Love Songs
Page 42

“And I don’t do bullying.”
Clara stepped up closer to him. “I’m not bullying you. I’m trying to get my answer. My husband is hiding something from me.”
“He’s not hiding it,” he said and his voice softened. “He just doesn’t know how to tell you.”
Her heart rate kicked up even harder.
“You’re scaring me.”
He turned toward her, but he took a step back from her and not closer to her.
“Patty had a daughter. She was two years older than me.” He turned and placed his hands on the counter top and bowed his head. “Patty never had much to do with her. I only met her a few times while she was even married to my dad.” He sucked in a long, deep breath and let it out. “She hated Patty as much as I did.”
Clara felt her stomach twist. She didn’t want to hear about another woman. She didn’t want to know anything about Warner loving someone else, but she felt it coming. Why else would he mention her?
“When I was about fourteen I had decided that I was already too good for school and the day was better drinking behind the gym shed. I was usually drunk and passed out by the time my grandma got home. Drinking led to pot. Pot led to…”
Clara couldn’t help but gasp and Warner turned his head.
“You want me to stop?”
She shook her head, urging him to continue, but she wasn’t sure she wanted him to.
He turned and backed against the counter shoving his hands into his front pockets.
“I was at this party one night and my buddy brought this girl with him. I was trashed and she made me look sober. I didn’t recognize her, Clara.” He looked up at her. “It was Mindy and I had no idea.”
“Mindy? Patricia Little’s daughter?”
“Yeah.” He stepped away from the counter and walked to the table where he stood as she had earlier with his hands on the back of the chair. “We both ended up sleeping the night off on the guy’s couch. She knew who I was right away. She acted like I was the long lost piece of her life.”
Clara watched him search for the rest of his story. She wanted to stop him from continuing. It already hurt too much to find out who he really was.
“You and Mindy?”
“Me and Mindy.” He pulled the chair out and sat down. He clasped his hands on lap and hung his head. “When Patty and my grandma found out we were—well you know—Grandma shipped me off to Vegas to live with my aunt.”
“You were so young.”
“I was. Seems so long ago.” He sat up and pressed his back to the chair. “Anyway, sending a kid to the cesspool of Vegas when he already has a drinking problem and a drug addiction isn’t the smartest thing. But I was there for the next year or so. I made some friends. I was even in a band.” He laughed. “They’d sneak me into bars because I wasn’t old enough to be in the bar I was playing in.”
“How old were they?”
“Old enough.”
Clara realized her own hands shook as he continued his story, so she tucked them behind her.
“Anyway, I was just another low life on the streets of Vegas. My aunt usually didn’t know where I was or care. Then one day Mindy walks through the door. It was like my salvation. There was my woman.”
Clara thought she was going to be ill.
“She’d hitched a ride when she found out where I was. She was almost eighteen now. The guy she’d hitched a ride from had driven her for a few rounds in the back seat.”
“Oh, Warner. That’s horrible.”
“This was life, Clara. This was the norm. We didn’t have this perfect protected life you did.”
“And you’re holding that against me?”
“No, but it sounds like you’re holding it against me.”
He was right. She wouldn’t have married him if she thought he was bad for her. But she certainly hadn’t expected this.
“Mindy and I fell right back into our routine. Then she started collecting men. I was just who she ran back to when she had used them up to get what she wanted. I was young, but I had feelings. I didn’t want to just be her guy for sex or the connection for her drugs.”
“Warner, this is killing me.” Clara walked out of the kitchen and into the living room.
“Let me finish and then I’ll go.”
“You’ll go?”
“You can’t even hear the rest of my story without walking away from me. Clara, this is the way it works in my life. People find out who I was and they walk. I’m prepared for you to do the same.”
“I’m not like everyone else.”
“Then prove it and sit down and listen to me.”
Clara felt as though he’d kicked her in the gut. And worse, she deserved his anger.
She sat down on the couch and looked up at him.
“Anyway, I decided I needed to stop the drinking and the drugs. I was much too young to be having a woman in my bed when I woke up, especially one who was continually trashed. So I stopped doing drugs and eventually stopped drinking. I saved up enough money for a bus ticket to Nashville and one night I told her I was going home.”
“She didn’t want to come with you?”
“No. Her kind of life was right there. She threw the biggest fit I’d ever seen a woman throw, and mind you I was there when her mother threw some serious fits. But she got a few punches in on me. Blacked my eye and bloodied my nose. She even cracked a rib. I got on the bus and she went back to whatever guy she’d been with the night before and…”
He shook his head, swallowed hard, and rubbed his hand over the back of his neck. “Well they tied on the worst concoction of coke and booze ever. But I don’t think that was all.”
Warner walked toward the front window and looked out over the street. “Patty found out I was back in town and she came after me with a vengeance. She wanted to know where her daughter was and I told her. Looked her right in the eye, with my black one that Mindy had given me, and told her that her daughter was turning tricks in Vegas for drugs and booze.”
“What did she say to that?”
“She called me a liar. Said that if that was true I must have been the one that put her up to it.”
“She didn’t know her own daughter well enough to know what kind of person she was.”