Page 4 of Steadfast
I missed the bunkhouse. Privacy was not a luxury for me. If I got out of this bed and went to find a fix, there was nobody who’d notice or care. I’d needed those six AM milkings to keep me on the straight and narrow. I needed the watchful eyes of Griff Shipley on me while we worked the farmers’ market stall.
This was going to be so hard—every minute. In Colebury, a fix was always in reach. Some of my druggie friends were probably within a mile of me right now. Still getting high. Still dealing. Colebury reeked of all my old mistakes and desires.
The itchy void in my chest gave a throb, and I rolled over to try to quash it. But that only reminded me of another absence. I stuck my nose in the pillow and took a deep breath, wondering if any essence of Sophie might remain.
But she was long gone.
Chapter Two
Sophie
Internal DJ Tuned to: “You Keep Me Hangin' On” by The Supremes
“Mom?” I called from the kitchen. “Did you make a shopping list?” After stuffing my wallet into my pocketbook, I threw on my trench coat. I was running a little late for work, as usual. “Mom?”
Silence.
Holding in my sigh, I walked through the house to the living room, where my mother sat in her chair, staring out the window. The cup of tea I’d brought her a half hour ago sat untouched beside her.
“Mom? The shopping list?” I said one more time.
Her head turned toward me, but her eyes were still flat. “I didn’t get around to it,” she said.
Of course you didn’t. She never got around to anything at all. During the hours when my father was at home, at least she appeared for meals and responded to simple questions.
But he’d left for work a half hour ago, and so she’d curled in on herself already, settling in for a long day of staring out the window, as useful as a paperweight.
“We probably need coffee,” she offered. “Your father is so unpleasant when we run out.”
Thanks for that insight. “Sure. I’ll just wing the rest,” I promised. “Bye.”
Without waiting for a response, I trotted back through the kitchen, grabbed my pocketbook and ran out to the garage. I climbed into my Rav4 and started the engine. Then I counted to sixty, because Jude had always said that an engine needed a minute to warm up.
I didn’t appreciate the fact that I thought about Jude three or four times a day when I started my car. Or every night when I lay down alone in bed.
There was a lot about my current situation that I did not like. I never thought I’d be living in my parents’ house at twenty-two. But halfway through college, I’d moved home. My mother became a zombie after Gavin’s death, and I’d wanted to help out. But I’d thought it was temporary. Who knew she would still be barely functional three years later?
Before the accident, my mother was like a forcefully orchestrated performance of Beethoven’s Fifth—a wave of ambition and pure will in every breath. She raised two children while working full time for the Vermont Department of Libraries. She directed our church’s Christmas pageant for fifteen years straight. She raised money for breast cancer, literacy and clean water in Africa.
Now? She did none of those things. These days she was a funereal dirge, played one-handed on an out-of-tune organ.
When my sixty seconds were up, I reversed out of our driveway and headed for work.
I had no clue how to help my mother heal. I’d made appointments for her with a therapist, but she refused to go. So I took over the grocery shopping. And the cooking. So long as a meal appeared on our family table each night, my father could pretend that we weren’t an entirely dysfunctional family. And since my mother was never going to rise to the occasion, the shopping and dinner making had become my problem.
Nobody wanted my dad in a snit, that was for damned sure. That would solve nothing. He was a bully and didn’t seem to care that my mother never improved. The situation at home was bad, but I had a job that I liked, and I was six weeks away from finishing my college degree.
On autopilot, I headed through our neighborhood, toward the state highway linking my smaller town with Montpelier. Since I was a bit late for work already, I didn’t have time to stop at the new bakery for a latte.
Driving over the speed limit was out of the question. When your father was the police chief, it was bad form to violate any traffic laws. Not that I minded a little rule breaking, it’s just that it caused me too much grief later. The deputies enjoyed ratting me out to Daddy.
These were my thoughts as I put on my brakes for the stop sign at Harvey and Grove streets. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw movement just inside the open bay doors at the Nickel Auto Body Shop.
I looked. (Of course I looked. Anyone would.) But I didn’t really expect to see him there, standing beside a beat-up Dodge that was up on the lift. And even when my throat seized up around the single, shocking word that flew to my lips—Jude—I still didn’t truly believe it.
Because he couldn’t possibly be standing there, right inside the garage, running a calm hand along the tattered bumper of an ugly car. But that arm stretching up to the car—Iknewthat arm. There was a bramble of roses tattooed on the bicep. And that hand had touched my bodyeverywhere.
Forgetting myself, I just sat there, one foot planted squarely on the brake, staring at what could only be a Jude mirage. A few of the details weren’t right. Jude’s hair would never be that lightened, sun-kissed color. And he wouldn’t be caught dead in that flannel shirt. We used tomockthe standard Vermont uniform. Mirage-Jude was too big, too, with a broad chest and visible muscles on his back when he moved his arm. My Jude had always been lean, and when he’d left my life he’d been downright skinny.
