Redemption Road (Jackson Falls #5) (10 page)

Colleen

Payday.

The sweetest word in the English language. On Friday night at
precisely five o’clock, Rob handed her a check imprinted with the Two Dreamers
logo, and she just held it in her hands, studying it with reverence. Her name,
printed in crooked block letters, at the top. Her brother-in-law’s loopy and
illegible signature on the bottom. A dollar amount that was exceedingly
generous in light of her meager contribution to answering phones, sorting mail,
and filing. Never in her life had a sum of money held such significance for her.
In years past, payday had meant nothing more than sitting down with her
checkbook to pay the bills, then trying to subsist on what was left over. During
her marriage to Irv, she hadn’t held a job, so payday had been a meaningless
term. But this payday, her first since starting her job at Two Dreamers
Records, was her gateway to the future. With her goal firmly in place, each payday
would bring her a little closer to reaching it. She couldn’t have been more
pleased if her brother-in-law had handed her a ticket to the moon.

First thing Saturday morning, she deposited it into her checking
account and withdrew the cash she’d need for gas and groceries and pocket money
to get her through the next seven days. After writing a check to Rob for rent
and another to Casey as payment on the loan her sister had given her, she
transferred the balance into a savings account. This was her escape fund, the
little stockpile she intended to watch grow, inch by inch, so that when Ali
returned, she could blow this town and start over fresh, someplace where she
owed nothing to anybody and where nobody would be able to judge her based on
her past. Hell, if she wanted to, she could invent a completely new past. A
completely new Colleen. People reinvented themselves every day. And who would
know the difference?

She still had a couple hundred dollars left from Casey’s loan. She
used that to put snow tires on the Vega. If she was going to spend the winter
here in the frozen north, she couldn’t continue to drive around on summer tires
as smooth as a baby’s butt. Four new tires with treads deep enough to take a
bite out of snow and slush pretty much cleaned out her checking account, but
there was nothing she needed before next payday. She had a roof over her head,
a warm bed, food in the cupboard, and the means to earn her keep. It might not
be quite the lifestyle she’d lived in Palm Beach, but then, she’d never been
greedy. She’d fallen in love with Irv not because of his wealth, but in spite
of it. As she’d reminded him often, she would have loved him even if he’d been
a ditch digger.

Halfway home, she saw the sign for Quarry Road, and without making
a conscious decision, Colleen clicked on her blinker, made a sharp right turn,
and took a journey into her past. Down a narrow paved road coated in black ice,
past a couple of ramshackle farms, to a nondescript trail, little more than the
width of a car, that led into the woods beneath old leaves and new snow. She
parked the Vega at the edge of the blacktop, thought about getting out of the
car and walking in. But at this time of year, even wearing boots, she’d have to
be suicidal to attempt the two-hundred-yard walk to the quarry. Instead, she
sat behind the steering wheel and watched the memories play like a movie reel
behind her eyes.

A steamy summer night. The two of them, she and Jesse, stretched
out on the hood of his old red F-150, leaning against the cracked windshield,
sharing a can of warm Pepsi while they gazed at the canopy of stars overhead. She’d
been sixteen years old that summer, the summer her sister left Jesse at the altar,
the summer she was waiting to catch him when he fell.

And fall he had, right into her waiting arms. She’d wooed him with
kisses and sympathy, this wonderful, amazing man, so kind, so handsome, with
that silver-blond hair, those cheekbones carved from granite, those dark eyes
that saw everything. How could her sister have walked away from him?  It
astounded her. It elated her. And it terrified her, because she’d loved him for
so long, and now that this opportunity she’d never expected to see had fallen
into her lap, she had no idea what to do with it.

This had been their place. They’d spent hours at the quarry,
parked beneath the stars, just the two of them. Here, he’d introduced her to
alcohol. Here, they’d gone skinny-dipping. Here, they’d lost their virginity
together, one hot August night after she’d pushed him, for weeks, until he
reached the breaking point. At sixteen, she’d thought she was an adult, thought
she knew everything. But she’d been woefully naïve to the ways of the adult
world. All she could think about was being with him forever. Waking up next to
him every morning for the rest of her life. She hadn’t thought about the
consequences, hadn’t thought about what he might want, hadn’t thought beyond
her own selfish desires.

