Not What She Seems: A Novel, page 7
I moved away from Daddy’s office, the phone alive and yelling, reminding me of other matters to deal with.
Best to leave his room for another time.
Avoidance had always been my best friend, so I didn’t need to read any of the texts or listen to voicemail or check email—I already knew they were filled with angry, threatening messages from Conrad, worried ones from Maura, and fishing ones from everyone else who wanted in on the drama I’d laid at their feet. I imagined the order of reveals as Conrad went through the day before and this morning: Got the email I sent the department. Saw the door. Realized his big comeback work was gone. He and Maura would have the same question I was asking myself. Same question I was asked six years ago, the night my father died.
Jac, what the hell have you done?
9
Granddad’s funeral took place on Saturday, three days later. There was no need to wait because his instructions were clear. He wanted to be buried quickly and his homegoing to be a celebration of his life. He’d had the conversation with Mama years ago, and she followed his instructions to a tee. Quick funeral. No fuss. Call the cavalry of his military and law enforcement colleagues and round up the family. Whoever could make it made it. Whoever couldn’t, he’d catch them on the other side.
Granddad’s send-off was a true celebration of his life because, though everyone who eulogized him said he’d died too soon, Granddad had lived a good, long life, dying at seventy-five. Daddy’s funeral had been one of incredulity and grief and, for me, guilt. Daddy died at forty-four, “much too young, gone too soon, and under tragic circumstances.”
At least that’s what everyone said in public. But the whispers said what wasn’t going to be said out loud: that those tragic circumstances were my fault.
Those comparisons ran through my mind as I sat in the first row of Richmond Regional’s gymnasium with my mother between Pen and me. Same comparisons as the night before, when we’d watched Granddad’s college frat conduct their special ceremony to send him off, just as Daddy’s had for him years prior. Same comparisons as when we’d stood in front of our family plot at Caldwell Memorial, where Granddad’s body was buried next to Grandma, Daddy, and Daddy’s younger brother, Uncle Jack. They ran over and over, through my mind on repeat, even now, as I suffered through the repast at the community center.
“It’s a good thing the repast was here instead of at your house,” said Sawyer Okoye, one of my best friends since first grade, when I traded my ham and cheese for the rice-and-spinach stew (complete with boiled egg) that her mother often packed. Sawyer was embarrassed by the other kids’ teasing because her lunch was deemed “weird” by the arrogant American youths. It was the best lunch I ever had.
Even at an early age, I was a rebel, and after telling Bobby Thornton I’d make my daddy arrest his daddy for Bobby being an asshole, I asked Sawyer if she’d be my best friend, and the rest was history. Today, Sawyer plopped down next to me at the table in the corner, farthest away from the well-wishers, curious secret stares, and ears hustling for gossip—where I could safely tuck away without any accusations of being totally antisocial.
“Who wants a bazillion people running in and out of your house with an up-close-and-personal view of you? They’d never leave, and you wouldn’t be able to get away from them,” she concluded.
I surveyed the wide-open room, adjusting myself in the metal chair. “Can’t get away from them here either.”
Touché. She pursed her lips and made herself comfortable in her own chair, settling in because she wasn’t going anywhere. “But you can fake a headache and go home. Or meet Nick and me at the diner for drinks and shooting the shit. I mean, it’s been a hundred years since you split.” Her hand shot to her mouth, her eyes as wide as small saucers. “I mean . . .”
I waved her off. “It’s fine.” If I got pissed at all the references to and reminders of my past, I wouldn’t be able to make it out of bed.
I took the plunge to clear the air right away. Besides, this had been gnawing at me for a while. Another layer of my guilt was about me not reaching out to my friends. But as time passed, guilt had turned to humiliation, and then I just thought maybe it was too late to say sorry.
“It’s never too late to say sorry,” Sawyer said blithely. “Not that you would have needed to. We get it. The situation was . . . intense, to put it lightly.”
“Yeah, but I shouldn’t have dropped off the face of the earth like that. Not from you and Nick.”
