The Lost Husband (30 page)

“Go ahead,” O’Connor dared. “He’s my cousin.”

Who knew if it was true or not? It shut her right down.

“Do your job,” O’Connor said, pointing at her. “Or I’ll do it for you.”

I was sure no parenting book in the world would tell you to march into your kid’s school and threaten to maim her bully, and I was equally sure that if they could find a way to do it, these teachers would slap charges and a restraining order on O’Connor before the day was out.

But in that moment, if only to myself, I made it official: I loved him.

And so when O’Connor stormed past us and blasted back
through the double doors and down the hallway, leaving PeePants and an entire slack-jawed class of seven- and eight-year-olds staring behind him, Abby and I joined hands and followed.

But not before Abby turned back to PeePants, still on the ground, and said, in a moment I will remember for the rest of my life: “Take that, you little shit.”

On the drive home, with Abby in the back and O’Connor in the passenger seat still breathing like an angry bull, something hit me.

“Abby,” I said, “PeePants Gaveski never totally left you alone, did he?”

Abby waited a minute before she admitted, “Not completely.”

I hadn’t wanted to be right. “Seriously?”

“He mostly stopped,” Abby said, clarifying. “But he still calls me ‘Limper.’ ”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

She shrugged.

“Abby,” I said again. “Why didn’t you tell me about it?”

She looked out the window for a second, and then she said, “I don’t know. I guess I didn’t want you to feel like a bad mom.”

“Why would that make me feel like a bad mom?”

“I don’t know,” Abby said, turning her eyes back to the window. “I guess because you couldn’t protect me.”

I pulled in a breath and felt the sting of tears rising.

“You know what, babe?” I said. “I could never feel like a bad mom. I am an awesome mom. And do you know what makes me awesome?”

Abby shook her head.

“Because I try so hard,” I said. “I let you down sometimes, and
I forget your lunch sometimes, and I certainly can’t protect you from everything. But I don’t give up. Even though I make mistakes, and even though I’m nowhere even close to the perfect mother that I’d give anything for you and Tank to have, I pick myself up after every stumble and I get back after it and I keep trying—harder than I’ve ever tried at anything in my life. Because”—and here another true thing hit me for the first time—“raising you and Tank is the most important thing I will ever do.”

“You really do try, Mama,” Abby said.

I nodded, feeling like I was giving her a terrific life lesson. “And that’s what makes anybody great at anything. Just trying like hell.”

Abby took that in.

“You hear that, right?” I asked. “Because I think that’s probably the smartest thing I will ever say to you.”

“I hear it,” she said.

“Good,” I said.

“But Mom?”

“Yes?”

“You have
got
to quit cursing.”

When we got home, I paused in the yard to thank O’Connor, but then I wasn’t sure what to say.

“Is the sheriff really your cousin?” I asked.

O’Connor nodded. “But I was bluffing. He’d actually love to put me in jail.”

I wanted to take his hand and squeeze it and look up into his eyes and tell him how very grateful I was for what he’d just done. But I hesitated, and in that moment, he caught sight of Abby, who was clearly feeling better and making a break for the tire swings.

He nodded in her direction. “Better catch her. You don’t want that scrape to start bleeding again.”

I definitely did not.

I turned to corral her just as Jean came down the back steps and saw Abby.

To her credit, she did not freak out. “Got a little scrape there?”

Abby nodded.

“You know what that means,” Jean said.

Abby shook her head.

Jean pointed at her. “Ice cream for dinner.”

Abby checked my expression. “Really?”

I looked at Jean like she was totally crazy. “I guess so,” I said. I turned back toward O’Connor to see if he might like ice cream for dinner, too—but he had already left the yard.

Jean went to pick up Tank while Abby and I went upstairs and spent the rest of the afternoon reading, playing Go Fish, and adding soaps to a luxury bath.

After bedtime, I creaked back down the stairs to the kitchen and let all my rage bubble over to Jean as I paced around barefoot.

