When tragedy took everything from Violet, she left home and never looked back. Until now. Her mother’s funeral.
Violet hopes she can settle her mother’s affairs and quietly return to the life she built after that day. Until she sees him. Skeeter Johnson. The boy who shot her in the face.
In a moment, her past returns to haunt her. A past she thought she left behind. A past, she comes to discover, full of her mother’s secrets.
“Her Mother’s Secrets,” by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is free on this website for one week only. The story’s also available as an ebook on Amazon, Kobo, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, and from other online retailers.
Her Mother’s Secrets
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Violet had one year of pretty in her life—1976—and at the time she had been too concerned about her weight to notice. She remembered, vividly, obsessing about her fat thighs. She was so obsessed, in fact, that she never wore shorts or miniskirts, even though she weighed 115 pounds, and had, at that point, thighs six inches in diameter.
She discovered her year of pretty twenty-one years later when she was going through old photographs in her mother’s house, preparing it for sale. Her mother had died of pneumonia two days before, and left Violet the task of dealing with everything, the estate, the house, and the daily phone calls from her mother’s friends, asking for a memorial service. Her mother had expressly asked for a conventional funeral, and Violet had had to explain that wish again and again.
The pictures were a revelation. She sat on the middle of her mother’s floor, boxes strewn around the orange shag carpet, her grandmother’s rocking chair a hand’s reach from her side. The television was off, unusual for that time of day in that house, and she had changed the radio station from her mother’s soft jazz station to the town’s only oldies station. The music somehow added to the memories, made them jar against the images in front of her.
She remembered that time so well, feeling gangly and dumpy and flawed. She remembered using Noxzema at night and Stridex in the morning, remembered hours in front of the beveled mirror in the bathroom playing with her hair, remembered shunning makeup because she was too terrified she’d put it on wrong.
The photographs said she hadn’t needed makeup. The girl that looked back at her was not the one she remembered. This girl was slender, with dark brown hair in a stylish cut, clear gray eyes and a skin that appeared flawless.
Not like she remembered.
None of it was as she remembered.
None of it at all.
***
The pretty had left her in 1977. Her boyfriend, Skeeter Jackson, had been holding a gun. It went off. The bullet hit Violet on the right side of her face, missing the brain—fortunately—but destroying the eye, and shattering the bones in her cheek. Reconstructive surgery had helped—she didn’t have to wear a patch or anything—but it didn’t hide the unnatural smoothness of her skin, or the immobility of the glass eye.
She had grown used to her face, but most people were startled by it. By, her husband once said, its appearance of normality far away, and its strangeness up close.
He had liked the strangeness, even at first. It was one of the things she loved about him. That, and his unusual calm. His great warmth. His strength and his protectiveness.
Her mother used to say, It’s amazing what gifts tragedy brings us.
“What a pile of crap,” Violet muttered, just as if her mother were still alive and listening. “What an absolute pile of crap.”
***
She didn’t want to show Tom the pictures, but she did within minutes of his arrival at the house. He was a big man, broad-shouldered with an athlete’s build that belied his bookish nature. He carried brochures and papers from the auction houses and cleaning services in town, and set them, surreptitiously, on the kitchen table. Then he had tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, looked at her face for a moment, and pulled her close.
She wasn’t going to show him, she resolved then. She didn’t want him to know what he had missed.
But he wanted to know what disturbed her so, thinking it was her mother, assuming it was her mother, and Violet had said—no, yes, no. Ah hell, and pulled the pictures from the box.
They were different sizes—the school photo was large, and the rest were snapshots from various cameras, made at a time when that determined the size of the print. He gave each photo due consideration, studying it as if it were a window into another world. Then, when he finished, he gave each photo to her.
Her first prom, when she stood beside Skeeter, her robin’s egg blue dress revealing a trim delicate form that matched her delicate features. A laughing girl, sitting in a tree, the delicacy buried in bell-bottom jeans, sweatshirt jacket, and wide crinkly smile. The same girl, same tree, different jeans, different mood, brow furrowed as she concentrated on a book.
With each photo, her hand shook. Tom’s familiar face, with its sun-wrinkles and age-softened skin, seemed unfamiliar as he looked through the pile. Then he stopped at her graduation photo, taken only weeks before the shooting.
Her auburn hair was in a pageboy without bangs, the ends turned under her ears. She wore no make up—she didn’t need any, not with her naturally rosy cheeks, her pink bow-shaped mouth, and her perfect skin. The green dress with its soft collar made her wide eyes look green as well.
Beautiful. She had been beautiful, not pretty. Tom would finally get to see what he had lost.
He wrapped an arm around her as if he had heard the thought. Then he set the photo down, and pulled her close, kissing the top of her head. He put a finger beneath her chin, lifted her face to his and pressed his lips against the smooth skin near the glass eye, the place where she had no feeling at all.
Yet she felt that kiss through every inch of her body, all the way to her soul.
***
The funeral home was two blocks from her mother’s house. Violet walked to the visitation, enjoying the warm summer twilight, the faint hint of roses in the air. Her mother had liked winter, and had said just before she died that she was sorry to miss another one. But Violet liked summer, with its heat and its flowers and its greenery. They had differed on so many things, but Violet knew that she would miss those differences for the rest of her life.
