Retreat (24 page)

    
Clara fought to physically restrain herself
from rolling her eyes. That just figured.

    
“So, Clara,” Josie said, casting a quick
sideways glance at her daughter. “Did you ever get in touch with the guy who
came up to warn you about David? Jon, right? If you ask me he was the one you
should have hooked up with in the first place.”

    
Clara peered out the window. “I talked to
him for a little while yesterday,” she said. “He called me at the office. I
left a message for Marcy, too, but I haven’t heard back.”

    
Josie nodded, smiling with satisfaction.
“So he did call again. Good. He was much better-looking than that David,” she
said. “I felt some major vibes between you two down in Texas. I thought for sure you were going to
hook up. Actually, I assumed you already had. What happened?”

    
“I decided to go to grad school,” Clara
said flatly. She really didn’t want to get into this with her mother when
Rebecca was hanging on the back of their seats.

    
“Rather suddenly I recall,” Josie probed.
“And you didn’t stay long.”

    
“Jesus Christ, Clara, why don’t you just
tell her the truth,” Rebecca announced, sitting back hard against her seat and
flinging her arms across her chest.

    
Josie looked over at Clara. “There’s more?”

    
“Yes there’s more,” Rebecca said,
exasperated. “I got her fired from her job with that guy, okay? That’s why she
took off to Oklahoma
and why you never saw that guy Jon again. Or me for that matter.”

    
“What?” Josie asked, shaking her head in
confusion. “Clara is that true? What the hell did you do, Beck?”

    
“I made a scene at an event at Clara’s
company,” Rebecca said. “I tried to get her boss to invest in my jewelry
business.”

    
“You didn’t,” Josie said, horror in her
voice. “Why would you do that?”

    
“I don’t know. It seemed like a good idea
at the time,” Rebecca shrugged. “You kept talking about how great she was doing
and how the company she worked for made investments in start-up businesses and
I thought they’d want to invest in mine.”

    
“You were also stoned out of your gourd,”
Clara reminded her.

    
“Yeah, I guess.”

    
“You guess?” Clara exclaimed, spinning
around and digging her nails into the cloth seats.
 
“You guess? You acted like a freaking
prostitute. I thought you were going to bend down and give Mr. Freedman a blow
job right there in the middle of the lobby!” She saw Meg turn toward the window
and try to stifle a nervous laugh.

    
“Don’t let him fool you; he would have
loved a blow job from me!” Rebecca spit. “And, apparently I didn’t do that much
damage because that cowboy of yours showed up looking for you, now didn’t he?”

    
“So let me get this straight,” Josie said,
still shaking her head as she tried to take it all in. “You lost your job
because of Rebecca?”

    
“Yes,” Clara replied.

    
“No wonder you’ve been so pissed off,”
Josie said, reaching over and patting Clara’s knee.

    
“It was more than the job, Mom,” Rebecca
said. “She was in love with that guy.”

    
“Shut up, Beck,” Clara said. “Just shut
up.”

    
“You were. And then he kicked you out.”

    
“It’s all in the past,” Clara said, trying
not to clench her teeth.

    
“Except that he showed up,” Josie said.
“With an agenda. That doesn’t sound like a guy who kicked you out.”

    
“It’s complicated,” Clara said.

    
“Apparently,” Josie replied.

    
She looked at her mother, who was staring
straight ahead at the curving road. “But maybe you can understand why I think
having Rebecca work for us is asking for disaster,” Clara said.

    
“Hey. Now wait a minute,” Rebecca said. “I
need this job. I need it to support Elizabeth.
I didn’t have her before and now that I do I need to make sure she’s taken care
of.”

    
“You’ve had her for at least the past two
years,” Clara said, shooting her a nasty look into the backseat. “And I can’t
even believe that you had her when you crashed Freedman’s event. You looked
more like a strung-out famine victim than somebody’s mother.”

    
“Gee thanks, Clara. I thought if I could
get your boss to invest in my company I could support Elizabeth and not have to worry about Matt
anymore.”

    
“He was the bracelet guy, right?” Josie
asked.

    
“Yes, the bracelet guy,” Rebecca said,
scowling behind Josie’s back. “He asked me to marry him but then he broke it off
at the last minute.”

    
“Why?” Josie asked.

    
“He got clean and found someone else,”
Rebecca shrugged. “He didn’t know I was knocked up. When I told him he went
ballistic. I never asked him for anything, but then about a year ago I got laid
off from my job so I asked him for child support. He refused.”

    
“Then what happened?” Josie asked.

    
“I went to domestic relations and they took
money out of his pay. He was pissed. They took more from his pay because I told
them he’d never paid before. I didn’t mean for that to happen. I didn’t need
anything before I lost my job. But once the government gets involved …”

    
“They don’t recognize shades of gray,”
Josie finished for her. Clara braced for an anti-establishment lecture but
Josie stayed focused.

    
“No, not at all,” Rebecca said. “So he said
if he was going to have to pay for Elizabeth
he wanted joint custody.”
  

    
“And you didn’t want that?” Josie asked.

    
“No. He married a …” she looked over at Elizabeth and lowered her
voice. “He married a total floozy. She wouldn’t know how to take care of a
little girl if her life depended on it. And he’s no better. So I didn’t want
him to have joint custody.”

