Dave. She quickly pushed the thought away. There was no point in daydreaming. It only led to disappointment when reality set in. And yet she couldn’t help but think maybe, just maybe, the day would come when she would learn the truth about her brother, a day when she would be able to let go of all the anger she carried.

But until that day the sheriff would be the sheriff. And that was all that he would be.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Jo slipped past the kitchen door and skirted through the living room, making as little noise as possible. She hoped to escape without bumping into anyone. She woke with a nagging feeling, and it had to do with Patricia, Sara’s mother. She sensed it last night while talking with her on the beach. The feeling, or thought, of a memory was there, it was close, but still too far to grasp.

She paused outside the entranceway to the screened-in porch, brushed her hair with her fingers, thinking the back door was the quickest exit to get away, just away, without getting caught. She took two steps into the room and stopped next to a wicker rocking chair.

Gram was sitting in the middle of the floor, surrounded by boxes and odds and ends. Her white hair was messy from sleep. She was wearing her cleaning clothes, an old sweatshirt and jeans, the kind with an elastic waistband. There was a faraway look on her face. She didn’t notice Jo standing nearby. Jo took a cautious step backward and turned to leave when Gram caught sight of her.

“Oh, good, you’re up,” Gram said. “I don’t suppose you could stick around for a minute.”

Jo closed her eyes before turning around and forcing a smile. “No, sorry. I’m on my way out.” She was about to leave when Gram slumped forward, not a lot, but enough to cause concern. She maneuvered around an old lamp, a stack of books, and crouched on the floor next to her. “Are you okay?” She touched Gram’s forearm. Her skin was cool.

“I’m a little tired today. That’s all.”

“Are you sure?” Close up, Gram looked pale.

“I’m fine.” She waved her off. “It’s just a lot of stuff to go through.” Gram looked down at the photo album opened in her lap to a picture of Pop when he was a much younger man. The picture was in black-and-white. He was in a sailor’s suit and sporting a crew cut, serving in the Navy at the tail end of the Vietnam War. Gram and Pop had married right out of high school before he had enlisted. She ran her finger over the old photograph. A sad smile crossed her lips.

“Pop was handsome,” Jo said.

“He was dashing in his uniform,” Gram said. “I remember seeing him in it for the first time.” She brought her hand to her chest. “I was so proud and scared for him. That damned war.”

Jo gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “But he never saw any action. He didn’t have to fight. The war was ending.”

“Thank God,” Gram said, but she seemed miles away, lost in memories.

Jo envied her parents’ marriage, the open way they had loved and respected each other. No marriage was perfect, of course, and there were times when Gram and Pop argued, followed by long stretches of silence, but they had always found their way back to each other. Jo wondered how they were able to balance the good with the bad and keep their love strong for so many years. She supposed it had to do with starting off in the right direction rather than buried in secrets the way her marriage had begun. And yet, she reminded herself that her love for Kevin was just as strong as her parents’ love for each other. It was just that sometimes her love was so tangled with guilt, it was hard to separate the two.

Gram continued to page through the photo album. Most of the pictures were taken before Jo had been born. Gram’s eyelashes were wet with tears. It had been five years since Pop passed and still, at times like these, his death seemed to catch Gram by surprise.

“I miss him too,” Jo said, and wiped a stray tear from her own eye.

She had been close to Pop ever since she was a little girl. She used to follow him around the house while he was doing chores—fixing the kitchen sink, changing the oil in the car, repairing the old washing machine. While he had worked, she would tell him stories, made-up bits and pieces from books or magazines, or she would act out scenes from the playground, or explain in lengthy detail the arts and crafts projects she had worked on in school. He would listen and ask questions as though whatever she was telling him was important when most of the time it was not. It was fair to say she had worshipped Pop and believed he could do no wrong. Even through adolescence, when she and Gram could hardly stand to be in the same room together, through all the arguing, she had maintained a close connection to Pop. That was until the summer she had turned sixteen years old, the summer Pop had learned she had gone ahead and gotten herself pregnant.

She had found out two weeks after Billy had drowned. She had missed her period. At first she had thought the stress she had been under and the grief had made her late. It had been reasonable. But after a few more days had passed and still no period, she had known without having to see the doctor. Her breasts had been sore and swollen more than usual, and her lower abdomen, although normally bloated around that time of the month, had felt different somehow. She had lain awake at night and sworn she had felt a fluttering in her belly as though the baby had already begun to move, to say, Hey, here I am.

Terminating the pregnancy hadn’t ever been a consideration. How could she have killed his baby when she had been certain it had been conceived out of love? She had owed it to him, to herself, to see the pregnancy through.

Gram had shouted, cursed, and stomped her feet. “How could you do this? What were you thinking? What will people think? My God, do you even know who the father is?”

Jo had handled Gram’s outrage with more ease than she had thought possible. Mostly because Gram hadn’t asked anything that Jo hadn’t asked herself. She could’ve taken the anger, the name-calling, the judgmental glares from Gram. It had been what Jo had expected from her. Gram was what Jo considered a “good girl,” never having said or done anything to raise an eyebrow.

And Jo had known how to fight back against Gram’s accusations, her old-school ways and beliefs about how a woman should conduct herself, about how she should understand her place in society, in a man’s world. Jo was from a different generation, one that didn’t care what men, or really anyone, thought, one that empowered women to be as outspoken as they wanted to be, to own their sexuality. She had wanted to be the one to define the person she would become. She had been free, and yet she had been reckless with that freedom. She had felt as though she had thrown it all away.

But after all the bickering and tough talk, it hadn’t been Gram’s reaction that had tortured Jo. It had been Pop’s. What she had remembered most whenever she thought back to that time was the look of betrayal in his eyes. His faith in her had been shattered. He had said she was no longer his little girl, the girl he had thought he had known and loved. His opinion of his only daughter had changed for the worse. And she hadn’t known how to tell him that she had let herself down too. That she had known all her dreams of getting out, living her own life, being free, were over. What she had needed from him was his support, for him to accept she had made a mistake, and that she loved her baby too much to ever turn back.

Gram closed the photo album and put it to the side, along with the memories it had conjured. They sat in silence until Jo slapped the tops of her legs and looked around.

“What are you going to do with all this stuff anyway?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gram said, and smoothed a white curl from her forehead. “It was just time to clean out the back closets and underneath the porch. No one’s touched the stuff in years.”