She had spent most of the afternoon finishing preparations for the visitation: viewing the body, making certain that her mother looked as normal as possible—whatever that meant—setting up the guest book, and making sure the flowers were arranged properly. The funeral home had been built in the 1960s and still reflected its origins. None of the decorations looked proper against the blue wallpaper and the blonde wood.
Not that her mother would have cared. Her mother always understood the importance of making do. She had been a single mother long before such a thing was fashionable, working two jobs and trying to raise a daughter in a somewhat normal environment. Violet had hated it all, her mother’s haste, the slap-dash meals, the hard-fought home. More often than not, her mother dropped her at school while still wearing her robe and curlers. Violet always asked to be let out a block away so that no one saw.
Someday you’re going to regret always thinking about how things look, Violet Marie, her mother had said a week before the shooting. Two months after, she had apologized, as if the injuries were her fault.
Even though Violet was early, there were still half a dozen cars in the funeral home parking lot. Her mother had been well known and well liked in this small Wisconsin town near the Minnesota border. She had been the first woman CPA, the first woman to head an accounting firm, the first woman president of the Chamber of Commerce. The last illness had happened not because her mother was elderly, but because she hadn’t been paying attention to her health. She had been too busy on a new project—helping the church buy a building big enough to house the town’s first homeless shelter.
At least Tom was at the funeral home. He had brought his suit coat with him, so that he wouldn’t have to go to the house and change. He had thought people would arrive early, and they had.
He had been a saint through all of this, something she wouldn’t have expected. He had once told her that he hated funerals, hated the ritualized grief. Then his father had died, and he had learned why the rituals existed. Tom thought of things she wouldn’t have considered, because he had experienced a parent’s death already.
She let herself in the double doors, shocked at the darkness of the entry. The artificial lights were on, but they did not compare to the fading summer light outside. Piped-in piano music played hymns that Violet thought might be appropriate—her mother had only liked big bands, jazz, and swing tunes, and Violet couldn’t play those here, not in this somber place. The air smelled of lilies and death.
The guest book stood beside the door to the small chapel, and inside, her mother’s open coffin was bathed in a yellow light. Three people stood before it, their gray heads bent over the open end as if they were praying. Tom sat in a pew, watching them.
She glanced at the guest book, saw seven names besides hers and Tom’s, and didn’t recognize any of them. That didn’t surprise her; she had spent her youth here, but had been gone for twenty years—except for short visits in which she saw only her mother. Her mother had tried to keep her up on the news, but it soon became clear that Violet didn’t care about any of it. Gradually, her mother only told Violet about the changes, and Violet had listened with half an ear.
She slipped into the pew beside Tom. He put his hand over hers, and together they watched as most of the town came to pay their respects to her mother. They heard stories about her mother’s good works, about her sharp words, and about the battles she had fought and won. Only one person was tactless enough to mention the unwanted pregnancy and the mystery of Violet’s father, and the kind way the event came up didn’t bother Violet at all.
Toward the end of the visitation, she found herself in the foyer, surrounded by grieving people she only dimly remembered, and nodding to their words of comfort. She hadn’t cried yet. She doubted she would, not in this place and probably not in the church during the following day’s funeral. Instead, she planned to mourn her mother when she returned home, to the safety of her own house, and the comfort of the things she found most dear.
Tom was talking to the funeral home director, double-checking the arrangements for the body to be transferred to the church the following morning. She could hear their voices faintly beneath the conversational hum around her.
Then the door opened to reveal some final guests. Violet had been watching Tom; she hadn’t seen who had arrived, but the growing silence caught her attention.
The man standing on the threshold was tall and well-formed with a short professional cut to his dark hair. He wore an obviously expensive charcoal gray suit with hints of black, and his diamond cufflinks caught the artificial light. He looked as adult as a thirty-eight-year-old man could, and yet she didn’t see him that way. She saw him as he had been, a reed-thin boy, so thin that he had looked as if a single blow to the stomach would break him in half. His hair had been long and scraggly, the home cut overgrown already, a scuffed and cracked leather jacket around his shoulders, and his jeans dirt-caked and full of holes.
Skeeter Jackson. The boy who shot her.
***
The crowd parted to let him through. He ignored them, ignored the guest book, and instead walked down the aisle toward the coffin. No one followed.
Violet didn’t move. It felt as if every muscle had frozen. She was facing the chapel so she could see him, and the people she had been talking to had turned slightly so that they could see him as well. Tom was across the room, frowning, looking worried. He would be at her side in a minute. He would be at her side and she would be safe.
Skeeter—surely no one called him that any more; they probably used his real name, such a tame name: Stephen—stopped in front of the coffin and bowed his head. He stood there for a long time, undisturbed, the posture clearly that of a man who mourned. Skeeter had never been one who could hide his emotions. She remembered him, fiery and quick-tempered, just as quick to smile.
She remembered the gun in his left hand.
He took something from his suit coat, and her muscles locked tighter. But all that emerged was a flower wrapped in cellophane. She squinted. It was a lilac branch. Lilacs were her mother’s favorite flower. Where had he gotten that? There were no lilacs in Wisconsin in August. It must have cost him a small fortune.
