40

Dad and I were unloading all our camping gear on the front lawn. Dad always liked to wash things down and organize them before he stuffed them up in the garage rafters. We were exhausted and filthy, but it had been so worth it. A three-day weekend at the beach, just the two of us. We’d hiked cliffs, played in the ocean, roasted marshmallows over a campfire, and met some really nice families, too.

Mimi came sauntering out the door, dressed in a short sundress and sandals, carrying a red drink in her hand. She smiled at Daddy. “And how was your trip?”

“It was great, great, great, great!” I jumped up and down. “Daddy says we can start camping at least one weekend a month. He says it’s his very favorite thing to do, and that we’re super campers. Right, Daddy?”

My father cast a quick glance toward Mimi before he grinned at me. “I do believe you’re right, Princess. We are super campers.”

“The best in the whole world. All the other kids were jealous because my dad was the most fun of any of them. He built a shelter out of driftwood right there on the beach and everything. I helped carry over the palm fronds for our roof. We make a great team, the two of us. Don’t we, Daddy?”

“Yes we do, hon, the very best.” He picked me up and swung me in a circle.

When he set me down, I wobbled a little as I looked toward Mimi. She was blinking kind of fast, and she took a big sip out of her cup. Then she sort of smiled toward me. “Well, I’m just so glad to hear it. So glad.” She took another big swallow of her drink and walked back into the house.

Kenmore had arrived at the store extra early on Monday morning, so he was surprised when he heard the back door open only minutes after he’d entered. Kelli came walking up to the office. “Kenmore, I want to know what you know about my dad’s decision to leave.”

“Like I said, I didn’t really know anything for sure. I just had my suspicions.”

“What made you have your suspicions? Please tell me everything, no matter whether you think it will be painful for me to hear or not. I’m at the point now where I don’t believe anything good about Daddy anymore, and I’d rather just know the truth.”

“I really don’t think it’s going to do you any good to hear all this.”

“You may not, but I do. I’ve been reading through the old letters Mimi wrote to her mother. Believe me, there’s nothing that you thought might be happening that I haven’t read about in glorious detail.”

He looked at her evenly, then nodded. “If you’re sure you want to know.”

“Please.”

“All right, but this is against my better judgment.” Kenmore made his mind travel back down the road it had gone down so many times over the past twenty-something years. He’d always had doubts about what really happened—until Kelli’s arrival had proven his suspicion correct. “I can still remember the look on David’s face when he came into the office and told me his mother’s money would run out by the end of the next year. He was a man defeated, overburdened, worn down. He told me he was going to have to move her out of Brighton Manor to somewhere more affordable.

“Brighton Manor was the best place in town for someone with cognitive impairment. I knew that, and so did he, and it was killing him to think of moving her. It was also by far the most expensive place in the area. He told me he’d looked at a couple of other local places, and a place called Bivens Haven the next county over. That place got written up for health code violations on a regular basis, and I reminded him of that.”

“What’d he say?”

“He asked what he was supposed to do, because his money could only go so far. I told him it had been a good couple of years for our business, and the outlook for the next couple was good, as well. If he started setting aside more money each month, he should be able to eke through, I was sure of it.

“He said he was sick of eking through, sick of never having time to do anything but work, sick of the guilt that goes along with working long hours and leaving your family home alone, and your mother in a nursing home. He was just plain burned out.”

“Maybe that’s why he was attracted to Mimi, huh? She was young and pretty, and there weren’t any other obligations attached.”

“Exactly. And that’s exactly what I told him. I said, ‘Not to add to your misery, but to tell you the truth, I believe you would feel a significant lowering of guilt if you would quit spending so much time at Jerry’s Place.’ Over the past year, I’d known David was spending more and more time there, and it wasn’t because of the food or the convenience.”

“What did he say?”

“He said it wasn’t any of my business where he ate his lunch. He jumped up from his chair, his face purple, and for a minute I thought he actually might take a swing at me. He yelled, ‘How dare you insinuate . . .’ But he stopped himself midsentence, stood there and looked at me, and then he exhaled long and slow and sat back down, shaking his head.

