“While he fixes your tire?”
“That’s right.”
“I thought you knew how to do that yourself?” the girl muttered sullenly, keeping her eyes on the ground as she shuffled along at Hally’s light prod in the back.
“I do,” Hally said calmly. Sullen lippiness was something she could handle. Most kids resorted to that as their first line of defense. “But I wanted to talk to you.”
“You mean, he wanted you to talk to me,” Corinne sneered with a baleful glance at her father, hunkered down by the front wheel of the VW Bug.
“Yes, he did.” Hally unlocked the door of the latemodel Buick that Mike had indicated was his. It was her policy to be strictly honest with her students. No games, no subterfuge, no secret pact with their parents. And she expected complete honesty from them in return.
“Get in.” Sliding in behind the wheel, she reached over and unlocked the passenger door.
She watched with weary amusement as Corinne plunked herself down on the seat with a put-upon air. It was hot in the car and, like Hally, she left her door ajar. Slouching, she looked down at her hands. In profile, with traces of baby fat still rounding the contours of her face, she looked achingly vulnerable and oh, so young.
“Were you one of the rioters?” Hally asked. The outright question startled some life into the girl. She turned her head and blinked at Hally.
But her answer was predictably rude. “So what if I was?”
Hally regarded her calmly. Her gaze held the girl’s, who clearly wanted to look away. “Did you know that someone was killed there tonight?”
Corinne visibly swallowed. She sucked her lips inward. Her lashes fluttered and Hally saw a sudden sheen of tears glaze her eyes before she turned her face aside.
Hally’s voice softened. “Now, do you really want your father and me to think that you had a part in that?”
Looking down, the girl gave her head a quick, negative jerk.
“I didn’t think so.” Hally reached out to give Corinne’s hand a reassuring pat. It was instantly jerked away.
Hally ignored the rebuff. In truth, it was no more than she had expected. “I want to help,” she said, “if you’ll let me.”
“Humph.”
“Your father is not the enemy, you know,” Hally said quietly. And was startled in spite of herself by Corinne’s vehement and venomous retort.
“He hates me.” The girl’s face twisted into an ugly mask of anguish and disdain. As if sensing that Mike had come to stand outside the open door—or maybe it was the dismayed glance Hally directed just past the girl’s head that gave it away—Corinne turned to look right at him as she raged, “And I hate him.”
The expression of raw hurt on Mike Parker’s face before he blanked it as deliberately as if he’d pulled down a shade, stayed with Hally as she slowly drove her car toward home. The spare tire did not allow for speed, which was just as well as she was in a meandering frame of mind after all the drama and trauma of the past several hours. She stopped briefly at the service station and dropped off her tire to be fixed.
Poor Mike, she thought. And poor Corinne, too. It would take a lot of time, patience and love for those two to find their way to each other. She ought to know; she and her father hadn’t found that way yet. And it was what—ten years later? Something like that.
The only thing Mike and Cory had going for them that was different from Hally’s situation with her father, was that Mike was there. His “defection” was not a fact, but a fixated notion that Corinne had come to wholly embrace as fact.
Doctor James McKenzie, on the other hand had, after years of philandering and sporadic, overstrict parenting, literally abandoned his wife and emotionally deserted his two daughters to marry his already-pregnant-with-his-child receptionist.
Hally pulled a face. Now thirty-four, Sweet Eva—their stepmother—was the same age as Hally’s sister Morgan, and only two years older than Hally herself.
It had all been rather sordid and sad, and to this day relations between Hally and her father were strained and contact practically nonexistent. Hally had only seen her father’s new wife and little half brother, now nine, a handful of times at a distance.
Stoutly in her mother’s camp, it was Hally’s choice to maintain the animosity, to ignore James McKenzie’s occasional olive branches and overtures. Reestablishing a cordial relationship with her father would have made her feel disloyal to her mother. Her sister, Morgan, did not see things that way. Morgan had always been their father’s pet, of course. And though she’d initially been hurt by his defection, with marriage and the birth of her own little boy—Kenny, now six—all had apparently been forgiven. Why, she even stayed in her father’s house during her infrequent visits to Long Beach.
Well, to each his or her own, Hally thought, a little righteously. But, seeing again in her mind’s eye Michael Parker’s look of anguish at Corinne’s hateful words, she wondered for the first time if her unrelenting attitude might not be causing her own father pain, as well.
Nonsense. Pulling into her drive, Hally resolutely brushed that unsettling notion aside. James McKenzie was much too arrogant and successful to let something as minor as the loss of one daughter’s trust and affection wound him in any way. Especially with his other daughter as doting as ever.
Getting out of the car, Hally absently glanced at her mother’s side of the house. No lights. She’d gone out.
Hally let herself into the house with a twinge of disappointment—some of her mother’s tea and sympathy would have been a good antidote to everything that had gone before. She sighed and resigned herself to a hot shower and some tea on her own.
She was greeted in the kitchen by an indignant Chaucer. Crouching and scooping the loudly meowing cat up for a hug, Hally hurried to apologize. “Did you get trapped in the house, you silly old thing, you?”
Chaucer was not big on displays of affection, however, and soon squirmed to be free. “Well, off you go then,” Hally groused good-naturedly as she let him out the back door. “Have fun….”
With a sigh—the house seemed strangely quiet and empty to her—she returned to the kitchen. She stood and looked around, irresolute. Was she hungry? She hadn’t eaten and a while ago she’d been starving. But somehow food held no appeal now. A novel occurrence. Maybe losing that five pounds wouldn’t be so difficult, after all.
Rolling her eyes, she considered a cup of hot tea but, spotting the blinking red light on the telephone console, dismissed that notion, too. Crossing over to the small planning desk, she pressed the Play button on the answering machine. Wine, she mused as the tape rewound with an audible whir. A nice glass of Chardonnay, that’s what she wanted.
There were obviously several messages that always seemed to send her dinosaur of a machine into a tailspin. It took forever to rewind to the beginning of the tape. As she poured the wine Hally decided she’d simply have to get with the program and order voice mail.
“Hally!” Ah, it speaks.
Setting down her glass, Hally picked up a pencil and bent over the desk, poised to jot down names and phone numbers. This was Morgan, however, sounding distraught. Of course, she often did. “Do you know where Mother is tonight? I’ve been calling and calling. And what are you up to, anyway? Phone me.”
Right. Hally rolled her eyes. With Morgan, who now lived in Detroit,