The Third Mrs. Mitchell

“Would you take him back…if he asked?”

Kate squeezed her eyes shut. “I think I would have to.” Tears crept out from underneath her lashes. “I don’t know what to pray for anymore. Whether to pray that L.T. comes home, for Trace’s and Kelsey’s sakes. Or…or to pray that he stays gone. For mine.”

Mary Rose leaned over to put her arms around her sister. And she wondered whether there was even one man on the entire planet worth the suffering he inevitably caused.

SUNDAY DINNER was a command performance for the Mitchell family. Pete and his brothers were expected to appear in time for the 11:00 a.m. service at Third Baptist Church and then to show up at the front door of the house they’d grown up in not more than thirty minutes after the closing hymn. Fortunately, their mother’s way with oven-fried chicken and angel biscuits made the effort more than worthwhile.

“I took delivery on some engine parts this week shipped by your company.” Pete handed the mashed potatoes to his older brother, a driver for one of the national courier services. “The box was beat up all to pieces. What’s with you guys these days? Playing dropkick with the merchandise in your free time?”

Rick plopped a mound of potatoes next to the chicken on his plate. “What free time? I’m working overtime every night just to get the stuff out there. Talk to the guys at the airport. They’re the ones who mangle the shipments. They put in their scheduled hours, watching the clock instead of their work, then head on home.”

“So few people understand the meaning of responsibility these days.” Denise Mitchell got up to refill her sons’ iced tea glasses. “If the work can’t be done in the time they’re required to be at the job, they just don’t finish. The younger teachers are especially guilty. That bell rings at three o’clock, they’re walking out the door, without even taking papers home to grade.”

Still shaking her head, she went back to her seat at the head of the table. “And the way some parents send their children to school is shameful. I had a boy in just yesterday running a temperature of one hundred and two. He said he’d been sick all night but his mama made him come to school anyway.”

Pete grinned. “Did you call her and give her a piece of your mind?”

“I did. But she couldn’t leave her job, she said.” Denise sniffed in disbelief. “That poor little boy lay on a cot in my clinic until after two o’clock when she finally got there. I’m still thinking about calling Child Protective Services. We’ll be lucky if a flu epidemic doesn’t strike the whole school.”

“She might be a single mom.” Pete’s oldest brother, Jerry, sat across the table. “Maybe she couldn’t stay home because she’d lose her job and that’s the only income the family has. Some women have tough choices like that to make.”

Their mother sat up even straighter in her chair. “I had those choices to make, if you’ll remember. After your dad died, I didn’t have anybody helping me raise you three, with money or anything else. Yet I never sent you to school sick.”

Jerry gave her an apologetic smile. “But not every woman is supermom. You’ve got special powers.”

“Sometimes even two parents aren’t enough to keep kids out of trouble,” Rick said. “I heard at church this morning that the cops raided a big party last night, arrested the whole bunch.”

Pete looked up from his plate. “Were they fighting? I swear, if any of the REWARDS kids were involved, I’m gonna take some skin off their hides.”

“Nah, this was the right side of the tracks, up on The Hill.” As opposed to the “wrong side,” Pete understood, where the kids in his rehabilitation program came from. “The beautiful people’s kids were drinking, getting crazy. Some of them went out cruising, got picked up for driving drunk. There were some private mailboxes knocked down, cars vandalized. The cops found grass in the house. Er…marijuana,” he corrected himself with a glance at their mom’s frown.

Jerry shook his head. “Makes you question what the people with all that money have in their heads for brains, that they can’t raise their kids right, keep ’em out of trouble.”

Pete wondered if Kelsey and Trace had been at the party. He could imagine how upset Mary Rose would be if her niece and nephew were arrested. She’d been worried about them yesterday, obviously caring about the trouble they were having with their parents’ divorce. Years ago, he’d been surprised at how real she was, how easy for a guy from the other side of town to tell his dreams to. To live his dreams with.

Not. Maybe if they’d been left alone, if the baby had lived, if they’d had a chance to work on building a marriage…

Regret stabbed him, stronger than anything he’d felt in a long time. Having Mary Rose in town was beginning to look like a recipe for the kind of remembering he really didn’t like to do.

“Earth to Pete.” A booted toe kicked his foot under the table. “Pass the gravy.”

He looked blankly at Jerry. “What?”

“Gravy, man. You deaf?”

Pete reached for the gravy boat. “Nah.”

Dumb, maybe. He thought about Mary Rose in her pink shirt and tight jeans, and sighed silently.

Really, really dumb.

STARING OUT her window on Sunday afternoon, Kelsey watched her father slam the door to his SUV and stride up the front walk. Seeing him two days in a row had to be a recent record.

She’d begged Kate not to call him, but that had been a waste of breath. At least he’d left the Bimbo at home. And that was the only good thing she could say about the afternoon ahead of them all.

The bell didn’t ring, but she heard the front door slam shut. He must’ve walked in without even knocking.

