“Mostly.” He passed the shaving cream over to her, adding a pack of chewing gum to it at the last minute. “Hey, Mrs. Aldrich, aren’t you originally from over near Franklin?”
“I am,” she said, looking surprised and pleased. “How did you ever remember that?”
He grinned at her. “Every time we played your old high school, you’d tell us about your mixed feelings.”
“Oh, dear,” she laughed. “I’ll bet that got old fast.”
“No, no, it was okay. But I wondered, did you ever know a family named Francis over there?”
“Francis?” She nearly rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll say I knew them. Everybody knows that family. I’ll tell you a secret, Rex. All by themselves, the Francis family is a good reason to teach school in this county instead of that one.”
“No kidding. They’re that bad?”
She shuddered. “Rex, I have opinions about those children that teachers aren’t supposed to have about their students.” She smiled at him again, passing over his change and his items in a sack. Then she winked at him. “Don’t tell anybody.”
He grinned back at her. “I won’t. Are they all like that?”
She squinted, in thought. “Almost. There’s an older sister who’s a nice girl, or at least she was the last I knew of her, which is some years ago. I substitute taught in their grade school the year I was pregnant, and she was in my class. Pretty child, maybe not an Einstein, but she tried hard, and she was very sweet. I never had to deal with her parents, thank goodness, because they never came to school to check on their kids, but her younger siblings were already raising hell. Even the sister was a mess. How that girl came out of that bunch, I’ll never know. I remember thinking at the time, if she’s smart, she’ll get as far away from them as she possibly can.” She leaned over the counter and said in a whisper, “I don’t say this easily about anybody, Rex, but they’re trash, nothing but trash, from their worthless parents on down to the littlest child, God help him.”
“Except that one daughter.”
Mrs. Aldrich shrugged, a little sadly. “I don’t know how she turned out.” Then it finally occurred to her ask the obvious question. “Why’d you ask me about them, Rex?”
He shrugged right back at her, and made a face as if it was no big deal. “I heard a couple of boys from that family might be looking for part-time ranch work, and-”
”Don’t even think about hiring them, Rex.”
“Thanks, Mrs. Aldrich. I won’t. I’ll tell my dad.”
“I doubt you’ll be telling your father anything he doesn’t already know,” she said, looking cynical. “I’ll bet sheriffs all over the state know the name Francis by heart.”
One last stop, and he was finished pursuing the story she’d told him.
The next Saturday, after morning football practice, and on a day when his father had released him from work at home, Rex fended off his friends who wanted him to drive around with them, and he drove alone to Franklin, twenty-five miles away.
He hadn’t had a reason to be there in years, and he was a little shocked to see how much the tiny town had declined since then. There never had been more than a handful of jobs there, and a scattering of houses. It was barely even a town. But it was in even worse condition now, with hardly a sign of life on the bedraggled-looking, two-block Main Street. Immediately, he understood why Sarah Francis had regularly driven all the way to Small Plains to find work cleaning houses, and it didn’t have anything to do with status in her hometown. It had to do with survival, from what he could see.
He hadn’t been able to find out where her family lived, not without drawing attention to the question, so he hadn’t asked. Now he realized it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a decent house in the town. It appeared that every resident lived on the edge of poverty, or deep down in it. Add that to a bad family, and a girl wouldn’t need any other reasons to want to run away. So maybe Sarah hadn’t sounded totally convincing to him when she had explained her presence at the Newquists’ place, but then maybe that was only because she was ashamed of where she’d come from and what she was going through.
I should have believed her, he thought, feeling bad about it.
He turned around and drove back home. Two days later, he worked up the nerve to go back out to see her again.
“I just wondered, is there anything you need that I could bring you?”
“Well, Mrs. Newquist makes sure I have groceries, but…yeah, there’s some stuff I don’t really want to ask her for.”
She gave him a short list, mostly expensive snack foods, which he happily filled at a grocery store in yet another town, where nobody would know him, and where nobody would ask why the sheriff’s son was buying women’s magazines and frozen diet dinners, among other things. Doing it made him feel happy and needed, and the nature of the things she asked him to get gave him the feeling of intimacy with her. When he handed them over to her, and she forgot to ask him how much they cost, he didn’t mind. After what he had seen in Franklin that day, he was happy to help her in any way she might need help. After that, he began to think of his trips to stores for her as favors that she was doing him, by allowing him to be of service.
Chapter Twenty-two
May 31, 2004
Randie raised her head, and looked around Sam’s Pizza, where the friends sat at a big round wooden table. “Am I going blind, or did it suddenly get dark in here?”
“It’s not you,” Abby told her. “Look outside, guys.”
Obediently, they turned to stare out the picture windows facing the main street. Cars were driving with their headlights on, even though the sun hadn’t gone down yet. Right at that moment, pings against the glass told them that rain had started falling.
“Looks like we got in just before the downpour,” Ellen observed.
One large pizza sat on the table in front of them-loaded with everything, thin crust, double cheese, sprinkled with hot pepper by Cerule’s liberal hand. The three women who weren’t either a mayor or a funeral director had beers in front of them. For Ellen and Susan, who might get called out by emergencies at any time, there was iced tea. The women were halfway finished eating when the lights in the restaurant suddenly seemed to glow a whole lot brighter than before.
“Ooo,” Susan said, “I just love the weather when it gets like this.”
“You would,” Cerule said, with a derisive snort. “You love morgues, too.”
“No, seriously,” Susan insisted. “Don’t you just love it when the air gets all dark and spooky like this? I think it’s exciting, like anything could happen.”
“Yeah, like we could all get blown away at any moment,” Cerule retorted.
With perfect timing, the manager of the restaurant stopped by their table. “We’re under a tornado watch, ladies. If it turns into a warning, we can head to the basement.” She smiled at them. “If you don’t mind sitting on cases of tomato sauce.”
When she moved on to the next table, Randie said, “If a tornado hits us and breaks all that tomato sauce, they’ll think there’s been a massacre.” After a laugh went around the table she returned them to their prior hot topic of conversation. “What do you think he’s been doing with himself all these years?”
“I heard he’s a lawyer,” Cerule said.
“You did?” Abby stared across the table at her. “I never heard that.”
“I heard real estate,” Susan offered.
“Well,” Ellen said, “we know he got married and had a kid, right Abby?” Nadine had made sure their mother knew that much. “A son, the year before Mom died. And we know he settled in Kansas City at some point. And we know he still looks better than he has any right to.”