Page 36 of This Time Around
Allie felt her pulse kick up again. “You mean you had a mistress?”
“What? No, of course not! I’d never cheat on your mother.”
His voice was loud enough that several inmates and their guests looked over. A man with tattoos up both arms stared for a long moment, then shook his head and went back to his own conversation.
“Who are the love letters from, Daddy?”
“Your mother and me.” A faint flush had crept into his cheeks, and Allie watched with curiosity as he dropped his gaze to the table. “They’re from when we first dated, back in college.”
“I don’t understand. Why is that a secret?”
“You know how your mom is.” He shrugged and gave a small smile, meeting her eyes again. “Not very sentimental. She was always throwing things out, doing spring cleaning and fall cleaning and purging. You remember when she threw out your old teddy bear?”
“Right. Well, I was sixteen, so?—”
“Doesn’t matter. Sometimes you want to hold on to things like that.” He shrugged again and glanced down at their hands. “Anyway, I didn’t want her to chuck those in one of her cleaning binges, so I hid them up there in Grandma’s attic maybe seven or eight years ago.”
“So that’s it?”
He frowned. “What were you expecting?”
She shook her head. “Not that, I guess.”
He gave her hand a squeeze. “Thought maybe you’d found them and read them. You had kind of a funny look on your face earlier. Like you were hiding something.”
“Right.” Allie shook her head. “I wouldn’t read your private letters, Daddy.”
He laughed and bumped her knee with his beneath the table. “Nah, you’re welcome to read ’em. Heck, you might even learn something. Good stuff about life and love and courtship—all the stuff your mom and I were still figuring out back when we were eighteen.”
“Did you figure it out?” The question came out breathless, and Allie realized she genuinely wanted the answer.
He laughed. “At eighteen? Nah, we were all dumb hormones and lofty ideals back then. We didn’t really figure it out until we were well into our mid-twenties. After you came along and we started to get our careers underway.”
“Oh.”
“But those letters—those early bumbling attempts at love? They’re worth remembering. Even if it’s not where we ended up, they’re part of how we got where we were going. That means something.”
Allie nodded, not sure what else to say. She’d been witness only to parts of her parents’ love story. The parts that included her, and the ones she saw through the trial and their prison separation. Her chest felt tight as she considered how much more there was to the story. Those long ago memories that belonged only to the two of them. Wasn’t that the core of intimacy?
Her dad squeezed her hand again, and Allie felt something twist in the center of her chest. “You sure there’s nothing else, Alliecakes? You seem like you have something on your mind.”
She hesitated. A movement in the corner of her eye made Allie turn to see the guard had changed positions. He’d moved four or five feet down the wall, a better position to keep close watch over the heavily tattooed couple holding hands across a gray table identical to theirs.
Allie looked back at her dad. If she kept her voice low, she could probably confess what she’d found. What she was really hiding.
But the words that came out of her mouth had nothing to do with the money. “Jack Carpenter is back in town.”
A look of understanding flashed across her father’s face. “Ah. That makes sense.”
“What makes sense?”
“Why you seemed so—undone, I guess.”
She started to argue, but took a deep breath instead. “He got married,” she blurted, not sure why she was confessing all this to her father. She knew she’d never tell her mom any of this, and it felt good to confide in one parent. “But his wife died a couple years later.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he murmured.
“They had a kid. A daughter. She’s ten years old and Jack’s been raising her alone. I think he’s grown up a lot.”
