Still, Stella knew a mother’s worry, the way each morning dawned with thoughts of one’s offspring before anything else, with a prayer for their safety and an entreaty to the Big Guy to hold them gently for one more day.
Which was also why she answered the way she did after Sherilee’s sleepy hello.
“Todd’s fine,” she said quickly. “This is Stella. Don’t you worry.”
“Oh, nooooo,” Sherilee moaned. Stella could hear some rustling as she came awake. “What’s that fool boy done now? I should’ve known he wasn’t over to Taylor Spokes’s house. Why, they barely been speakin’ since that thing with the gym lockers.”
Stella covered the mouthpiece and glared at Todd. “You told your mama you was sleepin’ over at the Spokeses’ place, didn’t you.”
Todd shrugged, an elaborately indifferent roll of the shoulders that was meant to signal boredom, but Stella didn’t miss the way his fingers picked at the collar of his shirt. The boy felt bad. And that was good. Todd was an ingrate, but he was a sweet one who hated to pain his mother.
She thrust the phone at him. “You tell her how sorry you are, boy,” she stage-whispered fiercely. “Make it the performance of a lifetime.”
Todd ducked his chin and kicked at the pavement and heaved a giant sigh, but he accepted the phone. “Mom, I—”
Even from a few feet away Stella could hear most of what Sherilee had to say. The woman had an impressive pair of lungs and she used them to bellow and scold without leaving a single gap to get a word in until she’d had her say—and then the silence hung oppressive and thick, and Stella almost felt a little sorry for the boy.
“I’m really, really, really sorry,” Todd mumbled. Stella saw the shimmer of unspilled tears in the moonlight and felt herself relenting a little. “I shoulda known better, I didn’t mean to—”
“Gimme that,” she said, snatching back her phone and knocking Todd on the head with it before turning her attention back to Sherilee. “It’s me again. Look, I’m going to take good care of him, I promise.”
“Is he over at your place?”
“Uh … well, not exactly. In fact we’re sort of out of town. It’s kind of complicated.”
“Oh no, you ain’t up at Fayette, are you?” Fayette, the county seat, featured the county jail, among other things. The sheriff’s department’s temporary holding cell in Prosper had been fashioned from an old Dumpster enclosure, so most suspects didn’t cool their heels there for very long before being sent north.
“No, no, nothing like that. Todd ain’t done anything illegal that I know of.” Although at that moment Stella remembered seeing Goat’s cruiser—which she had foolishly believed had been evidence he was looking out for
her
—but could easily have been a pursuit-type situation involving
Todd
.
“You mean, ’cept what he done to Royal’s car. Oh, that man was spittin’ nails.” Stella could hear the frustration in Sherilee’s voice, and she had the thought that having to be the go-between between one’s son-of-a-bitch ex and one’s own kids was yet one more layer of hell that a single mother didn’t deserve but was often stuck with anyway.
“He’s still mad about that? Didn’t insurance pay to repaint?”
“Yes, but I’m talkin’ about what Todd done
today
. Royal come over after work to drop off the check and practically invited himself in and what am I gonna do about that, the girls are so excited to see their daddy, so I set out some cookies and what-all and didn’t even give it a thought when Todd told me he was headed over to Taylor’s. Keepin’ him apart from his dad seemed like a good idea, in fact. And then when Royal saw what Todd done, and right on that fresh paint what he paid extra to get the waterborne finish—”
“Oh, no,” Stella said, her heart sinking. She stared at Todd, who realized he’d been found out. Rather than slinking further into remorse, though, he stood up tall and jutted his chin angrily forward, sparks practically flying from his long-lashed eyes. Yes, he’d done it for sure—and he wasn’t sorry.
That was a whole other type of problem, one she’d best sort out away from his mother.
“What did he write this time?” she asked heavily.
“Well, it was kind of like last time when he run outta room,” Sherilee said. “From the driver’s side it said
I SUCK
in big old red letters but then you round the corner and it said … uh, something else.”
Stella bit her lip, deadly curious but not about to pry, not with the sort of night that poor Sherilee was having.
She didn’t have to. “
BALLS
,” Sherilee whispered. “That’s what was wrote across the back.
I SUCK BALLS.
