Molly O'Keefe - Family at Stake

“Amanda.” Two months had passed since the harrowing nights she’d been gone, and he wasn’t any closer to finding out why she ran. “Maybe if you talked to me about why you ran—”

“Dad, I’ve told you,” she mumbled.

“I know it was Christie’s idea, but why did you go?” He watched her thin shoulders shrug. He expected that calculated shrug, considering it had been her standard answer for two months.

Why did you run away?

Why are you so sad?

Why won’t you eat?

Why won’t you talk to me?

Frank had told Mac that he needed to push his daughter for answers, that he couldn’t let her silence get the best of him. But staring at the delicate curve of her spine, he wondered how he could push her. She had already suffered so much.

He cleared his throat and put his foot down on one side of a line they rarely crossed. “Is it about Mom?”

There was a long stretch of quiet that Mac filled with wordless prayers that Amanda would talk.

“No, Dad,” she sighed. “Not everything is about Mom.”

“But maybe you saw something, or heard—”

“I didn’t see or hear anything!” she yelled, flipping onto her back. Mac watched the steady stream of tears running from the corner of her eyes into her hair. “I told you I was asleep. I woke up in the hospital, Dad. I already told you I don’t know what happened!”

“Okay, okay.” He took a step closer to the bed, but she immediately flung herself back onto her side.

“Go away, Dad. Just leave me alone.” Her voice was thick with her tears, and he knew that if he left the room she would sob into her pillows, shoving them into her mouth, probably thinking he wouldn’t hear her. He had stood outside her door for countless hours listening to her do that. What am I supposed to do?

He couldn’t believe after all this time it was going to come down to trusting Rachel Filmore. Amanda had to talk to Rachel. It was the only way out of this mess.

I hope someone somewhere is laughing, he thought.

“If you’re not going to talk to me, Amanda, I wish that you would talk to Rachel.”

“I’ll talk to that woman, I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispered, and even though she was probably lying, he felt a small measure of relief. She’d never said she would talk to Frank.

“Everything’s going to be all right.” He wasn’t sure at this point if that was an out-and-out lie, but he felt better saying it.

“Whatever,” she breathed, her voice tense with sarcasm.

“I’ll call and cancel the tutor.” At the moment he couldn’t force anything else on his daughter.

“Okay.” Her breath shuddered, her thin shoulders shook.

“Do you want to go into town with me, get some chicken at Ladd’s?” Fried chicken used to be a safe bet for his daughter, but these days with her uncertain appetite and mood, he could never be sure. Please eat. Please come eat with me.

“I’m not hungry,” she whispered.

“I’ll go get some for later, then,” he said, unwilling to give up the hope that sometime soon she was going to eat.

“Okay,” she said, her voice muffled.

See? He wanted to shout. See how normal we are?

He lingered for a moment, wanting so badly to have her look at him and smile. She gave him nothing but the cold chill of her silence.

Mac turned and caught sight of the glittery ladybug stickers that she had stuck on the plate of her light switch. She had gotten those stickers for her seventh birthday and put them all over the house. That was a million years ago. He had scraped those stickers off his car, the tractor, off the fridge, a couple of windows. He still had one on his alarm clock. He smiled as he touched them on his way out, those faded but still sparkling reminders of the girl she used to be.

A while later Mac parked the truck in front of Moore’s hardware store in the middle of downtown. The Main Street Café, where Rachel’s mom worked and Mac never ate for obvious reasons, stood next door, and the Dairy Dream ice cream parlor was a few doors down.

Maybe he’d get a pint of rocky road for later.

He smiled ruefully. He kept trying to get his daughter to gain some weight, but he was the only one whose pants were getting tighter.

“Hey, Mac!” Nick Weber, his insurance salesman, waved at him from where he sat with his family on one of the benches outside the Dairy Dream. “You got time next week to come down to the office, look over some of those papers?”

“No problem,” Mac shouted back, and Nick raised his vanilla cone in acknowledgement.

Mac was upping his insurance policies on everything. Fire. Life. Car. Everything was fragile in his life. Nothing was resistant to destruction, and if something happened to him or to the farm, he needed to be sure Amanda would be all right.

“Excuse me,” he murmured, squeezing between the few people standing in line at the movie theater.

The Royal had been standing for more than fifty years. He’d seen his first movie there—Bambi. He and Rachel had seen a million movies at the theater, though always through the back door without paying. And before she ran away, he and Amanda had seen their fair share there, too.

The cyclical way things worked in small towns appealed to him. He checked the marquee to see if the feature was something he could take Amanda to, but the Now Showing poster was for an R-rated movie.

Mac had never felt the way that Rachel did about this town. It had never been a trap for him. He’d always figured his life didn’t need much more than what this little town could offer him.

He’d tried to see the potholes and the bougainvillea and the families differently, as something bad, something to escape, the way Rachel had. But somehow it still all seemed right.

The scent of fried chicken led Mac to Ladd’s front door.

It didn’t matter how many times he walked in those doors, he never got tired of that smell. Ladd’s was right up there with the best smells in the world—sage on his mountain, his lemon grove after a rain, his daughter’s hair when she had been outside all day.

The sound of a girl laughing turned Mac’s head. Christie Alvarez stood with a group of high school boys. She was two years older than Amanda, but tried so hard to be a grown-up. Her black hair was pulled back in a sharp ponytail and heavy black eyeliner rimmed her eyes. Her shorts were far too tight and too short, and her belly, the last remnant of her baby fat, pushed out over the top.

He hardly recognized her. The last time he’d seen her at the courthouse she had been a scared little girl, dressed similarly to his daughter in a long skirt, tights and Mary Jane shoes. Both of them had worn their hair in braids. He remembered the sight of Amanda’s blond braid and Christie’s black one hanging down their backs as they’d stood in front of the judge, their hands locked together.

God, it seemed like yesterday that Christie had played with Barbie dolls with Amanda on the front deck. He had made that girl countless lunches of macaroni and cheese and now he watched as she took a drag of a cigarette.

He was doing the right thing trying to keep Amanda away from Christie. He didn’t know what had happened to the girl, but the very idea of his daughter dressed that way, looking at a boy with such shocking and resigned knowledge, made Mac sick.

Christie must have felt him watching her because she looked up at him with eyes like flat black stones. Empty. Cold. For a moment she appeared ashamed, a flush on her cheeks. But then she turned back to the boy she flirted with, as if Mac wasn’t there.

Mac’s instinct was to go over there, grab her and take her home to her mother. But who was he to judge? He was watching his own daughter fade away moment by moment.