“Be grateful. You pretty much missed those. And, anyway, now that you’re here I’m too happy to be moody. So please tell me what you need to tell me. As long as it’s not that you want to move to California.”
“No way. If I never see a palm tree or an orange again it’ll be too soon. No. It’s something else. Kind of a secret.” His voice grew somber, as if he’d shifted from his “fun Rex” persona to his all-business side. He paused another moment, then looked her in the eyes.
“Her name was Raejean,” he said.
Maddie’s heart flip-flopped a little.
He paused again. “It was back in Boston, when I had my restaurant there. She did the books. All the financials. And we lived together.”
He waited for Maddie to digest that, as if she thought he was a man without a past. As if she was naïve and didn’t know he was a human over fifty.
“I started to tell you this, when we had our picnic on the beach.”
She remembered. Apparently, he was ready to share the rest of the story. She tried not to brace herself, but did so, anyway.
“I remember,” she said with a soft smile of support because she sensed she needed to hear this.
“Okay. Here goes.” He smiled back at her. “One day, the cops showed up at the restaurant and hung a sign on the front door: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. I had no idea what was happening. Then they arrested me for a pile of crimes including writing bogus checks, embezzlement, tax evasion, and a few financial things I’d never heard of. It was a Friday. Our busiest night. I figured they’d realize their mistake, and I’d be back in time for the dinner rush.”
Maddie was stunned. This was hardly another tale of when he’d been a boy on Chappy and was “arrested” for shooting squirrels.
“I had a great lawyer, a regular at the restaurant,” he continued. “He put up bail for me and started digging around. Turned out, Raejean did it. All of it. In the process, she’d set up the books to make it look like I’d done it. Me. Not her.” He rubbed his chin. “When I got home, she wasn’t there and her stuff was gone. I remember sitting on the couch with no clue what to do. Raejean and I were together seven years. I trusted her, so I stayed out of the financial end of things. Stupid me.”
It felt like something from a bad movie. With a lousy plot. And no way for a happy ending. Maddie kept listening.
“I tried calling her a million times. I left messages. Finally, she called me back. I asked her what the hell was going on.”
He closed his eyes as if to regain his balance.
“She whined. She said she screwed up but hadn’t meant to. She was going to go to the police and tell them everything, but decided not to. She said, ‘I’m sorry, Rexy’—she called me that, which I detested—‘but I couldn’t do it.’ I asked her whynot. She said, ‘Because I’m pregnant, Rexy. I’m going to have our baby.’”
In that moment, everything Maddie had thought was going to be her wonderful new life started to crumble. She’d been wrong to think that Rex was perfect. So wrong to think their relationship could work, that having a baby with him would be an amazing experience based on love and trust. The bottom line was that she didn’t know him, after all.
He already has a child.
A small thing he’d failed to mention long before Maddie was pregnant.
She wanted to stand up, excuse herself, and leave the room. She wanted to go outside, climb into Orson, and try and figure out what in God’s name she should do.
She got as far as standing up.
“No,” he said. “Please don’t go.”
“I think I know the rest,” she said. “You took the blame because you didn’t want her to go to prison and have your baby born there.”
“My feelings for her were gone. But I wanted the baby to be safe. I should have handled things differently. Instead, I had to be a macho man, a martyr for his kid.”
Maddie headed for the door.
“No, don’t …” was the last thing she heard him say.
Chapter 29
The worst thing for Maddie to handle was that Rex already had a child somewhere in the world. No, she thought, that was not the worst thing. The worst thing was she hadn’t known. She wondered how many others did, people who hadn’t told her because Rex was an islander, not a washashore like her. He was the one they’d known and loved since he’d been a little boy, Grandma Nancy included.
How many others could have mentioned it but didn’t?
She started Orson and backed out of the parking lot without making a single driving error. Perhaps she was too tense about something more important than worrying about which gear she should be in.
