The roar of the industrial-size dishwasher helped Nina block out the questions that whirled around in her mind. Around and around. She concentrated on wiping down the counters. The final meal of the day had been served at Haven for Hope. The San Antonio Food Bank served more than one thousand meals a day, seven days a week, to homeless folks receiving services from Haven for Hope. All the servers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner each day were volunteers. Simple meals when compared to the fancy china serving dishes filled with New York strip steak, baked potatoes, green beans, Caesar salad, and four kinds of dessert cake served at her father’s funeral reception.
Her family had pronounced her crazy for refusing to miss her turn serving food on the day of her father’s funeral and the reception afterward. She needed this. Not volunteering meant the killer took yet another piece of her life and threw it in the trash. It had been almost five o’clock before she could slip away from her mother’s side. Grace was a wreck. She needed her daughters. Once she lay down to rest, Nina had slipped out. Too late to get to the bank. Now it was closed until Monday. Aaron was gone. Who knew what Detective King was up to.
She rinsed the washcloth and started on the stove tops. Monday she would go to the reading of the will and from there to the bank. If only Aaron would go with her. He’d promised to help her solve this. Instead, he seemed to be avoiding her. At the funeral, he’d been working. She understood that, trying to separate work and personal feelings. It couldn’t have been easy. Maybe it had been too much for him. Melanie’s death, Serena’s death. Maybe he needed space too. She would give him until tomorrow. If texting didn’t work, she’d track him down.
She would offer him comfort.
She inhaled the lingering scent of baking chicken thighs marinated in barbecue sauce and tried to piece the events together. Could Serena’s death have been an accident followed by a scared driver making a run for it? Could Melanie’s murder have been the result of a home invasion in which the burglar had been caught in the act and fled before he could steal anything?
Coincidental? Ridiculous. They had to be related.
“All the trays are washed and put up.” Deb Washington, another longtime volunteer, sang out as she chugged by with a huge bag of paper napkins. “I restocked the shelves.”
She settled the bag on the shelf next to a box of salt and pepper packets. “Hey, I wanted to say how sorry I am about your father.” Deb slung her beaded braids over her shoulder and smiled. She wore red lipstick even when she volunteered. “It was awful. My whole church has been praying for your family.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that.”
“Have the police found the killer?”
“No—”
“Nina Fischer.” The volunteer coordinator from the front office marched through the double doors to the kitchen, Liz right behind her. “You have a visitor. A very insistent visitor.”
Visitors weren’t generally allowed, and they couldn’t access the grounds unescorted.
“What are you doing here?” The same question as before. Only more so. Liz had failed to materialize at the reception. No surprise. She’d always liked to pick and choose when to show up. She could be counted on to pick the least opportune moment. “You shouldn’t be back here.”
The volunteer coordinator gave Nina a pained smile. “She wouldn’t take no for answer.”
“I’m her mother.” Liz directed that outrageous statement to Deb. “Pleased to meet you.”
“I’m so sorry. I’ll escort her out when I leave.”
The coordinator nodded, but her backward glance at Liz was anything but friendly.
“Do you mind if I step out for a minute?” Nina shot Deb an apologetic look. “I promise not to leave you holding the bag with all these cucumbers.”
“No worries. Go, go.” Debbie made shooing motions with her voluminous apron. “I’ll keep an eye on the chicken.”
Nina nudged Liz from the serving area and across the long room filled with orange-topped tables with attached benches. She didn’t stop until they reached the commons area with its half-grown trees that did their best to shade picnic tables a stone’s throw from the chapel.
She took a seat and motioned for Liz to sit across from her. “How did you find me this time?”
“I went home. Pearl told me. She wasn’t happy about it. She wouldn’t let me in. She said everyone else was napping. I told her I’d sit on the steps and wait for you if she didn’t tell me where you were.”
Home. Sometimes Nina forgot her biological mother once had lived in the Fischer house. “Why?”
“You’re my daughter. I came back to San Antonio because I missed you and Jannie. I want to see you. And Brooklyn too.”
