A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

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Table of Contents

Copyright Page

For Angela and Jenny, the girls at the end of the world

Acknowledgments

Glorious thanks to the bril iant Helen Atsma. She’s an old-school, hands-on, invested editor—thank God—fearless and whip-smart. I see her fingerprints al through this book and, as Mosey might say, the book is hel a better for them.

Thanks, as always, to my longtime friend and agent, Jacques de Spoelberch. He starts pushing me the second I look comfortable, and I love him for it. Caryn Karmatz Rudy is more than a friend and former editor; she’s a voice I always trust.

Grand Central Publishing has consistently gone the extra mile (more like the extra width of a mighty nation) to back my work. I sing their names aloud, probably to the tune of some old-school, righteous Springsteen hit: Jamie Raab, Deb Futter, Martha “Inimitable” Otis, Karen “Incomparable”

Torres (isn’t it weird how they have the same middle initial?), Chris Barba, Cheryl Rozier, Evan Boorstyn, El y Weisenberg, Nancy Wiese, Nicole Bond, Peggy Holm, Liz Connor, Thom Whatley, Toni Marotta, Carolyn J. Kurek, Emily Griffin, Celia Johnson, and Bernadette Murphy. I lift a glass and toast with a mighty STET/OK the work of Maureen Sugden. I wil remember always the kindness and support of Les Pockel .

As I wrote this book, Lydia Netzer, Karen Abbott, and Sara Gruen acted as an odd, unholy trinity. Sara had her wise finger on the pulse of Mosey from the first word. Karen, my whoodie, insisted I not prudishly shy from Big’s (absolutely necessary, sorry, Mom) sex scenes. Lydia was Liza’s advocate, demanding that I find a way to give my lost girl a voice. Al three holed up with me in various hidey-spots, armed with laptops and liquor.

My best working times were side-by-silent-side with them, each of us buried in our own imaginary landscape. I can’t imagine how people write books without friends like these. I bask in their col ective radiance.

Thanks to Gray James, for her valuable anthropological expertise (the girl knows bones!) and her even more valuable friendship. My Atlanta writing group—Anna Schachner and Reid Jensen—are sexy, sexy beasts: relentless, honest, bold, and talented. Thanks to Mir Kamin for early reads and for being part of the ful and plate-ly fel owship that is rounded out by Kira Martin. I am not the elephant plate.

Donna Baker, CTRS, the supervisor for therapeutic recreation services at the Emory University Hospital Center for Rehabilitation Medicine, and Dr. Ray G. Jones Jr. were wise and generous as I researched brain injury and recovery. Emergency room nurse Julie Oestriech was, as always, my go-to girl for information about the likely medical fal out from my characters’ less savory ideas. Any mistakes are mine alone.

A secret decoder ring message to my Best Beloveds at
Faster than Kudzu
, and to the evangelical handsel ers who are stil singing out for books in this rapidly changing industry, and to my bonded set of dedicated monster-kil ers in the Vents: You are my very favorite one.

Long live Jack Reacher, who taught me-n-Mosey the difference between a SIG and a Glock.

I have two families who keep my heart safe: The first begins with Scott—of course and ever and only—and with Sam and Maisy Jane, our amazing col aborations. Also Bob and Betty Jackson, Bobby and Julie, Daniel and Erin Virginia, Jane and Auntie Assilon. The second is my family at Macland Presbyterian, especial y the odd, good eggs of smal group. They love me through my best and my worst, along with the wild bunch of Irish pub–churched Emergent Cohorts who stand shoulder to shoulder on the slanted sidewalk and try to make the world a warmer place.

Most of al , I thank you, if you are one of those sainted people who respond to my books, who like my redemption-infested stories and my weird, imaginary friends. You are the ones who spread the word; because of you, I get to keep this job I love. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I’l keep writing as long as you keep reading.

PROLOGUE

Big

MY DAUGHTER, LIZA, put her heart in a silver box and buried it under the wilow tree in our backyard. Or as close to under that tree as she could anyway. The thick web of roots shunted her off to the side, to the place where the wil ow’s long fingers trailed down. They swept back and forth across the troubled earth, helping Liza smooth away the dig marks.

It was foolish. There’s no way to hide things underground in Mississippi. Our rich, wet soil turns every winter burial into a spring planting. Over the years Liza’s heart, smal and cold and broken as it was, grew into a host of secrets that could ruin us al and cost us Mosey, Liza’s own little girl. I can’t blame Liza, though. She was young and hurt, and she did the best she could.

And after al , I’m the damn fool who went and dug it up.

I should have known better; I was turning forty-five, and that meant it was a trouble year. Every fifteen years God flicks at us with one careless finger and we spin helplessly off into the darkness. I’d known that Old Testament–style plagues of Egypt would be stalking my family the second that December ticked over into January.