It was here, at the quarry, where Mikey had been conceived. And it
was here, on a cool night in fall, where she’d told Jesse she was pregnant.

The marriage had been a disaster right from the start. At
seventeen, she’d been too young to settle down with a husband and a baby, too
young to have given any thought to what kind of life she wanted. In her
naïveté, she’d somehow believed she would get married, and that would be it. She
would have achieved her life’s goal at the age of seventeen.

Looking back, it seemed ludicrous. But she knew she wasn’t the
only girl her age who’d felt that way, who couldn’t see beyond the wedding to
what might follow. Wasn’t getting married the be-all and end-all to existence? 
In small-town Maine, that was what young girls of her generation, whose role
models had been their stay-at-home mothers, had thought. By the time she
realized it wasn’t—that life continued after marriage—it was too late. She had
a husband and a baby and a noose around her neck.

The marriage had lasted for a decade, but by the time of its
official dissolution, it had unofficially been over for a very long time.

Now, parked by the side of an icy winter road,
thirty-five-year-old Colleen tried to muster some kind of empathy for her
sixteen-year-old self. After all, she’d only done what women had been doing
since the beginning of time: she’d tricked the boy she loved into marrying her.
Occasionally, that kind of marriage worked out. More often, it didn’t. Especially
when the feelings were all one-sided. It had taken time and distance to clarify
the truth in her mind:  While she’d loved him with the kind of obsessive love
only a young girl can feel, Jesse had never truly loved her. If she hadn’t
gotten pregnant, he never would have married her.

And what on God’s green earth was the purpose of this little trip
down Memory Lane?  Her marriage to Jesse had ended a long time ago. They’d both
moved on with their lives. As far as she knew, he was happy now, with a new
wife and a new little girl. Their son was eighteen years old, a grown man, older
now than she’d been when she delivered him. Those years, that young girl she’d
been, were long behind her. So why the sudden nostalgia for the good old days? 
Which, if you looked at them closely, hadn’t been all that good.

It was this place. This damnable town that she couldn’t escape
from quickly enough. A shiver ran down her spine, and Colleen cranked the
heater, which was no match for this frigid winter day. She released her
emergency brake and pulled away from the shoulder, found a driveway a half-mile
down. There, she wheeled the car around, and pointed it back in the direction
of her apartment, her only sanctuary. The only place where, if she was very
lucky, the ghosts of the past couldn’t follow her.

***

She spent the afternoon cleaning house. After five days of working
8 to 5 and coming home, exhausted, to flop into an easy chair in front of the
television with a frozen TV dinner, there was plenty to keep her busy:  laundry,
dusting, washing the floors, scrubbing the toilet. She borrowed Casey’s Electrolux
and cleaned the carpets, took the small area rugs onto the landing outside her
kitchen door, hung them over the railing, and beat the crap out of them with a
broom, the way Mama had done when she was a little girl. When she was finished,
the small apartment gleamed, and Colleen felt a sense of pride way out of
proportion to what she’d actually done. For the first time, this place felt
like hers.
Home
. But she steamrolled over those useless feelings until
they were nothing but roadkill. She couldn’t allow herself to grow attached to
anyone or anything; she’d be moving on soon, and she didn’t want any regrets
when the time came.

At dusk, as she was sipping tea and listening to oldies on the
radio, Jackson Browne rocking her on the water, there was a tap on her door. She
opened it to find Paige, Rob’s teenage daughter, on the other side. Like her
father, the girl was tall, slender, a little gawky. All knees and elbows and
awkward charm, with a cascade of wheat-colored curls that tumbled down her back.
“Casey sent me over to invite you to the get-together,” Paige said. “At
six-thirty, at Trish and Bill’s house.”

“Come in,” she said. “It’s cold outside. What get-together?”

