Before I Say Goodbye Read online

  Kyle rewound the music to the place where she’d left off and began with the new steps. That’s when I realized she was making up the dance, with a beauty and maturity I hadn’t known she possessed. I sat down on the bottom step and watched, entranced, as my little girl danced her heart out. There was longing and heartache in her expression, in her steps.

  You don’t even know how much you’ve lost, I thought. Yet it was there in the dance.

  I had to get out of there. I stood and started up the steps, but she’d finally sensed my presence and shut off the music. “Mom?”

  “James and I are going to get a video. Want to come?”

  She shook her head, still completely caught up in a world I didn’t share—could never share again. Not now. “I’m almost done, though, so I’ll watch it with you when you get back. I have some popcorn.”

  I knew about her stash. I’d seen it once, but no matter how desperate I became, I never, ever touched it. “Great. I’ll see you in a little while.”

  Once I’d had dreams. I had nothing now. For a moment, I didn’t know why I was back in Utah, or why I thought I could make anything happen, much less a plan that hinged on a boy I hadn’t seen for twenty years.

  I was worse than pathetic.

  I couldn’t hate God, because I wasn’t exactly sure He existed, but I could hate myself. I was at fault. Me. I shut my eyes and let myself go inside the pain. Just for a few moments, until I heard James’s footsteps.

  “Is she coming?”

  “She’s practicing. But she’ll watch it with us, and we’ll eat popcorn, too, so that’ll be fun.”

  He laughed. “And I get to pick the movie all by myself!”

  “Yay!” We ran out to the truck together.

  While we were out and about, I’d pick up another gallon of milk and a few other odds and ends that we would be needing. Life wasn’t so bad.

  “Mom, I forgot to tell you I need a light for my nightlight,” James said when we’d found a Redbox movie he wanted. “It’s busted again.”

  “There’s a K-Mart over there,” I said. “Let’s get it now.”

  “Remember, only up to seven watts.”

  “I remember.” This was our third nightlight, so we were being careful.

  Apparently, K-Mart was quite a hopping place on Friday night in Spanish Fork. Not as packed as the Wal-Mart Supercenter in nearby Springville where I’d taken the children shopping on Monday but more crowded than I expected.

  “Hey, Rikki.”

  I looked up, surprised to see one of the supervisors from my work. He wasn’t over my section, but I’d noticed him because of his beautiful green eyes. I’ve always been a sucker for beautiful eyes of any color. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but that could mean anything these days.

  “Hi,” I said, smiling.

  “I’m Quinn Hunter.”

  “From work, yeah.”

  “So how’re you liking it?”

  It’s killing me. “Fine.” He was broad in the way that Kyle’s father had been but taller so he didn’t look blocky. He had dark blond hair, a tan, and thick eyelashes. His other features were a little too plain to be handsome in a movie star way, but the eyes and that smile made up for a lot.

  The smile reminded me of Dante. Not in a painful way but in a way that made me want to smile back.

  “Good.” His eyes fell to James. “This your son?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Hi, there,” he said to James.

  “Hi.” James cocked his head and held up his DVD. “We’re going home to watch a movie and eat popcorn.”

  “Sounds great.” Quinn grimaced. “All I’m doing is changing my oil.”

  I laughed. “I need to learn how to do that myself.”

  “It’s a skill you grow up with here in Spanish Fork.” His eyes went to my hand, though he should have known I wasn’t married because it was on my application. Maybe he hadn’t known he was interested until now. Or maybe he didn’t have much say in who was hired.

  “You grew up here?” I asked. “So did I. What year did you graduate?”

  He’d graduated the year before me and kicked around the army ten years before coming home and marrying his childhood sweetheart. They were divorced last year, and he’d quit the army so he could have more access to his three children. “I don’t believe I’ve just bored you with all of that,” he said. “You have a way about you that makes me tell you things.”

  People told me that all the time. It was an instinctive balance of telling them about my own life and asking questions about theirs. To tell the truth, I was more interested in his oil-changing skills than anything else he’d told me. I’d learned to take care of myself, but I wasn’t above having a man help me simply because he was attracted to me.

  Counting on any kind of a future was not on the table.

  James tugged on my hand. “I’d better go,” I said.

  “Well, it was good talking to you. Let me know if you need help with that oil.”

  “Oh, I’ll need help. No doubt about that.” I knew later he’d ask me at work, and I’d let him come over to help. I’d kept putting oil in the truck, but I hadn’t changed it for a year. Or more.

  “Bye, buddy,” he said to James.

  “You could watch the movie with us,” James offered with the innocence that had attracted many family-oriented men to me in the past.

  “James,” I said.

  “If your mother invites me sometime, we’ll do it then.” Good save. It left things open but didn’t back me to the wall tonight, which was a good thing because pursuing him wasn’t exactly on my to-do list.

  He watched me go. Forty years old and I apparently hadn’t lost all my charm. Fat lot of good it does me.

  “Mom, look! There’s Travis,” James said as we left the store.

