Chapter Twelve #2
Benny checked the time on his phone. “Hour’s up.
We can all go. Grady, help Pearl hand out costumes and set up schedules for fittings.
” He gestured toward the third door, which turned out to be the town’s costume department, to Beau’s disappointment.
“Tilly, you spread the word. Starting tomorrow, we begin playing our parts. We want to have everything in place and well-rehearsed for when Sheik Ali lands.”
The party began to break up, but Beau found he was in no hurry to leave. Belle would be upset for sure, and he had it on good authority that his skillset was somewhat lacking when it came to supporting unhappy women. The problem was that he liked her, and he really wanted to be there for her.
“Maybe you should let me talk to Belle first,” Jayce said to him, with the cocky self-assurance of a man who’d never had a woman go feral on him.
“What are you planning to say to her? That you knew Mavis was her grandmother all along but chose to keep that bit of intelligence to yourself?” Beau asked.
“Beau’s right,” Tilly said, jumping in with her unasked-for opinion. “He should be the one to handle damage control for us since he didn’t know anything about it.”
Tilly had somehow gotten the idea that he was helping them out, but he let that slide.
He’d check on Belle and see how she was handling the family reunion. One of the many things he liked about her was her complete lack of drama.
She was going to be fine.
*
Belle
“I ran away when I was a teenager to see what the world was like. I came back because I love it here. Well,” Mavis amended, “and also because I was pregnant.”
Mavis had warned Belle that her mother would be a big disappointment to her. Now she claimed that she and Benny hadn’t told Belle that they were her family, too, because they hadn’t wanted her grandmother and great-grandfather to be disappointments to her, as well.
Shanda’s birth father was a bull rider Mavis met while waitressing in one of Montana’s small circuit towns. She’d traveled with him for a few months. When she found out she was pregnant, they parted ways.
“He wasn’t ready to be a father, and I discovered I needed mine. So, I came home.”
Shanda had been a handful from the beginning.
“She started running away when she was thirteen. The day she turned eighteen, she left home for good.” Mavis’s mouth pokered up.
“One thing I’ll say for her—she always knew how to get what she wanted, especially from men, and she didn’t care how she got it.
” Her expression grew sad. “She’s my daughter.
I’ll always love her. But there’s not much about her to like. ”
No, there was not. But Belle would hear Mavis out. She needed to know.
Adam had kept an eye on Belle and her father for Mavis for years.
He visited Nigel in prison shortly after he was arrested and told him that Burning Scrub would take care of Belle on the condition that he had no further contact with her.
Nigel asked only that she be given a good education in return.
“Your father said you were smart, and he was right,” Mavis said proudly.
“We needed a doctor, and you wanted to be one. We engineered things a little bit, getting you into the right schools and programs, but you did the hard work on your own. We planned to tell you everything eventually, but we wanted to give you a chance to get to know us all first. We didn’t want you to feel pressured to stay. ”
Belle tried to keep a fair mind. Her expectations of her mother had never been high, and even though she’d been lied to and shuttled into foster care, getting angry with Mavis wasn’t the answer.
It was too late for that. But her mother’s family wasn’t turning out to be at all what she’d privately hoped for, either. Did no one do normal anymore?
Deep down, she’d smugly believed she was better than the people of Burning Scrub—that because she’d gotten a good education, and didn’t buy into conspiracy theories not backed up by science, she was a level above.
Instead, it turned out she was one of them—and so what if she was? Benny and Mavis did good things with the money they made. She shouldn’t lose sight of that. Kidnappings and tax evasion aside, when it came to family, community, and old-fashioned values, Burning Scrub had it all.
No need to get angry. She could have a home here if she wanted.
But what if she didn’t?
“What about my contract?” she asked, dipping a toe in the waters.
“Nothing about that has changed. You owe us four more years,” Mavis said, proving that grandmother or not, nothing about her had changed, either.
She ran a business. “Four hundred thousand was what we invested in your professional career. We spent that and more making sure you were safe and secure in foster care. We’d heard horror stories and weren’t going to let anything bad happen to you. ”
Belle had no complaints about foster care.
At fourteen, she’d already been self-sufficient.
