Arthur nodded. “All right. It was near the end of the summer and that day I had an appointment to spend a couple of hours with Verna. She...” Arthur smiled. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather keep the physical part of Verna and me private.”
“Of course,” Kate said. “Just tell us about Cheryl’s father.”
“And who knocked her up.” There was anger in Jack’s voice.
Arthur smiled. “I saw you there that day. You looked like a lovesick calf. Big eyes staring at pretty little Cheryl.”
“I never saw you.”
“That’s because I made myself invisible. And besides, a herd of rhino could have tramped through the house and you wouldn’t have looked at anybody but Cheryl.” Arthur lost his smile. “I can’t imagine how bad you must have felt when she just up and disappeared. I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” Jack said.
“So anyway, it was about a week before the girl’s birthday. I knew because Verna was trying to get me to buy Cheryl a car. Verna saw no reason why I shouldn’t spend some of my settlement on a nice secondhand Chevy for her daughter. Anything for Cheryl was her mother’s motto. The love of her life.”
“But that love wasn’t stronger than her hate,” Sara said.
“I think they were all one. Sometimes I saw it as a giant ball that was on fire inside her. Once that fire burned itself to the surface, it was all going to explode.” He looked at Sara. “I used that in my book, so don’t try to borrow it.”
“I will do my best to restrain myself.”
“Still spicy, isn’t she?” he said to Jack.
“Would you tell us?” Kate asked, her voice soft. “From the beginning? Please?”
But before Arthur could start, Sara spoke up, her voice quiet. “I’ve written many novels, all of which required a great deal of research. In order to write about subject
s like PTSD, I’ve read a lot of books about it.” Pausing, she pointedly looked at his thin legs. “What we want to hear is the truth.” She looked back up at his face. “It’s time to tell it all.”
Kate and Jack were looking at her curiously, having no idea what she meant, but the redness of Arthur’s face seemed to show that he understood.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s time to tell the truth. Not what I wish were true and what the town believed, but what actually was...”
Lachlan, Florida
1997
Arthur Niederman did his usual trick of slipping around the side of Verna’s house, making sure no one saw him. Since he needed two canes to walk and his balance was bad, it wasn’t easy. Damn the landlord and his laziness! he thought yet again, working his way across the littered yard.
The owner of the house, Lester Boggs, wanted Verna—meaning Arthur—to pay three grand to clean up the place. But Arthur was holding out. He had enough trouble with every relative he had hitting him up for money. Just yesterday his mother’s third cousin by marriage had called and asked for twenty grand.
Even this long after he’d received the settlement, it still shocked him that people truly believed that if they just had X amount of money they’d be happy. At first, Arthur had yelled at them. “I’ve lost the use of my legs. You’re healthy and you have a loving family, but you’re the one crying?”
It hadn’t done any good. Within four months of the money being deposited in his bank account, his relatives had labeled him selfish. Uncaring about his own family. That not one of them had visited him in the hospital or helped with his rehabilitation didn’t seem to matter to them. Their demands had made him bitter and lonely.
He stopped at the corner of Verna’s house and looked both ways. No one was around. He liked to slip through the back so nosy old Mary Ellerbee across the road wouldn’t see him. She was like a mother and grandmother to Verna and her daughter. Always baking things for them, knitting useless little things. She would spend whole afternoons at their house, chatting with Verna for hours. And she was endlessly curious about their lives.
But then, poor Verna didn’t have many friends in Lachlan. Actually, only him and Mary that he knew about. There might be some other men, but he didn’t like to think about them. When you got down to it, he liked to think of Verna and Cheryl as his family. The one he never got to have.
When everything seemed to be clear, he leaned on his canes and started toward the back door. To his right were the remains of an old thrasher, something Boggs refused to move until Arthur paid him to do so. Farther away was what used to be a barbecue pit. Left over from the six college boys who’d rented the house for a couple of months. They’d dug the deep pit, cooked their hog, then hadn’t bothered to fill in the hole.
Because Arthur was thinking so hard about other things, he didn’t see Cheryl until he almost ran into her. He always tried to stay away from her. After all, what could he say to a kid who dressed like an adult? “How was work today? The traffic was bad, wasn’t it?” She didn’t look like someone you could ask, “Did you do your arithmetic homework?”
Cheryl was leaning over the concrete steps at the back of the house and throwing up her guts.
Arthur tried to leave unnoticed, but he didn’t make it.
“Oh, Mr. Niederman,” she said. “Sorry, I—” She couldn’t finish but collapsed on the step.