What the Heart Wants (What the Heart Wants, #1)(10)

Laurel’s eyebrows lifted. The roofed bench that served as Bosque Bend’s bus drop-off was attached to the side of Josie’s Muebleria Usada, a used furniture store across the street from Ulrich’s Drive-in Beer and Grocery, where the Friday-night bad boys hung out. The way Lolly was dressed, it was a miracle they hadn’t given her a hard time. Must be a quiet weekend. Of course, it was—everyone was recovering from the big Fourth of July blowout.

“How did you get here from the bus drop-off?”

“I walked.”

Laurel shivered. Ten blocks on a moonless night with the streetlights few and far between? Mama and Daddy would have grounded her for life. And what exactly had happened regarding the kid who took her iPod? She had the feeling Lolly was glossing over something.

“The boy who was giving you a ride—are you all right? Did he…try anything with you?”

Lolly made a sound of contempt. “He thought he was so studly!” She looked at Laurel out of the corner of her eye. “Don’t tell Dad.”

“Why not?”

“He wouldn’t understand. He’d get all bent out of shape and say I should have known better.”

“Honey, until this morning I hadn’t seen your father in sixteen years, but I don’t think he’s changed so much that he’d be mad at you because some sleazeball made a pass at you.”

Lolly’s lower lip pouted out. “He hates me.”

“Your father?”

“He’s always yelling at me about stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, my grades, my friends, boys, what I wear—that sort of thing.”

Laurel couldn’t help but smile. When was it she and Sarah had started viewing their parents, especially their mothers, as demanding, irritating people who didn’t understand them? Who purposely embarrassed them and stood in the way of everything they wanted to do?

Sarah complained that her mother was such an old fuddy-duddy that she wouldn’t let Sarah invite boys to her slumber party like the Fassbinder twins did, and her father, the county attorney by then, made her dip into her birthday money to pay her speeding ticket rather than get it dismissed, which anyone who really loved her would have done.

Laurel, in turn, insisted that Mama ruined her life when she nixed buying her a strapless dress for junior cotillion that looked exactly like the dress on the cover of one of her favorite romance novels. Then there was the battle of the shorts. Her mother absolutely refused to let her walk out of the house in shorts, and Daddy backed up Mama with a lecture about modesty and how she should set a model for other girls rather than try to be like them. But the greatest injustice of all was that Sarah received a new Thunderbird after she passed her driver’s test, while Laurel’s only reward for finally getting her license six months later was being allowed to share her mother’s car, Grampa’s old Lincoln Town Car, which was as big as a boat and looked like a hearse.

Yes, Laurel understood where Lolly was coming from. Adolescence was hard.

Putting on a bright smile, she charged into the fray as gently as she could. “Isn’t that the usual thing parents and teenagers disagree on? I bet the other girls feel the same way about their parents.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“They have mothers.”

It was a blow to the gut. As angry as Laurel had gotten about the car and the clothes, she always knew Mama was there for her. Daddy had been more prominent publicly, but he had his church and his parishioners and his good works to tend to. Mama’s primary concern was her.

“Mothers are very special,” she finally replied.

She missed her mother so much, but Mama’s world had turned against her, and, almost exactly a year ago, she swallowed every pill in the house to escape. Couldn’t she have stuck it out? Or put the house up for sale so they could move someplace that people didn’t know them?

No way. In the same sweet voice she always used, Mama said she had been born in Kinkaid House, and she would die here. And she did, preferring to join her parents and grandparents in the cemetery along the river rather than stay in a world that had turned against her. Thank goodness the burial plot had been prepaid, but strongly Protestant Bosque Bend had a Catholic abhorrence of suicide, and Laurel had a heck of a time finding a clergyman who would perform the simple graveside rite. Finally, Mrs. January, who’d retired as their housekeeper when Laurel was in middle school, had prevailed upon her son, who headed a small AME congregation in Waco, to lay Mama properly to rest.

“My dad doesn’t want me to meet my mother,” Lolly continued, building up steam. “He told me she wasn’t ready to take care of a baby so she sent me to him, and that he lost track of her, but he won’t even tell me her name. He says she asked him not to tell me and that he’s honoring her wishes. But I think that’s bull crap!”

Lolly spit out the last two words defiantly, her eyes blazing blue.

Laurel stifled a smile. Was “bull crap” the best Lolly could come up with? She’d heard worse from second graders. “This is all very personal, Lolly. Maybe you need to wait and discuss it with your father.”

“Or with my mother.” Lolly stared meaningfully across the table.

“Or with your mother,” Laurel repeated, folding her arms Indian-style in warning.