The Reckless Oath We Made(94)

“For the same reason I’m telling you not to call the police now,” I said. “I’m going to have a lot of questions to answer anyway and, unless you want to answer a lot of questions, you should stay out of it.”

“You deserve to go to jail.”

I couldn’t argue with him, so I did something I hated myself for. There was going to be a lot more of that in my future.

“Please, I am begging you not to call the police. If I go to jail, there’s going to be nobody to take care of my mother, who is disabled, and nobody to take care of my nephew, who is only five. Because if Gentry and Edrard didn’t come back, I don’t think my sister is coming back. For all I know she’s dead. And I can’t—” I couldn’t cry on command and I was too scared to cry for real, because I wasn’t sure I could stop if I got started. I took a step closer to Rhys, who backed up against the dresser like I’d threatened him. I took another couple steps until we were face-to-face.

“I can’t abandon them. Please. What do you want? Money? I can get you some money. Do you want me to beg you?” I got down on my knees, even though I wasn’t sure how I would get back up. A bolt of pain ran up my leg, and a muscle spasm followed it, so that it felt like my phoenix was coming to life. “Okay, I’m begging you. Whatever you want. Just please don’t call the cops.”

Rhys looked down at me the way men like him always looked down at me. Somewhere between contempt and curiosity with a side of maybe. Honestly, I think if Tiffany hadn’t been there, he would have made me suck him off.

“Jesus Christ. We have to call somebody,” he said, but he put his phone back on the dresser. We meant me.

“I already called Gentry’s brother. Should I call Rosalinda?”

“God. I guess so. I need to get out of here. If we’re not telling the police, I’m going home. I can’t have anything to do with this. Whatever happens with Gentry and Edrard, this is your fuckup. This is on you.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“Tiff, are you ready to go?” he yelled.

The hair dryer turned off and she said, “Sure. I can be ready in a couple minutes.”

Apparently Tiff was the same kind of sucker as LaReigne. She’d driven all that way to let Rhys talk like shit to her.

To give them a chance to get dressed, I went out and got in the truck. I’d brought Gentry and Edrard’s phones with me, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself to turn Edrard’s phone on. I imagined the kind of text messages his wife had been sending him for the last twelve hours. Surely she’d been expecting to hear from him. In Gentry’s contacts she was under D for Dame Rosalinda.

I was prepared for her to think I was Gentry, like Carlees had, and when she answered, she said, “What have you done with my husband?”

I told her exactly what I’d told Carlees, but it was harder, knowing how badly Edrard had been hurt. She yelled at me, but after I told her I didn’t know what happened, she got so quiet.

“If they got arrested will he get to call me? He probably doesn’t even know my number if he doesn’t have his phone. Who should I call?”

“Hang on,” I said. “Let me see if I can find a number.”

I left her on the line and pulled up the Internet, to look up the number for the Little River County sheriff. I gave her the number four or five times, because she kept jumbling them up when she repeated them back. It made me feel like a monster. An odious serpent. I had come to her house and stolen her husband, and now I was toying with her.

It was close to half an hour before Rhys and Tiffany came out of the motel room. I wondered if he’d called the cops, or Gentry’s parents, or Rosalinda, but when he came and stood at the truck window, I didn’t ask him any of that.

“If anything has happened to them, it’ll be your fault,” he said. “Girls like you, it’s how you operate. Take a nice guy like Gentry and use him. But if something happens to him, you’ll have to live with that.”

“I know.”

He got into Tiffany’s car and they drove away.

Girls like me. I wished I was the kind of girl Rhys thought I was. Girls like me, though, girls actually like me, we weren’t master manipulators. We were garbage fires of failure.

I went back in the motel room and finished packing. After I loaded the bags into Gentry’s truck, I wiped down the room and the keys, and left them on the dresser. Then I stripped the sheets off the beds and bundled them up. The housekeeping cart was parked a couple rooms down, so I carried the sheets over and stuck them in the laundry bag.

The housekeeper came out of the room she was working on and gave me a funny look. She was an Indian lady in a sari and a Justin Bieber shirt. By the time I got in the truck and started it, she’d gone back into the other room.

At the Walmart, I bought what I’d promised Dirk: rubbing alcohol, bandages, and aquarium antibiotics. Plus a case of beer and a frozen lasagna.

Standing in the checkout line, I was behind a woman with two daughters. Like some fantasy version of Mom, LaReigne, and me. I looked at the family-sized lasagna in my cart, and it seemed stupid and sad to me. My family was smaller. Again. Pretty soon maybe a single-serving lasagna would be all I needed.





CHAPTER 45





Alva