Paige stepped into the kitchen and Colleen closed the door. “It’s
a family thing,” the girl said, stamping snow off her boots. “We get together
on Saturday nights, a couple times a month. Sometimes here, sometimes at Aunt Trish
and Uncle Bill’s house, sometimes at Aunt Rose and Uncle Jesse’s.”

This was the kind of “family thing” she was determined to avoid. “Probably
not a good idea,” she said. “Especially considering that Trish isn’t overly
fond of me, and Jesse’s my ex-husband. You can only take the word
family
so far.”

“Hey, don’t freak out on me. I’m just passing on the message.”

The kid had spirit. Colleen liked spirit. “Sit down,” she said. “Have
a drink. Let’s see, I have Coke, coffee, tea, hot chocolate?”

Paige pulled off her coat and plopped onto a wooden chair. “Coke’s
fine.”

Colleen took a Coke from the fridge, popped the top, and poured it
into a glass. Leaned against the kitchen counter and said, “So tell me about
this family get-together.”

“Well…” Paige lifted the glass and took a long drink. “It’s kind
of hard to explain. They’ve been doing it for a while, I guess. Since before I got
here last year, anyway. And—”

“Wait. Stop. What do you mean, before you got here last year?  I
thought you came with your father.”

“You haven’t heard the story?”  At Colleen’s bewildered head shake,
Paige said, “I didn’t meet my dad until I was fifteen. I grew up in Boston,
with my mom. When she died a year and a half ago, I came here to live. He never
knew I existed until Mom’s lawyer called him and said, ‘Congratulations, it’s a
girl.’”

“Wow. I had no idea. And I’m sorry about your mom.”

Paige shrugged. “It is what it is. Things were sketchy for a
while, but it’s gotten better.” She took a sip of Coke. “So, anyway, about the
get-together, there’s all kinds of food, and Dad brings this impossibly hokey
music from when he was a kid, and we just eat, and visit, and—I can’t really
explain it any better than that. It freaked me out at first. I grew up as an
only child. I didn’t even have cousins. After my grandparents died, it was just
Mom and me. Coming here, landing in the middle of this clan, yeah. There was
some culture shock. I think it took a couple of months before I knew who
everybody was and how they were related. This is one huge, crazy-ass,
intermarried family. I mean, Jesse’s married to my dad’s sister, but he used to
be engaged to Aunt Casey, and apparently at some point he was married to you,
and—oh,
hell
.”  Her mouth closed abruptly.

Eyeing the girl with curiosity, Colleen said, “What?”

“I just realized. You’re Mikey’s mother.”

“Um, yes. I am.”

“Well. That’s—”  For an instant, the unflappable Paige seemed
impossibly flustered, and Colleen wondered what that was all about. Recovering,
the kid said, “Anyway, there’s usually fifteen or twenty of us, give or take. All
the cousins show up. And usually Paula and Chuck. They’re best friends with
Aunt Rose and Uncle Jesse. Sometimes, Harley and Annabel come, too. But not
always.”

“Sounds like a nightmare, if you ask me.”

“You think it sounds bad now, wait until you hear Dad’s idea of
good party music.”

“As much as it pains me, I think I’ll have to pass. You can give
my sister my regrets. Tell her I just came down with the Asian Flu and I’d
really hate to spread it around.”

Paige grinned. “I think I like you. By the way, I heard Dad
telling Casey that he wishes you were staying around because as much as he
loves Ali, you’re ten times the assistant she was.”

Colleen’s eyebrows went sky high. “Your dad said that?”

The girl finished her Coke, stood and pulled her jacket on. “You
know, when I first came here, I hated him. I thought he was a flipping idiot.” 
She reached up and pulled her hair free from the collar of her jacket. “Not to
mention an asshole. My mom told me all kinds of lies. She said he’d left us
because he didn’t want me. I had no reason to doubt her. But the truth was that
she didn’t tell him about me. I guess I’ll never know why. It’s funny how time
changes your perspective. I realize now that Dad’s a good guy with a huge
heart, and he’s the most honest—and probably one of the smartest—people I know.
He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.” She studied Colleen with open
curiosity. Said, “Thanks for the Coke.”