He removed the cellophane, stuffed it in the right front pants pocket on his perfect suit, and then carefully, gently, set the branch in her mother’s coffin.
No one spoke, but someone gasped. Tom was frowning at her. She had gasped. Tom excused himself from the funeral director and made his way to her side.
Skeeter’s hand lingered in the coffin for a moment, almost as if he had caressed her mother’s still face, and then he turned. His dark eyes met Violet’s and held them. Tom came up behind her. She could feel his warmth through the thin material of her dress. He put a hand on her shoulder, claiming her.
Skeeter didn’t seem to notice. He walked up the aisle, his gaze remaining on her. People parted so that they wouldn’t have to get near him, or perhaps so that they could better see the coming interaction. Her throat locked, and the tears that had threatened since her mother’s death suddenly seemed quite close.
It seemed to take him forever to come up that aisle. Finally he stepped into the foyer and stopped in front of her. His clothes were different, but his posture was the same: feet spread slightly in fighter stance, arms down, palms open, as if he were ready for anything that came at him. He smelled faintly of lilacs, and she realized that the branch he had placed in her mother’s coffin hadn’t been hothouse grown. It had been fresh.
“Violet,” he said, and his deep, rich warm voice—a musician’s voice with all the timbre and lyricism that implied—made her shiver. Tom’s grip tightened, and she knew what his face looked like without even seeing it: guarded, protective, warning.
Skeeter paused just a half moment—or had it merely seemed like that to her? Then he said, “I’m sorry.”
She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She wasn’t even sure what she would say, what she wanted to say. The moment stretched into an eternity, her gaze on Skeeter’s just like it would have been so long ago.
“Thank you,” Tom said finally.
Skeeter looked up at him as if seeing him for the very first time. Then he slipped around the people who had gathered, and went out the main doors.
“Who was that?” Tom asked softly in Violet’s ear. But she couldn’t answer him, not here.
The funeral home director turned to her, the fake compassion on his angular face unable to mask the interest in his eyes. “Would you like me to remove the flower, Mrs. Davies?” he asked.
The room remained silent. Everyone was still watching her, waiting, hoping to see—what? A breakdown?
“Mrs. Davies?” he asked again, as if she couldn’t hear him even though he was only a few feet away. “Would you like—?”
“No,” she said. Then she too slipped through the crowd and headed into the hot August night.
***
He was standing beside a sleek black Jaguar—not new, but an older model, one of the classics. His head was bowed and the yellow beams from the halogen streetlight above him painted streaks of gold in his shiny hair. He was holding a cigarette, rolling it over and over in his fingers like a magician would, a gesture she had seen countless times in other men’s hands, a gesture that always made her think of him.
“I haven’t held one of these in seventeen years,” he said. “What is it about you, Violet, that makes me want a smoke?”
He hadn’t looked up, yet he had known she was the one standing before him, the uncanny connection between them unbroken by time. The cigarette flowed from index finger to middle finger to ring finger and back again.
“I stayed in touch with your mother,” he said. He raised his head. In the strange light, he looked even more like a boy. “There’s a few things you should know. She—”
“No,” Violet said. “I didn’t come out here to talk to you.”
He looked surprised by that, by her vehemence, by the bitterness that filled every word.
“Then why did you come?” he asked at last.
“To get away from them.” She glanced back at the funeral home. It seemed as if she had been running from other people’s gazes ever since she was seventeen years old.
“And your husband?”
“What about him?”
“Were you getting away from him too?”
How could she explain life with Tom, the safety and security he gave her, the feeling of being completely and utterly loved? How could she explain the difference between that and the heady excitement, the razor’s edge of danger that she had once felt with Skeeter?
She had been very young. Foolish, even.
She took the cigarette from his hand, brushing his warm skin. He glanced up at her, obviously surprised at even this casual touch. She dropped the cigarette and then ground it beneath the thin sole of her shoe.
“Don’t ruin your life for me, Stephen,” she said.
He stared at her for a moment, then smiled, that crooked sideways smile that even now made her heart lurch. “Don’t worry, Violet Marie,” he said. “Once was bad enough.”
***
The house was still sticky with the afternoon heat. Violet opened the windows and set a fan before the patio doors, hoping to bring some cooler night air inside. Tom remained at the funeral home, although she expected him at any moment. She would apologize when he came, and offer him some sort of explanation, although what kind she wasn’t yet sure.
She went into the guest room and removed her dress, hanging it on a padded hanger that dated from the forties. Her hands were shaking. She had spoken to Skeeter Jackson. Finally, after all these years, she had found enough courage in herself to speak to him, to exchange words, to touch him. She felt sixteen again, and giddy with fear and excitement. How did he inspire that in her even now? She taught high school English to students she called “kids,” who were so young that she considered them unworldly and naive. They called her “Mrs. Davies,” and considered her so old she once heard an eleventh grader ask another when she had died.
When had she died?