“Missed us? After eighteen years, you suddenly missed us? Weren’t you busy raising my half sister or brother? He or she must be about thirteen now.”
“Hudson is thirteen. Emma is ten.”
“Hudson. Emma.” Dizziness swept over Nina. Accompanied by a strange sense of the surreal. Her mother had replaced Nina and Jan with new kids. New kids who had no uncle to swoop down and save them. How had they survived? Were they surviving? “Where are they?”
“Hudson took Emma to the library. She likes the library. And it’s free.” She shrugged as if her daughter’s fondness for the library was a mystery to her. “I know you don’t understand—”
“Of course I don’t understand. You kept having kids, even though you couldn’t take care of the ones you had.”
“It’s not like I planned it that way. Besides, I think I’ve done a decent job with these two.”
“Did Dad know there were two more?”
“Yes. He said he wasn’t going to take them. Which was rich, because I never offered them to him.”
“Offered them? I guess you never abandoned them in the middle of a tent city filled with strangers, many of whom live on the street because they have untreated mental illnesses. Some suffer from psychotic breaks. Some, like people who live in houses, are simply mean.”
“I meant to come back for you and Jannie. I did come back, but you were already gone.”
“You meant to come back? Mom, I was nine years old. Jan was seven.”
“You think I don’t understand what I did to you? I was messed up. You know I was.”
“The adult me knows that. But the little girl me was terrified, hungry, and afraid to close her eyes at night.”
Nina refused to unearth old memories with Liz. A few people had been kind. Annie let them Dumpster-dive for food with her and gave Jan the least rotten pieces of fruit found in the bin behind the grocery store. Keith, an Iraq war vet with a prosthesis on one arm, let them sleep in his tent a few nights while he kept watch. Tippy showed them how to sneak into the YMCA locker room to take showers. Good times.
“I know it was hard.”
Liz pulled a cigarette pack from her faded denim shirt pocket. The sound of the cellophane crumpling and the smell of phosphorus when she struck the match sent Nina down another memory lane. She’d opened her eyes one morning to see snake tattoos slithering up both arms of a man slumped in a chair next to the motel room bed where she and Jan slept. He wore a black T-shirt and faded jean shorts. His legs were covered with black hair. He smiled at her, stubbed out the cigarette, and smoothed her hair. He smelled like beer. “Morning, sunshine.”
She’d never seen him before in her life. Liz was nowhere in sight.
“Hard?”
Liz sucked a long draw on her cigarette and let the smoke escape through her nose. She flipped the matchbook through her fingers like a card shark doing a trick. “I’m here now. I’m asking you to forgive me. Isn’t that what Christians do?”
They did. Another of Nina’s failings. The inability to forgive.
Nina’s heart beat in her ears. Her pulse pounded. Yes, she wanted to forgive. Her mother. And her father. Was she capable of forgiving? Dad had been partially to blame for their long separation. Her mother had tried, albeit not very hard, to contact them. She’d given up after her letters went unanswered. Did that mean Nina had to welcome this virtual stranger back into her life?
She tugged her Leica from her bag and slid the strap over her head. “Why didn’t you come to the reception? You could’ve talked to everyone then.”
And no one would’ve made a scene.
“I was . . . I didn’t feel good.” Liz tilted her head and smiled, suddenly flirtatious. Her teeth were stained with coffee and tobacco. The sun backlit her face, giving her an ethereal look. She was skin and bones. She looked like a biker babe without the Harley and the biker. “That’s right. You’re a photographer.”
The camera had its usual medicinal effect. It created a fortress wall between Nina and a painful past. The crashing waves in her ears receded. “What were you talking to Detective King about after the funeral? I saw you as we were driving away.”
Liz pursed her lips and formed perfect smoke rings, a technique she’d perfected years ago to the delight of two little girls who didn’t know better. “King? Oh, King the cop. He knew who I was. The guy had done his homework. I guess he recognized me from . . . you know, a mug shot.”
