Daddy's Girls (34)

    “I begged him to divorce me and he wouldn’t. I wanted to take you with me, but I didn’t have the money to do it. And I couldn’t afford a divorce myself. Bobby pleaded with me to go with him to California, and swore we’d come back for you as soon as we could. I told Jimmy what I was going to do. He borrowed the money for a divorce from the rancher he worked for. He liked Jimmy. He divorced me, on condition that I give up all custody and rights to the three of you. He said he’d pay me three thousand dollars if I did. That was a fortune to me then, and I thought with that money, I could set up a life in California, come back for you, and a judge would cancel the relinquishment. It was the only way I could get enough money to leave, and set up a life for you, and I never believed any judge would uphold the paper I signed, if I said I didn’t mean it and came back. I was young and stupid,” she said humbly. “And I figured Jimmy would mellow eventually too. So I signed the papers and got the money and left. I figured I’d be back in six months.

    “Things were harder in L.A. than I thought. I couldn’t find a job at first. Bobby blew through some of the money. He got into drugs. I didn’t. And a year after we got there, he was killed in a motorcycle accident, drunk. It didn’t work out with us once he got into drugs. After he died, I had a small apartment and some of the money was left, and I went back to Texas to get you, but your father had left with you by then. There was no trace of him. No one knew where he went. It took me a year to find you in the Valley. I went from ranch to ranch until I found him. I’d been gone for two years by then. I had a job as a waitress. I took him to court to overturn the relinquishment. Your dad was making decent money on the ranch where he worked. The judge upheld the relinquishment. He said I couldn’t have supported you, but your dad had told you I was dead, and the court-appointed psychologist said that it would be too confusing for a five-and four-year-old to be told that their mother was dead, and then she came back to life again. So I lost. I tried to appeal the decision, but I didn’t have the money to take it too far. I was twenty-six years old by the time I lost the last hearing, and I had lost my kids, and in my mind, I had nothing to live for. Jimmy was relentless. He wouldn’t let me see you, and the psychologist said you were all happy and he was a responsible father, which is true, he was. But I was your mother and wanted to be part of your life.

    “After that, my life got ugly. I had been so sure the court would overturn the papers I signed giving you up. If I thought they wouldn’t, I would never have signed them. But I did. And after that, nothing mattered. I got into drugs for the first time. It was a way to escape everything, my hopes, my dreams, my past, my life. My parents had died and I had nothing left in Texas anyway. I just stayed in L.A., wasted on drugs, and in the gutter for ten years. I was homeless a few times, dealt drugs for a while, wound up in jail three times for possession. I never got into prostitution, but I did everything else, mostly involved with drugs, until I ended up in jail for a year for possession with intent to sell. Some social worker got hold of me, pulled me out of jail, sent me to rehab, and I slowly crawled back into the human race.

“I drove around Santa Ynez once or twice, hoping to see you, and hung around the school. I saw you once when you were about sixteen, fifteen, and thirteen. I saw Jimmy pick you up in his truck. He didn’t see me, or he would probably have called the police. I wrote to him and begged him again to let me see you. He said he wouldn’t, that I had made my decision and had to stick with it, and that there was no way he could tell you I had returned from the dead. Seeing me would make a liar of him. He said you didn’t need me. He didn’t know I’d been in jail, but I did, and I figured maybe he was right.

    “I gave up then. I got a job working in a hotel, and met a nice man, and my life changed after that. That was twenty-six years ago. My partner is an architect and he’s Italian. He built this house and we moved here. We’ve been together for twenty-six years, and never married. We don’t really need to. I never wanted to have more children. I do some decorating for his clients occasionally, and we have a good life. He’s very good to me.” She wiped away the tears which had been pouring down her cheeks when she told the story, and her daughters had cried as they listened. She smiled at Caroline. “I’ve read every one of your books. I saw them in a bookstore one day. They’re wonderful.” Caroline had written them using her maiden name. She turned to Gemma. “And I’ve watched your show every week for the last ten years,” she said proudly. The one she had never seen was Kate, working hard in the Valley for her father. “I want you all to know that I bitterly regret my terrible mistake giving you up. It was the worst thing I ever did. Nothing could ever make up for it. I thought I could undo it later, but I never could. Your father would never let me, and the court supported him. I have regretted it and missed you and loved you every single day of my life since. You were never forgotten,” she said, as she stood up and went to hug each one of them. Caroline sobbed as they embraced, and she had been the one who hadn’t wanted to meet her.

Gemma wiped the tears from her cheeks. “How could he not back down and let you see us, and how could he not tell us when we grew up? Who cared if he looked like a liar? It was always about him, how he looked, what people thought of him. What if you had died before we met you?” Gemma said, horrified at the thought. “We thought we had no mother all our lives, but we did. We had a right to know that.” But they all knew that was how their father functioned. He made the rules, and this was an extreme example of it.