Page 64 of His Wounded Heart

“Fungus, huh? Are you making fun of my dislike of mushrooms?”

“Maybe…”

She leans over and sets her beer on the coffee table, missing the coaster. I reach over and put it on one.

“Thanks.”

“I’d just turned nineteen when I went to Nashville to train as a paralegal.”

“Why a paralegal?”

“When I was sixteen, the one lawyer in town gave me a job filing for him. Mr. Fortnum’s kind of an institution here in Jasper Creek. He’s amazing. He’s been practicing law for almost fifty years, people from as far away as Kentucky and Alabama try to hire him. But he won’t take a case unless he believes in the client. He never did any work for my parents or the old sheriff or my uncle. You’ve heard about all that, right?”

“A little,” I admit.

“Well, that’s not the point of this story. Norville, my dad, went to prison when I was fourteen, and all of us kids were ready to lock the prison door behind him. The only shitty part was that Drake had to join the Navy because of trumped-up charges.”

I frown. I don’t know what she’s talking about, but I don’t ask questions. She should tell the story her own way. “So, what else happened when you were fourteen?” I ask.

“My youngest sister, Piper, was four. She was still traumatized after Norville broke her arm. The twins were seven, Maddie was ten and Evie? Well Evie was twelve, going on forty.”

“What about your mom?”

“You mean Wanda? When she wasn’t out chasing dick, she was on the couch passed out. Vodka was her booze of choice.” She gives me a considering look. “Is that too much for you?”

I shake my head. “Absolutely not. I want to hear it all.” And I do. After the whitewashed, picture-perfect life of Lizzy, I’m sick of not hearing the truth. Ugly suits me just fine. “How’d y’all survive? Who paid the bills? Bought food?”

“Mom claimed disability from the meat packing plant years ago, and the state was still paying, but it wasn’t a lot. Sometimes her boyfriends.” Trenda put air-quotes around the word. “Sometimes they would contribute to the family coffers, but mostly they wouldn’t. We had Granny Laughton, that was Wanda’s mom. She was living on social security, and she really was disabled. She lived a couple of counties over, but she always sent each of us birthday money, so that helped for school clothes from the secondhand store.” Trenda stopped talking.

“What else, Honey?”

“But mostly it was Drake sending half his paycheck to mom that kept the roof over our heads and the lights on. Evie and I never told Drake that Mom would use his money for booze, smokes, and gambling at the Indian casinos down in Mississippi. Sometimes she’d stay there for days. We let him think she was being a good mother to us. He needed something to believe in.”

“But didn’t you girls need the money?”

“Most of the time Evie and I could catch the mail before Wanda would, then we’d sign the check and then get it cashed at one of those Cash-Your-Check-Here-And-We’ll-Rip-You-Off places. They’d charge us a pretty big fee, but would turn a blind eye when Wanda’s ID looked nothing like us. Then we’d have the money we needed for rent, electricity, and food. If Wanda got to the mailbox first, she’d never use it for what we needed, and we had to rely on my babysitting and Evie mowing lawns or recycling plastic bottles. Whatever we could think to do to make money. We went to the food bank a lot.”

“That’s how you grew up?” Looking at the woman in front of me, I can’t square the circle of her growing up in such hardship. I know people said things were rough for the Avery children, but this was fucking heartbreaking.

“I figured you would have heard some talk by now,” she sighs.

“Just some, Trenda. Not a lot. And what I did hear is that it was a wonder all of you Avery children turned out so well, considering the parents you had.”

She leans in closer. “Really?” She seems really surprised.

“Yeah, Honey. Really. The few people I have talked to in this little town know you or your sisters and think very highly of y’all.”

She giggles. “You say y’all wrong.”

I know she’s deflecting, but I let her. “I do not,” I reply in a severe tone. I’ll say anything to get her to giggle again.

“I can tell you’re not a true Southerner. A true Southerner would have selected sweet tea, not coffee.”

“Any Southerner who spent time in the military would have requested coffee,” I disagree.

“Drake always asks for sweet tea, and so does Sebastian. He’s from Louisiana, and so does—”

I hold up my hand. “Stop already. Fine, I grew up in Ohio and spent the first part of my career in California. But I’ve been living the last thirteen years in Virginia, which gives me license to use the phrase y’all. So how am I using it wrong?”