Chapter Six
Mimi Stone sat at her small kitchen table with a warm cup of tea between her palms and a faraway look in her hazel eyes.
Moonlight peeked through her café-style curtains.
The house was silent, save for the light snore emanating from the small family room where Ted had fallen asleep on the couch.
She wondered how her life had found such an uncomfortable path.
It seemed like just yesterday she and Kara were looking for prom dresses and talking about the great life that awaited her only daughter after high school.
She’d been so sure Kara would have a carefree life, eventually marry a wonderful, loving man.
She’d thought that man was Daryl when they’d married.
She had hoped Kara would have an easier, more stable life than she’d had.
She sighed. Those days were so long gone; they felt as if they had happened to someone else, that she was simply an onlooker to a stranger’s life.
The feeling had become commonplace for her, especially when she was alone with her thoughts in the dark of night.
The sound of the community siren broke her thoughts, drawing her attention outside.
The siren sounded each time the fire station was alerted to a call.
Cellular service in the small town had proven unreliable, and several years earlier the siren system had been engaged.
Many residents complained—Mimi never did.
She accepted it as she’d accepted all other facets of her life. It was what it was.
“Hi hon, you okay?” Ted sauntered into the kitchen, startling Mimi. His dark hair was askew and sleep clouded his eyes. “Did she get her stuff?”
Her fingertips pressed against the porcelain cup. “Tomorrow. Her car’s in the shop.” Mimi watched him slump into the chair across from her and run his hand down his tired face. “She’ll get it, don’t worry. She’s working really ha—”
“Yeah, we all work really hard. I’ll get Daryl to pick it up for her.”
“Ted,” she began, then softened her voice. “I don’t think she wants him to pick it up.” She repositioned herself in the chair. A flush heated her neck.
Ted stood and the chair scraped against the floor.
“Yeah, well I don’t wannit in my rec room.
” He stretched, his paunch of a stomach strained against his white cotton undershirt.
“We pick up all her slack, Mim. We’re always there to pick up the pieces.
First she had to stay here, then she left her stuff here. ”
“She’s going through a separation.” Same conversation, different day. Mimi turned away from him, focusing on a lone star in the dark sky.
He touched her shoulder and sighed. “Okay, okay. I just wanna get my house back, that’s all.
” Ted looked down, then brought his eyes back up and held Mimi’s gaze.
“Is it such a bad thing to want some alone time with you, a little more of your attention? I’ve done pretty well as a stepdad, haven’t I?
But Mimi, it’s you I want to spend my time with. ”
Mimi lowered her face in her hands, wishing she could cry.
Tears wouldn’t come. She was numb. She and Ted had been together for thirteen years.
She had never understood the tension between Kara and Ted, and she’d accepted that she never would.
That didn’t stop her from wishing she could find a way to fix whatever was broken between them.
Mimi had met Ted a few months after returning to Williamsport, and she’d fallen in love with his certitude about life, and the way he’d stepped in as a provider, and eventually, a husband.
As the years progressed, tension mounted between Ted and Kara.
At first Mimi had thought he was just trying to pull her out of her shell.
“She isn’t like normal kids,” he’d said, stating she was disengaged, an outsider, untrusting.
He progressed from urging her to get involved with kids at school to practically pushing her into marrying Daryl.
Mimi was stuck between anger at her husband for pushing Kara so hard—though she agreed about wanting Kara to marry Daryl—and protection of her daughter.
Though if she were being honest with herself, she’d have to admit she had failed in protecting Kara for most of her life—not from the egregious things in life, but from the emotional pain that scarred invisibly.
“You comin’ to bed?” he asked, rubbing her shoulder.
Mimi let out a breath. “In a sec.”
Mimi listened as Ted left the room, then waited for the click of the bathroom door closing. She picked up her cell phone and texted Kara. “Sorry about earlier. Meet for lunch?”
Mimi checked her cell phone for the fifth time since waking up at six thirty.
Still no message. She had worried the day would come when Kara would no longer be forgiving, that she had tainted their relationship too deeply with the lies she’d told to protect her.
At what point did a daughter turn away from her mother?
When she thought her mother had allowed her child’s father to leave them without leaving them any money, forcing Mimi to go back to work and Kara to essentially raise herself?
When her mother remarried and didn’t stand up for her own flesh and blood?
Mimi lowered herself into a kitchen chair.
Or maybe, she thought, it was when her mother made her feel low for leaving her husband.
Daryl wasn’t Al. Mimi’s body began to tremble.
Kara’s father, Al, had left them when Kara was just six, and Kara hadn’t trusted anyone since the day she’d come home from school to find her mother, puffy eyed and exhausted, holding the letter her father had left on the kitchen table.
Mimi wrapped her arms around her stomach.
Maybe she’d already lost Kara. An unfamiliar quaking began in her chest: rising, quiet cries as tears tumbled down her cheeks.