Family at Stake

How could he trust the woman who’d showed up on his doorstep with promises to help, but who’d acted just as cold and formal as Frank, who’d betrayed him?

How could he trust the woman to whom he’d given everything he had of value? And she’d left it all behind like clothes she’d outgrown.

Mac took a deep breath and pushed himself out of the chair. Right now he had to convince his daughter that they needed to give counseling one more try.

Mac climbed the stairs, feeling a hundred years old, and knocked on his daughter’s door.

“Go away,” she yelled.

“Amanda?”

“Dad.” She ripped the door open and then took three flying steps back to her bed where she curled onto her side away from him.

Her nickname, Eddy, was embroidered on the back of her shirt, the fragile knobs of her spine pressed against the cotton. Suddenly, Mac was nearly on his knees with the desperate desire to rewind time seven years. Amanda would be starting kindergarten, her life an open book to him. There were no secrets, no locked doors, no terrifying three days of her disappearance. No criminal investigations. No Rachel Filmore.

“Amanda.” Two months had passed since the harrowing nights she’d been gone, and he wasn’t any closer to finding out why she ran. “Maybe if you talked to me about why you ran—”

“Dad, I’ve told you,” she mumbled.

“I know it was Christie’s idea, but why did you go?” He watched her thin shoulders shrug. He expected that calculated shrug, considering it had been her standard answer for two months.

Why did you run away?

Why are you so sad?

Why won’t you eat?

Why won’t you talk to me?

Frank had told Mac that he needed to push his daughter for answers, that he couldn’t let her silence get the best of him. But staring at the delicate curve of her spine, he wondered how he could push her. She had already suffered so much.

He cleared his throat and put his foot down on one side of a line they rarely crossed. “Is it about Mom?”

There was a long stretch of quiet that Mac filled with wordless prayers that Amanda would talk.

“No, Dad,” she sighed. “Not everything is about Mom.”

“But maybe you saw something, or heard—”

“I didn’t see or hear anything!” she yelled, flipping onto her back. Mac watched the steady stream of tears running from the corner of her eyes into her hair. “I told you I was asleep. I woke up in the hospital, Dad. I already told you I don’t know what happened!”

“Okay, okay.” He took a step closer to the bed, but she immediately flung herself back onto her side.

“Go away, Dad. Just leave me alone.” Her voice was thick with her tears, and he knew that if he left the room she would sob into her pillows, shoving them into her mouth, probably thinking he wouldn’t hear her. He had stood outside her door for countless hours listening to her do that. What am I supposed to do?

He couldn’t believe after all this time it was going to come down to trusting Rachel Filmore. Amanda had to talk to Rachel. It was the only way out of this mess.

I hope someone somewhere is laughing, he thought.

“If you’re not going to talk to me, Amanda, I wish that you would talk to Rachel.”

“I’ll talk to that woman, I’ll do whatever you want,” she whispered, and even though she was probably lying, he felt a small measure of relief. She’d never said she would talk to Frank.

“Everything’s going to be all right.” He wasn’t sure at this point if that was an out-and-out lie, but he felt better saying it.

“Whatever,” she breathed, her voice tense with sarcasm.

“I’ll call and cancel the tutor.” At the moment he couldn’t force anything else on his daughter.

“Okay.” Her breath shuddered, her thin shoulders shook.

“Do you want to go into town with me, get some chicken at Ladd’s?” Fried chicken used to be a safe bet for his daughter, but these days with her uncertain appetite and mood, he could never be sure. Please eat. Please come eat with me.

“I’m not hungry,” she whispered.

“I’ll go get some for later, then,” he said, unwilling to give up the hope that sometime soon she was going to eat.

“Okay,” she said, her voice muffled.

See? He wanted to shout. See how normal we are?

He lingered for a moment, wanting so badly to have her look at him and smile. She gave him nothing but the cold chill of her silence.

Mac turned and caught sight of the glittery ladybug stickers that she had stuck on the plate of her light switch. She had gotten those stickers for her seventh birthday and put them all over the house. That was a million years ago. He had scraped those stickers off his car, the tractor, off the fridge, a couple of windows. He still had one on his alarm clock. He smiled as he touched them on his way out, those faded but still sparkling reminders of the girl she used to be.

A while later Mac parked the truck in front of Moore’s hardware store in the middle of downtown. The Main Street Café, where Rachel’s mom worked and Mac never ate for obvious reasons, stood next door, and the Dairy Dream ice cream parlor was a few doors down.

Maybe he’d get a pint of rocky road for later.

He smiled ruefully. He kept trying to get his daughter to gain some weight, but he was the only one whose pants were getting tighter.

“Hey, Mac!” Nick Weber, his insurance salesman, waved at him from where he sat with his family on one of the benches outside the Dairy Dream. “You got time next week to come down to the office, look over some of those papers?”

“No problem,” Mac shouted back, and Nick raised his vanilla cone in acknowledgement.

Mac was upping his insurance policies on everything. Fire. Life. Car. Everything was fragile in his life. Nothing was resistant to destruction, and if something happened to him or to the farm, he needed to be sure Amanda would be all right.

“Excuse me,” he murmured, squeezing between the few people standing in line at the movie theater.

The Royal had been standing for more than fifty years. He’d seen his first movie there—Bambi. He and Rachel had seen a million movies at the theater, though always through the back door without paying. And before she ran away, he and Amanda had seen their fair share there, too.

The cyclical way things worked in small towns appealed to him. He checked the marquee to see if the feature was something he could take Amanda to, but the Now Showing poster was for an R-rated movie.

Mac had never felt the way that Rachel did about this town. It had never been a trap for him. He’d always figured his life didn’t need much more than what this little town could offer him.

He’d tried to see the potholes and the bougainvillea and the families differently, as something bad, something to escape, the way Rachel had. But somehow it still all seemed right.

The scent of fried chicken led Mac to Ladd’s front door.