Now, I try not to be overly superstitious; I like black cats about as much as I like any other color cat, and I’l go straight under any number of ladders if you put the right kind of pie on the other side. But the hold the number fifteen has on my family, there’s no natural explanation.

I was fifteen when I gave birth to Liza. Then, fifteen years later, Liza had her own girl. Not a hard pattern to catch on to. Liza and I had been prepping, in our separate ways, for this year ever since Mosey was four and kept holding hands with the same chubby blond boy at the park. I’d spent double for organic milk because I’d heard that the hormones in the regular stuff could make little girls bud early and jump-start their periods.

Liza worked nights and I worked days, so one of us was always around to keep tabs on where Mosey was and who she was there with. Liza was vigilant for any hint that Mosey was walking in a bad direction, and Liza would know; when it came to mapping al the bad ways adolescent girls could go, Liza had been Magel an. And she was so strong-wil ed, I never could pul her back to some more reasonable path.…

I remember taking Liza down to the beach when she was two, young enough to have forgotten she’d seen waves the summer before. She came to the ocean like it was a mystery. She sat by my towel on her fat bottom, made fatter by her damp Huggies, and she patty-caked the sand and stared at the blue-green water, mesmerized. I’d never seen Liza sit so stil , so long. After a couple hours, I packed up and told her it was time to go home. Her whole face went mulish. She stood up and braced her little legs against me, readying for a battle.

“Wannit,” she said.

“What do you want, Little?” I asked, and she pointed her baby finger right at the waves.

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. She responded by digging her toes into the sand, and I could read savage kickings and the wailings of the damned in her face. I didn’t have anything inside me to match it.

I tried to misdirect, saying in cheery tones, “Aren’t you ready for snack time, Liza-Little? I’ve got pizza-flavored Goldfish crackers at home.”

She ignored the bribe and repeated “Wannit!”—demanding I pack up the water and the sand and the deep blue sky above with half a hundred seagul s and pelicans wheeling around and bring it home and put it in her room. I looked at the rigid set of her spine, her set jaw, and I was already so tired of the fight we were about to have. She was wil ing to die on this hil , on any old hil , and I wasn’t.

I told her she could have it. I gave the child the Gulf of Mexico, just like that, and then I picked her up and we stood looking at her ocean. After a minute I turned my back, and she shifted in my arms so she could stil see. She rested her cheek against my shoulder, and I swayed back and forth to the rhythm of the surf. I stood that way for at least a half an hour, until she fel asleep. Al the while the waves crept closer, as if the very tide were trying to appease her by coming in and packing itself up into my beach bag.

I know that some folks think Liza was so wild and wil ful because she didn’t have a daddy to speak of and her mother was a teenage dumb-ass.

Maybe so. I admit she bent me like a weed to her wind, but I was a woman grown now, and no one could say I hadn’t done a good job raising Mosey. Mosey was a peach, right up until the trouble year came.

I was caught off guard, even though from the first minute of January al the way to June I had my eyes on the horizon, trying to see whatever might be coming for us. It never occurred to me I might be looking in al the wrong directions. I never thought to look under, never suspected we’d been living on a fault line for years.

Then summer came, and Liza had her stroke. I thought that was it. Surely losing most of my own daughter was enough to feed and silence even God. How could that not be al the trouble we were due, and more?

So I went digging, and what I unearthed would pul Liza down into the black of her own past, would lead Mosey so astray I wasn’t sure that I would ever find her, and would final y land me here: standing outside the glass wal of a fishbowl conference room ful of lawyers and their legal books. Not a one of them was on my side. Al I had was me, the truth, and an empty Dixie cup. I don’t think the lawyers cared a fig about the truth, so it was pretty much me and the cup.

I’d never before thought of “custody” as an ugly word. To me it meant that the police had the bad guys, so the streets were peaceful and the dark corners of the garden were safe. But today that good word had turned on me, gone purely ugly. Today it meant this cold-eyed crew was coming after Mosey.

I could have put an ad up on the Craigslist and tried to get one of my own: “Desperately seeking lawyer. Must like long walks on the beach, not getting paid, and losing.” I hear there’s a whole mess of lawyers just like that; they keep an office between Mermaid Cove and the Unicorn Forest.

I wished for Lawrence beside me. He’d been on the job, as cops say, for twenty-some years now; he ought to be able to stare down a few lawyers. He could make it their silence to break instead of mine. If Lawrence was with me, if he even knew I was here, he’d have my hand in his. I knew what he would tel me. That I should trade anything, surrender anything, sacrifice anything, but not let go of Mosey.