“Because I was asking him about suspects. So, is it true?”
She pursed her lips in apparent annoyance. “Well, I can’t think why a police officer would want to dredge all this up. Why he would want to tarnish a daughter’s memory of her mother. You want to know what’s true? Sadie Rawson was beautiful, she was funny, she loved you. Everything I told you, it’s all true. I really think that’s all you need to know, Caroline.”
I reached forward and touched her knee. “Thank you. For trying to be kind. But I’d rather know the whole story, all of it, even the bad parts.”
Cheral stared into the corner of the room for a long moment. “Oh, I don’t know what the right thing is to do,” she murmured.
“Look, you said yourself, none of this probably matters now. But since I’m here, and since I’m asking, I think I deserve an answer.”
Several seconds passed, then Cheral began to speak. “I didn’t know your mother before she was married. I knew her type, though, and so do you. You only had to talk to her for five minutes before you guessed that she’d been the prom queen, and the prettiest girl in her sorority, and that a dozen boys had dropped down to one knee and begged her to marry them, before she picked your daddy. She had that way about her, you know? A mystique.”
I nodded.
“I was flattered that she wanted to be my friend, if you want to know the truth. I mean, it was only because we were next-door neighbors. Her best friends were still her sorority sisters. They were mostly up in North Carolina, though, and she was down here and stuck home with a baby.”
“And so this other man—” I interrupted, hoping to hurry her along.
“But it was like she couldn’t stop,” said Cheral, ignoring me. “She was so used to having men buzzing around her. Like flies drawn to honey. The four of us—Rick and me and your parents—we would go to a party together, and she would be dancing and flirting and carrying on. She wasn’t happy unless every man in the room fell a tiny bit in love with her by the end of the night. Scarlett O’Hara had nothing on your mother, I tell you that.”
“She was young.”
“She was old enough to have a husband and a child. She was old enough to know better.” Cheral heaved a deep breath. “Sadie Rawson did love you, she really did. She was sweet when she was pregnant with you. She wanted a girl. She wasn’t much better at sewing than she was at baking, God knows, but she stitched together dresses for the two of you. Red and white gingham, with fancy, red bows at the waist. Mother-daughter dresses, so you two could be all matchy-matchy. Before she even knew whether you would be a boy or a girl! She just knew she wanted a girl, and Sadie Rawson always got what she wanted.”
The bitterness in Cheral’s voice was now unmistakable. “Wouldn’t you know she bounced right back, got her figure back in about four seconds flat? And I don’t know exactly when, but sometime after that, somewhere around the time you learned to walk, she started carrying on with Tank.”
“Tank?”
“He was a football star in high school. Notorious for rolling over the other team like a tank. I guess the nickname stuck.” Cheral rolled her eyes. “He and Sadie Rawson used to flirt like crazy. I’m sure it drove Tank’s wife nuts. But then, after a while, I noticed Sadie Rawson was ignoring him. We’d all go out, and she wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t even make eye contact with him.”
“And so you assumed something must have happened between them?”
“She seemed to think it was a game,” spat Cheral. “That having an affair was a great big funny game. She didn’t seem to get that what she was doing was . . . wrong. That she was hurting people.”
So this was the sour undercurrent I had sensed. Cheral had watched my mother cheating and had disapproved. Maybe she felt protective of my father and me. Or maybe she was jealous, as Beamer Beasley had suggested.
“But are you sure something happened, something more than flirting?” I pressed.
“Oh, honey. They were in love. They were discreet enough, but sometimes I’d see his car parked in your driveway. He’d pull all the way up, so you couldn’t see the car from the street. But my upstairs window looked right out over your parents’ backyard.”
I pictured Cheral scowling out her window at the driveway next door. Tried not to picture what must have been going on inside Sadie Rawson’s bedroom, with me asleep in my crib down the hall. “Do you have a photo of him? I want to see what he looked like.”
“Maybe somewhere.” Cheral shrugged. “Our old albums are boxed up in the storage unit. I keep meaning to clean it out.”
I pressed my fingers to my lips, thinking. “What about Boone? Did he know?”
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think so. I never saw the car except on nights when your daddy was flying overnight somewhere. And Sadie Rawson kept her mouth zipped shut. She didn’t talk about it, not even to me, not until after she ended it.”
“Ended it—you mean, ended the affair?”
Cheral nodded yes. “She eventually came to her senses, decided she wanted to try to make things work with your daddy. I’ll give her that.”
Relief washed over me. I couldn’t tell you why it mattered, but it did, to know that at the end my mother might have been faithful to Boone. To believe that, maybe, at the end they had been happy.
Then Cheral spoke again. “She was terrified, that’s why she talked to me. Scared out of her mind.”
“Scared? Of what?”
“Of Tank! He wanted them to run away together. Wanted her to leave Boone, and he was going to leave his wife, and they would run away. But Sadie Rawson wouldn’t do it. She could be so damn stubborn, your mother. When she broke things off for good, he went crazy.”
“Crazy how? Threatening to tell Boone?”
“Oh, worse than that. He hit her. He was a big guy, as the name suggests.”