Chapter 3 #2
Cole glanced at his mama, but Ellen didn’t meet his gaze as her smile tightened.
The lie was thin, Jocelyn knew. Uncle Joe was Nan’s much younger brother, and he was a well-known deadbeat drunkard.
Nan and Joe didn’t speak, so he wouldn’t even know Jocelyn was there, let alone that she planned to visit him.
If she even did. It wasn't likely he'd have any answers for her.
“I’m sure he’ll be happy to see you,” Ellen said with false cheer.
Cole snorted and folded his arms across his chest.
“Steaks incoming!” a voice bellowed from the front of the house.
Jocelyn turned when John came shuffling into the kitchen, his big frame eating up space. With all four of them in there, it was beginning to feel small.
“Jocelyn!” John hollered, shoving the grocery bags into Cole’s arms so he could scoop her up. The bear hug eased the hollow ache inside her that her father’s absence had carved out long ago.
He released her, grinning as he looked her up and down. “All grown up!”
“Thanks to you,” she replied.
He scoffed, waving her off.
Behind him, Cole brought the groceries to Ellen.
“John Hauser, what on earth is this?” Ellen asked, rifling through the first sack. She lifted the tub of ice cream and turned to look at her husband with a brow raised.
Pink crept up the back of John’s neck. “We’re celebrating, aren’t we?” He shot Jocelyn a wink, and Cole shook his head, smirking from behind him.
“You just had that appointment with Doc.” She wagged her finger in his face as he crowded close to her, pushing Cole out of their corner and toward Jocelyn.
John’s hands landed on Ellen’s hips, and he leaned down to kiss her. “Special occasions, El.”
She squinted at him. “Special occasion, my foot. You said the same thing last Thursday when you lost twenty dollars to Jimmy Ray.”
Cole settled closer to Jocelyn, an amused smile dancing along his mouth.
“I didn’t buy the pie!” John argued. “That was all Sissy’s doin’.”
Ellen slapped at his chest. “And who forced you to eat it?”
“I was bein’ polite.”
“Pop’s supposed to cut down on sugar,” Cole murmured.
Jocelyn nodded, expecting as much, but it was hard to look away from the easy affection that bounced between John and Ellen, aching at the what-might-have-been of a scene like that.
“Cole, go on and pour Jocelyn a glass of lemonade and settle in the front room ‘til supper’s ready,” Ellen suggested, her reproachful look still directed toward her husband.
“Please, Ellen, let me help,” Jocelyn offered, though Cole pushed away from the wall and walked across the kitchen to do his mama’s bidding.
“Oh, no, Honey. You just relax,” Ellen said, handing the bag of steaks to John so he could work on seasoning them for the grill.
“But—”
“She doesn’t abide arguin’,” Cole said softly as he poured the lemonade.
Ellen turned to pat his cheek affectionately before she set to work on whatever fixings she’d planned for dinner.
Jocelyn couldn’t help feeling like Ellen was dividing them this way on purpose, and the pinch at the edges of Cole’s mouth said he suspected it, too. He still managed a gentle smile as he tipped his head for Jocelyn to follow him across the hall, two glasses of lemonade in his hands.
The floor complained as they shuffled along through the wide cased opening into the modest living room. A small fireplace sat to the left, its mantel crowded by snapshots of memory, frames overlapping each other so it was hard to differentiate any single image.
One picture stood out, though, drawing her forward.
The last one she’d sent several years back, not long after she’d graduated college.
Tilting her head, she took in the self-conscious smile, the uncertainty that plagued her twenty-two-year-old self obvious in her face. So much and so little had changed.
There were several of Cole through the years. His rebellious stage, not smiling at the camera, his curly hair long and swept across his forehead, hiding half his face. His high school graduation, a picture of him in front of the restaurant and bar he now owned.
Cole set the glasses on the coffee table and settled on a big leather couch the color of butterscotch candy. The weight of his gaze was hard to ignore.
“It’s an honor to have my photo up here with all these family memories,” she said, desperate to fill the appraising silence.
He leaned into the couch, stretching his arm across the back in a casual way. Very little in his contained stillness seemed casual, though. “Been a picture of you in that frame since that day.”
She didn’t know if he expected her to react to that or to the reminder of what happened twenty years ago—if he expected a reaction at all.
Was he bothered that her picture was included with all the images that cluttered the shelf?
It was hard to read him, and it unsettled her.
She thought maybe there was a question he wanted to ask, but he didn’t voice it.
“It was an impulse,” she said, forced into the confession by his silence. “Sending my picture in my thank you letter to your dad.”
His eyebrows shifted up a fraction, but he said nothing to prompt her. Another wave of uncertainty danced through her.
“He deserved it—my gratitude. But I also had a lot of feelings back then.” Still do, she thought.
“And I didn’t have anywhere to put them.
Moving away from everything I’d known after losing my mama like that made me latch onto whatever I could.
Writing letters to your parents helped me get my bearings. ”
The words poured out, more than she’d meant to share, but she stopped before she admitted the most embarrassing part to Cole: that she’d briefly developed a crush on his dad.
It was a silly thing a kid in elementary school might do, and certainly understandable from an adult perspective.
But it was still uncomfortable to acknowledge that was part of what prompted her to write.
The memory of being cradled against the strong, broad chest while she screamed for her mama was what pushed her to stuff that picture into the envelope.
The blue eyes that had held such sympathy, the way he’d said, “You’ll be alright, baby girl,” in that masculine southern drawl, the faintest molasses in his baritone, had solidified her life-long admiration, though she’d moved on from the childish crush.
