The Truth About Tara (4 page)

“The timing is bad, too,” Tara said, ignoring her friend’s comment. She gazed out into the bay, where the sun was sinking below the horizon in a blaze of red and yellow. “I don’t know what I was thinking when I made the reservation, with the anniversary coming up on Tuesday.”

Tara had been friends with Mary Dee long enough that she didn’t need to explain the significance of the date. The other woman was well aware that was when Tara’s father and sister had died.

“You weren’t planning to leave until Wednesday,” Mary Dee pointed out. “And I thought your mother was going to treat the anniversary like any other day this year.”

“I’m not entirely sure she can do it,” Tara said. “She might need me to—”

“How about what you need?” Mary Dee interrupted. “They’ve been gone thirty years, Tara, but you’re here and you’re alive. When was the last time you did anything for yourself?”

Tara watched the last of the sun disappear before she answered. “I ran five miles last night and had a yogurt smoothie for breakfast this morning.”

“Would you stop doing that?”

“Stop doing what?”

“Pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about.” Mary Dee shook her head. “It used to work but not anymore. I’m on to you, Tara Greer.”

Was that really her name? Or was it Hayley Cooper? Tara thrust the ridiculous though from her mind, dismayed that she’d allowed it to surface.

“I’m sorry, M.D.,” Tara said. “I know you’re only trying to look out for me. But missing the trip isn’t a big deal. And it’s not like I have a choice.”

“You could have chosen to tell your mom no,” Mary Dee said. “She didn’t have any right to volunteer you like that without asking first.”

“I hadn’t gotten a chance to tell her about Wyoming yet,” Tara said. “Besides, the camp sounds like fun.”

Mary Dee thumped the table with a manicured hand. “Doesn’t matter. She still shouldn’t have volunteered you.”

“It’s for a good cause,” Tara said.

“Yeah, but why are her causes more important than yours?” Mary Dee asked. “She always needs something from you.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

Mary Dee raised her dark eyebrows. “Then why do you live two blocks away from her?”

“You know why,” Tara said. “My place was such a great deal, I couldn’t pass it up.”

“Was that really the reason?” Mary Dee asked. “Or did your mother
need
you to live close by?”

Tara twirled the tiny straw in her margarita glass, not bothering to point out that while she relished her own space she liked being available for her mother. Mary Dee would probably find fault with that, too. “You’re being awfully hard on me today.”

Mary Dee laid her hand on Tara’s arm. “I don’t mean to be. I’m only trying to get you to be a little more selfish.”

Tara reached across the table, plucked one of Mary Dee’s breaded mushrooms from her plate and popped it into her mouth.

“How’s that?” she asked.

Mary Dee laughed. “Better. Now, are you going to tell me about that guy I saw you with yesterday?”

Tara blinked, blindsided by the question.

“You didn’t really think I’d forgotten about it, did you? So spill.”

“He was nobody,” Tara said.

“What? A guy that hot—he was definitely somebody.”

“A tourist,” Tara clarified.

“What did he want?”

It was on the tip of Tara’s tongue to repeat the crazy tale Jack DiMarco had spun of the abducted three-year-old and Tara’s own uncanny resemblance to the age-progression photo.

“Directions.” Tara wasn’t sure why she lied, especially because she seldom censored herself in front of Mary Dee. Tara often felt as though her sister’s death had created a void in her life that hadn’t been filled until Tara had become friends with Mary Dee.

“That’s it?” Mary Dee’s expression crumbled. “I had such high hopes for you two.”

“You’re a real pain with that stuff since you got married,” Tara complained. “Just because you’re in love doesn’t mean I have to be.”

“Being in love is wonderful.” Mary Dee’s lips rose in the dreamy smile she got whenever anyone referred to marriage or husbands or love. Then again, she was still a newlywed. “If you’d make room in your life for a relationship, you could feel wonderful, too.”

“I’ve had plenty of relationships,” Tara countered.

“Short ones,” Mary Dee said. “You find fault with everybody you date.”

“That’s not true,” Tara said. “I’m just not willing to settle for anything less than fireworks, like you have with Bill and my mom had with my dad.”

“You should have gone to Wyoming to increase your chances of finding someone, then.” Mary Dee gestured to the happy-hour crowd, made up of almost all couples. “Speaking of that, did you at least give that tourist your number?”

