“Macey, if you’d just come an hour earlier,” Mama yelled from her side of the bar. “I would never have caved and married your no-good, two-timing drunk of a daddy! I would have been a brave, single mother, much like I’ve been anyway!”
Mama’s water broke two minutes after they said “I do” the first time, a fact she never lets me forget.
“Your daddy was having an affair. With that schoolteacher, Dixie Dunn, who smelled like a bottle of something sinister. I never could figure out what kind of perfume she used, and it drove me crazy. But you know who I mean. Anyway, I was pregnant with you, eight months, and he didn’t have the courtesy to at least wait until I wasn’t forty pounds overweight and carrying around another human being. No, you know your daddy. He can’t wait, so he didn’t. He started parading around town with Dixie after one of our big fights, and here I was, about to give birth, and he’s nowhere around.”
I stomped my foot. “Mama, you’ve told this story a thousand times.”
“Well, history’s not going to repeat itself again,” she said.
Daddy cowered behind his great-granddaddy’s bar that’s now his, using the counter as protection and wearing a guilty look on his face. Mama’s new friend and bridesmaid, the big-haired, big-breasted Donna Kapchuk, stayed a safe distance away from all three of us, but I could see the hickey on her neck from here. Apparently, Mama could, too, because she picked up an empty beer bottle and aimed it at Daddy’s head.
I picked up the family shotgun. “I took target lessons for this very reason. To prevent stupidity from ruining this family. Now put down the bottle, Mama.”
I turned to Riley, who was looking at me wide-eyed, her perfect blond ringlets standing up on her head. “Take Ben and Free out the back door to Logan’s.”
The sound of glass shattering made me jump, and I whipped my head around to see Mama’s eyes blazing as she went to pick up another empty beer bottle off the closest table.
“No!” I stepped into the path between her and Daddy.
But it was too late. Mama had already released the bottle from her hand, and I never learned to duck the way Daddy did.
The bottle hit me square in the soft side of my wrist as I threw up my hand to protect my face. I heard Mama’s panicked scream as hot liquid seeped down my arm. When I looked down, I was surprised how much blood there was and how fast it was coming down.
I glance at Logan now. “That accident became my curse,” comes out of my mouth.
“Your curse?” He furrows his brow. “How so?”
I nearly tell him about the page in Vivian’s diary and how Mama’s spent years terrifying me that I’m as trapped as a fake ghost in a fake jail cell, but I don’t.
“Nothing. I’m being silly.”
I return to my diary.
Then Logan was there. Rushing into the bar, his normally cocky eyes so big I could see the fear as he ran toward me. But he put on a brave front, and so did I.
“I’ll be fine,” I said to him as he tightly wrapped my wrist in a dishtowel and Daddy handed Mama his truck keys. “I’m sure it will just be a few stitches.”
Logan put his callused, sturdy hand to my cheek, and we looked at each other in silence before he said, “Don’t be scared, Mace. Everything will be okay. I promise.”
I got home a few hours later, and just as we pulled into our driveway, the rains came, and they made everything red.
It rained and rained and rained…for four days and four nights straight. The back roads overflowed, and the Jacksons and Coles had to go to a shelter for the week because their basements flooded. The creek was so swollen you couldn’t sit by it for a month. They compared the rain to blood here because if you tried to go to the river, the bank was so muddy when you walked everything turned nearly rust red.
Logan called it the blood of our ancestors, the sins of our parents being washed away. After what had happened to him in the barn a few months earlier, and now me, we were feeling pretty low.
When it finally stopped raining, Logan and I stood by the river for hours, our feet in the mud. He kissed me, and I kissed him back. He held me in his arms and said he wished we could lie down on the bank together.
Well, we didn’t lie down because I can’t imagine what would have happened if we had. I can’t help myself sometimes. I just want to touch Logan Wild all over.
I clear my throat and dare to raise my eyes to Logan’s.
His are so intensely focused on me that a throaty noise escapes my mouth.
Logan closes his eyes and when he re-opens them, there’s that neutral barrier that’s been between us since he came home engaged.
“Keep reading,” he encourages me. “You’re doing good.”
I force my eyes back down to the page.
