The Almost Sisters(71)

This was supposed to reassure me, but it didn’t. She was too young to know yet that their conversations about the things that mattered most were far more dangerous. They were the conversational equivalent of tequila, a faster path to intimacy than flirting ever could be. She pulled on my hand, tugging us toward Birchie’s darkened house. The porch light was off, and only the living-room window had a faint glow to it. Wattie always left one of the side-table lamps burning, to deter all the burglars Birchville didn’t have. I pulled Lav to the side, thinking we should go around to the back door. It was unlocked, and I thought we had a better chance of sneaking in that way. I didn’t want to risk waking up our exhausted old ladies. Much less Rachel. I’d had enough ballistics for one night.

We turned, but something caught the corner of my eye. Something in the deep shadows of Birchie’s porch. I stopped dead, staring up the hill. I could barely make out the figure of a man. He was sitting in the porch swing. The light was off, and the moon was setting, but he was silhouetted against that faint golden glow from Wattie’s lamp.

I recognized him as the shadow I’d seen earlier, flashing past the gate when I was in the graveyard. It hadn’t been my imagination or a dog after all. It had been this guy. I could see those points on the top of his head that looked a bit like tiny ears.

There was a crazy moment, hardly longer than a heartbeat, when I knew, I simply knew that it was Batman. Somehow he’d learned that there was a Digby and the news had mattered to him in every way that was right. He’d come racing across the state line, Georgia to Alabama, hurrying to see about his son.

Lavender had stopped with me. She said, “What?” too loud, in a nervous voice. “Why did we stop? You look spooked.”

The figure on the porch started and stood up when she spoke. The guy was tall like Batman, but maybe too tall, and definitely too broad across the shoulders. Too bulky. I felt an odd sink of mingled relief and disappointment as he came to the stairs and started down them, toward us. Lavender heard him, and when she saw him, she went dead still, too.

“Daddy?” she said.

Once she said it, I recognized him. He’d gained a little weight in the two weeks he’d been MIA. The points on the top of his head were his messy curls. I hadn’t seen him without his hair blown out into that sportsy flop across his forehead, not for years.

But it was Jake all the same, and the moment he heard Lav’s voice, he sped up. He hurried down the stairs, and Lav tore her hand out of mine and ran, so fast she was like a teeny Flash in the waning moonlight. He reached the bottom step and started running, too. They met in the middle of the yard. She swarmed up him, and at the same time he was lifting her, and she wrapped her arms tight around his neck. Her feet dangled in the air, and one of her sandals had dropped off onto the ground. She didn’t seem to notice. I could hear that she was saying something, too choked by crying for me to make out the words. That was okay. They weren’t for me.

Watching them from the road, I felt a small pang for Hugh, because that was done. She might not know it yet, but I did. Jake swayed gently, as if he held a fussy baby instead of a half-grown girl.

He said, “Hush, sweetie, hush. I’m here now,” and she was still talking and crying all incoherent with her face buried in his neck.

I looked around for Jake’s truck and spotted it across the road. He must have just arrived when I’d seen his shadow cross the cemetery gate.

I climbed up the steep slope of the yard, angling toward them. Up close he looked worse. He had big bags under his eyes, and his skin had an unhealthy sheen, as if he’d been living on Swanson’s and bourbon without Rachel there to infuse him with wild-caught salmon and organic beets.

“It’s okay,” he said to Lav, but his eyes were on me.

“If you guys want to talk out here on the porch swing, I’ll leave the back door unlocked,” I said quietly.

I tried very hard to sound gracious, and welcoming, and unsour, because this was a good thing. He’d done better than call. He had come, and I could see that it was what she needed.

“Thank you,” he said, all meaningful, like he was thanking me for more than the unlocked door.

“No need,” I said, and it did come out sour. Too bad. I tilted my head pointedly at Lav and said to him, “I didn’t do anything for you.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. He was still rocking his daughter, holding her tight, but his eyes were locked on mine, his so wide with sincerity I could practically see white all around the iris. “I panicked and I ran. It was wrong, and I’m so damn sorry. I shouldn’t have disappeared like that.”

His face was puffy from the weight gain and, I guessed, some heavy drinking. It softened his chiseled jaw. Add the hair sticking up in little poinks and he looked almost more like my old friend JJ than like Jake. It made me wonder if his plan to flee to Portland had ever been about creating a third life. Perhaps his recent setbacks had instead cracked him open, exposed the raw boy he’d packed away under caring about football, and playing golf, and booming, manly laughter. Maybe he’d just been running. Cowardly more than ice cold.

Lavender said a muffled “It’s okay” into his neck, but he hadn’t been talking to his daughter.

Not entirely anyway.

Beneath the Jake who was saying he was sorry to his child, I could see JJ, fat and dorky and hopelessly in love with Rachel, talking to seventeen-year-old me. It was twenty years too late and doing double duty as an apology to Lavender, and it hardly covered everything. He was still the same jackass who’d breezed into my parents’ Christmas party, almost knocking me sideways, shame-running past me with bravado to get to Rachel. On the other hand, he was finally acknowledging that I had been hurt. That he had hurt me. He was attempting to put paid to an old, old debt here, with shitty coin, but still trying. Perhaps it was the only coin he had.