Of course, he swore on his life that he would never do that.
It was only when he was on his way home, just moments later, that Rex realized that his brother must know. She trusted Patrick not to tell anybody? Obviously, she didn’t know his brother very well, or she’d know that Patrick drunk was an even bigger blowhard than Patrick sober.
At first, it really worried him to think of Patrick entrusted with such a secret.
It was only later, a couple of days later after the glow had worn off a little, that Rex began to feel the first tug of doubt. How secret could something be if Patrick knew it? And how likely was it, really, that Mitch’s mom, who wouldn’t give a spare sandwich to a bum if he was starving to death on her doorstep, would turn her precious ranch house over to a “mere” cleaning girl? But if all of that was unlikely, then so was Sarah’s story, and if that wasn’t true, then what the hell was she doing out there?
Still, he said nothing to Mitch, or to anyone else, just in case it was true.
He started going out there every few days to check on her, to see if she needed anything, to try to figure out the truth of the mystery of her being there. And he tried a few other gambits that wouldn’t give anything away.
Chapter Twenty-one
“Mom,” Rex asked Verna, in his first foray into checking out the truth of Sarah’s story. “How come you guys don’t party at the Newquists’ place in the country anymore?”
His mother looked over from the counter where she was mashing potatoes for supper, with a surprised expression on her plump, pleasant face. “What in the world made you think of that, Rex?”
“I don’t know.” He shrugged, walked closer, stuck a finger down into the potatoes, dangerously close to the whirring blades, and got his hand slapped for his trouble. He still managed to emerge with a grin and a fingertip-full of potato, which he sucked off. After he swallowed, he said, “I just got to thinking about it the other day, how much fun we used to have when we’d all hang out there. You and Dad, Doc and Abby’s mom, the judge and Mrs. Newquist, and all of us kids. I thought that was almost like your favorite place to be with your friends.”
“I’m sure we’ll do it again sometime.”
“Why did you stop?”
“Stop? We didn’t stop, Rex, it’s just…you know how Nadine is, if she can’t have something perfect, then she doesn’t want to have it at all.”
“What’s not perfect?”
“According to her,” his mother said, with a comically sarcastic twist to the pronoun, a twist that made him think of her other friend, Margie Reynolds, “the house isn’t fit for company anymore. She says she’s not having anybody out there ever again until Tom lets loose with enough money to fix it up the way she wants it done. And you know what that means.”
Rex laughed, thinking of Tom the tightwad and Nadine the perfectionist. “Never gonna happen?”
“Probably not in my lifetime,” his mother said, grinning. “Maybe in yours.”
“Hey, Mrs. Newquist,” he said the next time he was in their house. “How come you guys don’t use the ranch house anymore?”
Mitch’s mother took her time answering him. Finally, she looked up from the newspaper she was reading in the den, and said, in her cool, precise way, “I’m having it redone, Rex.”
“Redone? Like, how?”
“I am having a new foundation put in, new roof, painting inside and out, new furnishings, and we’re putting a gazebo in the backyard.”
“Sweet,” he said. “So it’s all torn up right now?”
He watched her hesitate, though he wouldn’t have called it that if he hadn’t been watching for it. He would have just thought it was one of her controlling moments, when Nadine answered people when she, and only she, damn well pleased. “Yes. I don’t want anyone out there while the work is in progress.”
It almost jibed with what his mother had told him, except for one thing-from what he had seen at the ranch house, there wasn’t any work going on at all. It appeared to him that Mrs. Newquist had told his mother one story and now was telling him a slightly different one, but they both added up to the same thing: hiding the fact that the Newquists were giving shelter to a girl who didn’t want to be found.
Mitch’s mom went up in his estimation in that moment.
Not only was she a pretty damned good liar, much better than he had ever given her credit for being, but she was doing a good deed without getting any credit for it from her friends and neighbors. His mother and Abby’s mom would be amazed if they knew about it. Which they weren’t going to, because he wasn’t going to tell them.
“Hey,” he said to Mitch while they waited for Abby and his own date to come back from the bathroom at the movies. “Remember that hot chick who used to work for your mom? Sarah, I think her name was? What the hell was her last name, can you remember? And where was she from, anyway?”
“Sarah?” Mitch turned toward him, with a lascivious grin. “Ah, Sarah.”
Annoyed, Rex thwacked his friend’s sack of popcorn so kernels flew out.
“Hey!” Mitch objected. “Why’d you do that?”
“Do you remember her last name, or don’t you? I was trying to think of it the other day, and I can’t remember it, and it’s driving me crazy.”
Mitch picked popcorn off his lap and dropped it onto the floor. “Um, I dunno. Oh, wait. Yeah, I do know.” He reached over and grabbed a huge handful of Rex’s popcorn and put it in his own sack.
“Hey!” Rex objected.
“Francis,” Mitch said. “I remember it was two first names, and her last name was like the town she was from. Sarah Francis from Franklin. That’s how I remember it.”
Rex moved his feet so Abby could walk by him. His own date sat down on his right.
“Why do you want to know her name?” Mitch asked him, too loudly.
“Whose name?” Rex’s date immediately wanted to know.
“Our second-grade teacher,” Rex said.
“You’re kidding!” His date gave him a disbelieving look. “You forgot Miss Plant’s name? How could you forget Miss Plant’s name? She looked just like a rhododendron.”
All four of them started to laugh.
“I don’t even know what that means,” Mitch said, almost choking on the popcorn he had been swallowing when she said it, “but you’re right, she did.”
“Not nice,” Abby reproved them, but her giggles undercut her disapproval.
After the movie started, Mitch leaned in close and said in a lower voice, “So. You gonna look her up?”
“Who?”
“Don’t give me who. You know who. You going to look her up?”
“No way. I just couldn’t remember her last name, that’s all.”
Even in the dark he could sense his best friend’s suspicious grin. “Yeah? As I recall, Sarah Francis doesn’t look like a rhododendron.”
“No,” Rex had to admit, “she does not. Did not. Now shut up.”
“She looks like a rose, a beauteous, blossoming, ripe and luscious, fragrant-”
“Shut the fuck up.”
Mitch subsided, chuckling to himself, which made Abby turn her face to look at him quizzically. He answered her by darting toward her and planting a quick kiss on her lips, which made her smile over at Rex, and then subside back into her seat.
On the pretext of needing some shaving cream, Rex stopped by the Rexall Drug Store where one of his high school history teachers worked behind the counter between school sessions.
“Rex,” she said, “what are you up to this summer? Helping your dad at the ranch?”