“Ma’s always enjoyed your letters,” Cole said. His eyes were so much the same as his dad’s—mournful azure pools that seemed to pierce down to the marrow. A smile tugged one side of his mouth up. “She talks about you often.”
Warmth filled Jocelyn’s chest, and a twin bloom of anxiety formed in her stomach.
Although she cared deeply for his parents, and maybe by extension him, she knew that what she was doing here would ruffle some feathers.
Maybe even theirs. But it was worth burning bridges if it meant getting answers, and she could finally put her mama’s memory to rest. Twenty years was a long time to wait for the truth, and too long for those responsible to live scot-free.
Cole’s gaze sharpened as if he could sense something hidden behind her expression.
Maybe it was in her body language. She was twisting the high school ring that’d belonged to her mama around her right ring finger.
It was one of few things Jocelyn had of hers after the fire destroyed everything else, and that was mostly because it had been at Nan’s house, abandoned after her father had broken her mama’s heart years before.
Jocelyn wore a pair of her earrings, too. She’d brought everything she still had of her mama’s, hoping those few items would help tether her to the town Bonnie Murphy had grown up and died in.
Jocelyn’s heart started its rattling again as she and Cole stared at each other. Her mind screamed that he knew what she was up to, that he thought she was a horrible person for wanting to stir things up, that he might hinder her, or that he’d hate her.
It wasn’t until Ellen came into the room with a bowl in each hand that Cole’s intense gaze left her.
“Steaks’ll be a minute yet,” Ellen said, smiling at Jocelyn. “So here’s a little somethin’ to tide us over.”
At first, it seemed like she was oblivious to the string of tension in the room until Jocelyn caught the searing look she sent Cole’s way. It only served to pluck that taut string, making it sing discordantly, and Jocelyn shifted from the discomfort.
It’s not about them, she reminded herself, even as a part of her shied away from saying something that might ruin what she and Ellen had forged over the years.
Jocelyn had been without a mother this long.
What difference did it make if she ruined a surrogate bond that had only existed on paper anyway?
Despite Ellen’s look and the arrival of snacks, no one said a thing. Ellen cleared her throat a couple of times, and Jocelyn’s skin started to hurt from the pressure of the unspoken.
“Gotta let those steaks rest a minute,” John said as he lumbered in, heavy as a bear in boots.
It’d been years, but Jocelyn remembered the way he moved, how it felt to be carried by someone that big and capable.
His head tilted as he took in the coiled silence that enveloped the room. “Cole, you been runnin’ your mouth?”
It sounded exactly like an accusation. Enough to make Jocelyn look between them, but Cole didn’t even flinch. He was still staring at her.
“Jocelyn?” John turned to her since Cole didn’t seem to plan on responding.
A debate raged inside her. She’d already lied once, even if they had known from the get-go that she wasn’t there to visit Uncle Joe.
Ellen and John watched her now, too, but with benign interest. It was Cole’s intensity she couldn’t shake, though. His eyes blazed along her face like he could read every thought that went through her mind there, and he was just waiting for that shoe to drop.
“You deserve to know, I suppose,” she said, resigned.
Ellen sucked in a breath, folding her hands in her lap like they were about to pray for the meal. John’s brows lifted, but there was no worry in his expression.
The bound energy that buzzed like some kind of frequency off of Cole wound tighter, urgently buffeting Jocelyn. She fought an urge to put her hands up as a deflection, reminding herself the onslaught wasn’t physical and that she wasn’t responsible for how they might take the news.
“The real reason I’m in Cedar Hollow is because I’m looking into my mama’s death.” The words, spoken so matter-of-factly, bolstered her. “It’s always felt like something wasn’t right, and I want to know why.”
Ellen and John exchanged a tight look she didn’t miss but Cole did because he was too intent on her.
But that look, the silent communication in it, twisted something in her chest. “And I want you to know because I’m going to be digging deep, might stir people up. I can’t abide the secrets.”
John’s big hand rubbed the back of his neck as his gaze shifted away, and oh, that twisting got more painful.
“So if there’s something you’re hiding,” she said, forcing the words over the pain, wishing they weren’t necessary, “I’m going to find out about it.”
Cole sprang up from the couch. “The hell’s that supposed to mean?”
“Cole,” Ellen said, her hand shooting toward him.
Jocelyn didn’t look away from Cole. “It means nothing if no one is hiding anything.”
He cocked his head, jaw tight. “Are you accusing my parents of somethin’?” There was anger in that question, but also something else. Disbelief. Betrayal. Maybe even a little fear.
Jocelyn lifted her chin but was unable to keep from folding her arms across her chest as if it might ward him off.
“Cole, please,” Ellen said again.
John was quiet and still.
“Ma, you’re hearing this, right?” Cole’s frustration filled the space, burned Jocelyn’s skin. He turned to Ellen, and then his whole body clenched as he shifted his attention to his father. “Pop?”
John didn’t respond, didn’t look at him. His breath came heavier than it should’ve, his silence answer enough.
The disappointment dropped like a boulder in her stomach.
The warning had been a courtesy, but she hadn’t expected it to go this direction.
It shouldn’t have been surprising. Too many times, she’d experienced the letdown from those closest to her, and a part of her knew there had to be something there.
John had been the perfect paragon of heroism.
Of course he couldn’t stay on that pedestal she’d set him on.
She swallowed the urge to cry. “I’ll get out of y’all’s way,” she murmured as the Hausers continued to breathe life into the tense moment between them.
No one moved a muscle as she rushed through the entryway and back into the warmth of the afternoon.