    
Clara tried not to choke on her own spit.
This from the woman without a car seat, she thought.

    
“What did the judge say?” Josie asked.
 

    
“She gave it to him. Elizabeth is supposed to go with him every
Saturday and again on Thursday evenings.”

    
“So you ran?” Josie asked.

    
“No, not right away. I tried it for a
while, hoping for the best. But then I’d go to get her and she’d be crying and
I just didn’t feel comfortable with it anymore. When I told him that she wasn’t
coming over anymore he threatened to sue for full custody.”

    
“So, you’re breaking the law at this
point,” Clara said pointedly. “He has joint custody and you took off with his
daughter, with no car seat and only the clothes on your back.”

    
“Clara, these things are complicated,”
Josie said.

    
“Not really, Mom. Rebecca is breaking the
law and being irresponsible as usual.”

    
“Okay. Now you listen to me,” her mother
shot back, stealing a leveled glance at Clara. “We are family and we’ll figure
this out. If Rebecca doesn’t think Elizabeth
should be with Matt then I trust her judgment on that.”

    
“You trust her judgment. Unbelievable. Way
to drag us into it, Beck,” Clara said. “I should have known something was going
on when you showed up.”

    
Rebecca started to respond but then Elizabeth began to cry.

    
“Stop it. Okay. Just stop it,” Rebecca
said. “You’re scaring Elizabeth.”
She turned to her daughter. “What’s wrong honey? Hmmm? Do you want some juice?”

    
Elizabeth
nodded. Big fat tears rolled out of her brown eyes and her bottom lip quivered
as she looked at Rebecca. Rebecca dug around in a makeshift diaper bag that
looked like one of Josie’s old backpacks. She pulled out a sippy cup and filled
it with apple juice from a small container in Josie’s travel cooler.

    
“Here you go honey,” she said.

    
“Mommy!” the little girl cried as Rebecca
handed her the cup. She pushed it away with her little hand. “No, Mommy!”

    
“It’s okay, honey,” Rebecca said, trying to
calm her down. “Shhhhh….” She reached over to hug her but Elizabeth screamed and pulled away.

    
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca yelled over Elizabeth’s cries. “She
gets like this sometimes on long trips.”

    
Clara turned around and poked her head from
behind the seat. “Peek!” she said.

    
Elizabeth
stopped crying and looked at her curiously.

    
Clara hid behind the seat and then popped
her head up again. “Peek!”

    
Elizabeth
giggled. A full throaty little girl giggle.

    
Clara did it again. “Peek!”

    
Another giggle. This time Josie laughed,
too.

    
“Hand me the juice, Beck,” Clara said.

    
Rebecca picked up the hot pink sippy cup
and handed it to Clara.

    
Clara popped out from the seat again, this
time holding up the sippy cup. “Peek!”

    
Elizabeth
squealed with delight and reached for the cup.

    
Clara did it again and this time moved the
cup closer to her. She reached for it again with delight. On the third try
Clara handed the cup to her and she took a big sip.

    
“How about a little story,” Rebecca said
gently, trying to preserve Elizabeth’s
calmer state. The little girl nodded. Rebecca pulled out a little board book
and began to read it to her quietly. By the time she was finished Elizabeth was dozing off
and Rebecca had to grab the sippy cup to keep it from falling onto the minivan
floor.
 

    
“Whew!” Josie whispered. “I forgot those
days.”

    
Clara sat back in her seat and watched the
miles go by, grateful that their conversation had been interrupted.

    
The terrain had grown decidedly hillier,
with fewer breaks between the stands of trees. Josie tried to find a station on
the radio but nothing came in clearly. She dug around in the console and pulled
out a CD, popping it in and bathing them in Credence Clearwater Revival. Josie
sang along with every song, encouraging the rest of them to join in. She was so
adamant that Clara finally gave in and found herself as part of an off-key
quartet belting out anthems like “do-do-do-looking out my back door” and “heard
it through the grapevine” for the next thirty miles.

    
They were about a mile from the entrance to
Foster’s Glen when Josie turned down the radio and asked Clara to call her
father to see where the men were. They’d lost them back on the interstate, and
hadn’t seen them since. Clara reached down on the floorboard and pulled her
phone out of her purse.

    
She looked at the blank screen and flipped
the phone open. “Sorry, Mom, but there’s no service,” she said.

    
Josie looked at her.

    
“No service,” she repeated.

    
“Oh,” Josie said. “I hadn’t considered
that.”

    
“We’re practically off the grid out here,
Mom, what did you expect?” Clara asked.

    
“We are not off the grid, for goodness
sakes,” her mother replied. “I’m sure they have a landline at the campground
and I know for a fact that they have electricity there.”

    
“I’m sure the men are fine,” Meg called
from the back seat, a touch of irritation in her normally calm voice. “Now turn
the radio back up.”

CHAPTER
12

    
It was nearing dusk when the red minivan
topped the spiraling mountain road and veered to the right through a wide set
of open cattle gates onto a red-clay throughway that looped around the
perimeter of the state park.
 
Missing the
turn would have sent them down the other side of the mountain and, after thirty
miles or so, into the incorporated town of Valleyview, population 2,500.