda slid her gaze over to Suzanne, her eyes sympathetic. “That’s a sad thing for a young girl.” She wiped a smudge of mascara from under her eye and replaced the sunglasses.

  Suzanne straightened her shoulders, drawing in a deep breath. “It was. But I got over it. I manage fine on my own.”

  They drove by a house with a large wraparound porch and an elderly woman sitting in a rocking chair, a pink sweater thrown over her shoulders. Lucinda waved, and the woman waved back, a thick paperback novel in her hand. Lucinda glanced back at Suzanne, a twisted smile on her face. “Until now, I suspect.”

  Suzanne stared out the window at the neat, trim houses with big yards, swing sets, and roller skates on the driveways. She watched a group of small children riding tricycles down the sidewalk, following two mothers like fledgling ducks. Her fingers ached for her camera, to capture this scene somehow and make it real.

  “Into each life some rain must fall.”

  “What?” Suzanne swung her attention back to Lucinda.

  A small smile tugged at the corner of Lucinda’s rouged and powdered cheek. “Oh, I don’t know. It’s just a little saying a friend of mine has on a cross-stitch on her wall. It reminded me of you for some reason.”

  Without saying anything, Suzanne returned to the window, anxious to escape this woman’s close scrutiny but also somehow grateful for it. It had been a long time since anybody had cared enough to ask.

  They passed through an intersection with an elementary school on the left and a large, tree-filled park on the right. A brick sign by the front gate read HARRIET MADISON WARNER MEMORIAL PARK. Even though it was August, plastic poinsettias sat in pots at the base of the sign.

  “Who was Harriet?” Suzanne asked, sure she already knew.

  “She was my niece and Joe’s wife. She died of cancer three years ago come this Christmas. It was the saddest thing this town has had to live through in a long time.”

  Suzanne thought of the man whose face told stories he didn’t want to tell her. If she’d been able to take his picture, she would have seen a man who wore his grief like a window on his heart. But she had spent so much of her time with him being on the defensive that she had somehow missed it.

  Harry threw a toy into the front seat, and Suzanne caught it before handing it back. “But Harry could only have been . . .”

  “He was born on Christmas Day and Harriet died the next week. Joe was devastated. We all were. But we’re getting by.”

  Lucinda lifted her finger under her sunglasses, and Suzanne let the conversation drop, not knowing how to comfort. But she couldn’t stop herself from thinking of Joe and of the girl Maddie. She must have been about fourteen when her mother died, and Suzanne felt her own pull of grief, knowing the toll of losing a mother while on the cusp of womanhood. “I’m sorry,” she said, surprising herself by meaning it.

  Lucinda pulled into the parking lot of the grocery store, sliding the large pink car in between two pickup trucks. She turned off the engine, then reached into her purse for a lipstick and began applying it. “I’m fixin’ to hire me some temporary help at my lingerie store to get me through inventory and set up for Christmas. If you think you could stick around for a couple of weeks or so, you could come work for me. You won’t get rich, but I can pay you over minimum.” She looked expectantly at Suzanne.

  With a small thrust of her chin, Suzanne said, “I know something about large-sized bras, but that’s about it. Why would you want to offer me a job?”

  Lucinda blotted her lipstick, leaving a bright orangey-red kiss on the tissue. “Because it looks to me like maybe you could use one to give you time to sort things out. Plus, I really do need the help.” She snapped her purse shut. “You don’t need to decide now, sugar, but let me know.”

  Suzanne climbed out of the car, then opened the back door to help Harry out of his car seat. Lucinda showed her which buttons to push and which clips to undo. When she was done, she straightened and looked around, disoriented for a moment. In her mind’s eye, she saw herself in the middle of the parking lot of a store called Piggly Wiggly, holding a small child and standing next to an oversized pink convertible driven by a woman with hair a color nature never intended.

  As disjointed as the image made her feel, she took consolation in the fact that nobody would recognize her here. After less than twenty-four hours in Walton, she could barely recognize herself.

