Game (Gentry Boys, #3)(65)

When I was five years old my mother took a week-long trip upstate to her hometown. I don’t remember exactly why - something to do with an old friend who needed her - but she left the three of us children at home with our father. While she was gone my father invited another woman into their bed.

I knew her as Mrs. Weiss. She lived down the street and had one son in my brother Robbie’s class. She had beautiful tulips in her front yard and it was tough to walk by there every day on my way to the kindergarten bus stop without picking some.

It was late on the second night my mother was away. I woke up and padded excitedly out of my bedroom because I heard a female voice in the hallway and assumed it was her. It wasn’t, though it was not surprising to see my father talking to another woman. He talked to women all the time. They liked my father. They smiled at him and no matter what shape or age they were they pressed their legs together and moved close to him, touching his chest and smiling up into his handsome face. No, what was surprising was the fact that this particular woman was naked from the waist up and my father was groaning as he ran his hands down her body.

“Daddy?” I whispered, fearful and hesitant. They had their faces pressed together now, this woman and my father. They didn’t hear me. “Daddy!” I shouted.

The woman gasped. Her hands flew to cover her pendulous breasts and she turned her head enough so I could see her profile. She was Mrs. Weiss from down the street. She was my mother’s friend.

“Steffie.” My father smoothly picked me up and returned me to my room, quickly tucking me beneath the frilly covers.

“Daddy, why is Mrs. Weiss here so late?”

My father’s voice was shocked. “What are you talking about? Oh honey, you were just dreaming.”

I sat up, indignant, clutching the stuffed bunny rabbit who was my best friend. “I wasn’t dreaming, Daddy. I was awake.” Although even as the words left my mouth I was no longer sure. Only my father was sure. And he would know.



“Trust me, Steffie,” he said, kissing me on the forehead. “You were dreaming.” Then he closed my bedroom door behind him.

The Weiss family moved away long before my father’s business became salacious gossip, and I hadn’t thought of that night in years. Now when I remembered it there was a peculiar dream-like quality about it all, even as I knew Nick Bransky was nothing but a fraud who tucked his small child into her bed and told her not to believe her own eyes. I didn’t know if my mother was ever wise to the affair, but it might not have mattered. It was only one betrayal in a long line of them.

Truly kept trying to interest me in television, in ice cream, in anything to take my mind off Chase Gentry. But even though my mind was a whirlwind, I’d said little since we’d arrived home.

Instead I sat on the couch and listened to Truly chattering away as I gratefully accepted the company of her cat in my lap. I knew that to most women this gambling shit would not have been a big deal. Perhaps it would have been a minor irritation, a brief argument. To me it was so much more. Chase hadn’t told me something important. And there were important things I hadn’t told Chase. It was an entrance into a permanent state of deception and I knew how far down the rabbit hole it was possible to fall.

“What do you think, Truly?” I suddenly blurted. “What would you do if you were me?”

My beleaguered roommate sighed and tucked her legs underneath her. “I can’t hand out those kinds of instructions.”

“I didn’t ask you to instruct me. I asked what you think.” I turned to her beseechingly. “Tell me. Please.”

“You and Chase,” she sighed, leaning over as if she was trying to choose her words carefully. “I think maybe you two need one another.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That might have been the problem from the beginning. We needed each other too f*cking much.”

“That’s not what I meant, Stephanie.”

“Doesn’t make it untrue.” I pushed Dolly into Truly’s lap and rose from the couch. “I’m going to bed.”

My bed was too big. It had never occurred to me before Chase started occupying it regularly. Now that he wasn’t in it there was far too much room for my body alone.

“Feel that, Steph? That’s yours. And this is mine.”

Since he’d spoken those fervent, passionate words to me we’d spent nearly every night together. I missed him fiercely.

My pillow was a poor substitute for Chase’s body, but I curled my arms around it and rested my cheek on the cool surface. When I thought about the possibility of never falling asleep in his arms again every working part of my body contracted painfully. The feeling was terrifying so I tried to get rid of it by thinking about something even more horrible.

In the weeks leading up to my mother’s death I was exhausted. On one particular afternoon I gave up on school by sixth period and sped home in the black Mustang that had been my sixteenth birthday present. The car would be repossessed in a few short months when my father’s assets were seized but by then I wouldn’t care because so many worse things had happened.

Death approaches with a sickeningly sweet smell that hangs heavily in the air and clings to you. Our house had smelled that way for months. I could escape it, but only for a little while. I would leave for school once the nurse had arrived and I wouldn’t appreciate the absence of that awful odor until I walked through the front door in the afternoon. There, it would find me again. No amount of candles or plug-ins could wholly dispel it. It had gotten inside of me, the smell of death, and I could no longer escape it. I wondered if other people, strangers, the kids at school, could smell it on me and I took to keeping the half empty bottle of my mother’s Coach perfume in my pocket.