She grabbed a t-shirt from her suitcase, and slipped on a pair of jeans. She left her feet bare. When she was sixteen, she had spent all her free time with Skeeter Jackson and thought herself daring. She had learned how to hotwire cars and siphon gas and hold a gun. She had learned how to spot a cop car from the position of its taillights, and she had learned how to pass for a woman ten years older so that she could get in bars. All the while, she had remained the model student and the perfect daughter. Her mother was too busy to notice who Violet spent her evenings with, and Violet was too involved to mention it. Her mother hadn’t even met Skeeter until two months before the shooting when he came by during a small family reunion picnic wearing a blue nylon muscle shirt with small holes all the way through it, revealing his as-yet-unmuscled chest. He smelled of cigarettes and beer with the faint hint of pot, unfamiliar odors at her house, and her mother had invited him to share some fried chicken and to meet the relatives.
He had. He had been personable and charming, and he had eaten as though he had never had a homemade meal before. Then he had left on his older brother’s motorcycle, and her mother had watched him disappear.
“Looks like Vi has her own James Dean,” her uncle Robert had said.
“Every girl needs one,” her mother had said slowly, and then turned away. Everyone grew quiet, and Violet had known, from long practice, that her mother had just made a rare mention of her father.
She smoothed her hair back, felt the sweat on her scalp. She pulled open windows in the study, and gazed out of them at the funeral home where there were still cars.
Skeeter’s was gone.
Who would have thought that he would drive a Jag, that he would wear a suit that cost more than her monthly salary? He had come from one of the poorest neighborhoods. His sister had died two years after the incident, beaten to death by the local pimp. His brother ended up doing twenty to life for a series of burglaries, the last involving a gun and a motorcycle dealership. She had always assumed that Skeeter would end up the same way.
Skeeter. She would have to get him out of her mind. He no longer had a place in her life—he hadn’t since the shooting. She was here to honor her mother, and to clean up the home her mother had lived in for forty years. Not to dwell on Skeeter Jackson.
She touched the smooth scar beside her eye, felt the reconstructed bone, wished she could remember more about the incident than she did. It was forever gone from her mind, just a tantalizing hint of the night—the new drug Skeeter’s friend Jake brought, the buzzing, elliptical feeling that it gave her, the way the entire room seemed both larger and smaller. The sadness, the deep welling sadness, and the beauty of the gun in Skeeter’s hand. And then there was nothing except pain, the incredible throbbing in her head that didn’t leave for months, maybe, if she were honest, maybe even years. The hospital bed against her back, the pillow beneath her head, and the nurse’s voice, Anita’s voice, asking her if she wanted flowers from Skeeter, and the way she had screamed then, remembering the gun and the pain and—
She shook it away. That was why she never thought of Skeeter. That was why she never saw anyone from this town, why she visited only her mother, and only then for short periods of time. Being trapped here for the week before her mother’s death, and now for at least a week afterward was like being in hell, and she had just had a vision of the devil himself.
The house was finally getting cooler. The streetlights had kicked on, and given the room an odd sort of gray light. She flipped the green desk lamp that she had purchased for her mother on one of her last visits.
Her mother had kept her important papers in a box beside the narrow table she used as a desk. Beside the lamp were expensive pens—one of her mother’s few indulgences—including a quill pen complete with inkwell. The makeshift desk had a blotter, unsoiled by doodles, and it also had account ledgers nearby, all of them neatly labeled by year.
Violet grabbed that year’s ledger, and opened it to the place marked by the ribbon. Her mother’s handwriting, still the perfect cursive she had learned in grammar school six decades before, recorded each bill paid whether for utilities or a credit card, and each check received from the Social Security stipend to her retirement. Her mother’s bills had been up to date as of two weeks before. Despite her illness, she had sat at this desk and filled out that week’s bills, making certain that she remained a responsible citizen all the way to the end.
The bills were small and inconsequential. The house payment was gone long ago. Violet thumbed through the ledger, looking for the tax payment to make sure the property taxes had been paid, and also to see what the county considered a fifty-year-old suburban ranch house to be worth. The farther back she went, the sturdier her mother’s handwriting became. Cable, telephone, groceries, heat—fluctuating with the weather—electricity, insurance, gifts. The property tax payment might have been in the fall of the previous year. Her mother had enough money set aside; she had probably paid the bill the moment it was incurred. That had been how her mother had done things.
Violet removed the previous year’s book, and opened it to the ribbon marker. The only notation on that page was in red: underlined and followed by an exclamation mark. Paid in full! She turned to the previous page, and froze.
The notation was simple: 12/31 Stephen White Jackson (Loan: cf. 8/14/80) $42,125.14. It was a payment to her mother of forty-two thousand dollars. The repayment of a loan her mother made to Skeeter, three years after the shooting.
The shaking had returned. Violet left the ledger open and rummaged until she found the 1980 volume. She found August easily and turned pages until she reached August 14. The notation was in the middle of a pile of mundane bills, including one for Violet’s medical expenses.
8/14 Stephen White Jackson—interest free loan $10,000.
Interest free. Given to Skeeter when Violet was attending college downstate, and the other students were looking away from the angry redness that marred the right side of her face.
Why?
A door banged in the front of the house. Violet jumped, heart pounding.
“Violet?”
The voice was Tom’s. She took a deep breath and put a hand over her stomach. She hadn’t realized how tense she was until that moment.