  CHAPTER 4

  Nurse McCormick took the thermometer out of Maddie’s mouth, and frowned as she examined it. “You don’t have a fever, sweetie. I can’t send you home if I can’t find anything wrong with you.”

  Maddie clutched her abdomen, wishing she’d thought of it when she’d first gone to the nurse’s office. “It’s my time of the month and my cramps are really bad.” She moaned for effect.

  Nurse McCormick’s round blue eyes softened in understanding. “You poor thing. I used to be the same way. All you want to do is lie in your own bed and eat chicken soup. Let me call your daddy. . . .”

  Maddie sat up, remembering to still clutch her midsection. “No. You’ll just make him worry and I know his AP chem class is doing some big, complicated experiment today. I’d hate to distract him.”

  The nurse’s blond curls nodded in agreement with her head. “You’re probably right. Is your aunt Lu at home?”

  “Yes. I’ll call her on my cell to let her know I’m on my way home so she can start making some soup.”

  “Perfect.” Nurse McCormick gave her a look of sympathy and Maddie braced herself for what she knew was coming. “I know how hard all this girl stuff must be for you to go through without your mama. You’ve got Lucinda, but I just want you to know that I’m here, too, if there’s anything you need to talk about that you’re not comfortable talking about with your daddy or your aunt.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Maddie said as she stood, remembering to hunch over a bit.

  “Anything,” the nurse repeated, and Maddie forced a smile and nodded as if she agreed that well-meaning strangers could ever replace the mother who’d been stolen from her.

  “I’ll go ahead and write an excuse for your sixth- and seventh-period teachers and turn them in for you. You just run on home and get in bed. A warm compress should help, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Maddie repeated, trying not to look too eager as she headed out of the nurse’s office. She walked very slowly to the front doors of the high school, belatedly realizing that she was limping, too, and hoping nobody had noticed.

  She walked through the school’s parking lot—where she did not have a car parked because her dad really believed that just because she lived within walking distance she should actually walk or ride her bike. She hadn’t ridden her bike since she was fourteen, not that he noticed. She sometimes thought that in her daddy’s mind she was still that same little girl she’d been when her mama died, as if all the clocks had suddenly stopped.

  Maddie paused for a moment to swipe her palm across her forehead to get rid of the perspiration that threatened to drip in her eyes and found herself standing next to Lucy Spafford’s red Audi convertible with KDZUQNE on the license plate. She groaned inwardly, trying to tell herself that she wasn’t jealous. Maddie’s mama would have made sure she had a car. A cute Volkswagen Beetle convertible. Or anything, really, that wouldn’t accommodate car seats and younger siblings. Or wasn’t a bike.

&n
bsp; As soon as Maddie was sure nobody from school could see her, she broke into a sprint, not slowing until she’d reached the loading docks in the back of the Piggly Wiggly. She was panting hard and sweating so bad that at first she didn’t see her two classmates lounging against one of the Dumpsters at the edge of the building.

  “You got the stuff?” Ritchie Kobylt asked, his mouth barely moving as if the effort of forcing out words was too much effort. Despite the heat, he wore a black studded leather jacket draped with chains. His black hair—about six shades darker than it had been in middle school—matched his black eyeliner, jeans, and unlaced combat boots.

  The girl next to him, Sandy Creek, obviously shopped at the same place since her outfit matched Ritchie’s exactly, even down to the placement of the chains. Even their skin had the same vampiric paleness.

  Maddie reached deep down into her purse—one that was worn and old but had been one of the last presents her mother had given her—and pulled out two packs of Marlboros before handing them to the goth pair. She’d taken them from Aunt Lucinda’s stash in the laundry room. They belonged to Sheriff Adams, who’d been trying to stop smoking for about two years, with Aunt Lucinda helping him by confiscating his cigarettes. Luckily for Maddie, Lucinda was a believer in not throwing anything away since it might be useful later on.

