Page 112 of The River We Remember

“We have to stop, Garnet.”

She took her hand away.

“It’s Angie Madison, isn’t it?” she said.

“No, Garnet. It’s the situation. We’ve been lucky no one’s found out. Just so damn lucky. Because it would break this family apart. You know that.”

“What I know is that I can’t live without you.”

“I’m not going anywhere. But this part of our lives is over. It has to be.”

“I don’t want it to be over.”

“Do you love Tom?”

“Of course I do,” she said.

“Do you want to hurt him?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Then we have to stop this.”

Now the stone of her face cracked, and she seemed ready to fall apart. “You don’t want to hurt him but you’re willing to devastate me?”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone, Garnet. I’m tired of being afraid of doing just that. We can’t go on like this forever.”

“Why not, Brody? We’re careful. And you love me, you know you do.”

“There’s so much more to consider than you and me. So much hurt. Let me go, Garnet. Just let me go.”

And now she would not look at him. She turned her face away toward the small patch of woods where the children had disappeared. He could tell from the quiver of her body that she was crying. Everything inside him wanted to reach out and hold her, comfort her, to feel the familiar contours of her body against him. It took all his strength to refrain.

At last she seemed to gather herself. She turned to him, her eyes red from weeping, and said, “There’s something you should see.”

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

ON THAT FATEFUL Sunday, Angie Madison was like a woman with a terrible fever, drifting in and out of awareness, time lost to her. She worked the Wagon Wheel but walked leaden through her duties, waiting for the world to collapse around her. At five that afternoon, Ida told her to go to the house and get herself ready for her evening with Brody Dern.

“I think I need to call him and cancel,” Angie said.

“Are you sick?” Ida asked for the umpteenth time.

“Not sick, no.”

“What then?”

“I just…” Again, she couldn’t answer.

“You’re just nervous. Go bathe, clean yourself up, put on something pretty. You’ll be fine,” Ida insisted and ushered her out the back door of the Wagon Wheel Café.

But all her preparations seemed like playacting, as if she were going through the movements of something that wasn’t real. It had always been a dream, she knew, this life she’d been living. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the aged face of a girl from the bayou country, a girl who, before she met Christian Madison, had given herself to so many men she had finally ceased to count them, almost none of whom she’d remembered. But she could see them now, a legion of ghosts parading naked before her. For so long now that had been another life, had happened to another woman. But the curtain that had hidden her sins was about to be drawn aside. For Evangeline Madison, it felt like Judgment Day.

She heard Scott come in from his work at the diner. He came upstairs and began rummaging in his room. She left her bedroom and stood in his doorway, watching him roll and tie his sleeping bag.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“I’m spending the night with Del at Fort Beloit, remember? I asked and you said it was okay. We’re going out as soon as we’ve changed the Rialto marquee.”