Chapter Three
I KNEW SOMETHING was wrong before I got the car in park, because Brenda was running, and Brenda didn’t run.
She came out the side door of the clubhouse with both hands over her mouth and headed straight for the trees at the back of the property, not slowing down, not looking where she was going.
I sat there half in and half out of the car with my bag still over my shoulder, trying to make sense of what I was seeing.
Then Horse came out after her.
That was when I knew it was bad.
Horse didn’t run either. He was a big man who moved at his own speed and expected the rest of the world to deal with it, but he was almost jogging after her, his face wrong in a way I’d never seen. I dropped my bag onto the seat and stepped into his path before I’d even decided what I was doing.
“Horse. Hey. What happened.”
“Amy, honey, not now.” He tried to go around me.
I moved with him.
I might’ve been a third his size, but he couldn’t get past me without physically moving me, and we both knew he wasn’t going to do that, so I stayed exactly where I was.
That stopped him.
He dragged a hand down his beard and looked toward the trees, and whatever he’d been about to say to get rid of me seemed to leave him.
“Devil sat her down tonight,” he said. His drawl came slower than usual. “Been puttin’ it off. We all been puttin’ it off, tryin’ to be sure before we—” He stopped and started over. “That fella she’s been seein’. Montgomery. Tom Montgomery.”
Something in his face made my stomach drop.
“He’s federal, darlin’. DEA. Has been from the start. Every time he’s been comin’ around, takin’ her to supper, sittin’ with her...” His jaw tightened. “He was workin’ us. Usin’ her to get close.”
For a second I just looked at him.
Then all the little things came at once. Brenda wearing the good perfume she only put on when she was going somewhere with Tom. Humming while she worked. Telling me two weeks ago, almost embarrassed by how happy she was, that maybe she’d finally found a good one.
“She thought he was—”
Horse looked away.
“I know what she thought.” Horse’s jaw worked.
And there it was, under the anger, the thing everybody at the compound knew and nobody said out loud, that Horse had had fifteen years to be the one who showed up when he said he would, and hadn’t, and had watched some man in a golf shirt come along and do it instead, had hated it, had run his mouth about it, and now the golf shirt was a badge and that was so much worse than jealousy that he didn’t know where to put himself.
“I gotta go get her, Amy. She ran off toward the water and it’s near dark and she ain’t thinkin’ straight. ”
“No.” I put my hand flat on his chest. Didn’t push. Just left it there. “Let me.”
“Amy — ”
“Horse. Let me.” I looked up at him, and I made my voice come down soft, because I understood something right then that I don’t think he did.
“If you go out there right now, she’s gonna have to hold herself together for you.
She’s gonna feel you standing there being everything she couldn’t have while she cries about the man who turned out to be nothing.
You’ll make it worse just by being you. You know that. Some part of you knows that.”
He looked at me for a long moment, before his eyes went to the trees again.
“Yeah,” he said finally, rough. “Alright. Yeah.” He stepped back. “You get cold out there, or she… you holler. I’ll be right here on the porch. I ain’t goin’ inside.”
“I know you’re not.”
I left him there and went out across the grass toward the trees, it was getting dark fast, and I found her at the bottom of the yard where the property ran down to the marsh.
She wasn’t running anymore. She’d stopped at the old split-rail fence and folded up over it with her arms crossed on the top rail and her face down in them, and she was crying the way people cry when they think nobody’s coming, no sound to it, just shaking with every breath.
I didn’t say anything at first. I just came up beside her and put my hand on her shoulder, light, the way she’d done to me about a thousand times when I first came here and couldn’t stand to be touched but couldn’t stand to be alone either.
She knew that hand. She leaned into it without lifting her head.
“I feel like such a damn fool,” she got out. Her accent went thick when she cried, all the vowels gone soft and wide. “Amy, sugar, I feel like the biggest fool God ever made.”
“You’re not.”
“I am. I really am.” She lifted her head then, and her face was streaked and swollen, mascara and all, and she laughed at herself in that awful way that’s worse than crying.
“You know what I did? I left my things at his place. Little by little. My good robe on the back of his bathroom door, my coffee in his cabinet ’cause he only ever bought that awful instant, the book I was readin’ on his nightstand.
” Her voice broke clean in half. “I was movin’ myself in a piece at a time, thinkin’, thinkin’ this is it, this is the one, I finally get the regular kind of thing other women get.
Layin’ my robe out in the house of a man who was writin’ up reports on us the entire time.
On me. Everything I told him. Every little thing. ”
“I am fifty-three years old.” She scrubbed the back of her hand under her eyes. “I’ve been made a fool of by better-lookin’ men than Tom Montgomery and lived through every damn one of ’em. I thought I was past it. That’s what gets me. I really thought I’d finally found a good one.”
She looked out over the water.
“First man I ever had that showed up when he said he would.”
I didn’t have anything for that.
Then she said, quieter, “And he was a lie. The one that showed up was the lie.”
“That’s on him,” I said. “Every bit of that is on him. Not you.”
I heard everything in that. I heard the man she wasn’t naming, the one back up on that porch who never had shown up, not the way she needed.
I heard twenty years in it. And I did the only thing there was to do, which was not try to fix a single bit of it, because none of it could be fixed and she didn’t need me to pretend otherwise.
I just moved in and put my arms around her, and she turned and grabbed onto me hard, this woman who’d found me at my lowest, and never once asked me to be anything but a mess for as long as I needed to be, and I held her up the way she’d held me, and I let her cry into my hair, ruin my shirt and I didn’t say hush and I didn’t say it’s okay, because it wasn’t, and she deserved somebody who wouldn’t lie to her even to make her feel better.
“I’ve got you,” I said instead, into her shoulder. “I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere. You hear me? I’ve got you.”
She cried harder, which I’d learned by then meant it was landing.
Over her shoulder, up the long dark slope of the yard, I could just make out Horse on the porch, standing exactly where he said he’d be, not coming, watching the two of us down at the fence like a man standing guard over the one thing he’d long since decided he wasn’t allowed to have.
I knew a little something about that. More than I wanted to.
We stayed there until the worst of the crying passed and her weight stopped leaning so hard into mine. I don’t know how long it took. Long enough for the last of the daylight to go and the bugs to get loud around the marsh, long enough for my shoulder to start aching from holding her up.
I didn’t mind.
She’d held me up plenty.
When she finally pulled back, I wiped under one of her eyes with my thumb and showed her the black streak.
“You’re a mess.”
She sniffed. “Shut up.”
“There’s my Brenda.”
That got the smallest laugh out of her.
It wasn’t much, but I’d take it.
I got her turned around, finally, and walked her back up toward the clubhouse with my arms around her, and Horse straightened off the porch rail when he saw us coming, didn’t say a word, and held the door.