“Violet?” he said again, and this time his voice was closer.
“In the study,” she said.
He came in, blocking the door with his large build, and flicked on the overhead light. “How come the house is so dark?”
She blinked at the brightness. “I was looking through Mom’s financial records.”
“You didn’t have to do that tonight.”
“I couldn’t do anything else,” she said. Her voice sounded strained and strange to her own ears.
He hadn’t moved, as if her strangeness had put a wall between them. How hard this had to be on him. He had known her mother for fourteen years and had respected her. He had to have some feelings about her death as well, but he never spoke of them, instead taking care of Violet, letting her needs come first.
He was a caring man. He had always been. That was part of the attraction for her. He was the only man she had met since the shooting who made her feel as if she were the most important woman on earth.
“I found something,” she said softly, unable, as usual, to keep something from him.
He came in the room almost too quickly as if he had been waiting for an invitation. He put a hand on her shoulder. “What did you find?”
“Mom loaned Stephen Jackson $10,000 in 1980.” Her voice was shaky and brittle, rather like she felt.
“Stephen Jackson? The man at the funeral home?” Tom was pretending ignorance, but she could tell that someone had already told him who Skeeter was.
“Yes,” she said. “He paid her back in full and with interest last year. I don’t know how long he’d been paying her before that.”
“Why is that important?” Tom’s question wasn’t about the payments. It was about the loan.
“Stephen is the one who shot me,” she said, marveling that she couldn’t keep anything from Tom now, but that she had never told him that detail before.
His hand tightened on her shoulder. “Then why did you let him in the funeral home?”
“I didn’t have a choice. It’s a public place.”
“No,” Tom said. “It’s not.”
“Mom lent him $10,000 interest-free. That had to be some of the money she inherited from Grammy. And she did it three years after the shooting, about the time Skeeter—Stephen—would have been released from jail.”
“Why would she do that?” Tom asked.
Violet ran a finger across the old notation, feeling the impressions left by her mother’s pen so long ago. “I don’t know.”
“And your mother never said anything?”
Violet shook her head. Then she frowned. “But Skeeter did. He said tonight that he had stayed in touch with Mother, that there were a few things I should know.”
“You spoke to him?” Tom sounded alarmed.
Violet turned slightly in the chair. The desk lamp illuminated Tom’s face, made it seem even paler than it really was. “He was in the parking lot.”
“Waiting for you.”
She hadn’t thought of it that way, but he probably had been. “I don’t know,” she said.
“And you spoke to him?”
“I told him I didn’t want to. I left him there. He didn’t have a chance to tell me whatever it was he started to say.”
“He’ll tell me,” Tom said. He was starting to bluster, his grip on her shoulder too tight, his body growing tense.
“No,” Violet said.
“He will.” Tom seemed to grow taller. He knew how to use his build to advantage.
“He might,” Violet said, “but it doesn’t matter any more, don’t you see? Whatever was between them was finished last year. The loan was marked paid in full.” She smiled ruefully. “And emphasized with an exclamation point.”
“But it’s got you upset,” Tom said.
“Mother’s got me upset,” Violet said. “Skeeter Jackson is simply part of my past.”
***
The following morning was too beautiful for a funeral. The sky was a light blue; the sun bathing everything in a soft golden light. The day promised to be hot, but the type of heat that made Violet think of spreading a beach towel, grabbing a fat novel, and spending the afternoon on a nearby beach, listening to children scream and splash in a lake. Instead, she would be wearing her new black dress, listening to condolences, and sitting on a narrow pew in a church she hadn’t attended since she was seventeen years old.
Tom had gotten up before her. He had cleaned out the car, and taken it to a nearby gas station for a wash so that everything looked good for the funeral procession. He had pressed his own suit, something he hadn’t done since they were married, and then made her breakfast. He had even put the ledgers away.
It felt odd to be in her mother’s house, eating from her mother’s dishes, drinking her mother’s coffee, without her mother standing near the sink or reading the newspaper in her chair by the window. The house was quiet and there seemed to be a waiting in the stillness, as if her mother would come through the door at any moment, and flick on the television.
Violet hadn’t slept much, and she had gotten up twice so that her tossing and turning wouldn’t wake up Tom. They were crammed together in the sleeper/sofa, neither of them willing to take over the queen-sized bed her mother had slept in. As dawn had arrived, Violet had stood before the living room window, staring at the street. She could remember it in a million incarnations—with snow blocking the view, with a line of blooming roses between their house and the neighbor’s, with children skating on a thick yellow plane of ice. She had walked down that street with every boyfriend she had ever had—except Tom—and she had held various hands, kissed her first kiss beneath a long-gone maple, ran back from the seventh-grade Christmas Dance excited because Scotty Turine had danced with her.
Her sixteenth year, the boy who kissed her beneath the maple had been Skeeter. He had also been the first to touch her breasts, the first to see her naked, the first to discover the small mole above her heart. He had been very tender, and had shown remarkable restraint for a boy his age: he had been afraid of getting her pregnant, of having them turn out like his parents had turned out: married at sixteen, parents at seventeen, divorced by twenty. She had seen him as her savior and protector then, much as she saw Tom now, only with Skeeter it had ended horribly, shattered in a night she could barely remember.
