Crooked Little Lies Read online

  “I would have been content with something smaller. I’ve always said that.”

  “What is the point of bringing that up now?”

  “I know why living in this neighborhood means so much to you, but, Jeff, your dad is old now. He’s lost most of his mind. Whatever it is you’re looking for from him—his approval, respect, I don’t know—he can’t give it. And as for what other people think of us—”

  “It’s got nothing to do with Pop. I’ve built a name and a reputation in this community. I’ve got connections, people I do business with. The kids have good friends. We’ve put down roots. I’m not tearing all that up.”

  She might have said it was already torn up, but he knew that.

  “We’ll be fine.” He came to the bedside and bent to kiss her temple, her mouth. “We’ll get back on our feet. You’ll see. We’re getting some decent work now—taking down the old Waller-Land building is going to make our fourth quarter.”

  “Yes.” She paused. Had they won the contract, then? She searched her foggy brain. Oh, but now, here it was. She did remember, and she smiled at Jeff. “I picked up the permits.”

  “Yes, you did,” he said. “Thank you.” He smiled as pleased as she was that the memory had returned to her.

  “But you still think we should sell the farm.”

  “I don’t see another way. I’m sorry.”

  “I should go with you, then, since you’re so determined,” Lauren said, although she wondered how she would stand it, packing away her grandparents’ belongings, watching as the house became an empty shell. How would she close the door for the last time? How could she walk away?

  “No. Stay. When do you ever get a weekend like this without me and the kids and a hundred things to do?”

  That might have been a legitimate question back in their old life, when she would have been thrilled by the prospect of oodles of time with no one to cook for or clean up after. It had been a rare occurrence then for Jeff and Lauren to have a weekend to themselves. Having lived in the neighborhood for all of the sixteen years they’d been married, they had a network of friends who had shared childcare along with birthday and holiday celebrations, backyard cookouts, carpool duties. But things were different now. They didn’t fit into the circle the way they once had, and Lauren didn’t know how to go back, how to make amends—if it was justified or even possible. Step nine of the twelve cautioned you should not attempt to ask forgiveness if doing so would only cause further harm. She didn’t know if it would or not.

  “Give it time,” Jeff said, reading her thoughts.

  “A person makes one mistake . . .” she said and wondered why she was defending herself, how she could even imagine there was a defense.

  “I know.”

  “It wasn’t on purpose.” That was her refuge—her lack of intent, shabby as it was.

  “I know that, too.”

  Do you? The query sat in her mouth. Asking it would start them arguing again. She would only feel worse, more angry, more ashamed. She had thought she was so much better and stronger than she’d turned out to be. Brave? What a joke. “I feel so useless, lying here.”

  “You don’t want to push it, though, get dizzy and fall again, right? Just concentrate on getting well.”

  “I am well.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Unfortunately, she did. He was referring to the little lapses, the tiny glitches and misfires that still occurred in her brain. Like this morning when, instead of turning right, she’d turned left and nearly hit Bo Laughlin. It overcame her anew, the panic at how close she’d come. She would tell Jeff, but it would only underscore his opinion that she ought not to be driving, period. He might try to push it, take her car keys, say, or insist she have someone with her when she drove. She’d lose every shred of her independence then, every step of the ground she’d worked so hard to regain.

  “You’re picking the kids up at school?” she asked.

  “Gabe’s dad said he’s got all their camping and fishing gear packed. He wants to pick up the guys and head straight to the lake. I told Drew to call me when they get there.”

  “I know you wish you were going with them.” Fishing was a favorite pastime of Jeff’s, one he and Drew shared.

  “Next time,” Jeff said.

  “What about Kenzie?”

  Jeff answered she had a ride, too, with Amanda, her best friend.