“Hey, look now, it’s tough being here after what happened to the chief. And we all know how petty and shady Brook Haven can be—hell, all of these small towns.”
She rotated in her chair, facing me. I obliged and followed suit, thinking, Okay, we were gonna do this here over a barely eaten plate of congealing mac and cheese, greens, brown sugar–crusted ham, and fried chicken. Oh, and a Hawaiian sweet roll because those were the best.
“I guess I just feel like I could have done more for you, you know? We could have gone with your mom and sis to visit you. I kept tabs with them. But I guess I felt it wasn’t our place. Nick and I didn’t want to intrude.”
Wasn’t possible. Sawyer and Nick could never be an intrusion. I should have seen beyond myself and articulated that. I should have done a lot of things differently.
“You couldn’t do more than I’d let you do,” I told her, irritated at the lump rising in my throat. I rubbed at it.
So far, so good. No public breakdowns. No added drama. I had been the proper, well-behaved Brodie girl with a magnifying glass on me, knowing all eyes were waiting for the slightest slipup. Not Sawyer, though. Or Nick either. Still, I stuffed them in the same box where I’d put the rest of Brook Haven and shoved them under the bed, relegating them to oblivion, only answering their occasional texts and social media messages.
“I’m just thrilled the team’s back together again,” Sawyer said and then fanned her hand over her eyes. “I never thought we’d be together like this ever again. I mean, he left for the military soon after you left—I think his dad had something to do with convincing him. Looks good for future politicians to have served, and Mayor Tate has always wanted Nick to follow in his footsteps. When Nick returned from his deployment in Afghanistan a couple years back, he suggested we go up to DC to see you. You know how Nick is with you . . . your mom gave us her blessing, and I think she was hoping we could get you to come back.”
I rolled my eyes in disbelief, wishing Sawyer didn’t feel the need to explain why she hadn’t come to see me.
“Stop,” I said softly. “I didn’t expect anyone to come up and see me. I wouldn’t expect that.” I looked over at Mama, bouncing around like a server in a busy diner, then at Pen, tucked into Patrick’s protective arms.
Not to be derailed from her train of edification, Sawyer continued. “Contrary to what you believe, Jac, your mom really did want you back. But I didn’t know if it was a good idea to intrude on you after all these years. You stayed away for a reason, and it felt, I don’t know, unfair to guilt-trip you back home. So I stayed put, and Mayor Tate kept his boy busy, being the big political force here that our illustrious mayor is. Plus, everybody knows I am the most valuable player at the Brook Haven Police Department, so . . .”
Sawyer held her hands up to accept all the adulation from her adoring fan of one.
I couldn’t picture it. “Yeah, how’s that going? I never imagined you working at the very establishment you swore was always out to get you during high school and college. The police department? Really?”
She grinned. “I mean, we can’t all take after you and be fuckups for the rest of our lives.”
Had it been anyone else, I would have been pissed. But I laughed, drawing sour expressions from people at nearby tables who thought I wasn’t grief stricken enough. They weren’t saying the same of Pen, who was smiling and chatting quietly with the blockheaded Patrick by her side. Every now and then, she’d dab at her eyes with the handkerchief her fiancé had provided for her.
Maybe that’s what I needed to do to appease these people. Shed some damn tears.
I went back to Sawyer. I’d missed this, missed her—the yin to my yang, as cheesy as it sounded.
“The whole department would go up in flames without me. They tell me this all the time.”
I side-eyed her. “Do they?”
“Well, they tell me I should stick to my admin work and leave the detecting to the detectives. I like to be in the know, is all. I am a wealth of knowledge. I have opinions, you know.”
I shook my head, feeling her struggle. “Always have. So, let me get this straight,” I rationalized. “I’m the fuckup, but you still live with your parents at the big age of two-eight. Explain that to me.”