From one of the many arrests for public intoxication, panhandling, trespassing, pot possession, or fighting. Nina focused and snapped shot after shot. The commons created a soft, peaceful backdrop to the hard lines around her mother’s mouth and the crow’s feet around her eyes. Her denim shirt was a size too big and missing the top button so her wrinkled cleavage was displayed. She wore green Army pants and black tattered Converse sneakers. Living from the Salvation Army store or a church homeless closet/pantry.
“He wanted to know when I’d last seen Geoffrey. He wanted to know where I’m staying. Why I came back to town. If I knew some reporter named Melanie something. And if I knew Serena, which of course I did, although I barely remember her.”
“Where are you staying?”
“With a friend.”
She still had friends in San Antonio? More likely another seedy motel room. How did she feed this half brother and half sister? Where were their fathers? Same father or different fathers? A person had to have an address to get food stamps. “The church down on the access road gave me some vouchers. I have some money from a waitressing gig back in Baton Rouge.”
As if she read minds.
“What were you doing in Baton Rouge?”
“Earning money to get here.”
“Did King ask you about me?”
“Sure. Did I know what a pain you are? To which I said, if you’re anything like me, I would imagine so.”
“But you wouldn’t know because you abandoned me years ago.”
“I did one good thing. I asked Geoffrey to adopt you and Sissy.”
One good thing. It had been one good thing. And it had been her idea and not Dad’s. The letters proved that. “Did you ever get married?”
“What is this? Twenty questions?”
“I just want to know something about my biological mother.”
“Biological mother. That’s what adopted kids call them.”
“Yes, it is.”
Liz snorted. She stubbed out the cigarette on the bench and lit another one. She took her time as if concocting an answer. “No. I wasn’t into that. I don’t need to be tied down by some jerk who tells me what to do and wants dinner on the table by six. Most men are jerks in my experience.”
She never expected better so she never received it. A wave of sadness enveloped Nina. Liz wasn’t just her biological mother. She was also a woman—a depleted, sad, disappointed woman who’d never loved with abandon, never been truly loved.
Trying to hold back tears, Nina chewed her lower lip. She and Jan had pinky sworn that they would never be like their mother. Never drink. Never abandon their children. While Jan had conceived a child out of wedlock, she had loved and cherished that child and married her father. She’d asked for forgiveness and received it.
Nina had feared being burned by love. Being so afraid of love, she might never have it. The failure to trust in love. She would not be her mother. She would learn to trust and learn to love. All-in, all-cards-on-the-table love.
Aaron’s kind of love. God’s kind of love.
She swallowed against the lump in her throat. Was it as simple as that? Aaron claimed it was.
God?
Would He understand the entreaty when she called His name?
Aaron claimed prayers didn’t have to be elaborate. He said God understood her pain.
He loved her despite her flaws.
Good thing, because her doubt was at the top of the list.
“Earth to Nina!” Liz waved her cigarette in Nina’s face. “Where’d you go? Am I boring you?”
“No. Nowhere.” Forgiveness started with Liz. At least an effort at forgiveness. Feelings of abandonment stored up for eighteen years couldn’t be erased in a day. She could try. Maybe God would give her an E for effort. Liz’s letters represented her best effort at love. She wasn’t responsible for Dad’s unwillingness to hand the letters over to Nina and Jan that proved their mother had been willing to try again. They would put their cards on the table and start over. “Did you know Dad never gave us your letters?”
“I figured as much. We agreed that no contact would be best, but I couldn’t help myself. I thought of you and Sissy every day. Every single day.”
“He kept them. I found them and read them after he died.”
“Which means you know I never stopped loving you. I did the hardest thing a mother can do. I gave you up to someone who could do right by you.”
“You make it sound so noble now. You wanted to have your life without feeling guilty about it.” Her stomach suddenly rocking, Nina waved away the stench of tobacco. “You chose alcohol and pot and men over your children. There’s nothing noble about that.”
“You have no idea what I’ve been doing since Geoffrey brought you here.”
“Whose fault is that?”
“His.”
“Seriously. You’re trying to blame him for your failings as a parent. He raised us. He loved us. He gave us a roof over our heads and food and clothing. He paid for my college education and made sure I went.”