And then she hadn’t seen him again, until the night before her mother’s funeral.
I stayed in touch with your mother.
And her mother had never said a word. She had loaned him what to them was a small fortune—which he had repaid at more than four times the original amount—and she had never mentioned that either. With that one single notation, her mother had become as strange to Violet as the road. Familiar only in memory, the details now tainted by a slightly different light.
Finally Violet had taken an aspirin, her mother’s old remedy for sleeplessness, and had fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep. She hadn’t felt Tom leave to do his errands, waking only when the delicious odors of bacon and coffee tantalized her nose.
Somehow she made it through the hours before the funeral, arriving at the church to find a group of elderly women in the basement cutting sheet cakes and making more coffee. She had waved hello to Anita, a Ladies Auxiliary member who had also been the nurse who had cared for her during those awful weeks in the hospital. Anita had smiled back, wiped her hands on a towel, and seemed about to come over, when Violet was called upstairs to greet some of the first arrivals.
The funeral itself was short; her mother had insisted on a standard religious ceremony. From the phone calls Violet had received in the days since her mother’s death, it seemed that her mother’s friends would have preferred the memorial service. They all wanted to stand up and give testimonials to her place in their lives. She had had to turn them all down, and give the remembrance of her mother to a minister that Violet had never met.
He acquitted himself well. He spoke of her mother’s life and her friendships and her generous nature; he only spoke of God a few times, and then in the proper context. The prayer was one that Violet herself had offered up every day since her mother’s death but had not acknowledged, a prayer that her mother would be as well received in the afterlife as she had been in this one. The music was beautiful, the service mercifully short, and Violet had only used one purse-sized box of Kleenex: a victory, she thought. Her Midwestern roots showed in that; she wanted to do her crying in the privacy of her own home.
She didn’t notice how full the church was until the ceremony was over. Every pew was filled, and part of the balcony as well. Most of the mourners went to the basement, while a select few attended the graveside service. Violet watched as her mother’s casket was lowered into a dark hole beside her grandparents’ graves, beneath a cottonwood tree that was shedding tiny white seedlings. It looked as if God had decided to create snow in August, just to honor her mother and her love of winter.
That thought, more than anything else, made Violet cry.
By the time she returned to the church, her eye and nose were swollen, and a new coat of makeup couldn’t hide the redness in her skin. But she put on what Tom called her company face and went to greet all the people who had come to acknowledge her mother and see her safely home.
As Violet started down the stairs, she heard the rumble of conversation. There was little laughter, but there was warmth. The air smelled of coffee, and she found that soothing. She rounded the corner, and saw the dining room was full. The long blonde tables were covered with paper tablecloths. On them, the Ladies Auxiliary had placed silver bowls filled with mint candies and peanuts, platters with tiny cake squares, and the china coffee cups that were designated only for special occasions. Each table had one Auxiliary member stationed in the middle: it was her job to pour and to make certain the food supplies remained.
Most of the mourners stood in small clusters. A handful sat at tables, mostly the older ones, and all around her, she heard her mother’s name mentioned with affection. People were telling stories, and she wished she could simply flit from group to group to hear those stories without tainting them by her presence.
She took a cup of coffee and a piece of chocolate sheet cake with whipped cream frosting just before she saw him, standing in the back. He was wearing the same suit as he had worn the night before, but he wore a black shirt and matching black tie that somehow made him look even more expensive. A few people were talking to him, but he wasn’t listening.
He was staring at her.
Warmth flooded her face. Tom took her arm. He followed her gaze. “I’ll make him go.”
She shook her head. “They clearly knew each other. He has as much right to be here as anyone.”
“He bothers you. I don’t think your mother would have wanted that.”
Obviously not. Her mother had kept her entire relationship with Skeeter secret, and she had probably done that so that she wouldn’t upset Violet. It was too late now; Violet was upset. There was nothing anyone could do to change that.
“Let him be,” she said wearily. “We won’t see him after today.”
Tom harrumphed as he always did when he disagreed with her, then he went to a nearby table to get his own coffee and snack. She would have to keep an eye on him; when they disagreed this badly he often took matters into his own hands. Whatever her mother would have wanted, it wouldn’t have been a scene at the reception following her own funeral.
Several women came up to Violet and told her how wonderful her mother had been and how much they’d miss her. She smiled and nodded and spoke to them softly, unable to remember their names. Others came to her as well, and the hour passed quickly. People had their coffee and their memories and their moment to tell Violet what they would have said at the memorial service, and then they left to go on with their lives.
She would have to reconstruct hers. But she had done that before. She was an expert at picking up the pieces.
“Violet?”
She started, even though she was prepared to hear his voice, even though she knew it would come. She heard his voice in her dreams sometimes, its warmth, its tenderness. Its fear.
She turned. He was standing so close to her that it took her breath away. How could a man’s face remain essentially unchanged after twenty years of living? His eyes had the same vulnerability, his lips the same self-conscious quirk, his skin the same lucent quality that it had always had.
“I don’t think this is a good idea.” Tom had come up beside her. He put his arm around her, pulling her close.