“No, Mary Dee,” Tara said with exaggerated patience. “I did not give my number to the stranger who stopped to ask for directions.”

“What good are you, girl?” Mary Dee asked, shaking her head. “I know you want children some day. You need a man for that.”

Tara laid a finger on her cheek. “So now you think the tourist who asked for directions should be the father of my children? I don’t even know if he’s single.”

“You didn’t check out his ring finger?” Mary Dee asked.

She had, actually. It was bare. She was uncomfortably aware that she’d found him attractive. No, not merely attractive. Appealing. If he’d been anybody else, she might have found a way to give him her number.

Mary Dee pointed a finger at her. “You did, didn’t you? I knew you were attracted to him. Too bad you don’t know where he’s staying. You could at least have a fling with him while he’s visiting.”

Tara’s heartbeat sped up at the prospect, although she should not have been thinking about Jack DiMarco in those terms. She had ample reason to hope she never saw him again. “I guess I missed my chance, then.”

“Too bad.” Mary Dee fanned herself. “Now, that’s a man who could get a woman thinking about her needs.”

Tara’s cell phone vibrated and skittered a few inches on the table, as if it were alive. With an apologetic look at Mary Dee, Tara picked it up and checked the display. Her mother. Not that she’d tell her friend that.

“Sorry,” Tara said. “I’ve got to take this.”

Mary Dee nodded, watching Tara over the rim of her glass as she sipped her margarita.

“Hey, what’s up?” Tara asked, careful not to call her mom by name.

“I think I smell gas in the kitchen!” her mother cried. “I checked and the pilot light’s not on. Wouldn’t you know the shut-off valve’s behind the stove, which is way too heavy for me to move.”

Tara turned away from Mary Dee and spoke directly into the phone so her mother could hear and her friend couldn’t. “Did you call the gas company?”

“Yes, but what if it takes them an hour to get here like it did the last time?” her mother asked. “I can’t stay outside on the porch with Danny for an hour. You know how he gets when his routine is disrupted.”

Tara tapped her nails on the table, trying to come up with the best solution to the problem. “I guess I could be there in about twenty minutes.”

“Could you?” her mother asked. “That would be wonderful.”

Tara cast a glance at Mary Dee, who was still watching her. Tara wouldn’t be leaving her friend high and dry if she cut out early. Mary Dee had mentioned that her husband had rented a movie they were planning to watch tonight.

“I’ll leave right now,” she told her mom. “In the meantime, open some windows and stay out of the kitchen.”

“Already done. Bless you!” Her mother made a few more gratifying noises before Tara disconnected the call.

Taking a deep breath, Tara addressed Mary Dee. “I’m sorry. Something’s come up. I’ve gotta go.”

“Of course you do.”

Tara finished off the last swallow of her margarita, set enough money on the table to cover their tab and stood up. “I really am sorry, M.D.”

“I know you are,” Mary Dee said.

Tara turned away from her friend and started for the exit. She hadn’t gotten two steps when she heard Mary Dee’s voice calling after her.

“Say hey to your mom for me.”

* * *

T
ARA
GRABBED
FOR
HER
foster brother Danny’s soft hand the following afternoon, holding it securely in hers as they crossed the parking lot to the Kroger in Wawpaney. There weren’t a lot of choices. The next closest grocery store was twenty miles away.

“You’re a good boy to come with me.” After picking up Danny from his Saturday swimming lesson at the community center in Cape Charles, where the camp was being held, she’d announced she needed to make a stop. “If I don’t buy a few things, my cupboards will be bare. Like Mother Hubbard.”

“Your mother’s name isn’t Hubbard.” Danny gazed up at her out of small brown eyes with the distinctive slant characteristic of people with Down syndrome. He was short for his age, another trait common to children like him.

“You’re right.” Tara sometimes forgot how literal children with Down’s were. “It’s Carrie. She’s your foster mother and my mother.”

No matter what the stranger who’d stopped her on the street had suggested.

Tara released Danny’s hand to take one of the grocery carts in front of the store, careful to keep him in sight. During the time it had taken Tara to get to her mother’s house the night before, Danny had wandered close to the street to follow a butterfly.

