Page 78 of Second Start: Family
All that tore through his mind and heart at high velocity in the breath before his son spoke again.
“You were supposed to loveMom. But you let herdie.”
At some level Hall recognized Vicky disconnected the call from her end, but what attention he could spare from keeping the truck on the road was on Dan.
“You know I didn’t—”
Dan cut him off. “If we’d lived someplace else, they would have found that aneurysm before it burst. She wouldn’t have died.”
“How do you think that would’ve happened? A test? There’s no—”
“The hell there isn’t! That shows how ignorant you are, living out here in the middle of nowhere. It’s called a … a cerebral angiography. They put dye into somebody’s leg and it travels up to the brain and then they x-ray. If they’d done that on Mom, they would have seen the aneurysm. They could have treated it— Surgery, or put in these beads, or a balloon thing. Any of them and she wouldn’t be dead.”
He jerked away, hunching one shoulder to try to wipe at his eyes without bringing his hands up to them and betraying what Hall already knew. Maybe that’s what kept Hall’s tone even.
“I was going to say, there was no reason to think anything was wrong, so nobody would have done a test, no matter where we lived. We could have been in the middle of a hospital and they wouldn’t have taken her in for that test. You think I didn’t research, too? You think I didn’t wonder what and if and why? Where do you think you get it from? Not from your mother. She didn’t ask questions like that.”
He stopped himself from adding that was because she was always sure she had the answers.
It would have stopped Dan from accepting the rest of what he’d said.
Dan glared at him, but he didn’t argue — because he knew it was the truth. Down at the bottom of his honest soul, he knew it.
*
Vicky swung her truck into the packed-earth parking by the trailers with him right behind her.
Kenzie looked out of her trailer window, then came out the door, pulling on a jacket.
“Hall? Vicky? Was there a decision already? What—?”
“No decision,” Hall said, clipped. “Eric’s coming behind us and he needs to talk to you. Naomi’s lawyer pulled out a story about you being put on leave for some trouble at your previous school — just that first story — and gave it to the judge. Eric and Pauline found the other ones fast enough. But he wants to get more from you. The judge is going to look over all the material and we go back the day after tomorrow.”
Kenzie stood absolutely still at the bottom of the steps.
Even when Vicky put an arm around her shoulders, she remained immobile, her face blank.
“I’m sorry, Hall. So very sorry that my history might cost you…”
His son.
“It won’t,” he said grimly. “I won’t let it. If you’ll talk to Eric—”
“Of course. Except—”
Eric arrived then, all of them turning and watching, waiting for him to join them.
Except…
Kenzie’s final word rattled around in Hall’s gut.
Except what? She’d talk to Eric, but not him? What the hell—?
Vicky said to Eric, “We told Kenzie you need to talk to her. She said of course.Except.”
“No exceptions, Kenzie,” lawyer Eric said, “I need it all — every detail. Holding nothing back. And we do it now.”
“I won’t hold anything back, but not with Hall here, not yet. I have to tell Hall and … and someone else in my own way. Tomorrow.”