Skeeter didn’t look at him. “Violet, please. I’ve respected your wishes not to see me for the last seventeen years. At least let me talk to you now.”
“I don’t think what you have to say matters,” Violet said. “We won’t see each other again.”
“It matters to me.”
“She doesn’t want to listen to you,” Tom said. “And I don’t think she has to listen to the guy who shot her, not on the day of her mother’s funeral. Not ever.”
Skeeter’s beautiful eyes widened. He looked at her, then at him, then at her again. “Is that what you told him? That I shot you?”
“You did,” she whispered.
His lower lip trembled. For a moment she thought he wasn’t going to be able to speak. Then he said: “Violet, what purpose does lying serve? Especially now?”
“Don’t call her a liar,” Tom said.
Violet put her arm around him, in part to hold him in place, and in part to maintain her own balance.
“He didn’t shoot you, Violet Marie.” A quavering voice spoke behind her, and for half a moment, Violet thought that it belonged to her mother. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Anita, the head nurse of the children’s wing of Sacred Heart. She had spent as much time in Violet’s hospital room as her mother and grandparents, holding her hand, and telling her that there was more to life than a pretty face.
Once Violet had awakened to see Anita holding Violet’s sobbing mother. I don’t know how she’ll live like that, her mother had whispered. I don’t know how to give her a future anymore.
Just be thankful she’s alive, honey, Anita had said. A quarter-inch to the left and you wouldn’t have to worry about nothing ’cept how to bury her.
“You never got your memory back,” Anita said, “did you, honey?”
Violet felt the flush in her face grow deeper. “No.” Then she looked at Skeeter. “But I remember you holding the gun.”
“I took it away from you twice,” he said softly.
“But you went to jail.”
“Juvie,” he said. “For the drugs.”
The drugs. They had been such a part of that night. They had been such a part of that year. Her mother hadn’t known, not until the accident, and even then she hadn’t wanted to believe.
“He pushed the gun away from you,” Anita said. “You kept staring down the barrel.”
“How do you know?” Tom’s voice was so low as to be menacing. Violet tightened her grip on him. His presence was good for her, his voice echoing her thoughts. How would Anita know? How would anyone know except Violet and Skeeter.
“There was a witness,” Anita said.
Jake. Jake who had brought the drugs. Jake who had been laughing when she took out the gun the first time. “Where’s he?” Violet asked Skeeter.
“Joliet,” Skeeter said. “Trafficking charge.”
“He lied for you,” Tom said.
“He wouldn’t lie for anyone,” Skeeter said. “I barely knew him. Don’t you think they investigated? A good girl like her, a boy like me. It was his gun, and she had the powder burns on her arm.”
“Skeeter,” Violet said.
“Stephen,” he corrected. “Stephen now.”
“You didn’t try to see me.”
“I was arrested,” he said. “I had my brother get you flowers with money I should have used for the lawyer, but they got sent back.”
“They made you scream,” Anita said to Violet, and she remembered those, like she remembered the gun. And Skeeter’s name, along with the pain.
She closed her eyes. Tom tightened his grip.
“Then when I got out,” Skeeter said, “your mother said you were gone. And she wouldn’t help me find you. She said you refused to talk about what happened, that you’d scream or cry or leave the room whenever someone mentioned my name.”
“But she gave you money,” Tom said. “To stay away.”
Violet opened her eyes. So that was why. To keep her safe. The explanation felt good.
But it also felt wrong.
Skeeter—Stephen—shook his head. “She gave me money,” he said, “to go to college.”
Violet leaned into Tom. She felt her breath stop in her throat, her body so tense that she seemed frozen in place once more.
Stephen misunderstood her silence. “She was a good woman, your mother,” he said. His nose was turning red. “She told me that I had a choice. She said I could be like my brother or my sister or my friends, and end up in prison for the rest of my life, or I could make something out of myself. She said no one would take me as a risk now, that I wouldn’t be able to get aid or help or maybe even a job, not yet. So she loaned me the money. She put in it an account and paid my tuition and my room and board and my books, and she told me that it was an interest-free loan, and she said I didn’t have to pay it back if I made something out of myself. And I did. I own a chain of restaurants in Minneapolis, and they’re well known, reviewed in all the best magazines. I paid her back. All of it, a little at first, then the full amount last December. I paid her back with interest, and she didn’t want the money, but I had to, Violet Marie. I had to. Don’t you see? She gave me my life back. The only thing she couldn’t give me was you.”
He reached out to touch the right side of her face, the ruined side, and Tom caught his hand.
“No,” Violet said, bringing her own hand up to grab theirs. Stephen’s fingers were cold, Tom’s were warm, and the single fist they made was too big for her small hand. “Tom, let me talk to Stephen.”
“Violet—”
“Please,” she said.
He let Stephen’s hand go, then pulled her against him. She could feel his heart pounding, saw in his face his desire to stay. But this wasn’t about him. It hadn’t been about him from the start.
Finally he let her go and then he went into the hall. Anita smiled at Violet, then followed, picking up Tom’s coffee cup as she went.
“Protective,” Stephen said.