  Kenzie was spending the weekend with her. Suzanne, Amanda’s mom, had gotten tickets to see the Houston Ballet perform Sleeping Beauty for Amanda’s birthday. Last year, Lauren and Suzanne had taken the girls to a performance of Giselle. It was tradition, the four of them seeing a ballet two or three times a year and dining afterward, fashionably late. Lauren had only learned to love the ballet when Kenzie, at age three, conceived a passion for it. She and Amanda had taken classes together since then. It was how Suzanne and Lauren had become close, ferrying the girls to and from lessons and each other’s houses, gathering embellishments for costumes, sharing the endless grind of rehearsals, the thrill of an opening-night performance. But it was awkward now. Suzanne had seemed relieved when Lauren told her she couldn’t accompany them to the ballet, that she would be away this weekend. Jeff said it was her imagination, and it would be so easy to think so, but even Lauren, with her injured brain, couldn’t be that deluded. Whatever was left of her friendship with Suzanne didn’t amount to more than the pretense they kept in place for their girls’ sake.

  “Can I get you anything before I go?” Jeff asked.

  “A new head?”

  “Babe, I can fix a lot of shit, but I think that’s a little beyond my expertise.”

  Lauren heard the smile in his voice, and her heart eased.

  “Did you call Tara?” he asked.

  “I tried; she didn’t answer. I left a message. You realize she and Greg might cancel.”

  Greg Honey was Tara’s current boyfriend, the latest in a long line, and as much as Lauren liked him, as much as she wished her little sister would find someone to make a life with, she would break them up if she could find a way, and not think twice.

  Jeff shrugged into his jacket. “If they do, I’ll pack and load what I can by myself. Maybe I can get Greg to meet me at the warehouse on Sunday and help unload. That’s where you and Tara want the stuff, right?”

  Lauren said it was.

  Jeff bent to kiss her again, and while his touch was brief, his mouth on hers was warm and tender and conveyed his concern for her. When he straightened, she caught his hand, looking into his eyes. She wanted badly to reassure him, to tell him she was fine, that he could count on her as he once had. Words to that effect flooded her mouth, but she bit down on them and released him. She was lucky he was standing by her, given the way she’d disgraced him and their children. Some husbands—lesser men than Jeff—would have walked out.

  Lauren slept for a while after he left, and when she woke the room was cool and filled with muddy shadows, and the ache in her head had subsided; her mind felt clearer.

  “I’m much better. I think I should come,” she said later when Jeff called. “There’s so much to do.”

  But he only repeated what he’d said earlier, that she should rest, take advantage of a weekend to herself. “I’ll call you later tonight, see how you’re doing.”

  Ending the call, she wondered, and she wasn’t proud of herself for it, if his checking on her was more out of suspicion than concern for her well-being. Even though she’d been clean and narcotic-free for almost a year, he still watched her. He looked into her eyes, not out of love, not in the name of romance. No. He was examining the size of her pupils. It made her furious. It made her angry enough that sometimes she almost hated him, and she regretted that, too. But she regretted her weakness that had led her to get hooked in the first place even more. Gloria, her sponsor, said Lauren’s emotions were normal. Sh
e said it would be helpful if Jeff would attend meetings, too, but so far, he refused.

  He wasn’t the addict, he said. Why should he? Or else he said he had too much work.

  Both things were true.

  He wasn’t an addict. But she didn’t feel like one, either. It wasn’t as if she’d gone looking to get high like some reckless party girl. She hadn’t willfully chosen to take drugs any more than she’d chosen to fall from the bell tower of the old church they’d been deconstructing. She’d cracked herself up to a point nearly beyond repair, collapsing her lungs and smashing her pelvis. There’d been internal bleeding. All of that in addition to slamming her brain against the walls of her skull. Once she stabilized and began the long road to recovery, she’d suffered bouts of pain so excruciating that at times not even the doctor-prescribed OxyContin could touch it.

  It was only recently that she’d been able to look back and take comfort and a degree of satisfaction from how far she’d come in the twenty-two months since the accident. At first, she’d been unable to speak properly or do simple things like tie her shoes. She’d finally learned to walk again, but she was warned she would always need a walker. When she tossed that contraption out the door, the doctors and her physical therapist said she’d use a cane the rest of her life. She’d proven them all wrong. She’d recovered her speech and her motor skills. Everyone had been in awe of her willingness to work. They said she was lucky. Like Margaret, they believed she was brave. They didn’t know about the narcotics she took by the handful, the ones she got on the sly. How had she learned the ways?