Oh, that sure did make Royal mad. He called the sheriff up straightaway, even after I offered to pay for it.”
“Oh, Sherilee,” Stella said, adding a couple of tasks to her ongoing to-do list: Deal with Todd—and then deal with Royal next. Maybe he needed to send his checks Certified Mail for a while. Stella was all for boys having their fathers in their lives—and she’d go so far as to say that an imperfect father was better than none at all—but a cooling-off period seemed like it might be in order. “Okay, look. I’ll talk to Royal, and the sheriff too, but it’s going to have to wait a day or so. In fact I need to keep ahold of Todd for a bit. That okay with you?”
“Sure, you can keep him,” Sherilee said without hesitation. “Only where are you-all at?”
“Well, see … we’re headed up to Wisconsin.”
“Wisconsin!”
Sherilee exclaimed, as though Stella had said Rome or the North Pole.
“Yes. I have a little … business thing up here, shouldn’t take me too long. I’ll keep Todd in sight every minute, I’ll promise you that. That sound okay?” Stella wasn’t sure if she was making promises she could keep, but there would be time to worry about that later.
“Oh my yes,” Sherilee said, sounding only marginally relieved. “That’ll give me a chance to work on Royal, see if I can get him calmed down some.”
“Could you maybe look in on Roxy for me?”
“Sure thing, the girls just love that dog. We’ll bring her over here until you get back.”
“Thanks, Sherilee. I promise we’ll check in with you.”
“All right. And Stella…”
“Yeah?”
There was a pause, and then Sherilee coughed delicately. “See he gets some sleep, will you? And eats something that ain’t all sugar? And … maybe give him a kiss when he ain’t lookin’?”
Stella turned away from Todd so he couldn’t see her smile. “You got it, Sherilee.”
She pocketed the phone and got her scowl back in place before turning back around. Todd followed her meekly to the truck and clambered into the passenger seat. They weren’t half a mile down the road before he was asleep, tucked against the door with his arms crossed across his chest, and Stella couldn’t help hoping his dreams were sweet ones.
Chapter Six
By the time they reached the outskirts of Smythe, Wisconsin, Stella was wishing she could pull over and sleep, too. However, the vague plan she’d cooked up over the course of the nearly five hundred miles she’d covered in BJ’s truck hinged on making her move while it was still the middle of the night—or, more precisely, 3:46
A.M.
, according to the clock on the dashboard.
The way she figured it, her best source of information was bound to be Chip himself. She had the address that Gracellen had given her, a rented house that her sister had assured her was “right in the thick of things,” as though keeping close to the pulse of this eight-thousand-person town would make the place any more exciting for a young single man. Missing ear or no, there weren’t that many places a man could hide, Stella concluded as she drove down the shuttered streets, passing a single grocery store and half a dozen churches and a war memorial that rose a couple of stories tall in the moonlight.
When the eerie, disembodied voice of BJ’s GPS assured Stella she was on the right track as she pulled a U-turn at a dead end and stopped in front of a very small cinder-block house wedged between a couple of aging wood-frame ranchers, Stella wrinkled her brow in consternation. She let the truck idle at the curb while she dug out her reading glasses and the ancient address book she’d had for several years. Stella was itching to get herself an iPhone so she could keep everything on it, but the little address book had been the last gift her mother had given her before she died, a little “just-because” gift because Pat Collier had spotted the sunflowers on the cover and, knowing her daughter loved sunflowers just about more than any other flower, had wrapped it up with a little bow and brought it over with a pan of homemade lemon bars.
Maybe it was because it was nearly four in the morning and she’d been up all night. Maybe it was the stress of volunteering for what looked like yet another messy, potentially violent escapade in a year that had already featured several. Maybe it was the heightened responsibility of having a sprawling, lanky, ripe teen in the car, one who was unpredictable on the best of days and who was going to be in her care for the foreseeable future.
Whatever the cause, when Stella squinted at the address book in the dome light of the borrowed truck, music playing faintly in the background so as not to disturb Todd’s slumber, she felt a pang of sadness that she hadn’t felt in a while. Not only missing her mother, who’d passed a number of years ago, but also missing having someone know the special things about her. Someone who remembered she loved sunflowers and lemon bars, who knew she had double-jointed toes and an astigmatism in both eyes and liked to nap in front of a fire on rainy days and read the comics first and sprinkle her grapefruit with sugar.