  “You got my stuff?” Maddie asked in return, trying to sound tough, too, and nearly managing it, too, except for the slight squeak on the word “stuff.”

  While Ritchie opened one of the cigarette packs and pulled out a lighter, Sandy groped around in her oversized backpack—black, of course, but with an attractive skull-and-crossbones motif splayed across the front—and pulled out a small stack of large envelopes. “My mom’s all excited because all this stuff is coming in from schools all over the country. As if.” She took a lit cigarette from Ritchie and sucked on it as if it were the last drop of water in the desert.

  “You didn’t tell her they’re for me, right?” Maddie asked as she took the envelopes emblazoned with college logos from everywhere except Georgia. She tucked them out of sight into her bag.

  “Hell no. She’s been leaving me alone and not nagging me about homework or my room because she thinks they’re for me.” She took another drag and looked at Maddie with black-rimmed eyes. “How come you don’t want your dad to know?”

  Maddie shrugged as if it weren’t really important. “Because he’d freak. He wants me to go to UGA or anywhere, really, that’s within the state of Georgia. Not just because it’s cheaper, either, but because he wants to keep me close to home. Personally, I’d rather be in a jail cell.”

  She glanced up at Ritchie, knowing he’d had firsthand experience with a jail cell, and hoped she hadn’t insulted him. He responded by handing her a cigarette. Trying to pretend that she did this every day, she accepted it, holding it between her lips as he lit it. Holding it between her thumb and forefinger just like Ritchie and Sandy, she pulled it away from her mouth without inhaling it.

  “What do you think of your dad’s new girlfriend?” Sandy asked.

  Maddie looked at her in surprise. They’d been best friends in elementary school, eventually drifting apart as Sandy’s parents divorced and she’d started hanging around with the goth crowd, and Maddie, well, Maddie stayed the same. Except that her mother had died. That had changed her, but only from the inside where nobody could see how much.

  “She’s not his girlfriend. They just met and he’s helping her out. Not that I would mind my daddy getting a girlfriend. Maybe then he’d have something to distract himself with besides keeping tabs on me and where I want to go to college.” This was mostly true. Her daddy hadn’t so much as noticed another woman since Maddie’s mama died three years earlier, so it hadn’t really ever occurred to her that he might actually want to date again. The thought made her want to throw up a little bit in the back of her throat, but she realized that it could be to her advantage. It wasn’t as if her mama was ever coming back.

  They both looked at her with the same sympathetic look Nurse McCormick had given her—minus all the eyeliner—and Maddie glanced away, wondering how soon she could get away from this town and the people who would always know her as “the girl whose mother had died.”

  After having bypassed the fresh fruits and vegetables, Suzanne stood in the frozen food aisle, finally finding herself in familiar company. She opened a freezer case and pulled out a stack of frozen dinners and dumped them in the cart. Lucinda, following in a separate cart with the two children riding in the basket amid collard greens, sweet potatoes, and toilet paper, stopped to stare inside Suzanne’s.

  “Is that all you’re going to be needing?”

  Suzanne stared at her loot defensively. “That will last me.” She reached in and held up a loaf of bread. “Plus all the peanut butter sandwiches I can eat.”

  Lucinda shook her head. “No wonder you’re so thin. I might have to add you to the Women’s Guild list of dinner donations.”

  Pushing her cart ahead, Suzanne called over her shoulder, “Don’t be silly. There’s more than enough food here to last me until I leave. I can’t take the frozen food with me when I go, and I hate to be wasteful.” She stopped in front of another case and pulled out a box of frozen pancakes. She held it up like a trophy. “See? I eat healthy. They say that breakfast is the most important meal of the day.”

  With a cluck of her tongue, Lucinda shook her head and pushed her cart toward the checkout line.