  Her memory of that time was so hazy, even she didn’t know, not really. One day, she’d been an ordinary wife and mother, a businesswoman, someone who walked the straight and narrow, and the next, she’d been swallowing dope like candy. It scared her, thinking how easily she’d become hooked. But the worst part for her was the mortification that came from knowing she had been stoned, doped to the max in front of her children and others, their friends and neighbors. She’d made a spectacle of herself.

  Done to Jeff what his father had done. Made a mockery of him. Made him look like a fool by association. Coach Wilder, the Wildman, had been known for his explosive temper and outrageous antics both on and off the collegiate football field. It might have been easier growing up if Jeff could have out-and-out hated his dad, but they’d been trapped together by their mutual love of football, the impossible dream of the Wildman’s expectation that Jeff would go pro, and Jeff’s struggle to fulfill it. Maybe if he’d lacked talent, if the scouts hadn’t come wooing, if the media hadn’t made such a thing of it—Wilder and his Wild Old Man. The jokes, rendered in headline format, had gone on through four years of high school and three years of college. It wasn’t until Jeff’s junior year, when he sustained a gruesome hit to his knee, tearing every ligament, that his career ended, and the press, along with the Wildman, gave up. Without football, Jeff nearly ceased to exist in his dad’s mind. Jeff was still battling feelings of failure and abandonment when Lauren met him. In their early days together, when they were falling in love, he’d credited her with restoring his confidence and the will to find a way other than football to achieve success in his life, which in his mind then had been the same as proving himself to his dad.

  But even that had faded now, Lauren thought, with age, with the onset of the Wildman’s Alzheimer’s. Jeff had eventually come to view the injury as a mixed blessing. It had ended his football career, but at least the notoriety had ended, too.

  Until now.

  Now he had his druggie wife’s antics to deal with, to excuse and explain—to live over.

  She’d made him the object of gossip and whispered speculation, made them outcasts, and the reality of what she’d done to him and to their children was the thinnest of blades slipped between her ribs. No matter which way she turned, it hurt. And in one small, frightened corner of her mind, she was still waiting for the day when he would act on the ultimatum he’d given her months earlier, that she get off dope or he would be forced to take Drew and Kenzie and leave her. She had been so angry at him, and at Tara when she took his side. The two of them had aligned themselves against her. For her own good, they said. Out of love, they said. You won’t stop yourself, so we’re doing it for you, they said. Dope or your kids: you choose. It had infuriated her all the more because, down deep, she knew they were right and it shamed her. She honestly didn’t know if she would have stopped without their interference, their threats.

  It haunted her now, that they might still be plotting to take her children and toss her into an institution. It was ridiculous; she knew it was. Yet she was afraid. She doubted them, and she was aggravated by them, and resentful, and sorry for them and herself, and she didn’t know what to do about any of it. And that was the hardest part.

  Lauren was dozing when Tara called her back, worried for her, asking what she could do, and when her sister said, “Remember the little bed tray Mama used when we were sick, the blue one she painted the bouquet of daisies on?” Lauren’s heart constricted; she felt the burn of tears. She guessed it was the pain making her weak, and the affection in Tara’s voice, her obvious concern. How could she doubt Tara’s allegiance, her own sister?

  Lauren said, “She brought us chicken soup with those little alphabet noodles.”

  “And cups of shaved ice flavored with grape juice when we had strep throat.”

  “I still miss her sometimes, TeeRee, so much.”

  “I know. Me, too.”

  “I thought Jeff would cancel.”

  “Well, we really need to get this done, you know?”

  “But he seems so—”

  “So what?”

  “I know he doesn’t tell me everything.”

  “He doesn’t want you to worry.”

  “But why can’t he see that not knowing only makes me worry more?”

  The note of vexation was there in the beat of silence before Tara spoke, before she said, “You have to stop doing this to yourself.”

