‘I will,’ Jo said. ‘Thank you.’
There was a change in the air. Stress draining away. The call had ended. Jo put down the phone. Her elbows went to the bar. Her head dropped into her hands. Relief radiated off her thin body.
Her voice. Angie had been too wrapped up in the whispery hush to analyze the sound.
Jo started to cry. Angie had never been good with emotion. Her options were always to either wait it out or go away. She racked her brain to think how a normal person would behave in a Starbucks with a woman crying a few chairs away. Angie could reasonably ask the girl if she was all right. That seemed like an appropriate response. Jo’s shoulders were shaking. She was clearly upset. Angie could just say the words: Are you okay? It was a simple question. People asked variations of it all the time to complete strangers. In elevators. In bathrooms. In line for coffee.
How are you doing?
Angie opened her mouth, but it was too late.
Jo stood up. She unhooked her purse from the back of her chair. Or at least she tried to. The strap got caught. The chair toppled. The sound was like an explosion in the small space. Hemingway rushed over to help her.
‘I’ve got it,’ Jo said.
‘I can—’
‘I know how to pick up a fucking chair!’
She snatched the chair from his hands. She slammed it back in place. The sound echoed like a gunshot. Heads swiveled to see what the problem was. The barista started to walk around the counter.
‘I’m sorry,’ Hemingway apologized. ‘I was just trying to help.’
‘Help.’ Jo snorted. ‘Mind your own fucking business. That’s how you can help.’
Jo yanked open the glass door. She stalked across the parking lot. She threw her purse into her car. Her tires burned against asphalt as she streaked out of the parking lot.
‘Jeesh,’ Hemingway said. ‘What was that?’
Angie smiled.
That was her daughter.
WEDNESDAY, 10:27 AM
Angie drove down Chattahoochee Avenue at an old lady’s pace. Her transmission was slipping. She didn’t have time to top off the fluid. She didn’t have time to change her coffee-stained jeans. She was late meeting Dale and his electronics guy. There were a lot of things Angie didn’t mind being late for, but everything had changed half an hour ago inside the Starbucks.
‘Dammit!’ Angie struggled to push the gear into fourth. There was a grinding sound that sent a rattle into the clutch.
Maybe she could talk Dale’s guy into topping off her transmission fluid. Or maybe she would torch the car and leave it burning in front of Sara Linton’s apartment building. She was the reason Angie had to buy transmission fluid by the case. Normally Angie would spend a few weeks with Will, let him fix the car, then head on her way, but that wasn’t an option since Red Riding Hood was sleeping in her bed.
His name is my favorite word, Sara had written to her sister.
‘Shit.’ Angie hissed out one of her favorite words between her teeth. She couldn’t dredge up her usual anger for Sara Linton. She was too worried about Jo.
She had to watch the Starbucks video again. Her phone battery was almost gone from playing it so much. Angie kept her palms on the steering wheel and balanced her phone between her fingers. She tapped the arrow for play. ‘Do you see?’ Jo whispered, holding up her iPhone, proving to the caller that she was inside the Starbucks. ‘I understand . . . I will . . . thank you . . .’
Before Angie made detective, she had worked as a beat cop. She took nights, because they paid more. Every shift was basically ten seconds of adrenaline sandwiched by eight hours of social work. The old-timers called them chicken bones, because you’d get a call to somebody’s shitty apartment and find two rednecks fighting over something stupid, like a chicken bone. Not that the call was ever a cakewalk. You never knew when two neighbors arguing about a barbecue grill could turn into a stand-off with a drunk pointing a loaded shotgun at your chest.
Domestic violence calls were the same, but different. You always went in assuming something really bad was going to happen. Even Angie, who was drawn to confrontation, hated rolling out on a battery call. The men always tried to push her around. The women always lied. The kids always cried, and in the end, all Angie could do was arrest the guy, write up the report, and wait until she got another call to go to the same house over and over and over again.
Jo didn’t have any obvious bruises or scars. Her face was perfect. She walked with an even stride, not in the bent-over posture of a woman who’d gotten the hell beaten out of her.
But still, Angie could tell that her daughter was being abused.
The way she never looked at her husband. The way she stayed glued to his side, never talking to anybody, never daring to raise her eyes above the floor. The way she never left home except to go to the elementary school, the grocery store or the dry cleaner. The obedient air she assumed around her husband, as if she was not a person but an appendage.
Two nights ago, when Kip was convening a meeting about Jo being a problem, Reuben Figaroa was being flown by private jet to an undisclosed location, where the best orthopedist in the world would perform micro-surgery on his knee. That was all the information Angie could get out of Laslo. An injured player was the kind of news that could tilt the shape of the upcoming basketball season. Jo had stayed at home because things had to look normal. She had to take the kid to school. She had to make people believe that nothing was wrong with her husband.
Angie didn’t give a shit about Reuben’s surgery. What she cared about was what his absence was doing to her daughter.
Jo was terrified. That was clear. Angie held the evidence in her own two hands.
When Jo said, ‘Do you see?’ what she meant was, ‘Do you see where I am? Exactly where you told me to be.’
When she said, ‘I understand,’ what she meant was, ‘I understand you are in charge and that I can’t do anything about it.’
When she said, ‘I will,’ she meant ‘I will do exactly what you just told me to do, exactly how you want me to do it.’
The worst part was at the end of the video. Tears slid down Jo’s jaw, her neck. Her fingers trembled around the mic. Still she said, ‘Thank you.’
Reuben Figaroa. Angie could clearly see him on Jo’s iPhone when she turned the camera to show him the almost empty coffee shop.
Kip had said that Jo was getting too close to Marcus. Maybe that was by design. Jo had known Marcus in junior high. Obviously they were still friends. He was rich. She was desperate. If Marcus was Jo’s parachute, then the plan wasn’t a bad one. The most life-threatening time for a battered woman was when she tried to leave her abuser. The only thing that shifted the odds was having another man around to protect her. If Jo was getting close to Marcus, it was only because she was pulling away from Reuben. This was what Angie had abandoned her daughter to: a lifetime of being nothing more than a kept woman.
Angie tossed her phone back into her purse. She wiped her eyes. The juice from Starbucks must have gone bad. Her hands were sweating. Her stomach cramped.
Back in her early twenties, Angie had been with a guy who slapped her around. And then punched her around. And then did other things that she thought meant he was desperately in love with her. The violence worked like a magnet. That, and seeing a big, giant man cry like a baby because he was so fucking sorry that he’d hurt you and he was never, ever going to do it again.
Until he did it again.
‘Jesus,’ Angie whispered. What was the point of staying out of Jo’s life? First the pill problem, and now this. Jo had inherited all of Angie’s bad choices. ‘Fuck!’ She banged her hand against the steering wheel, but not because of Jo. She had missed the turn into the parking lot.