“Later that afternoon, like clockwork, he looked down at his watch and then back at me. ‘I’ve got a meeting. I’ll be back in a little while.’ He walked out the door and down the street to the diner, just like always. It was only a few weeks after this conversation that he came in one morning and told me that your mother was pregnant.” Kenmore pushed himself up from his chair and walked over to the coffee pot, poured himself another cup. “You want one?”

“No, thanks. So, Mom’s pregnant, he can’t leave right away, then what?”

“David had always been a solid guy, family man, church, the whole bit. I noticed it was about that time he started reading books that were by most any account non-biblical—books stressing how God wants us to make the decisions that will make us the most happy, not so much the hard decisions that involve doing the right thing.”

“God doesn’t want us to be happy?”

“Kelli, I have a deep faith. I don’t spend a lot of time talking about it, don’t know the answer to a lot of the great theological debates, but one thing I’m convinced of—we have to make the decision that we’re going to do the right thing no matter what it costs us before we get pressed in tight between the hard place and the easier place. If things get difficult and you start looking for an easier way out than what you know is right, chances are you’re going to find it, but it won’t be the best long-term decision. Take Joseph, for example.”

“Joseph?”

“From the Old Testament—coat of many colors, all that. His own brothers sold him into slavery in Egypt, right?”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

“But God’s favor was upon him, so soon he became the second in command of Potiphar’s household. Seems like the best he could hope for in a bad situation—until Potiphar’s wife decided Joseph looked pretty good and she’d like to have him for her own. If you think about it, this could only have made his life easier. She’d likely take special care of him, give him more things, not to mention he’d get a mistress out of the deal. Joseph could easily have said that God abandoned him and that there was no reason for him to continue to live the harder way, the way he knew to be right. But he didn’t. He made the hard choice, and it got him thrown in a dungeon for ten years.

“But he kept trusting, kept moving forward, and from that dungeon he eventually ended up where he was supposed to be—in Pharaoh’s palace, saving humanity from starvation and becoming second-in-command of the entire kingdom. See, something better was waiting, something that made him much happier in the long run, but if he’d decided to make the easier choice earlier on, he never would have known it.”

Kelli bit her lower lip and nodded. “I guess I see what you mean. So you’re saying if my father had stuck it out at home, in spite of the fact that there were some rough years ahead of him, he would have eventually been glad he’d done the right thing.”

“I absolutely believe that. But, unfortunately for all involved, that’s not the choice he made. I started noticing that he was moving money around in his accounts. I assumed he was funneling his money to Suze. I didn’t have any idea he was actually setting up other accounts under a different name. This is all assumption on my part, but I think he had planned to leave your mother much sooner, then found out she was pregnant, and while he might have been a cheater, he wasn’t going to walk out on his pregnant wife.”

“Why didn’t he just divorce my mother?”

Kenmore shook his head. “I think he knew that she would get custody of you kids, and by the time he paid child support and alimony, there wasn’t going to be much left for him to live on and he would get to see even less of y’all. He was so entrenched in those so-called religious self-help books by then he must have convinced himself that by setting up an insurance policy he was taking care of your mother and siblings, and then by keeping you it was a bit like having his cake and eating a slice of it, too.”

“I guess that’s pretty much the way it happened, as far as he was concerned. He lived happily ever after and left everyone else to pick up the shards of the broken lives he left scattered.”

“Maybe so.” Kenmore rubbed the back of his neck. “But I’m betting he got plenty of cuts from all those shards himself.”

Kelli was shaking her head. “Whatever wounds he might have received along the way, they were far less than he deserved. The worst part of it is that I can’t even tell him how angry I am. He gets away with everything, without a single repercussion.”

“Regardless of how things may appear on the outside, I’m guessing he paid a much higher price than you will ever know.”

“I certainly hope so.”

Kenmore watched Kelli turn slowly and walk into the storeroom without another word.