“Now stop that, Stella,” she whispered to herself, wiping a tear away with the back of her hand and blinking several times. “You got more’n most folks.”
That was true in spades. The older Stella got, the more she realized that a single good friend was a precious gift that lots of people couldn’t hang on to, whether it was from a lack of trying or bad luck or people dying out from under you—and she had several. While none of them might know everything about her the way her mama had, put them all together and they took darn good care of her. Chrissy sometimes knew Stella better than she knew herself, and she didn’t put up with any whining; the girl kept her on top of her game. Jelloman Nunn was the closest thing to a maternal figure Stella had, which was kind of funny since he was ten years older than her tops, and a
man,
not to mention one with a long gray ponytail and a beard down to his Adam’s apple and a thriving weed business—but he could be counted on to fuss over her and bake for her and set her up with a pile of blankets and a chick flick in front of the TV if she so much as got the sniffles.
Then there was Dotty Edwards and Sherilee and Jane down at Hair Lines and Roseanne Lu and all her clients. Stella shook her head and clucked in impatience; she didn’t have any right to fuss. In the back of her mind was that other thought bubble, the one that occasionally bloomed into a full-fledged craving to have all those fine qualities rolled up into a single person, more specifically a male person who was reasonably attractive and equipped for an assortment of bedroom-type activities. Okay, okay, a
boyfriend,
not to put too fine a point on things. It was no kind of mystery why her little pity party had gone in that direction, since she was sitting here in a man’s truck, the very same man who’d only hours ago been working his big strong manly hand downward toward her tender nethers, one who’d been hinting for a while now that he might be available for a variety of leisure-time activities.
Heck, Stella had both a problem and a ready-made solution. Only, why did it all have to come to the surface now, five hundred miles from home, when she had a job to do and—as usual—an imperfect set of resources to do it with?
Stella opened the address book to the
P
page and ran her fingers down the list until it landed on “Papadakis.” Chess and Gracellen had the most robust entry, not only because they’d moved into the huge fancy tract home recently, but because Stella liked to keep a variety of facts on hand for gift shopping, like their sizes and colors and the fact that Chess was allergic to latex and rooted for the A’s and Raiders. For Chip, who she did not know nearly as well, fewer particulars were listed, but one of them was his address, and it took only a second to confirm that she was, indeed, parked in front of it.
Which was a curious thing. It wasn’t that Stella couldn’t picture the young man in this humble little house despite his family’s considerable if recently diminished wealth—she knew how any kind of addiction, including the gambling sort, could send one’s quality of life plummeting.
No, what caused her some consternation was the way he’d seen fit to decorate the place. Even in the not-optimal light cast by the streetlights and the truck’s aftermarket xenon headlights, Stella could make out clumps of faux flowers in the window boxes, bunches of plastic geraniums and roses and daisies with festoons of ivy trailing over the edges.
It wasn’t the most manly decor Stella had ever seen, and it didn’t quite jive with Stella’s memory of the boy, who had been sullen and poorly groomed and not really giving off a whole lot of indication that he had a softer side that might show itself in outward displays of floral exuberance, even if she wasn’t one to judge about such things.
She turned off the truck and put the back of her hand gently to Todd’s cheek, which was warm from sleep. She rested her hand there for a moment, feeling him breathe, a habit that went back to the night she brought Noelle home from the hospital, a mother’s need to confirm for herself that her children were well and thriving. Even if Todd wasn’t exactly
hers,
well, she’d given his mother a promise to care for him, and that meant “as if he were her very own.”
Todd didn’t stir when she shut the door and trudged up to the house. She knocked gently, not wishing to wake the neighbors, and given how close-set the houses were and how flimsy the construction looked to be, that was a real concern.
Inside she heard some shuffling and muttering and then a thump and some more urgent muttering and then silence. Someone was up, even at this hour, and from the sounds of it, there was more than one someone. Which might, come to think of it, explain the flower boxes, especially if the other someone was female—though for the life of her Stella didn’t recall Gracellen ever mentioning Chip having any romantic interests.