Charlaine Harris - Grave Secret

The waitress came up with our food then, and we took the little ritual of spreading napkins and using salt and pepper to regroup.

“Mark,” Tolliver said, “is there any reason you can think of that I ought to make any effort to include that man in my life? In Harper’s life?”

“He’s our dad,” Mark said doggedly. “He’s all we’ve got left.”

“No,” Tolliver said. “Harper’s sitting right here.”

“But she’s not our family.” Mark looked at me, this time a little apologetically.

“She’s my family,” Tolliver said.

Mark froze. “Are you saying I shouldn’t have left you-all in that trailer? That I should have stayed there with you? That I let you down?”

“No,” Tolliver said, astonished. We exchanged a quick flicker of a glance. “I’m saying Harper and I are together.”

“She’s your stepsister,” Mark said.

“And she’s my girlfriend,” Tolliver said, and I smiled down at my salad. It seemed such an inadequate term.

Mark’s mouth hung open as he stared at us. “What? Is that legal? When did this happen?”

“Recently; yes, it is; and we’re happy, thanks for asking.”

“Then I’m glad for you,” Mark said. “It’s good that you have each other.” But he still looked doubtful. “Isn’t it kind of weird, though? I mean, we grew up in the same house.”

“Like you and Cameron,” I said.

“I never felt like that about Cameron,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But this is the way we feel. We didn’t start out this way, but it’s the way we ended up.” And I smiled at Tolliver, suddenly feeling ridiculously happy.

He smiled back. Our circle closed.

“So what do you want me to tell Dad?” Mark said. There was a little desperation in his voice. I couldn’t imagine how Mark had pictured this conversation going, but it had not turned out to his satisfaction, obviously.

“I thought I’d made myself clear. We don’t want to see him,” Tolliver said. “I don’t want him to get in touch with me. If he emails us through the website, I won’t answer. That last year… you were lucky you were out on your own, Mark. I’m glad you were old enough to leave, to start your life. I’ve never blamed you for leaving, if that’s what you’re thinking. Even if you’d been in the trailer, you couldn’t have stopped anything that happened. And you brought us food and diapers and money when you could. We were glad one of us had made it out into the real world. My job at Taco Bell wouldn’t have been enough.”

“You don’t think I was just running away?” Mark sawed on his steak, his eyes on his knife.

“No, I think you were saving your life.” Tolliver put down his fork. His face was serious. “That’s what I really believe. And that’s what Harper believes.”

Not that Mark was so concerned with my opinion, but I nodded. It had never crossed my mind to think any differently about it.

Mark tried to laugh, but it was a pretty pitiful attempt. He said, “I never intended this evening to get so intense.”

“It’s your dad reappearing. Not your fault.” I smiled at him, trying to will him to lighten up.

But that seemed to be a lost cause. “You really haven’t visited your dad?” he asked me. He was wrestling with my attitude.

“No,” I said. “Why would I lie about that?”

“What is his illness?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he heard your mom died?”

“I have no idea.”

“He know about Cameron?”

I thought about that for a moment. “Yeah, because some of the newspeople tracked him down and talked to him when she went missing.”

“He never came to see…”

“No. He was incarcerated. He wrote me a few letters. My foster parents gave ’em to me. But I didn’t answer. I don’t know what happened to him after that. More of the same, I expect. I never heard from him, or about him, until he got so sick. Then the prison chaplain wrote me.”

“And you just… didn’t answer?”

“I just didn’t answer. Tolliver, can I have a bite of your sweet potato?”

“Sure,” he said and slid his plate sideways toward me.

He always orders one when we’re at a Texas Roadhouse, and I always have one bite. I swallowed it. It wasn’t as good as it usually was, but I didn’t think that was the staff’s fault. I thought it was Mark’s.

He was shaking his head, his eyes turned down to his plate. He looked up, meeting first Tolliver’s eyes, then mine. “I don’t know how you two do it,” he said. “When Dad comes calling, I have to answer. He’s my dad. If my mother was alive, it’d be the same way.”

“I guess we’re just not as good as you, Mark,” I said. What else could I say? He’ll drain you and leech off of you. He’ll break his word and your spirit.

“I don’t guess you’ve heard anything from the police since the last time I talked to you?” Mark said. “Or from that private eye?”

“You’re determined to push all the buttons tonight, Mark,” I said, and now it was a struggle to sound even civil.

“I have to ask. I keep thinking someday there’ll be news.”

I let my anger go, because I sometimes thought the same thing. “There’s no news. Someday I’ll find her.” I’d said it for years, and it had never happened. But one day, when I least expected it-though on some level I always expected it-I’d feel her nearness, like I’d felt the proximity of so many dead people before. I would find Cameron, and I would know what had happened to her that day.

She’d been walking home alone after helping to decorate the high school gym for the prom. I had become the kind of girl who doesn’t do things like that, by that time. The lightning had done its job on me. I was still settling into my new skin, terrified of my new and weird ability, recovering from the physical damage. I was still limping, and I tired easily. I’d gotten one of my terrible headaches that day.

It had been in the spring, and we’d had a cold snap. The night before, the temperature had dropped below forty. That afternoon, it was only in the sixties. Cameron had been wearing black tights and a black and white plaid skirt and a white turtleneck. She looked great. No one would have guessed she’d pieced the outfit together at the thrift store. Her blond hair was long and shiny. My sister Cameron had freckles. She hated them. She made all As.

While Mark and Tolliver made conversation, I tried to imagine what Cameron would look like now. Would she still be blond? Would she have gained weight? She’d been small, shorter than me, with thin arms and legs and a will of iron. She’d run track with some success, though when the paper had called her a “track star” after she’d vanished, we’d all looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

My sister hadn’t been a saint. I’d known Cameron better than anyone else. She was proud. She could keep a secret till it screamed. She was smart. She studied hard. Sometimes she resented our situation, our fall from affluence, with such anger that she screamed out loud. She hated our mother, Laurel, hated her passionately, for dragging us down with her. But Cameron loved our mother, too.

She couldn’t stand Matthew, who was Mother’s second husband but her hundredth “boyfriend.” Cameron had had this persistent delusion that our father would return to his pre-drug self, and that he would show up at the dismal trailer someday and take us off with him. We would go back to living in a clean house, and someone else would wash our clothes and cook our meals. Our father would show up at the school for PTA meetings, and he’d talk to us over the supper table about where we might want to go to college.

This was Cameron’s fantasy, her happy one. She had some that were darker, much darker. She told me, one morning on our walk to school, that she also dreamed one of our mother’s dealers would show up at the trailer while we were gone and kill our mother and stepfather. After they were dead, we’d be put in a nice foster home. Then, when we’d graduated from high school, we’d get jobs and rent an apartment and work our way through college.