His voice came up the stairs as loudly as if he stood just outside her bedroom. “Kelsey Ann LaRue, Trace Lawrence LaRue, y’all get yourselves down here right this minute.” He waited five seconds. “Don’t make me come up there. You’re not too old for me to take my belt to you.”

She remembered her last encounter with that belt all too clearly. Ignoring the pitch and twist of her stomach, Kelsey eased off the bed and walked slowly to open the door. Trace looked at her from down the hall, his face white with a combination of hangover and nerves. He hated it when their dad yelled.

“Come on.” She tilted her head toward the stairs. “Let’s get this over with.”

Kate waited for them at the bottom of the steps, trying to smile but looking every bit as nervous as Kelsey felt. She’d never been arrested before, never done anything quite this bad. There was no telling what her dad would do about it.

He was staring out the French doors into the side yard, but as they stepped into the living room, he whipped around to face them. “Have you lost what brains you ever had? Bad enough you were drinking, but to get in a car and go knocking down mailboxes…In one of my neighborhoods, no less. What kind of stupid is that?”

Kelsey shrugged one shoulder. At the time, it had seemed immensely funny to knock over mailboxes that her dad’s company had set up. Now she didn’t have an answer.

“Don’t give me that sullen face, young lady. You’re gonna explain this until I’m satisfied with what I’m hearing.”

Staring at his clenched fists, Kelsey got nervous. “I was drinking. Not thinking straight.”

“No shit. And you dragged your brother along for the ride? I thought you might have more sense, boy.”

Kelsey caught Trace’s glance, knew he was wondering if she would give him away for having been the one to think up the stunt to begin with. “We didn’t start out to—to cause trouble,” she said, trying out her guiltiest look. “It just kinda happened.”

“Yeah, right.” He propped his hands on his hips and shook his head. “I’ll just have to see what I can do to fix it, is all. I’ve got a call in to the D.A. If we’re lucky, he’ll be able to get this whole situation handled before the court system even sees the paperwork.”

Kate stepped forward. “L.T., I really think Kelsey and Trace need to realize there are consequences to behavior like this.”

He gave her a quick, contemptuous glance. “Oh, you can bet there are consequences.” His gaze shifted to Kelsey. “You’re not going anywhere but school for the next six months, you hear me? No ball games, no parties, nothing. You can sit here and twiddle your thumbs and think about how stupid you were last night. Same goes for you,” he told Trace. “Forget the rest of soccer season. You’re off the team.”

“You can’t do that!”

Kelsey watched her dad’s face change and knew the protest was a mistake. Closing the distance between them, he took a handful of Trace’s T-shirt and brought their faces together. “You want to watch me? I’m not having my boy raising hell in this town, ruining the reputation I’ve built these last ten years. You’ll behave, or you won’t leave the house.”

Letting go with a shove that rocked Trace back on his heels, he whipped around to face Kate. “I don’t know what you’re thinking about, either, letting my kids go to a party like that. Anybody with common sense would know that a houseful of teenagers with no supervision means trouble.” He sneered as he looked their stepmother up and down. “But you’re not real strong in the common-sense department, now, are you? So let me make it plain. Keep those kids in the house, except when they go to school. Got it?”

Before she could say anything, he marched to the front door and slammed it one more time on the way out. In the silence, they heard the squeal of tires as he stopped at the corner, then roared away.

The three of them stood for a long minute without moving a muscle.

“I don’t know what he’ll be able to convince the district attorney to do,” Kate said finally, and went to sit in a chair by the fireplace. “I wouldn’t count on getting off without some sort of punishment from the court.”

Aunt Mary Rose came in from the kitchen carrying a tray loaded with a plate of cookies, glasses and a pitcher of lemonade. “I gather the storm has passed. Y’all want something to drink?”

Kelsey looked at the tray, tried to imagine putting a cookie in her mouth or swallowing a sip of lemonade. Tears burned her eyes and her stomach clenched. With a gasp, she turned and bolted up the stairs. She made it to the toilet in the hall bathroom just in time. Since she’d spent half the night throwing up and hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch, there wasn’t much to lose.

Somebody started up the steps. “Kelsey?” Kate would want to make her feel better. Like that was even possible anymore.

Still retching, Kelsey managed to shut and lock the bathroom door. Then she curled up in a corner, buried her face in one of her stepmother’s soft turquoise towels and cried.

WHEN HE CAME off duty on Monday afternoon, Pete got the message that the assistant chief of police wanted to see him as soon as possible. Without stopping to change his uniform, he signed out and then hopped in the Jeep for the drive across town to the police station. He had to wait about thirty minutes for another meeting to end, but finally got into the big man’s office. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

“Yeah, Pete. Sit down.” The assistant chief shuffled through some papers, tapped the stack on his desk and folded his hands on top. “I told you I’d get back to you as soon as our budget decisions were made.”

“Yes, sir.” This was not going to be good news.

“The city council handed down a fifteen-percent cut in next year’s police department appropriation. We’ve frozen salary levels across the board, denied most new-equipment requisitions. But to meet the budget, we’re gonna have to trim nonessential programs.”

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