“He was a saint, I know.” For the first time, Liz’s words had an edge. She stubbed out the cigarette smoked down to the filter and lit yet another one. Her hands shook. “I lived with Saint Geoffrey for a lot of years. Mister bachelor’s degree in three years, Harvard Law, Mister Do-No-Wrong. You never knew our father and mother.”
Grandma and Grandpa Fischer died in a car accident in New York City the year before Dad adopted Nina and Jan. Grace’s parents were divorced. Her mother died of breast cancer, her father of prostate cancer on opposite coasts.
“I know Dad loved them and missed them.”
“Of course he did. They worshipped the ground their son walked on.” She coughed, the loose hack of a longtime smoker, swiveled, and spit in the grass. “I can tell you this about them. When I got knocked up with you, they didn’t get all huggy and kissy like Grace and Geoffrey did with Jannie.”
Nina swallowed against nausea. “There was no huggy kissy—”
“They wanted me to give you up for adoption then. I said no. I wanted you. They kicked me to the curb with the clothes on my back. I was eighteen. I had enough money for a bus ticket to Tampa.”
“Dad said you got kicked out after they caught you drinking in the cellar and smoking pot after they’d just paid for rehab.”
“It was all part of the same.” Her tone turned defensive. “I didn’t drink or smoke while I was pregnant with you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
The one thing that kept her from vices. “Why Tampa?”
“I thought your daddy was there.”
Nina wouldn’t call this man whom she never knew Dad. That was reserved for Geoffrey Fischer, whatever his failings might have been. “Who was he?”
“A guy I knew. Just a kid from my class. He and a friend drove his Camaro to Florida right after graduation. They thought they could get jobs there.”
“Did you find him?”
“Sure. Shacked up with a waitress he met at a club.”
No superhero.
“What about Jan? Who was her biological father?”
“You want the truth?” Liz’s gaze dropped to the table for a second. She looked up, her blue eyes brilliant and hard as stone. “I have no idea. Men came and went in those days.”
Nina put her hand to her mouth. She swallowed bitter bile in the back of her throat. Inhale, exhale. She let her hand drop. “Why did you come back here?”
“I told you. To ask for your forgiveness.” Liz motioned with one finger with its nail chewed down to a painful nub. “Let me take your photo.”
Nina glanced at her phone. Almost time to serve dinner. “I have to go.” She stood. “Do me a favor. Don’t ever tell Jan what you just told me.”
“My lips are sealed.” Liz pulled her fingers across her thin lips, turned them, and tossed away the imaginary key. “It’s not like it’s something I’m proud of.”
She grunted, stood, and smashed the cigarette butt with her ragged tennis shoe. “I’d like to come to the house tonight. I want to see Jannie before she heads back to Afghanistan.”
“I’ll give you a tip.” Nina forced herself to soften her voice. “Call first. Make sure she’s there and she wants to see you.”
“I haven’t had a drink in three months.” Liz dug around in a coffee-stained canvas bag. “I got my chip in here to prove it.”
A step in the right direction on a long road to redemption.
“I have to get back to the kitchen.”
“I wondered if you could spot me a twenty for the bus and some groceries for the kids.”
She wanted money. Of course. Twenty bucks would be an eighteen pack or a couple of bottles of cheap wine. Nina worked to keep her expression neutral. “My shift will be over in half an hour. Wait and I’ll give you a ride. I’d like to meet my half brother and half sister.”
“Sure, sure.” Liz slumped on the picnic bench. “I got nothing better to do than sit around and wait while you feed a bunch of bums and hoboes.”
“It’s your call.” People who were homeless like Liz had once been. “If you’re not going to wait, tell me. I’ll escort you to the gate. Or you can come with me and sit at one of the tables until I get done with serving.”
“I can’t smoke in there. I’d rather sit here in the sun.” She sounded like a child who’d missed her nap. “Besides, I’ve done my time hanging around the down-and-out.”
So had Nina. Enough to feel nothing but compassion for people who were trying to dig themselves out of deep holes. “Don’t go anywhere. Stay put. Do you understand?”
“I’m not a kid.”
When she returned thirty minutes later, Liz was gone. Nothing left behind but cigarette butts.