“Not yet. Coach Rivers said—and I quote: ‘In this great land of ours, a man is innocent until proven guilty.’ ”
“In other words, Drew plays until they shut the prison door on him.”
“Exactly. But here’s the really great news: I just took a call from one of the girls. She’ll talk to you. On camera.”
“Meet me in the lobby in thirty minutes. We’ll come up with a game plan.”
“You got it.” With a hurried nod to Elizabeth, Sally left the room. The door banged shut behind her.
Elizabeth looked at her husband. “Let me guess. You’re not coming with me.”
He took her in his arms. “Come on, baby,” he murmured against her ear, “you know how much I need this. Like air.”
And your needs are always important, aren’t they, Jack?
It pissed her off that she couldn’t say it aloud. At what age would she finally learn to speak her mind?
“I’ll make it up to you,” he promised. “And I’ll be at your dad’s before Christmas Eve.”
His voice was as soft as silk, seductive. She knew he had no doubt at all that he’d get his way. Her acquiescence on all things was expected, a support beam of their sagging marriage.
They were close enough to kiss, but she couldn’t imagine any more distance between them. “Mean it, Jackson,” she said.
“I do.”
The two words reminded her of all their years together. She wondered if he’d chosen them specifically. “Okay, honey. I’ll go on ahead.”
He kissed her hard and let her go. She stumbled backward, off-balance.
“I love you, Birdie.”
She wanted to answer, but couldn’t. He didn’t seem to notice anyway. His mind had already followed young Sally out the door.
Later, as she walked through the station’s empty parking lot, she wondered—and not for the first time—how often could a woman bend before she broke?
Elizabeth hated to fly alone. It made her feel like a stick of licorice in a bowl of rice. Noticeable and wrong.
She didn’t say a single word except “thank you” on either of the flights, just kept her nose buried in a romance novel.
At the rental-car agency in Nashville, she chose a sensible midsized white Ford Taurus and filled out the paperwork. Amazingly, she’d never done this before. She’d always stood silently by while Jack did all the writing. Her job had been to keep the documents in a safe place until they turned the car back in.
When everything was finished, she got into the car and drove south.
Each mile driven calmed her nerves.
She was back in her beloved Tennessee, the only place in the world beside Echo Beach that felt like home.
At the Springdale exit, she hit her turn signal and eased the rental car off the freeway.
First, she noticed the changes. Springdale had definitely grown up in the three years since her last visit. The main part of town had migrated east, as if all those glorious old buildings were carriers of some communicable disease. They stood clustered together, a brick-and-mortar enclave huddled around what had once been the only stoplight in town.
Now a four-lane road ran through Springdale, with long, strip malls on either side. A Wal-Mart sat kitty-corner from a Target; foes locked in a discount dogfight in a blue-collar town. There were golden arches and neon Winn-Dixie signs and even a Blockbuster Video store. Everything was decorated red and green for Christmas. Countless signs advertised holiday sales.
But there, tucked on the corner of First and Main, between a sprawling new Kroger and a Cracker Barrel restaurant, was the tavern her daddy had loved. More than once, Elizabeth had dragged him home from there.…
Why, darlin’, he’d always say in that roaring voice of his, with laughter just below the surface, it can’t be time for supper yet?
A mile out of town, the road thinned down to two lanes again, and she was back in the place where she’d grown up. On either side of the quiet road, empty tobacco fields stretched to the horizon, broken only by occasional groves of bare trees. A few homesteads presided over it all, the houses hidden from view by carefully planted evergreens. The only signs of progress were dozens of manufactured houses and the billboards that looked down on them. Up ahead, there was a four-way stop. On one of the corners was a tall pole; a rusted orange tractor sat atop it on a metal plate. It had been the landmark entrance to Sojourner Road for as long as anyone could recall.
Elizabeth turned onto the long gravel road that bordered her father’s land.