Since She Went Away(53)
But her eyes opened wide.
“Tell me you didn’t,” she said.
“I lost my cool. It just came out. I don’t want people to think the worst of you. I deserve a share of the blame.”
A flush rose in her cheeks, and it wasn’t from the wine. She was pissed. She slammed the wineglass down on the table, making the liquid slosh up the side like waves on a storm-tossed ocean. Jared was surprised it hadn’t broken. “Dammit, Jared. I asked you never to say anything about that. To anybody. I lied to the police. Do you understand that? I told the police a different story to keep you out of it. I said I was just a dumb-ass who was running late because I couldn’t find my keys and my phone. I could get in a lot of trouble for that. And then once that starts to spread and everybody knows . . .”
“It was just Ursula and a few of her * friends.”
She gave him a withering look. “‘Just Ursula’? The biggest pain in the ass in town.”
“I thought you liked her. You felt sympathy for her.”
“I do. And I liked her more when she was a sweet kid. Not a nasty teenager. And those other kids . . . They could tell their parents or anybody else—”
“Okay. I get it. I’m sorry.” He held his hands out like a televangelist beseeching the crowd. “You know, most parents would like it if their kid stood up for them. And most parents would like it if their kid decided not to tell a lie.”
His mom studied him for a moment, her cheeks even redder. “I’m done with you for the night.”
She grabbed her wineglass and left the kitchen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Jenna and Jared circled each other warily that weekend. Neither one mentioned the tension between them, and neither one apologized. They both did their own thing and passed by each other like roommates, answering each other’s questions with grunts, politely informing the other person where they would be.
Jenna spent most of her Saturday with Sally. In the afternoon they went shopping at the small mall in Hawks Mill. Sally needed to buy a dress for a wedding she was attending, and she wanted to bring Jenna along as an extra set of eyes.
“You’re younger than me,” Sally said. “You can keep me from looking like the bride’s grandmother.”
That evening, they met up with some friends from their book club at a Mexican restaurant. They all ordered giant margaritas and fried ice cream, and Jenna made a point of not saying anything about Ian or Celia or Reena Huffman. To their great credit, her friends didn’t bring it up either.
While they drank and talked and laughed, Jenna was also aware of where Jared was. He told her that morning that he and Syd and Mike were going to a movie—some horror movie they’d all been hearing about for weeks—and then they were heading back to Mike’s house to play video games and hang out. Jenna knew Mike’s parents and had been to their house on numerous occasions to pick Jared up or drop him off. They were attentive parents, and even though Mike was already developing into a bit of a smarmy smart-ass, she trusted them to keep an eye on the boys while she went out.
She told Jared, as she always did, to text her if he went anywhere else.
Jenna returned home around eight thirty and started reading a book. Her reading habits had changed as soon as Celia disappeared. She used to read mysteries and thrillers, books about serial killers and disappearances, but she quickly found she couldn’t stand to experience those kinds of stories anymore. She’d taken to reading historical romance novels, dramas that ended with the man and the woman riding off into the sunset together, all their troubles behind them. Just a few months earlier she would have laughed if someone suggested she read something like The Stranger Carried Me Away or The Knave Who Stole My Heart. That night, waiting for Jared to come home, she read the last fifty pages of one of them and ended up getting a little teary-eyed when the hero and heroine finally got together.
“God,” she said out loud, “what’s become of me?”
Jared returned home just after nine. He told her that Mike’s dad had given him a ride, and then he started for his room as if he couldn’t wait to get away from her.
“Do you want to watch a movie or something?” Jenna asked.
“I already watched one today,” he said, and kept on going.
His words had some bite to them, but Jenna shrugged them off. She knew she couldn’t take a teenager’s mouthing off personally, and she remembered the awful things she’d said to her parents while she was growing up. What goes around comes around, her mother always told her. Someday you’ll have kids of your own.
Indeed.
She went to bed early.
She spent Sunday cleaning while Jared studied in his room. He emerged from his sanctuary from time to time, helping with the laundry and carrying the garbage out to the curb, but otherwise they remained in their mutually imposed détente.
Jenna knew she shouldn’t have lied to the police. And she shouldn’t have asked Jared to keep a secret. She never wanted either one of them, especially Jared, to get into the habit of lying, even about the most inconsequential thing. But she made her decision early on and felt she had to live with it. She wanted to protect Jared from the kind of scrutiny she had endured in the wake of Celia’s disappearance. Maybe he’d thank her for it later.
On Sunday night, after the laundry and the cleaning were done, Jenna didn’t feel like reading. She’d finished her latest romantic adventure and wasn’t quite ready to start a new one. She faced another week of work and liked the idea of giving her brain even more of a rest than a romance novel could provide. So she turned on the TV, making a conscious choice to avoid any channel that carried anything resembling news. She didn’t want to come across some weekend host offering their half-baked opinions on Celia’s affairs or Jenna’s lies about them.