Page 28 of A Matter of Time
“I’m glad you changed your mind,” she began as the waitress walked away to put our orders in. “I’ve told Cam so many times to simply tell you what happened, but he keeps refusing. You know how stubborn he is.”
Hearing that they were still in touch, that she talked to him ‘so many times’ and her bringing up his stubbornness like we could laugh about it together did nothing to improve my mood. I hadn’t gone there to catch up or to make friends. I wanted to hear what she had to tell me, and nothing more.
“I didn’t even know you and Cam were friends,” I told her bluntly. “In fact, I asked him straight out if he knew you and he said no.”
She winced at both my tone and the accusation in my words. “Well, as I mentioned briefly the other day, I asked him not to tell you. And the truth is we didn’t really know each other very well until a few weeks before prom. I was a nobody at school and he was… well, he was Cam Bailey, with you as his girlfriend. People like the two of you didn’t pay attention to people like me.”
I didn’t think that was fair. I may have been popular, but I had never been a snob about it. In such a small town, there weren’t really cliques, not like there were in city schools. “You weren’t in our year,” I pointed out to her. “And you didn’t play sports or take part in any of the clubs. When would we have gotten to know each other?”
Her fingers drummed nervously on the table. “I know, I’m not trying to… shoot, this is coming out wrong already. I’m not trying to say you were mean to me or anything like that. I just knew you didn’t notice me and neither did Cam, not until he caught me at work one day.”
“Caught you?” My brow furrowed as I tried to figure out what she meant. Cam had worked at the local grocery store during high school. He’d been great at it, like he was at most things; charming the older women when they came to do their shopping, negotiating deals with local suppliers, and helping the manager completely revolutionize their bookkeeping. He’d even been offered the assistant manager job at 17, but he had always had bigger dreams than that. Dreams like being the CFO of an oil company, for one.
Marley nodded to assure me I’d heard her correctly. “He saw me shoving some fruit into my bag without paying for it. He could have called me out right then and there, but he didn’t. He waited until I’d left and he followed me. You know that park across the street from the store?”
Of course I did.
“He caught up to me there and asked why I’d done it. I was terrified he would report me or call the cops or whatever, but that wasn’t what he wanted. He just wanted to know why I felt I needed to take it.”
That sounded exactly like Cam, or at least the Cam I used to know. Based on what I’d seen in the past week, I had to guess he still behaved the same way.
“I didn’t want to tell him. I hadn’t told anyone about my situation and I didn’t know him at all. I remember my hands shaking, I was so nervous, but he stayed kind and encouraging. He made it feel like it would be okay to tell him.”
Again, I knew exactly what she meant, so I simply nodded.
“So, I told him the truth. My mom had gotten really sick the week before and my dad brought her all the way to Houston, to a clinic that would take uninsured people. We didn’t have a lot of money and we didn’t have health insurance. My dad had been on disability for years ever since he hurt his back, and he hated the idea of people knowing just how poor we were, so he took her as far away as he could go. When they got there, they found out that she had advanced liver cancer. They couldn’t have done much to treat it even if we had money for the treatment, which we didn’t.”
Immediately, my mind flashed back to Shawna in her hospital bed the previous night, and the way Marley had expressed her sympathy over hearing that Shawna’s cancer had returned. Apparently, she had personal experience with it, and cancer sucked, we could agree on that much.
“Anyway, my dad couldn’t come home. We didn’t have the money for gas to keep driving back and forth, so I got left on my own, with no money left for groceries. My hunger got the better of me and that’s why I took the food from the store. I begged Cam not to tell anyone, even though he had every right to. I didn’t want my parents to be worried about that on top of everything else.”
They should have been a littlemoreworried about their daughter having food to eat, I couldn’t help thinking, but I kept my mouth shut, letting her speak as the waitress brought our drinks over. Neither of us touched the glasses as she continued her story.
“He said he wouldn’t report me, and though I offered to give the fruit back, he told me to keep it. He went back to work and I went home, and later that night, someone knocked on my door. I didn’t plan to answer since I was there on my own, but Cam called through the door, and when I opened it, he stood there with two bags of groceries he’d bought for me.”
Just like he had at my brother’s wedding, Cam always came to the rescue; he couldn’t help it. It seemed to be in his blood, and I could appreciate the kindness and thoughtfulness of the gesture. What I didn’t understand was why he never told me about it, and how it led from that one selfless act to him taking her to prom.
Marley did her best to explain that next. “He wanted to tell the ladies at church, he said there would be so many people who would help me out if they only knew, but I knew my dad would be furious. He’d always been ridiculously stubborn and proud, and he didn’t want handouts from anyone, even when we could have used them. So, I begged Cam to keep it a secret, even from you. The way his face fell when I asked him that, Tonia, if you’d have seen it… I could tell he’d never kept anything from you before.”
“You had no right to ask him that,” I pointed out, though I kept my tone soft. I felt bad for her; who wouldn’t? I wasn’t a monster, but it still didn’t explain everything.
“I didn’t see another choice,” she told me bluntly. “The Callahans were exactly the type of people my dad didn’t want feeling bad for us. If Cam told you, other people might find out. I trusted him, barely, but I didn’t know you. I only knew the perfect girl at school that everyone else wanted to be like.”
I ignored that comment to return to her narrative. “How long did this go on for?”
Marley took a sip from her drink to wet her mouth. She’d been doing almost all the talking up to that point. “Just over two weeks. He came over almost every night to make sure I had what I needed, and he even slept over a few times, on the couch in the living room, because he felt bad about me sleeping there on my own. He was just a really, really decent guy, and I began to think… well, I began to hope, I guess, that something else lay behind all of this attention he gave me other than just friendship.”
We were getting to the heart of things. This must have been when things took a turn, and I did my best to brace myself for it.
“My dad called and said that they’d been told my mom only had a couple of weeks left. He put her on the phone with me and she was so sad, talking about all the things she’d never get to see, like my wedding or even my prom, and that’s when I had the idea.”
“What idea?” I asked uneasily. So far, Cam hadn’t done a single thing wrong in her story other than not telling me the truth, and I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
“I decided to…” She trailed off, closing her eyes in pain or embarrassment, I couldn’t tell which. Maybe both. “I asked Cam to take me to prom so that I could take pictures for my mom and show them to her when I went up to visit the following weekend. My dad said he would come and bring me up to say goodbye, and I thought it might make her happy to see the pictures, and I thought… well, I hoped that maybe if Cam took me to prom, if people saw us together and we had a good time, that maybe he would admit he felt something for me too.”
The sinking feeling in my stomach got worse. “Youaskedhimto prom?” When she nodded, I quickly followed up with another question. “And he just said yes?”
Marley shook her head vehemently. “No, of course not. He told me he would be going with you, of course, but that he could ask one of his friends to take me and that we could all go as a group. Looking back, I can see how hard he tried to make me a reasonable offer, but at the time, I was really shy and I didn’t want to go with someone I didn’t know, not to mention that I really wanted to go with Cam, so I refused. I got really emotional about it, and I’m… I’m ashamed now when I think about it. It’s not something I’m proud of, but basically, I blackmailed him with my dying mother to take me to the prom instead of you.”
