Coffey grimaced. “Reception in this area is more than terrible. Last week, I almost missed the news that my dad was dying. I was at work, cell towers were down again—we had one get damaged in a snowstorm a few months ago and they never fixed it—and my sister kept calling and calling and calling. Eventually, she drove up to the restaurant to get me because she wasn’t able to get through.”
A lump lodged in my throat.
“I’m sorry about your dad,” I admitted. “Mine died last year. I’d like to say the pain gets better, but it doesn’t. Not at all.”
He gave me a sympathetic smile that sent my heart once again pounding.
Even his teeth were perfect.
Wow, how does one get that perfect and not have a wife?
Wait…
I glanced down at his finger, something I’d noted at the diner when he’d confronted me on why I’d been there and had observed the absence of a ring. I couldn’t see the ring today since he was wearing a pair of driving gloves.
But just because he didn’t have a ring didn’t mean that he wasn’t still with someone. Engaged or even dating, casual or serious.
“Are you married?” I asked, pretending nonchalance as I rimmed the top of my glass with my finger. “Your sister?”
“My sister is married to a dude named Bob. It’s not short for anything. His whole full name is Bob. I’m divorced. Very happily divorced. You?” he asked.
I blinked at him. “It’s kind of hard to have any romantic engagements, period, when you travel seventy percent of the year. We don’t even have a home base when we’re off during the last three months of the year. We just go where the wind takes us.” I paused. “Your ‘happily divorced’ sounds like it has a story behind it.”
He took another long drink of his beer as if he needed the liquid courage to even consider his ex in any way.
“Well,” he admitted once he’d licked his lips clean of foam. “I met Carron—pronounced Car-on; God forbid you say it any differently, that should’ve been my first clue—when I was young. We were both fresh out of our associate’s degrees in arts. I was heading to culinary school. She was heading to health and nutrition. Anyway, we happened to be in the same building, so we saw each other a lot. What I didn’t know was that in front of people, she put on a very different face than she did in front of just me. And even that face wasn’t the same one that she showed me when we got married.”
“I’ve heard of a lot of women being like that when you meet them young. They’re not quite old enough to know who they are just yet and change. Or so I would assume, or hope might be a better word.” I took a sip of my own drink.
“I put up with it for five years until one day I came home with the news that my sister had to have her gallbladder removed and I was worried about her because she didn’t do anesthesia well. She snorted and kept going on with her life as if I was stupid for being affected by it. While my sister was having her surgery, I was at the hospital with my dad and Bob. And Carron kept blowing up my phone, all but pissed way the hell off that I’d left her there to do the housework on her own—our usual Monday was spent cleaning because we were both off—and told me I better not come home tonight expecting anything from her.” He sighed. “That was the day that I decided that I couldn’t live with someone like her anymore. I wasn’t happy, hadn’t been happy for a long time, and well…I wanted something more out of my relationship than constant wondering about what life would be like without her. With someone that actually cared about me. The final nail in the coffin, though, was her infidelity.”
I blinked. “So let me get this straight. Your sister was having surgery, and she was mad that you were up there instead of being home.”
He nodded.
“She sounds like a very special person.” I grimaced.
“Needless to say, the moment the words ‘I want a divorce’ came out of my mouth, I felt like this heavy weight had lifted right off my chest. We’ve been divorced for a couple of years now, and I’ve never been happier,” I explained. “I only wish that I didn’t have to see her all the time. She acts like nothing changed. Like we’re still very much married. She tries to come sit with me when she sees me out to eat. She came to the funeral, sitting right at the front where only family sits, even though she and my dad never really got along. Hell, she tried to come to Bob’s farewell party, telling them she was my wife at the door so they’d let her in.”
“How is she finding out about all of these things?” she wondered.
That was the million-dollar question right there.
“I suspect that someone in my family is keeping her informed,” I admitted. “My dad’s sister—not my aunt because she’s definitely not aunt material—is likely keeping her informed. I’d say, since she and my mother are close, that it could come from there. But even my mother isn’t informed of the things we do because Sienna really doesn’t get along with her. If I want Sienna in my life, then my mom won’t be anywhere near it.”
“I feel like there’s a whole lot more to your mom’s story,” she smirked.
“There’s so much baggage there that it would take a day and a half and a bottle of shitty liquor to unload it. Plus, the very last thing I want to talk about tonight is my mom,” I admitted the truth.
I couldn’t stand my mother either, but there was this little piece of my heart that would always belong to her. Some obligatory piece that thought one day she’d turn herself around, and I could have a mother again.
“My mom is dead, too,” she admitted. “She died when I was a kid. It was an unsolved murder case. My dad was a suspect for a while. Obviously, he’s a shade promiscuous, having seven children with seven different women. They questioned him relentlessly. The circus was held up for a couple weeks until they cleared him.
“That’s…” I shook my head. “Wow.”
She looked kind of sick for a second as if she was going to explain more of the story, but the door to the bar crashed open and a couple of drunk college students from the university in town walked in.
I watched them come, knowing they were going to interrupt.
“Oh, boy,” Simi grumbled.
“You’ve seen them?” I wondered.
“Seen and kicked out of the circus tonight,” she admitted. “They were drunk as skunks and being disorderly and disruptive of the show tonight. Keene kicked them out because they kept yelling slurs at me during my act.”
“What kinds of slurs?” I pushed, feeling myself tensing the closer they got.
“The kind of which I don’t want to repeat, ever,” she murmured as she took a large sip of the glass the bartender sat down in front of her.
I waited and watched, wondering if I could push her to tell me, but the set of her shoulders and the way she was staring at nothing but her drink now told me that she wasn’t willing to be pushed on the subject. Not at all.
Which only intrigued me more.
I tugged on my coat collar, realizing that it’d gotten hotter than hell in here in the last five minutes or so. When I looked down, I realized that I was once again still wearing the gloves that I always wore when I was outside.