  It seemed the woman knew everyone. From the checkout clerk to the man in front of her in the line, Lucinda was greeted by everybody who saw her. It wouldn’t have been so bad except for Lucinda’s insistence that she introduce Suzanne to every single one of them. Reaching toward a rack of sunglasses, Suzanne snagged a pair and pushed them on her nose, trying to ignore the dangling price tag. She tried on several pairs as Lucinda ran through yet another bout of introductions. She felt stupid, but it was the only thing she could think of that she could hide behind to avoid recognition. Just in case.

  As she waited for Lucinda to ring up her own purchases, Suzanne casually picked up a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and opened it. She scanned the headlines of the first page, feeling her skin tingle in relief when she didn’t see what she was looking for. Plunging head-on into the middle of the paper, she continued perusing headlines. It’s not there. Why isn’t it there? She glanced around, aware that she was breathing heavily. Just because it’s not in the Atlanta paper doesn’t mean he’s not looking for you.

  “Suzanne?”

  She looked up, temporarily unaware of where she was.

  “Sugar, could you grab a paper for me, too? I’ll pay you back.”

  Numbly Suzanne placed the paper on the belt, then plopped a frozen lasagna behind it. As she reached into the cart for the next boxed dinner, two voices spoke in unison behind her. “You must be Joe’s woman, who’s staying at the old Ladue house.”

  Suzanne whipped around and spotted two women, well past their sixties, wearing identical yellow capri pants with matching shirts and hats with brims so big a strong wind would have made them airborne.

  “Joe’s woman—?”

  Lucinda interrupted. “Thelma and Selma Sedgewick, I’d like you to meet Suzanne Paris. She’s visiting for a little while.”

  The women held out gloved hands as a dazed Suzanne responded by shaking the fingertips of each woman.

  Thelma—or was it Selma?—spoke first. “So, how did you and Joe meet? You know, it’s about time he started to show an interest in women again. Dr. Parker said you were right pretty, too, although it’s hard to tell with those sunglasses. . . .”

  Not quite sure how to respond, Suzanne pulled out a bill and handed it to the cashier.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I can’t take anything over a fifty-dollar bill. I could call the manager. . . .”

  Suzanne stared down at the crisp one-hundred-dollar bill and felt the blood flood her cheeks. She looked up and found Lucinda staring at her. Wit
hout a word, Lucinda handed the cashier two twenties.

  Feeling as if she might faint, Suzanne whispered a quiet “Excuse me” and pushed through the two women dressed like canaries and walked toward the back of the store to find either a restroom or a way out. She wasn’t sure which made her feel more nauseated: being referred to as “Joe’s woman,” whatever the hell that was supposed to mean, or remembering that Anthony was looking for her. Either way, she needed space to breathe.

  She eyed two large doors with an exit sign above them at the end of the snacks and soda aisle and pushed through them, gasping for air. Blinking, trying to adjust to the bright sunlight, she spotted three figures standing about six feet in front of her.

  Maddie Warner stood leaning against a back wall of the grocery store near a Dumpster, a boy and girl around the same age standing nearby, each with a hand in the other’s back pocket. As soon as they heard the door shut behind Suzanne, the three looked up.

  The smell of old garbage mixed with that of cigarettes, making Suzanne cough as she stared at the three teenagers. The boy tugged on his girlfriend’s arm. “Come on, Sandy—we gotta go.” With a quick gesture at Maddie encouraging her to follow, they walked around the Dumpster and disappeared around the corner of the building.

  Maddie stayed where she was, looking at Suzanne through narrowed eyes. “What are you doing—shoplifting cheap sunglasses?”

  Belatedly, Suzanne realized she was still wearing the glasses from the checkout counter. She yanked them off her nose and was about to defend herself when she noticed the cigarette trailing smoke from Maddie’s fingers. “Aren’t you supposed to be in school?”

  Maddie took a long drag on her cigarette, and Suzanne watched in amusement as the cool and collected expression on Maddie’s face quickly crumpled into a coughing fit. Suzanne reached over and grabbed the cigarette from the teenager’s hand and crushed it underneath the heel of her sandal.

  “Don’t you know these are addictive?”