  So it was. Looking at Dante’s boy took me back in time—except back then it had been only Dante and me. Travis was with two other boys and a girl with short brown hair, who seemed to be attached to one of Travis’s friends. They were in a huddle outside the store, crowded around their cell phones. “Dude, they’re looking for you big time,” said a teen with black hair and a bad case of acne. “You should just go home and face the music.”

  I would have walked right past them without speaking, but Travis’s expression stopped me. He looked—well, he looked like Dante had on the night his father had forgotten the fathers and sons’ campout. Again. Broken, sad, lonely, and angry. Travis also looked a bit frightened, and that did something to the mother in me that wasn’t related to my past with his father.

  “Hey, Travis,” I said.

  His eyes met mine. “Oh, hi.”

  His friends smiled at me. “Hey, I know you,” the black-haired boy said. “You were at church on Sunday.” His voice was admiring.

  “Yep, I was.”

  “I’m Travis’s friend, BG.”

  “Rikki Crockett, and my son, James.”

  “You mean like Davy Crockett?”

  “My great-grandfather.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  He laughed. The other two teens were texting on their phones, only half aware of what was going on around them. Travis still looked like he’d lost his best friend. “Well, we’d better go,” he said.

  “Wait. Are you driving them?” He had to remember that I’d been at his house when Becca had told him not to drive his friends.

  His face flushed. “Yeah.”

  Now I understood. “I’m not going to tell your parents, but don’t you think someone’s going to? This isn’t a very big town.” Especially within the Mormon community where his father was well-known.

  BG barked a laugh. “They already did. He’s busted. Now he doesn’t wanna go home.”

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nbsp; “Hey, guys,” the girl said. “Ben and Jeanie are coming here to get us. We’re going to their house. Later, Travis.” They started toward the entrance to the store.

  “I wanna come,” BG said.

  “What about me?” Travis asked.

  BG shook his head. “I don’t want to be around when the bishop catches up to you. From what we hear, he’ll be over at Jeanie’s soon. He knows where we all live.”

  “Sounds like Dante,” I said.

  “I hate being the bishop’s son,” Travis muttered.

  “Hey, he’s a nice guy.” BG started toward the store entrance where the others had already disappeared. “Later.”

  Travis sighed and began walking to his car alone. James and I tagged along since we were parked in the same direction. “I’m never going home,” he said. “Never.”

  “I said that once.”

  He looked at me.

  “And I didn’t. Not for twenty years.”

  “I wish that could be me.”

  “I wish I had those twenty years back. I never got to tell my mother goodbye.”

  He stared at me, saying nothing.

  “You look so much like your dad,” I ventured.

  “That’s what my mom says.”

  “Well, she’s right. I bet you’re close.”

  “He doesn’t have time for me.”

  I blinked. “That doesn’t sound like Dante.”

  “All he cares about are his rules and the ward. I’m sick of rules. I just want to be myself.”

  Travis definitely needed help, but I suspected what he needed was easier than what Kyle would need. “Go home, Travis. Your parents love you.”

  “My dad’s going to kill me.”

  “He’s not going to kill you. He’s just going to ground you, and I know it might sound really stupid to you right now, but your dad would have given anything in the world if his dad had grounded him just once. You know why? Because that would mean he’d actually seen him and knew that he existed.” I blinked away tears I hadn’t known were so close.

  “You mean my grandpa?”

  “Yes. Go home, and when your dad starts yelling, you ask him what happened at his last fathers and sons’ campout. Your dad isn’t perfect, but he’s trying. That’s far better than he ever had. Now go home.”

  He stared at me for a long time, but I met his gaze without flinching, and gradually the fire in his eyes subsided. “Okay.”

  “Do I have to follow you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Promise?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll take your word for it. I know you won’t go back on your word.” I smiled at him. He was so dejected that it was all I could do not to pull him into my arms and hug him. Not him, really, but the boy Dante had been. What a mess!

  James and I watched Travis get into his car. “Do you think he’ll go home?” James asked.

  “I think so.”

  “Maybe we should follow him.” James’s voice showed excitement. “Like on the TV shows.”

  Travis wasn’t my responsibility, yet in a strange way, because of my plan, he was, and it would ruin everything if something bad happened to him. At least that’s the reason I gave myself for caring.

  “Well, we’re going home, so we have to go somewhat in the same direction anyway,” I said. “We’ll see if he’s at least heading the right way before we turn down our street.”

  At first it was easy enough to follow Travis, but at some point I had to let him out of sight or risk his seeing me. Or risk James understanding and telling Lauren that I really had been following him. In the end, I took a different street and drove by Dante’s. Their garage was shut, but Travis’s car was in the driveway. I breathed a sigh of relief.

  Be kind, Dante. But it wasn’t my place to tell him that. If it needed saying, Becca would have to do it. Who was I to preach anyway? I’d made so many mistakes that whatever Dante did could not compare.

  Without stopping, I turned the corner and drove home.

  * * *

  The pain brought me from a sound sleep where I had not been dreaming. I came from a delicious blackness where I knew and felt nothing, a kind of death, really. All I could do against the pain was to clutch my head and try to find rational thought. Impossible. The agony was huge, horrible, all-encompassing. I wouldn’t survive another minute.

