Tuesday, May 10
Tuesday, the ominous day that Randy and Caleb were fighting about, had arrived. Immediately after the confrontation, Amelia tried to get information out of both men, but they seemed to have come to their senses and clammed up. Caleb returned to work, Randy to the electric-blue economy rental he was driving now. Ellie shooed Amelia into the car, talking a mile a minute about the possible reasons Caleb and Randy had been fighting in the driveway. She’d only seen Caleb nearly knock Randy out and thankfully hadn’t heard any of the previous conversation. Ellie was a little shaken up and went on about how weird Caleb was and how calm Randy seemed. All of it was too much for Amelia to process. She retreated into her shell and hid there, putting on the well-worn masks of “I’m okay” and “Everything is normal.”
Amelia and Steve never spoke about his confession or about the two men who had claimed to be working for him in less-than-legal ways. She didn’t know how to bring something up to Steve head-on. He always had some magic way of explaining it away or even convincing Amelia that it was all her fault. So for now, she kept it in the box she reserved for her marital issues. Out of sight but never out of mind. In fact it was so heavy on her mind, she could barely find room to do simple things like keep up a schedule or make a complicated meal. Either she’d find a way to stop worrying or she’d find a way to bring it up to Steve, but she wasn’t ready to do either just yet.
Lying in bed together after they’d made love early Saturday morning, Amelia had been seconds from asking him why he lied about knowing Randy. Then the girls started knocking on their locked bedroom door. Steve groaned and got up to shower while Amelia dressed in silence, wishing she didn’t feel like the bad guy for asking her husband about his mistakes. But that was where life had led them.
Amelia used to think she held back because of respect, but lately she realized it was something else—fear. He’d never hurt her, not physically, but she never felt good enough, and the chains of his judgment and anger were enough to keep her in line.
Amelia didn’t know what to do. She was a passenger in her own life, and even though she made very few decisions and had very few options in her personal and business life, some extremely treacherous consequences were headed her way if Steve was ever found out. Her name was on everything, including the business and insurance policies.
Trapped. That was the word that kept scrolling through her mind as she went through the motions every day. She was trapped, and she didn’t know how to get out or even how to take any control back. Randy’s career opportunity could’ve been a chance if it had been real, but it was another one of Steve’s manipulations. That level of deception shattered any idea Amelia had that she could make it on her own. But still . . . it was Tuesday.
She had watched her father wheeled into the senior center and then had swapped out the van for her car. She looked at the clock on her dashboard: 9:15 a.m. She was planning to do some grocery shopping before running to see Cora perform in the school’s Spring Fling concert. The precocious nine-year-old had picked viola rather than cello, which didn’t bother Amelia as much as her family thought it would. They could barely get Bessie around town without a trailer hitch, so there was no way their cars could take two cellists in the family.
The closest decent supermarket was two towns over, which was why she always wished they’d rebuild Nancy’s. But it was just a dream, and though Randy had shown interest in her business scheme, she now knew it was all part of a ploy to use her. Amelia shook her head, embarrassed that she ever believed him. She wished that box would stay closed and stop leaking out all her worries. It used to work so well, but now it seemed like that mental container was overflowing and nothing she could do would keep the anger and frustration down for very long.
She’d lived through most of her relationship with Steve being paralyzed with fear that he’d leave her, but lately she wondered why she’d never considered another option—leaving him. No. That idea was still too overwhelming, but just considering the option filled her with equal parts panic and optimism.
As she headed to the interstate, Amelia passed by the burned-out shell of Nancy’s Emporium, which almost seemed to be mocking her. The front of the building looked nearly the same as before the fire. Across the front, large red block letters spelled out NANCY’S, and then smaller slanted letters whispered Emporium underneath.
It was during the ascent up the ramp to the highway that you got a good view of the rear of the building. It was still blackened and burned out from the fire fifteen years ago. Steve had been on that fire. He told her all about it after they’d been dating for a while. He was there when the building caved in and when the young firefighter, Tim Ray, was pulled, dead, out of the ashes. Steve called it the worst night of his whole fire career, and pinpointed it as the moment he decided he couldn’t do it forever.
Amelia always thought the building looked like it had been stepped on accidentally by a giant who, walking through the open corn and soy fields of Central Illinois, hadn’t noticed the market sitting there. She told Ellie a story like that once, but then her father heard it and got angry. He said that a good man died in that fire, and there wasn’t any use in telling fairy tales to make it better.
Richard Brown had seen a lot of death and destruction in his career, but she’d never seen him cry in public until her mother’s funeral. Amelia never told the giant story again, and Ellie never asked about the shell of a building. They’d heard rumors every year since of the building being torn down or a farmer buying out the land, but so far no one had ever made good on their plans.
Instead of turning onto the on-ramp, Amelia turned into the Emporium’s parking lot. The asphalt was cracked and covered in a lacy pattern of prairie grass and wildflowers poking through. Sitting there, staring at the ruins, she wondered how to remake her life instead of dreaming of remaking the destroyed supermarket.
The first thing she had to do was find out what Tuesday held in store for Steve, Randy, and Caleb. She wasn’t completely convinced that she had the nerve to do it, but it was time to retake control of her life, starting with this moment.
Amelia crept the SUV up to the edge of the road and turned on her blinker, which pointed toward home—back to Broadlands and back to the old Amelia, strong Amelia, the girl who helped raise her sister, who comforted her father, who dreamed of beautiful houses, happy children, and playing music, real music, because it filled her soul and not only her pocket. Back to the Amelia who knew what she wanted in her life and didn’t back down for anything or anyone.
CHAPTER 31
ELLIE
Wednesday, May 11