Sawyer guffawed. “Girl, did you forget during your descent into hermithood? I am half Ghanaian and half Nigerian. It is my double God-given right and duty to live with my parents until I’m old and gray.” She thought about it, tapping her bottom lip with a pointy-tipped French manicure. “Or until my betrothed bestows a hefty dowry worthy of my hand in marriage.” She leaned in, her voice dropping. “There’s no betrothed, by the way. This fucking town is dryyyyyy.” Her voice faded as she raised her hand to her neck to emphasize her point.
“Speaking of your parents, have they forgiven me yet for convincing you to go to USC?”
Her father’s family had immigrated to the US, and he met Sawyer’s Ghanaian mother while they were attending Clemson University. It was a running joke between the Okoyes and me—off whom Sawyer still mooched, or lived (another running joke Sawyer was actually proud of)—that I had ruined Sawyer’s life by enticing her away to attend Clemson’s biggest rival, the University of South Carolina (the real USC, not the one in California).
I countered, “Not entirely my fault. Nick also had a hand in your defection and disloyalty, but no one ever blames him.”
“Well”—she fell back into her seat in a dramatic flair—“I couldn’t break up the team, could I? What would y’all have done in Columbia without me? Hmm?”
“The Three Amigos being back together again?” The last of our trio dropped into a seat opposite us. “Are you proud of us, holding out three days before pouncing on you?” Nick cracked a smile.
“Appreciate it,” I answered, suddenly hyperaware of how sexy Nick’s smile was and how it was generously directed toward me, like there was no one else in the room.
It was the worst possible time, but my goodness. The years had been very good to Nicolas Tate, town golden boy and only son of the current Mayor Tate. Nick had filled out in all the right places, had muscles in all the right places. I’d always had the biggest crush on Superman, and Nick developed into a picture-perfect Christopher Reeve blended with southern gentlemanly charm that never hit my radar until late in high school, to the irritation of my father. His reasoning was never quite clear, only that I was his daughter and therefore too good for those Tates, who “always had an agenda.” I took that to mean that there would never be a man good enough in my father’s eyes.
However, Nick’s appeal was blipping on my screen again, and apparently also on the screens of several other women in this room, even the grandmas.
It was as if Nick exuded a hormone that made all the ladies want to drop their panties and all the guys want to be him. One of the more noticeable features was the swoop-like scar etched in the right side of his jawline, ending on his chin, just below his lip.
The scar gave Nick an edge, roughing up his perfect southern-boy face that I had suddenly found sexy as hell the day it had happened, during a Gamecocks football game our senior year, where he’d played defensive end. He had a hard hit. The budding scar hadn’t been a big deal then, but now . . . the scar had me remembering that one time, before my world ended. It might not have been an entirely alcohol-induced fluke after all.
Get it together, Jac, now is so not the time. Plus, Nick was my best friend. Sex ended best friendships. Proven fact. I thought.
Nick leaned in, and I leaned back so I wouldn’t fall to his powers of seduction. “What are we talking about?” he asked conspiratorially.
We really shouldn’t have been friends, the three of us. We were from different walks of life. Sawyer and I were Black in the South. There was no escaping that. And we shouldn’t have been close friends with a guy like Nick Tate, who came from the richer area of the county, the lakefront properties and gated communities of very old money and long-reaching pull throughout the state. Though Nick was from a world different from Sawyer’s and mine, he never acted like it.
Nick wasn’t supposed to have spent his high school and college years hanging with the kids who didn’t look like him or his ancestors. He was all-American, a legacy, a politician’s son. He wasn’t supposed to have anything in common with two Black girls who liked to just chill and dream of when they could leave Brook Haven, one as a writer and the other a world traveler (because Sawyer said her job was going to be “traversing the lands”).
He should have stuck around the groups of students at our high school who’d grown up like him—rich, southern, and white, with the safety net of generational wealth to sustain his lifestyle. But Nick seemed to feel more at ease with our diverse group, and especially with Sawyer and me. But who was going to say anything about the son of the town’s mayor, with aspirations of becoming the governor or a state senator?