  Yet I knew I would. I had so far. The pain didn’t dim, but somehow I found the courage to drag myself from bed and move slowly down the hall. I tried not to cry out, but my breath sounded loud and tortured in the dark hallway. Hurrying the last few steps, I grabbed my bottle of pain pills from my purse on the counter, identifying it by the way it fit into my hand, and slumped to the floor as my vision darkened and a renewed agony sliced into my skull. Unseeing, I uncapped the bottle and swallowed a pill. Then another.

  How many had I taken? Too many, and it really would be all over. I didn’t want that. Minutes ticked slowly by. How could I hold on?

  Somehow I would. I always did.

  I moaned. Tears wet my face, but I hurt too much to wipe them away.

  Gradually, miraculously, the pressure in my head eased. I felt as though a day or more had passed, but I knew it hadn’t been more than a half hour. On wobbly legs, I stumbled back to bed, hoping for the delicious relief of sleep.

  I had almost reached that sweet blackness when I felt a movement by the bed. Kyle’s thin body slipped under the covers, pressing against me like a small child in need of comfort. Tears ran silently from my eyes as I drew her into my arms. I love you. I didn’t say the words aloud, but I knew she knew.

  I wondered again how long she would hate me when I was gone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kyle

  Mom and James were still sleeping when I left the house. I wasn’t surprised. James had stayed up far too late, and Mom, well, she had her own problems. As for me, I felt beaten and exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep. My mind was going a million miles an hour.

  I grabbed a piece of bread from the cupboard, and for a moment I could see my mom as she’d been last night in nearly this same spot, curled up in pain, unseeing. Should I have called 911? I didn’t think so because she recovered, but what if one of these times she didn’t?

  I could never sleep alone anymore, and I didn’t understand why. The past few nights I’d gone to my mom’s room. She never pushed me away, but she wondered what was up with me. So did I.

  During the day, I was so mad at her most of the time for bringing me here, for not making dinner, for not cleaning the house like Allia’s mom did. But at night, there was a terrible darkness that threatened to eat me alive. Only Mom could make it go away.

  I was little more than a baby. I disgusted even myself.

  Allia had put the bike outside her garage as she promised. It was a nice bright blue one that made me think of the sky by the ocean on a cloudless day.

  “Oh, good, you’re here.” Allia emerged from the depths of the open garage. “Look, if you’re going inside anywhere, you’ll need to lock the bike up. Make sure you put it through both tires and around the bicycle rack. There’s been a lot of stolen bikes around here lately.”

  “I know what that’s like. My bike in California had so many pieces stolen, I didn’t bother to bring it.” That was the truth, but it was also a little girl’s bike, which hadn’t made me feel too bad. It was nowhere near as nice as Allia’s.

  “I hardly use it anymore,” Allia said.

  She was staring at me oddly, and I realized I still had in my nose ring that so far I’d remembered to put in each night. I’d thought about putting it in at school, too, but not many others wore them here in the eighth grade and I felt surprisingly self-conscious. I reached up and slipped it out and into my pocket.

>   She followed the movement with her eyes but didn’t comment. “Are you sure you know where you’re going?”

  “Yeah.” For a moment, I wished she’d volunteer to go with me, but she’d probably be bored. “Thanks a lot. I’ll be careful with it.”

  She shrugged. “Okay, well, have fun. As long as I’m up so early, I might as well get to my chores.”

  “See ya.” I climbed on the bike and rode away.

  The morning breeze felt cool against my arms, and I wished I’d brought a jacket, though I should warm up soon enough with the effort of pedaling. At the end of the street, I slowed to consult the map I’d printed at school. I really hoped it wasn’t as far away as it looked because I might not get there before nine.

  In the end I was there in plenty of time, which was a good thing because it took me a while to figure out that a house was the right address and that the studio was around the back and down some stairs. A sign above the door read La Belle Dance Studio. The door was locked, and I sat down to wait. There was no bicycle rack, but the bike was probably safe enough here behind the house in this quiet neighborhood. To be sure, I edged it behind some bushes where it was mostly out of sight.

  The morning sun felt good on my skin as I sat against the wall, dozing. When I heard the lock on the door click open from the inside, I practically jumped. I waited a bit longer before the girls began to arrive. They were my age, I figured, between twelve and fourteen, though all of them except one was taller. They wore tight black stretch pants, and leather jazz dance shoes dangled on their fingers by their laces. I ignored their curious glances as I followed them inside.

  They went to a dressing room and then into the studio, while I stayed outside the wall of glass that separated the studio from a row of chairs meant for viewers. Unfortunately, that’s what I was. My dance teacher at school had told me about the classes here, and though I knew Mom couldn’t afford them yet, I couldn’t stay away. The instructor was supposed to have danced on Broadway or somewhere just as important. I didn’t know what she was doing here in Spanish Fork, but I wanted to see if she was any good. And the girls. Would they be good, too?