Clay didn't understand why she was so worked up. "What exactly are you worried about?"
"If she contacts him, it might bring him here. I don't want that."
"He won't bother us, not after so many years."
"He could see it as an opportunity to make amends," she said. "Especially with you. You were the oldest. He knew you best."
Clay brushed some of the dirt from his pants. His father had never come back. Not even for him. It was a wound that would likely never heal. But he refused to indulge in self-pity.
Anyway, something else was going on. He could feel it. "You think I'd welcome him back?"
"You used to worship the ground he walked on," she said.
She was right. Lucas Montgomery had once been Clay's hero. He was the man who showed up on payday and took them to town for an ice-cream cone. The man who waltzed Irene around the kitchen, or pretended her spatula was a microphone, making them all laugh. The man who held Molly on his lap until she fell asleep, then tucked her safely in bed. Clay's life--and he assumed it was the same for the rest of his family--had been better, more complete whenever Lucas was around. He couldn't lie about that.
But even when Clay was only five or six, Lucas had stopped coming home on a regular basis. And when he began staying away two and three days at a time, the fighting started. Clay could still hear his mother pleading with his father. "Lucas, you've gotta stop drinkin' and carousin', do ya hear? The water bill's due. What we gonna do if we can't pay the water?" and
"You've got children to take care of now, Lucas. How's Clay gonna learn to be a man if you don't stick around and teach him?" His father always said, "It has nothin' to do with drinkin', Irene. I'm still a young man. I've got a lot of life to live, a lot of places to see. And I can't do that strapped down to a wife and three kids."
Clay had initially sympathized with his father. It was his mother who was wrong, who tried to tell his daddy that he couldn't have any fun. She was the reason he didn't stick around like he used to. Then Lucas abandoned them altogether, and Clay was forced to grow up almost overnight.
As he worked for the local feed store, making less than half of what he would've been paid as an adult, Clay had realized which parent really loved him.
Occasionally, he still felt guilty for the way he'd blamed his mother during those years. But, as a child, he'd found it was difficult to fault the parent who was always smiling and saying, "I'm just funnin', Irene, don't get yourself in a state."
"There's no reason to worry," he told his mother. "I don't want anything to do with him."
"It's his fault, you know. We'd still be living in Booneville if it wasn't for him."
"I know," Clay said. When his father walked out, he'd left Irene so destitute she'd almost lost her children. Without an education, she couldn't make enough to feed them. Clay remembered eating nothing but oatmeal for one entire summer. So when Reverend Barker had asked Irene to marry him, she'd agreed mostly out of desperation. They all knew that. Clay suspected even Barker understood. How else could he have gotten a woman so much younger and so much more attractive than he was?
At least Irene had gone into the relationship determined to be a good wife, to make the best of what she considered a second chance. Clay remembered her treating Reverend Barker's daughter, Madeline, the same as Grace and Molly, remembered her pulling him aside to say that the reverend might not be a handsome scoundrel, or make them laugh, but he had his priorities straight. He was a man of God, and they were finally going to be a complete and happy family.
Little did she know life would only get worse from then on....
"Talk to Allie, convince her to stop what she's doing," Irene said.
Clay blew out a long breath. "Why? Let her do what she wants and ignore it. If you react, she'll know she's struck a nerve and she'll keep after it."
"But she has struck a nerve! You need to explain how it was for us after Lucas left. Tell her not to bother with him."
"Mom, you're not making any sense. If Dad hasn't looked back before now, what makes you think he's going to? And even if he does, I've just told you it won't make any difference to me.
I'm sure Grace and Molly feel the same. You have nothing to lose."
She clasped her hands tightly. "That's not true," she said, her gaze intense.
Clay narrowed his eyes. "What are you talking about?"
"He called me once," she admitted.
"When?"
"Not long after Lee died."
"How'd he find you?"
"Everyone in Booneville, including his own cousin, knows I married a reverend and moved to Stillwater. I'm sure it wasn't hard."
Clay jammed a hand through his hair. "Okay, he called once. Why is that so significant?"
"I was at my lowest, Clay. I--I was inches away from a nervous breakdown. Grace was...you know what Grace was like after what that bastard did to her. She'd walled herself off from both of us. And Molly was just a little girl, confused but mostly oblivious. You were all I had, and you were only sixteen."
Adrenaline began to pound through Clay's veins. "Tell me you didn't," he said.
"Clay, I needed him. I--I'm ashamed to admit it, but I was so desperate that I pleaded with him to come back."
His chest constricted. "How much did you tell him?"
"All of it," she said. "I had to talk to someone, let the pain out. My head was going to explode if I didn't. And I thought if he knew what we were facing and how unfair it all was, he'd stand by me and be the man I'd always wanted him to be. How could any man hear how his daughter had been abused, defiled by her own stepfather, and not support her?"
Anxiety made it difficult to speak. "What did he say?"
"He promised to come. He was living in Alaska, said it was beautiful and that he'd move us up there with him."
Clay dropped his head in his hands. "Even if he'd kept that promise, we couldn't have left,"
he said. "You knew that. We still can't. The moment we sell the farm, the police will get the new owner's permission to search, and they'll go over every inch."
"Maybe he realized that," she said softly.
"Because..."
Her gaze fell to the ground. "I never heard from him again."
"God." Clay squinted into the distance, out across the cotton fields. What was he going to do? If Allie tracked down his father and started questioning him, there was no telling what Lucas might say. And once the details of Barker's death were revealed, they wouldn't be hard to prove.