“I don’t think he would have taken steroids without a major push from that one,” Brad Nevins said to Kendall Stark as they sat in the living room of the family home.
“That one” was Brenda, of course.
Joe was an only child, the answer to his mother’s dreams after a pair of miscarriages early into the Nevins marriage. The couple waited an excruciatingly long five years before they tried to conceive again.
“My wife had a lot of depression about losing those two babies. It bothered me, too. Really it did. But not like her. After the second one, she took a job at the Merry-Go-Round, a children’s clothing store downtown. It was like she had to have the hurt flung at her over and over. I don’t know, like a person who’d had gastric bypass surgery goes to work at the Cheesecake Factory or maybe an ice cream store? Just seeing what you can’t have over and over was like a strange punishment she put on herself. I told her we should try one more time to have a baby of our own, but honestly, I wasn’t really sure it was a good idea.”
“But it worked, right? That was Joe?” Kendall asked.
“Right,” Brad said. “Thankfully there were no more miscarriages. Just a beautiful little boy.”
Once Joe came home from the hospital, Brad said the boy stayed in their bedroom in a crib until he was almost two. His wife knew that babying a boy wasn’t a good idea, but she couldn’t help herself.
“‘He’s my miracle,’ my wife said, over and over, as she rocked him to sleep. ‘We waited so long for him and now that he’s here, nothing will ever hurt him.’ ”
Those words were almost a curse, Kendall thought.
* * *
The day Brenda showed up for the first time was the beginning of the end of the Nevins family’s hard-fought happiness, though it would take some time for her to do what she wanted to do.
“Don’t judge me,” Brad told Kendall, “because what I have to tell you has the tendency to not go over too well, you know, with women.”
“Trust me,” Kendall said, “I’ve heard everything from everyone.”
“Fine,” he said, still sizing her up. “I’ll tell you exactly how it went down, and at the end of what I have to say, you’ll wonder why it was that we didn’t try to cut that relationship off at the knees. I have an answer for that. But first, the story.”
CHAPTER TEN
It was the middle of summer, and eastern Washington was on full blast, preheat. It had been six days straight of egg-frying-on-the-asphalt weather. In fact, a couple of kids made the news by actually frying two eggs on the hood of a cop car parked outside the precinct. That hot.
But not as hot as Brenda.
She wore a cropped top and cutoffs that she’d made from Levi 501s. Her hair was different then, a coppery color with blond streaks. On anyone else, it would have looked ridiculous, but not on Brenda. She somehow managed to find a way to attract attention and still appear as if she wasn’t even trying.
Both parents noticed that their son behaved differently around this new girlfriend. Different than he had been around others. He’d always been a gentleman when it came to how he treated girls. With Brenda, he was even more attentive. Almost too much. She was only sixteen, but it was clear she’d mastered the art of getting a man to do whatever she wanted him to do.
“Joey won’t take me to a concert at the Gorge that I want to go to,” she said as she sucked Pepsi through a straw.
“Don’t have the dough right now,” he said.
“Dan says he wants to take me.”
“Then go with him,” Joe said.
“But, baby, I want to go with you. It would be zero fun without you.”
“I don’t have the money.”
“You have a birthday coming up,” she said, looking over at Elise Nevins.
A little startled, Elise answered. “Yes, you do. I think tickets to the show would be a great gift, don’t you?”
Joe stared at his feet. “Pretty expensive, Mom.”
“You only turn eighteen once,” Brenda persisted.
A few minutes later, Brenda and Brad were alone in the living room. Mother and son were in the kitchen. Brenda sat in the sofa directly across from the recliner where Brad took his place.
“So hot out there,” she said.
“A scorcher,” he said.
“I thought you guys had air-conditioning,” Brenda said.
“We do.”
“Feels hot in here.”
“Set at a constant seventy-four,” Brad answered. “Could be cooler, but we don’t want the power company to get every last dime we have.”
She sipped her Pepsi and moved her legs under her on the sofa. In doing so, she allowed a flash of her vagina to show. She wore no underwear. The fabric that held her cutoffs together was like a twist of yarn.
“That’s better,” she said. “More comfortable now.”
Her eyes locked on his.
You did that on purpose, Brad thought.
* * *
“You think she flashed you intentionally?” Kendall asked.
“No women does so unintentionally,” Brad said. “I’m not saying that a woman wearing sexy clothes is an open invitation for some guy to stare at her. Say something to her. But, Detective, you have to know what I mean. There was something about the way she moved her legs, splitting them slightly apart and holding that pose just long enough to make sure I got a good look. It wasn’t anything I’d never seen before. I’ve had my share. But here’s the real deal, she was showing me what she had—not because she wanted me to get all jacked about her hotness—but because she wanted me to see what my son was getting.”
Kendall was unsure how to respond to that. She’d never pegged Brenda’s former father-in-law as a narcissist, but here he was making it all about him.
“How do you know that?” she asked.
“Because of what she did next.”
Kendall narrowed her gaze. “Which was?”
“She told me.”
“What did she say?”
“I’ll never forget it.”
* * *
After dinner, after Elise had given an early birthday check to Joe, Brad found himself alone with Brenda in the kitchen cleaning up while mother and son sat in the living room talking.
“I saw the way you looked at me,” Brenda said. Her voice was low, only loud enough for Brad to hear.
Brad bristled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You want my pussy,” she said. “Well, you can’t have it. It’s for your son. If you look at me that way one more time, I’ll tell him. I swear that I will. I won’t be victimized by a lecherous old man.”
Brad tried to keep his cool. It wasn’t easy.
“You’ve got it all wrong, and you’re