“Did you see her shirt?” I demanded. “She must have lost half the blood in her body.”

Jean had made me a cup of tea, but it had gone cold while I ranted.

“The shirt looked bad,” Jean agreed. “But at least it wasn’t unprovoked.”

“Unprovoked?”

“What I mean is,” Jean said, moving to start another teakettle, “at least it was a playground fight. At least Abby wasn’t a hapless victim.”

“She
was
a victim!”

Jean nodded. “But he wasn’t just bullying her. They were adversaries.”

“Who cares?” I said. “He pushed her into a fence.”

“But,” Jean said slowly, so I could take a breath, “she was standing up to him when he did that. And not even for herself—for someone else. She chose to pit herself against him.”

“And now she’s got a gash in her head to show for it.”

“What I mean is,” Jean went on, all patience, “the fact that she stood up for George tells me she’s not afraid. She saw herself as strong enough to protect him.”

“But she wasn’t.”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that she tried.”

“Hasn’t she just learned now that standing up for others gets your head bashed in?”

Jean shook her head. “No,” she said. “She’s learned that standing up for others makes you feel braver. She’s learned that it feels good to do the right thing. And she’s learned that even getting a gashed head is not going to break her.”

I considered this.

“Didn’t you see her face tonight?” Jean said. “Didn’t you hear her telling the story over and over? She’s proud of herself. And not because we told her she did a good thing. Because she knows in her bones that she did a good thing. She’s proud from the inside out.”

Abby
had
seemed awfully happy that afternoon, I thought. I’d chalked it up to leftover adrenaline.

Jean’s eyes were shining. “You couldn’t stop the bully, even though you wanted to. I wanted to, too. But something better has happened. Abby stopped him herself. She showed us all.”

“Do you think he’s really stopped?” I asked, afraid to even hope for it.

“It doesn’t matter what he does,” Jean said. “Maybe O’Connor scared him into changing his ways, or maybe he just made him worse. Either way, he’s not going to bully Abby. Because she’s not a victim anymore.”

I wanted to believe that too much to actually let myself believe it.

But I stopped pacing at last and sat down and put my head in my hands. All the tension of the day had emptied me out, and I suddenly felt like a human version of a rubber chicken. I couldn’t even answer when Jean said the new tea was boiling.

She looked over and eyed me at the table. “Go to bed,” she said, adding, “You look like a rubber chicken.”

I sat up in amazement. “I was just thinking—
just thinking
—that’s exactly what I felt like.”

Jean shrugged. “It shows.”

She dried off the last clean pot with a dish towel while I watched. When I finally rose to take my untouched tea to the sink, I had a Pavlovian response to look for O’Connor’s trailer at the kitchen window. But it wasn’t there.

“Where’s the Airstream?” I said.

“O’Connor took it,” Jean said. She was doing a little sweeping now.

“Took it where?” I asked, looking back to double-check.

Jean didn’t seem sure of what to say. “He wanted to talk to you about it,” she said. “He waited down here for a long time this afternoon, hoping to see you.”

“But?”

“When it started getting late, he had to go.”

“Go where?” I asked, feeling a hitch in my chest.

“I really can’t say,” she said with a sigh. “He wanted to talk to you himself.”

Jean truly was a vault, and I loved that about her—usually. “You can’t know and not tell me!” I said.

She shook her head. “He specifically asked me to let him handle it.”

“Handle what?”

Jean put the broom away. “It’s not my place to have O’Connor’s conversations for him. Especially ones like this.”

“Jean,” I said, “you’re killing me.”

“He’ll explain everything when he can.”

“Just tell me where he went,” I said, feeling like that one decent piece of information would be enough.

And so Jean, finally taking pity on my tired face—while knowing full well that one piece of information would not even remotely be enough—set a record for the most information she’d ever let slip about another person’s life: “He went to Austin.”