  Lauren groaned. “Please don’t lecture me, TeeRee.”

  “But we’ve been over this. You make this stuff up in your head, that Jeff’s conspiring against you, that he’s going to divorce you and take the kids away, and it’s so not true. The man has done everything he can to get you well. He’s killing himself, working, trying to keep you guys solvent.”

  “I know,” Lauren said, although she wondered sometimes if, in part, killing himself wasn’t a ploy, a way to make himself look like a good guy, a heroic guy, one who was keeping it together in spite of his loony wife. Or maybe the long hours were a way to avoid her. She’d thought that, too.

  “Look, this isn’t you doing this. It’s your brain. It gets ideas, bad ones, and runs away with you.” Love mixed with exasperation shone in Tara’s voice. She’d given the speech before, so many times they were both tired of it.

  Tara had sat in on a few of Lauren’s sessions with Dr. Bettinger. She knew the potential for aftereffects in the wake of Lauren’s head injury—everything from hallucinations to bouts of paranoia, extreme fatigue, emotional outbursts, even the onset of psychosis—as well as Lauren. Tara had heard Bettinger say some or all of whatever symptoms Lauren might endure would go away, eventually. Or not. Who knew? Not Bettinger. The neurologist only said not to expect recovery to unfold in a straight line, that it was often two steps forward and three back. He cautioned Lauren might never mend in a way that would make her seem entirely familiar to herself or to her family. He repeatedly told her she was lucky, that others with a less traumatic injury than hers were disabled for life.

  He had said she hadn’t made it easier, getting hooked on Oxy.

  Lauren sat up, closing her eyes when her head swam. “I really think I should be there. I mean if you all are so determined to get this done—”

  “No,” Tara said. “Jeff’s right. Think of it as a little mini vacation and rest.
”

  “You talked to him?”

  “Texted.”

  “Huh.” Lauren picked at the coverlet. Was it the post-addiction paranoia that made her think Tara and Jeff seemed to be in touch with one another more than they had been before the accident? Or was that thought, when it blinked off and on in her brain, the product of real intuition, one she should pay attention to?

  “He said you got groceries.”

  “I did, everything except wine.”

  “We can pick that up at Scarlett’s.” Tara named the country store that carried everything from duck liver pâté to cowboy boots.

  “Maybe you should skip it.”

  “The wine? Why?”

  “Well, because drinking around Greg . . . It might be hard for him to not join in.”

  “Why shouldn’t he? You drink wine sometimes. What is up with you two, anyway?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” But Lauren did know very well, and she wished she hadn’t mentioned Greg now. She wished she had bitten off her tongue instead.

  “It’s just lately you’ve been acting as if you think he’s dangerous or something. Why? What’s changed between you two? You had such a mutual-admiration thing going.”

  “Have you asked him?”

  “He acted like you, as if he didn’t know what I was talking about. But I know better.”

  There was a lot Lauren could have said. The trouble was she didn’t know if she had the right. She bit her lip.

  “It can’t be because he used drugs. I mean you knew that. We all knew it. He’s always been up front about it.”

  Lauren’s mind seized on this. “Well, still, it’s hard for me to feel comfortable about my little sister dating a guy who was on heroin.”

  “All right, but honestly—and don’t get mad when I say this, but you used drugs. They may have started out as prescription, but is that really better? So I don’t see how you can judge him.”

  “Oh, Tee, you know me better than that. I do admire Greg. He’s like a—a mentor, you know?” It was true, a fact that only served to complicate Lauren’s sense of the situation, of the danger Tara might be in from Greg, the very same Greg who’d been there when Lauren crossed the line and went from using to abusing OxyContin. Greg had recognized what was happening before anyone had, least of all Lauren herself. He’d understood in the way only another addict could how it had happened; he knew the hell it was to quit and what it cost Lauren every day to stay away from it. She deeply appreciated him for his support, his kindness and acceptance. But there were other things, aspects of his character, that bothered her, and some of these went beyond the disturbing piece of Greg’s history, the thing she knew about him now that she was forced to keep from Tara.