Violet nodded. Tom had always been protective. She had liked that. It had made her feel safe. Safe, she used to think, from the Skeeters of the world. But Skeeter had protected her too. She simply hadn’t remembered, that’s all. How strange her memory was, how fickle, and how her mother had never contradicted her, had simply let her go on, just as she was supposed to.
“What happened?” she whispered.
Stephen stuck his hands in his pocket, ruining the lines of his suit. “Jake brought the LSD, and it was a better grade than we were used to. You went first, and it was clear right off the trip would be messy. You got Jake’s gun. You thought it was so beautiful. You kept staring down the barrel, and Jake kept saying, ‘Take it away from her, man.’ So I did. Twice. And you kept reaching for it, like a baby seeing something pretty. Finally something else caught you and I thought it was safe. I was about to get high myself when I saw you had the gun. Your finger was on the trigger. I shoved it away—”
He stopped, swallowed, shook his head. She felt as if she were encased in glass.
“I’ll never know,” he whispered, “if I’m the one who made the gun go off.”
She turned away from him. She had to find a chair. Her legs wouldn’t hold her any longer. There were still some folding chairs out, metal, sturdy. The Auxiliary was cleaning up the cake. She and Skeeter—Stephen—were the only mourners left in the room.
“Mother knew,” she said.
“Everyone knew,” he said. “Jake ran, but it didn’t take the cops long to find him. I went to the hospital with you. I thought you were dead.”
She tried to see it from his perspective, the only one still sober in the room, the blood, the fear. But she couldn’t. She still remembered the gun, and how pretty it looked. That memory had never gone away.
“I don’t even drink any more,” she said.
He smiled. It was a sad smile. “I don’t either.”
“Mother forgave you.”
He grabbed another chair, pulled it close, sat on it backwards so that he could rest his arms on its top. “She said it was all our faults. Her for not watching you more closely, me for buying drugs, and you for being stupid enough to try them.”
Violet swallowed. Her mother had never spoken that candidly to her. Had she?
“I still think it was me, Violet. You wouldn’t have done it without me. Without my contacts. Without Jake and his gun.”
He had lived with this as long as she had, and it had scarred him just as it had her. Only he hadn’t found someone like Tom, someone who had told him that the scars were a part of him, and beautiful for that reason alone.
“I’m sorry, Violet Marie,” Skeeter said. “I’ve been wanting to say that for twenty years. I’m so very sorry.”
She had her hands clasped in her lap. She unthreaded her fingers, extended her right arm, and took his left hand. Then she placed it against her ruined cheekbone. He touched the scar gingerly, as if it still hurt her. She put her hand on top of his, and pressed it against her skin.
“We were young,” she said. “Stupid. We’ve lived with this every day. Mother did her best to make sure there was no damage.”
“There’s always damage,” he said.
“But it heals,” she said.
He bowed his head. “I wanted to say thank you to her. I wanted there to be a memorial service so that I could let everyone know just what she did.”
Violet swallowed hard, the lump in her throat so large she almost couldn’t move it. “I don’t think she wanted anyone to know what she did. I think that’s why she wanted the ceremony she had. She always kept secrets. Your loan. My father. God knows how many others there were.”
He didn’t speak for a long moment. Dishes clattered in the kitchen, and a woman sang, softly, one of the hymns from the service.
Then he raised his head. “I loved you, Violet.”
She stared at him for a moment. There were lines on his skin, visible in the fluorescent light of the church basement, sorrow lines around his eyes, worry lines around his mouth. The boy was there, but hidden in the man’s face.
“I loved you too, Skeeter,” she said. Then she kissed his wrist, let go of his hand, and stood. She ran her fingers through his still thick dark hair, wondering what would have happened without the drugs, the gun, the shooting. Wondering if he would have a chain of restaurants, and she would be content with teaching children how to enjoy their lives.
She doubted it. She wondered if this was what her mother had spoken of, whenever she mentioned the gifts that tragedy could bring. How strange to think of it in a different context. Violet had always thought her mother had been referring to Violet’s birth.
Stephen smiled at her, nodded, as if he knew that the conversation was at an end. There was nothing more that they could say to each other. They would never exchange addresses or phone numbers or pleasantries. There was too much between them for that.
She left him, sitting alone in that large room, empty chairs around him.
As she stepped outside, the heat of the day wrapped itself around her like a hug. The sun had lost some of its brilliance and had gained a mid-afternoon diffuseness. Tom stood at the edge of the parking lot, beneath an oak tree whose roots were pushing through the concrete. He was rocking on the fissure like a boy.
She walked up to him and put her arms around him. He held her for a long time, his face in her hair, and she could feel him shaking. What had he been afraid of? That Skeeter would hurt her? That she would leave without him, chasing a shattered dream?
Finally Tom let her go. “What happened?” he asked.
She slipped her hand through his, and led him to the car. “I’ll tell you,” she said, “when we get home.”
Her mother’s home, where there were pictures of a pretty girl that Tom hadn’t known, where there were ledgers filled with secrets that Violet wasn’t sure she wanted to find.
But she would find them. They were all there, waiting for her, and she didn’t need to fear them any more.
The first one taught her that.
Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch
First published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, March, 1999
Published by WMG Publishing
Cover and Layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing
Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing
Cover art copyright © Nikitu/Dreamstime
This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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