“C-Carrie is getting pretty,” Danny announced. He had a good vocabulary, although his speech was halting and not quite clear. He also stuttered occasionally. Once school started again, he’d be in speech therapy.

“Right again,” Tara said. “Carrie’s at the beauty shop. That’s why I picked you up from swimming.”

Her mother had insisted Danny take the lessons, maintaining that anyone who lived in an area surrounded by water should know how to swim.

Danny scrunched up his face. “Don’t like swimming.”

That was an understatement. Today had been lesson number two and Danny had yet to agree to get into the water. Afterward the instructor had advised Tara to suspend the lessons until he had a change of heart.

“You can’t know you don’t like it until you try it,” Tara said.

“Know it now,” Danny insisted.

“Oh, yeah?” Tara asked. “What if I refused to learn how to drive because I thought I wouldn’t like it? Then how would we get to the grocery store?”

Danny looked thoughtful. “Walking.”

“Good answer,” she said, laughing. It served her right for asking a question with such an easy answer. “Dan the Man strikes again.”

Danny giggled at the favorite nickname, and she bent down and gave him a hug. He loved hugs. He’d also been laughing more and more in the three weeks since he’d come to live with her mother. It was a welcome change from the sad little boy who’d kept asking where his real mother was.

She waited for Danny to precede her through the automatic door into the store. “Stay close,” she told him.

He moved a step nearer to her.

Tara stopped at a table of navel oranges at the front of the produce section and tore a plastic bag off the roll. “You want me to buy a couple extra for you?”

“Don’t like oranges.”

“I love them.” Tara injected enthusiasm into her voice. She picked out four oranges and dropped the bag into the cart, then pointed to the refrigerated section containing precut bags of vegetables. “How about some baby carrots?”

“No,” he said. “No c-carrots.”

Her mother was in the process of ensuring that Danny ate healthy foods. Like a lot of Down syndrome children, he was on the chubby side. Diet, however, was only one factor. Many children like Danny weren’t active early in life because they had decreased motor skills. Add stunted growth to the mix and weight problems resulted. In Danny’s
case, they were compounded because he loved to eat with a rare passion.

“I’ll give you a hint about what I need next.” Tara turned the cart with difficulty, noticing for the first time she’d chosen one with a bum wheel. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck.”

“Chicken!” Danny said.

“Right you are.” She maneuvered the cart to the top of one of the long aisles and got ready to push it to the refrigerated section in the back of the store.

“Tara!” Mrs. Jorgenson, who’d been her mother’s neighbor for as long as Tara could remember, headed toward them with the help of a cane. Otherwise, she was in admirable shape for a woman of eighty-plus, with a trim figure and dark blond hair without a trace of gray. “How nice to see you. You, too, Danny.”

“Who are you?” Danny asked.

“You know Mrs. Jorgenson, Danny,” Tara said. “She lives in the white house across the street from you.”

“Old lady in white house,” Danny said. Tara winced.

“That’s me,” Mrs. Jorgenson said cheerfully. “I’ll be eighty-seven on my next birthday.”

“I’m ten,” Danny said.

“Lucky you,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “Where’s your mother, Tara?”

“At the beauty salon,” Tara said. “School’s out for the summer so I have more time to help her with Danny.”

“Such a good heart your mother has,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “I don’t know what I would have done without her when Artie was in the hospital. She drove me there every day. Now that he’s home, she stops by a few times a week to check on us. Always brings us something home cooked, too.”

Tara hadn’t known that, but it didn’t surprise her—not when frozen dinners filled Mrs. Jorgenson’s buggy.

“Artie doesn’t feel up to cooking these days,” Mrs. Jorgenson said, gesturing to the food she was going to buy. “I was never much good at it.”

Danny started down the nearest aisle, darting back and forth as he checked out the items on the shelves. Tara debated whether to call him back and decided against it. The attention span of a ten-year-old, disabled or not, was only so long.

“Nice talking to you, Mrs. Jorgenson,” Tara said. “But I’ve got to go after Danny.”

“Certainly dear,” the older woman said, shooing Tara away with the motion of her hand.

Tara gave chase, the bad wheel on her buggy causing the entire cart to wobble. “Danny, wait up!”

She needn’t have bothered calling out anything. The child had stopped, transfixed by an item on the shelves. Tara groaned even before he reached out and grabbed a jumbo-sized bag of potato chips.