CHAPTER 42
Melanie Garrett put down the phone and sat at the kitchen table nibbling at breakfast. Amanda would be down soon and off to school, but this was an interesting conversation, she thought to herself. She began to thoughtlessly twirl a Hermes silk scarf through her hand. Memorial Day was approaching, so she decided she’d go with a flashy pattern of red, white, and blue for her matching linen jumpsuit.
She pulled the material through one hand and then retraced the route through the other while staring absently through the sliding glass door and across the recently stained deck. A steaming cup of coffee sat next to her elbow. She was looking at nothing in particular, just lost in thought.
“Who was that on the phone?” Nina asked.
“Principal Rugsdale. He just got back from some Southeast principals’ convention in Raleigh. He was extending his condolences about Zach. Why are you here so early on a Monday morning?”
Nina stared at her a moment. “Needed an update. Lot’s going on. Dan Rugsdale? What’s he care?”
“Not sure he does. Maybe he was just being nice.”
“Is that all?”
“What else could there be?” Melanie’s eyes remained fixed on the horizon.
“Sounded like you were on longer with him, that’s all.”
“You worry too much.”
Changing the topic, Nina said, “I checked out last night when you said Amanda probably wasn’t going to come by. No point in paying for an extra day.”
“Bree picked her up.”
“Bree? That slut?”
“Don’t ask. She got in last night after spending the night with her Saturday. She’s acting strange.”
Nina considered the comment and asked, “How much time do we have left?” She was leaning against the center island of the kitchen holding a dish towel in her hand.
“You know as well as I do when Amanda’s birthday is, Mama. We’ve got less than a week.”
“That’s not going be a problem, is it?”
“Depends on how everything plays out.”
Nina sat next to her daughter in an adjacent chair, resting her wrinkled arm on the reflective sheen of the recently polished kitchen table. She was wearing a sleeveless chartreuse top with bone-white Capri pants and matching straw sandals. She stared at her arm, then covered it quickly with her hand. If only there was plastic surgery for arms.
“Well, this is what it’s all about. You know what they say. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’ The question is, are you tough enough? Can you look her in the eyes and do what you need to do?”
“I haven’t had any problems so far, Mama.”
“That was child’s play, literally. You remember what they said to Herschel Walker when he finally joined a real football team? ‘Welcome to the NFL.’ You’ve got a half a million dollars from that worthless son of a bitch sitting out there. He made it hard on you in life, and now he’s making it hard on you when he’s dead.”
“Amanda has gone to this shrink. Then she went up to the house. She was required to do those things, and she’s done them. I’ll talk to her before she goes to school this morning, and we’ll get the Army guys back over here to sign all the paperwork.”
“Before her birthday?”
“Before her birthday.”
Nina leaned back into her chair and nodded in approval. Over the years she had nudged and cajoled when necessary. Other times she had intervened and been more direct, more forthright, like she did at Riley Dwyer’s office. She was raised in the same swamps in which Francis Marion had earned his “Swamp Fox” moniker during a time when blacks weren’t slaves, but they might as well have been. Real men beat their wives, screwed the “help,” and sometimes slept with their daughters. The tough girls escaped, some with the scars, some without.
Nina Hastings could be someone’s best friend and an instant later be working a serrated edge into their back. A vacuous narcissism dominated her psyche, and some of her theatrics were Oscar-worthy. Over time she had developed the street fighter’s knack of recognizing a threat and either establishing an alliance or swiftly cutting its throat. Some of her instinct was primal, as if she’d been raised in a jungle of beasts that wanted to take what she had gathered. All that mattered to Nina Hastings was that she got hers, and she kept it.
Agile enough to socialize and win key acquaintances to her fold, her veneer would shed as quickly as snakeskin when a threat presented itself. Moreover, she could seize an opportunity better than any battlefield general, exploiting her daughter and granddaughter like infantrymen sent as fodder to enemy trenches, to achieve her victory.
“Hey, Mom,” Amanda said, sitting down to the table with her book bag over her shoulder. Her hair was still wet from the shower.
This was Nina’s cue to melt away. Never be near the conflict, if it was to develop. Amanda glanced at her grandmother’s visage disappearing into the dining room. Amanda grabbed two pieces of toast from a plate on the table and took ample bites.
“Good morning, Amanda.” Her mother hesitated. “Are we going to talk about this weekend?”
She swallowed hard and said with a partially full mouth, “Well, Jake’s in jail, and I’m kinda freaked out right now.”
“Jail? Why would Jake be in jail?”
“Something happened to Miss Dwyer and to Dad’s house—”
“Who’s house?”
“My dad’s house, Mom. You know, your ex-husband?”
Amanda had rarely used the term “Dad” in the presence of her mother or grandmother because of the reaction the utterance would create. He may be your biological father, but he’s no Dad.
“Don’t talk to me that way, Amanda. We’ve got something more important to talk about right now.”
“Wait a second.” Amanda held her hands up as if warding off an attacker. “My boyfriend’s in jail and my father’s house burned down, maybe, and there’s something more important?”
“What can you do about the house, if indeed it burned?”
“I can find out what happened, first of all. There was a lot of important…”
“What? There was a lot of important what? What was in that bastard’s house that you want?”
“What is up with you? The man’s dead and you don’t have the decency to talk about him with any respect whatsoever?”
“Where is this coming from? What about the poem you wrote? What about all the crap for the past ten years?”
“You wrote that poem, Mom. I submitted it.”
“That’s not true.”
Mother and daughter squared off across the kitchen table. Nina’s presence permeated the house. This was the classic showdown. The moment of truth had come. Whose side was Amanda on? Was she in the fold or straying from the flock? This may not have been the sordid backfield of a Moncks Corner farm, where nefarious deeds occurred out of sight and out of memory, but it was the same essence — primary greed being advanced at all costs.
Amanda slumped in her chair. “Okay, whatever. Can you just help me with Jake?”
“You need to get to school. Your little excursion last week isn’t helping matters, but we’ll talk about that later.”
“What matters?”
“Principal Rugsdale called me this morning. He’s wondering what’s up with you.”
“I’m cool with him, Mom.”
Melanie paused a moment, considering the comment. She decided to leave it alone. “I’ll call Jake’s mother and see what’s going on.”
“Thank you.”
“That’s more like it. Now we need to get those papers signed that the Army men brought by.”
“What’s the rush?” Amanda asked, shifting from one line of thought suddenly to another. A distant alarm rang in her mind, perhaps indicating the acorn indeed does not drop too far from the tree.