“Austin’s not good,” Sunshine said in the milking barn the next day. She was back now as a kind of substitute milker.

“Why not?” I asked.

“One, his wife is in Austin with her sister now.” Sunshine counted on her fingers, as if she were piecing together a great mystery. “Two, he’s got their house here listed for sale. And three: Russell just told me that a buddy of O’Connor’s at the Austin Fire Department got him a really awesome job there.” Sunshine turned to give me a shrug. “So it looks like maybe he just moved away.”

I stood straight up and almost knocked over my milking bucket.

“What?” Sunshine asked.

“Why would he move away?”

“Maybe he wanted to be near his wife. Maybe he wanted a real job.”

I gestured at Betsy Ross, up on the milking stand. “This is a real job.”

“No, it isn’t,” Sunshine said. “You said so yourself.”

“But he wouldn’t just disappear like that.”

“Jean said he waited around all afternoon to talk to you,” Sunshine said. “Maybe he was waiting to say goodbye.”

The situation was so backward: Jean couldn’t tell me what was going on with O’Connor because she
did
know, but Sunshine could go on and on about it because she
didn’t
. But the more I thought about it, the more the pieces came together. Try as I might to assemble them another way, they only really seemed to fit one scenario: that Sunshine was right. O’Connor was gone. He had hitched up that Airstream and left us all in the dust.

Chapter 24
 

In the days that followed, I watched Abby closely. And Jean, for her part, watched me.

“You look a little tense,” Jean told me one morning.

I thought about it. “I am tense.”

Jean studied me for another moment. “Because Russ and I were just thinking about how fun it would be to take the kids camping this weekend.”

“Camping?” I asked, like I didn’t know what it was.

“Sure,” Jean said. “They could use an adventure. And you could use a break.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “What about Abby’s head?” Camping didn’t seem very sterile.

“The cut is all scabbed over,” Jean said. “We just won’t go swimming.”

I did not want to let Abby go camping. I just wanted to keep her in the house and stare at her until she was healed up good as new. But Jean wasn’t about to let me get away with that.

“So it’s settled,” she said. The four of them would go to Enchanted Rock with Russ’s family-sized tent, and I would stay home and have a glass of wine. Or several.

“Maybe I should come along,” I said, frowning at Jean.

“You,” Jean said with a smile, “are not invited.”

In the end, I let them go. I did need a break. I needed some sleep, too, after so many nights of thrashing around. Jean wanted me to have a nice dinner, soak in a hot bubble bath, and read a book—preferably all at the same time. But I didn’t do any of those things. The day they left, I was so tired, I was fast asleep by seven-thirty.

In the morning, I woke up before Dubbie crowed. Sunshine never showed up, and so I spent the sunrise hours alone—milking by myself and packing up the truck for the farmers’ market, my feet rustling through the long grass as I went. I moved so quietly through the Saturday morning routine that all the lonesomeness I’d been too sleepy to notice the night before seemed to drizzle down on me like rain.

With everybody gone, I had no one to talk to but myself, and nothing to direct my thoughts but their own whims. What really bugged me that morning, as I drove the highway to Houston, was how very hard I kept trying to build a life for myself—a sturdy one I could count on—and how the universe kept getting in my way. I’d had Jean, but then my mother took me from her. I’d found Danny, but then he died. I’d found O’Connor—or at least I’d wanted to—but now, apparently, he’d moved away.

Jean had taught the kids, when they had trouble falling asleep at night, to count their blessings instead of counting sheep. She literally had them make lists of all the things they were grateful for. I spent my entire, silent morning at the farmers’ market trying
to talk myself into doing the same thing. But I didn’t feel like counting my blessings that day. I just felt like moping.

The late afternoon was the same. Mostly I just walked restlessly out to the barn and back again, checked on the goats and the garden, and kept my body busy to try to distract my mind. At last, out of desperation, I went through the motions of the bath and book, but I hardly achieved the restorative bliss Jean had hoped for.