“Well, how lucky for you. How very lucky for you, indeed. I—have not.” I looked around the empty lake as though the words I meant to say would be there. If those dream-supplied ribbons of words were ever going to surface, now was the time. “I’ve been on hold all these years, Ray. You have a lake house and a lake and a wife and a dog and grace, and I have put my life on complete hold for thirteen years with fear of you. All the time you were getting counseled and fixed, hooray for Ray, I was wondering when you were going to come kill me.”
His hands lay in fists on his thighs. I took a shuddering breath, watching them, and kept going. “If it seems like I can’t let go of what you’ve already left behind, it is because I haven’t left it behind. I came here for one thing. And now I’d like to go home and maybe get on with my life. Maybe get a house and a—dog.” I had almost said husband. “I have been on hold. I have been on ice. No matter how well your anger has been managed, I remember. And I don’t forgive you. You stole—” I pictured Joshua, small, on my shoulder, his thumb in his mouth. What if I’d stayed? What if I didn’t have him? “You stole everything, and you would have stolen more if I’d let you.”
Ray’s attention had returned to the lake. A boat with an outboard motor putted along the shoreline toward us, two men in camouflage caps casting into the darkest shallows. Ray let them pass, everyone but me nodding acknowledgment. The boat tugged along until I couldn’t sit still anymore. I stood and strode down the dock, Magic at my heels.
The dog beat me to the stairs, but Ray was just behind.
“Wait.”
“I will scream.” I saw the rowboat at the dock and inside, two shiny red oars. I turned and fled up the stairs, the dog racing beside.
“Wait. Damn it, Leeanna.” His fingers grazed the back of my elbow as I ascended the last stair.
I whipped around and faced him. “That is not my name,” I said. “Not anymore. That girl is dead.”
He looked away. “What, then?”
“You don’t need it. Just for you? I’ll answer to some of our old favorites—” He winced. “You want to catch my attention in the next five minutes before I leave here forever? I’ll answer to bitch-face. Or whore. I’ll answer to—”
The screen door slammed, and Mamie came out on the deck in a long robe, a mug in her hand. “Morning,” she called. “You-all are up early.”
I glared at Ray. “I’ll get my things and be out of your way.”
“Don’t you want your kid to have a father? As crappy as I would have been then, Ell, I’m not such a slouch now.”
Ell—he was the only person who’d ever called me that, giving me a new identity that was all his. I’d loved it, then. “I think he’s doing just fine without a father, slouch or not.”
“Fine? Missing for a week? He’s just dandy.”
“Shut up. We have some things to—”
“But why would you give me a chance? That father relationship was never anything you had much time for.”
I shook my head. “You know what my father was for me. He primed me for one thing: a relationship like the one you and I had.”
I turned on my heel and walked toward the house. I had a calm face for Mamie.
“Is everything OK?” Mamie said, reaching out to touch my arm as I swung by for the deck door.
“Leeeee-Anna!” Ray taunted at my back. “Just a damn minute before you pack your shit and leave forever.”
I pulled at the door and left Mamie, open-mouthed, in my wake. Inside, I saw that nothing at all belonged to me. Except the photo of Joshua. I’d thought to leave it, a token, but just now I wanted it back. The photo was mine. Joshua was mine.
Ray walked in. His eyes dropped to the frame in my hands. “I know your dad was pretty messed up—”
“Don’t talk to me about my father,” I said. “Your memory is pretty bad concerning the years you were slamming me into walls, so I can’t imagine you remember the stories I used to tell you about him. But why would you? It’s all revisionist history in this little idyllic cottage by the lake, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s more like a course in denial.”
I tucked the photo under my arm, making sure he saw me do it. “Thanks for the visit and the new outlook on life.”
“Yeah,” Ray said. “Oh, yeah. Look at Lee-Lee Winger now, running out when things get tough. That’s what she’s good at.”
I had reached the kitchen door. I burst through it and hurried for the truck.
He ran up behind me and grabbed my arm, spinning me around. The frame slipped out. We both reached for it, but too late. The glass shattered on the driveway. I raised my hand, but I couldn’t let it fly. As much as I wanted to hear a resounding belly flop of a slap on that man’s face, all I could see was the shape of my hand on Joshua’s cheek.
“Go ahead. You learned from the best,” Ray said.
“I don’t need to,” I said. The glass was smashed and the frame broken. I reached down and slid the photo out of the debris.
“But you wanted to,” he said. “I wonder why Joshua hit the road.”
I stood. “I’m a good mother. I could have done better, but I could have done worse. Much worse, since I learned from the best there, too.”
“Such loyalty,” he said, shaking his head. “I used to wonder how you left her behind, but I’m starting to see. Are you even going to pay your respects while you’re in town? Before you leave, you know, forever?”
I didn’t even know where my mother had been buried.
The clock was ticking. No, the alarm was going wild, and I needed to get going. The longer I was here, the more I turned into a person I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be—home. Wherever Joshua was. All I wanted was to make sure he was safe. I’d thought, once, that when I was a parent I would finally understand my own. But I actually understood them less.
“You wouldn’t be a father if I hadn’t left,” I said. “You know what you’d have done.”
Ray, ashen, glanced toward the house.
I felt only grim confirmation. “Didn’t tell her that part, did you? Sorry I won’t be here to see her believe in love on this one.”
“Ray, what’s going on?” Mamie called. He nodded, and she disappeared into the house.
“You should at least pay your respects.”
“Respect was the one thing my mother didn’t earn.” I pushed the photo of Joshua into his hands. “She never did a thing to stop it. None of it.”
“Didn’t mean her,” he said.
“I need to—I’ve been gone too long.” What if Joshua had come back? And I wasn’t there?
“That’s what I’m saying. You’ve been gone too long. You should go see him while you can.”
I shielded my eyes. Ray was backlit, his expression lost in shadow. “Who?”
“Who?” Ray turned his head toward the deck, where Mamie stood with a box under her arm. “I mean your dad.”
“My—? But he’s—” He was dead. But when I tried to remember how I knew this, I came up short. “His name wasn’t in her obituary,” I said. And I’d put him behind me long before I’d left town. Only my mother’s death had concerned me. Only my mother’s death had released me.
“They were divorced by then,” Ray said. “She left him. She just didn’t get far.”
Mamie had arrived in her slippers. She held out the box. “I’m sorry it’s not nicer—”
Ray took the box and thrust it into my hands.
I swallowed the rock in my throat. “What—”