Desperate for something to do with my hands, and my mouth, and especially my tongue, I step out of our dance and sit back down on the table. I wildly grab my diary and open it to the entry I left off on. “You really want to hear where I am in the life story of Macey Henwood?”
Logan’s eyes widen slightly, the only clue to his surprise that I’m letting him in like this. Really, in a way I’ve never let him in before. He sits down next to me, taps my leg lightly, and says, “Go for it. Then, I can say I heard your words before they were published.”
Maybe having Logan listen to a few entries will help me get through the diary. At this point, I’ll try anything to get past the ache in my chest when I think of him marrying Gigi.
“One entry,” I say.
“Sure.”
“Where’s Gigi?” I ask abruptly.
“She’s staying with her sisters at the Old West Inn. They’re going over wedding plans.”
“Oh. Of course.” I look down at my diary.
Logan taps the open page. “I’m ready when you are.”
I suck in a breath and then start reading out loud.
On my sixteenth birthday, just as it turned July fourth, Mama and Daddy had a big fight at The Cowherd Whiskey, mere hours after they officially remarried.
“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.”
