I wasn’t going to out anything Chance wouldn’t want me to say. “I don’t know. I only saw him in LA.”
She frowned. “So what was all that nonsense in Star magazine? Those pictures were…” She unfurled the napkin to wave in front of her face as if she needed air.
“Faked,” I said. “It’s a sad but true part of the movie industry that bottom feeders use famous people as a way to sell papers and get television ratings.”
She sat up. “I guess I knew that. But those pictures…”
Yeah, she was picturing them. My face burned.
“Photoshop,” I said. “They have entire teams of people sticking one person’s head on another person’s body.”
“Oh, my land,” she said. “That’s just awful.” She reached across the table to squeeze my wrist. “I feel just terrible that I thought those terrible lies about you were true. I can see that you are really just a victim of a horrible scheme.”
Yeah, right. A scheme I set in motion all on my own. I refused to feel bad about lying to Chance’s mom. Everything I said was true, just not in my case. Not this time.
My stomach had settled and I attacked the scone with more energy. This was going well, really. And surely Charlie would report my appearance to Chance. And if he heard I was with his mother, well, maybe that would be what got him home.
“Do say you’ll stay with me, dear. I’d love to hear every detail about my boy. I’ve missed him. I can take off work tomorrow and we can see the sights. I can show you all of Chance’s favorite places.”
As tough as it seemed, this was probably a good idea. The more I kept close to the people who knew Chance, the more likely I would be to find him.
But I’m pretty sure his mother didn’t want every little detail.
Chapter 39: Chance
Bus tickets were a lot cheaper than I remembered and I had enough to easily cover the short trip back to Chattanooga. The bad part was the schedule wasn’t very good and I had to wait an hour just to board. It might have been faster to hitch.
The ride back gave me time to think things through. Charlie said Redmond had brought Jenny around, so she must have figured out where I used to live. I pictured her on the porch with him and Ace and Pete and wanted to laugh. They’d think she was a wild thing with that crazy hair.
She sort of was.
I had this lightness inside I had forgotten I could feel. I’d lost it a long time ago, way before the accident, maybe as far back as when my dad left.
No, there were good times after that. Mom wasn’t a crazy church lady right off. I think she believed Dad would come back. She called his going away a midlife crisis, not that ten-year-old me knew what that meant. It sounded bad, though.
Maybe I lost it when Mom did figure it out. Hannah got sick with the croup and we had to go to the hospital. She had to sleep in a little tent thing. Mom tried harder than she ever had before to get hold of Dad. He’d been gone something like two years by then, so looking back, I wondered why she thought it might work. Maybe she believed he would come out of fear for Hannah.
He didn’t. And I knew the score then. If he wasn’t going to come back when one of his kids was in the hospital, he wasn’t coming back at all.
About then she decide to let Jesus take the wheel. I had no opinion on the matter. We already went to church, and my Sunday school teacher was nice. We got cookies and coloring pages.
But Mom definitely took salvation seriously. As I got older, I couldn’t stand how nothing was ever interesting to her unless it involved the right hand of God. I got wilder and wilder, because nothing got my rocks off faster than seeing her go ballistic in the name of the Lord. I’m sure He got a whole lotta earfuls about me.
Hannah handled Mom’s deep end with a lot more grace. She was rebellious too, but in a quiet way. She buried herself in school activities, keeping to things that made Mom proud, like French club and orchestra. No cheerleading with short skirts or dance teams with their peppy gyrations, two things that made high school worthwhile back in my day.
I moved out at the first shot, but I could see by then my mother struggling to make ends meet. The only work she ever did was a few hours a week in the church gift store. Maybe Dad sent less money by then, with me grown.
So even though I couldn’t much stand to be in her company, I did deposit half my paycheck into her accounts. When I left five months ago, I dumped pretty much every dime to my name into hers so she wouldn’t be too hard up while I was gone.
Now I was going back.
I set aside how I might feel about seeing everybody and focused on Jenny. She was one pure good thing, no part of my past. I figured if she was here that meant she had told the truth about that man with his hand on her arm. He wasn’t anybody to her but a boss, maybe a too-friendly boss, but still, not anybody she belonged to.