He wasn’t supposed to connect with us, and we definitely weren’t supposed to let our guard down and let him in. And yet Nick did. And we did, seeing something in him that was different from the rest of them. There was another side to Nick. A deeper one. An edgier, more enlightened and accepting one. He managed his own beliefs with his loyalty to his father and their long-standing, respectable family name in South Carolina. Maybe one day he’d break free of the chains of generational expectations. Maybe one day I would too.
10
“Karaoke at Park Diner later? Or drinks at Cog’s?” Sawyer asked, referring to the best family restaurant in all of Richmond County and our old stomping ground at the local bar. She jiggled her shoulders in a sultry dance. Then, as if she’d just remembered where we were, her face fell and she suddenly became solemn, which was a feat for her. “I mean, when you feel up to it. I know you’re grieving.”
She tried to be serious, but it didn’t last long. Seriousness wasn’t Sawyer’s style or what I needed. What I needed was her levity. I felt a sudden pang, missing my cousin from farther down south, wishing we’d had a chance to meet up before he left on his quick turnaround.
“Maybe just drinks at the house and chill. Something I can’t do around my mother.”
“Can’t do it at mine either. Mrs. Okoye would even fuss at Jesus for making all that wine, okay?” Sawyer said to my vain attempts at covering my laughter. “So the only person who has their own place is Nick.”
“How’d Tate end up the responsible one?” I asked. Out of the three of us, Nick had been the least ambitious. He wanted to do absolutely nothing.
“Rich white daddy,” Sawyer returned. “You carry them around in your back pocket like an Amex card. Whip it out when you need a leg up.”
Nick chimed in, “No, it’s called being an adult.”
On the other side of the community room, my mother elegantly played the one role she shouldn’t have on a day like today—hostess. She should have been seated and letting everyone else cater to her. Instead, she was bustling around, greeting and thanking, ensuring everyone’s plates and glasses were full, putting herself and her care last . . . as usual.
I landed on a face I’d seen only momentarily three days ago entering the hall like she was at a campaign rally and needed a few babies to kiss.
“What’s that noise for?” Sawyer asked.
I hadn’t realized I’d said anything.
“Yeah, the hmm you make when you’ve got something rattling around in your head.”
“The hmm that means trouble. Usually for me,” Nick chimed in.
“Oh, it’s nothing much. That woman over there in the pink dress. I don’t remember seeing her around before.”
They followed where my head inclined toward Ms. Tweed, who was offering her condolences to my mom. Mama returned her own matching smile, not to be outdone. She motioned for the impeccably dressed woman, her hand secured around Mayor Tate’s arm like she was staking claim, to follow Mama to one of the tables up front. Guess the good mayor and his companion were at one of the tables reserved for special guests and family.
Nick let out a low chuckle and looked at Sawyer. “What I tell you? Trouble for me.”
Sawyer laughed.
“What? You know her? Why’s she hanging on your dad like she’s afraid someone’s going to snatch him up?” I asked, pursing my lips. “She’s afraid of losing her bankroll?”
“Come on now, Jac,” Nick said sheepishly, his ears reddening as his gaze swept across Mayor Tate and Ms. Tweed before returning back to me.
It was probably inappropriate on several levels, but being back in Brook Haven had me settling into old, roguish ways, and my sliver of patience for anyone made me unable to keep myself in check. I did feel just the slightest tinge of guilt at picking on my friend. Sawyer’s lifted eyebrow let me know I was being ugly and took the twinge up two levels.
Nick rubbed at his scar absentmindedly as I watched his father pull a chair out for the woman—younger by twenty years—and then seat himself next to her.
Nick said, “Tell me first why you’ve got that look on you?”
“What look? I don’t have a look,” I said innocently, making a show of wiping my face clean of any expression until Sawyer cracked a smile, my earlier pettiness already forgotten.
The two of them shared one look that said I was full of bullshit.
Finally, I gave in. “It’s really nothing,” I said, deciding it wasn’t a big deal and chalking it up to her not paying attention and me being overwhelmed with Granddad and being back in town. “We bumped into each other at the hospital the other day. I mean she bumped into me and . . . sounds like she’s pretty popular.”