Other than the night her father sent her away and told her not to come back, she’d worked hard to be a trouble-free roommate and the least burden possible to the people who’d taken her in. They’d been kind enough in return.
Why wouldn’t they? She’d been a paycheck.
But it was too late to begin dwelling on that.
“When can I meet my mother?” she asked, because she wanted it over and done with.
“I suppose there’s no real point in putting it off,” Mavis said, echoing her thoughts.
But Mavis’s lack of enthusiasm plainly stated that no warm reunion was coming, which was okay.
Belle was in no mood for one, either.
*
Belle
Mavis’s house consisted of a combined sitting room and kitchen along the front, with two bedrooms and a bathroom behind. Adam, resigned to his fate but unenthusiastic about it, glowered from a deep wicker chair close to the front door.
The door to one of the bedrooms was open. Inside, next to a narrow bed with a pretty pink quilt that had seen many washings, a slender woman in jeans was rummaging through a half-emptied backpack. She looked up when she heard the front door open.
Belle got a small degree of satisfaction from watching the expression on the face of the woman who gave birth to her shift from indifference to awareness to shock.
Then, with such speed that Belle was caught completely off guard, Shanda Jenkins Forsythe abandoned the backpack and rushed into the front sitting room to grab hold of her hands.
“I’d know you anywhere,” she squealed, squeezing Belle’s fingers.
“We could be twins!” She whirled on her mother.
“How did you find her? Never mind.” She smiled so brilliantly at Adam that he blinked from the sheer force.
“I’m sure you’re to thank.” She spun to Belle. “I’ve been looking for you for years!”
And that, Belle understood, with her stomach tied into tight knots, was the beginning of the lies she was about to be told. Because Belle knew Shanda hadn’t searched for her. If she had, Belle would have been found.
She glanced over at Mavis, and when she saw the look on her face, her own disappointment vanished.
Mavis looked old and sad and tired, with love and resignation rolled into the mix, to prove how messy human emotions could be.
Belle decided then and there that she was not going to add to her newly minted grandmother’s distress and would simply follow her lead.
“Belle is our doctor,” Adam said.
If he had an opinion on Shanda’s sudden appearance, or on Shanda herself, Belle couldn’t tell. He was a hard man to read.
“Come sit with me while I unpack and tell me all about yourself,” Shanda said, dragging Belle into the bedroom, where it was somewhat more private. “What made you decide to become a doctor?”
When Belle picked their conversation apart later, she realized that she’d learned exactly nothing about why her mother had abandoned her husband and daughter.
Shanda had been more interested in learning about Burning Scrub’s theme park business than she was in Belle.
Whenever the subject drifted in that direction, Mavis or Adam intervened.
At the end of an hour Belle had her mother summed up.
She was smart, which came as no surprise, since she was Mavis’s daughter.
She was looking for money and trying to figure out how much she could get, hence all the questions about Burning Scrub’s business endeavors.
And she didn’t like having a daughter Belle’s age, because it made her own age more apparent.
She referred several times to the fact that they looked more like sisters than mother and daughter. Belle didn’t disagree.
But Belle’s head ached from listening to her talk about a beach in Florida where college boys on spring break bought her drinks. Things like that never happened to Belle. She’d been the college girl who boys copied class notes from before they went off to party with girls who were more fun.
She came to the conclusion that Mavis and Benny really had done the best for her they could, mostly because they didn’t have a whole lot to work with, and it was hard to hang on to any resentment toward them.
Except.
Except they’d managed to keep her so protected from the world that they might as well have brought her to Burning Scrub at fourteen. Her foster homes. Her scholarships. Her summer camps … she’d been groomed for this role, even if they’d meant well.
And she didn’t like it.
She was not going to let this new knowledge define her, however. She knew who she was. She was the same person this afternoon that she’d been this morning.
Boring. Average.
A little angrier, perhaps.
By the time she entered her home, it was closing in on ten o’clock. She leaned against the inside of the door and let the peace and quiet soak in. Then, she stripped down to her pink yoga pants and black tank top and hung up her costume.
A small noise told her that Beau was in the sitting room they used as a library, and she went to find him.