Nowhere to Run

“Excuse me?”

Marybeth turned quickly from the window and felt her face flush. “I’m sorry,” she said into the telephone to Elizabeth Harris, the vice principal of Saddlestring High, “I didn’t mean you. I just saw something outside that . . . alarmed me.”

“Goodness, what?”

“A predator,” Marybeth said, immediately sorry she had voiced it.

Harris said, “I read in the paper where people in town have been seeing a mountain lion. Did you see it?”

“No, I was mistaken,” Marybeth said, and quickly moved on. “But you were saying?”

What Harris was saying was that April Keeley, their fifteen-year-old foster daughter, was absent again for her math tutor. It was the third time she hadn’t shown up since summer makeup courses had begun the week before, she said.

“This is news to me,” Marybeth said acidly. “I should have been informed before this.”

“It sort of fell through the cracks,” Harris said. “We’re short-staffed in the summer and we thought you’d been called.”

“I haven’t been.”

“Obviously, we know she has plenty of making up to do,” the vice principal said, lowering her voice to sharing- a-conspiracy level. “We’re fully aware of her . . . difficulties. But if we want April to be able to be competent with her classmates at the ninth-grade level—and we do—she needs to be there on time and prepared to complete the remedial coursework before the school year begins.”

“I’m sorry,” Marybeth said. “I had no idea. I mean, she left for school on time after breakfast. . . .” She recalled two of April’s friends, Anne Kimbol and Michelle McNamara, standing shoulder-to-shoulder together on the front porch waiting for April and clutching their math textbooks. Those girls were trouble.

She looked up to see Sheridan, eighteen, standing in the threshold of the hallway in her maroon polyester Burg-O-Pardner smock, about to go to work for the afternoon. The logo for the restaurant—a hamburger wearing a cowboy hat and boots with spurs, and holding a carton of their special Rocky Mountain oysters—was on a patch above her breast pocket. Sheridan, like Marybeth, was blond and green-eyed and serious.

Sheridan wanted to save some money for her senior year in high school, and she’d discovered to her surprise she was a pretty good waitress. She was juggling her part-time job with “optional” summer basketball practice. Sheridan played forward for the Saddlestring Lady Wranglers. Although she had her mother’s concentration and determination to make it all work, her basketball coach—a venal, sideline-strutting peacock of a man who interpreted Sheridan’s job and other interests as a personal affront to him and his potential success—had threatened to take her out of the starting lineup if she missed another practice. The coach, she thought, would make her senior year in high school miserable.

Sheridan had overheard her mother and mouthed, “April, again?”

Marybeth nodded to her daughter and said to the vice principal, “I’ll make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll drive her there myself if I need to and watch her go inside. I’ll deliver her to the classroom if necessary. And the good news is my husband will be back next week for good. If I can’t bring April in, I’ll ask Joe to do it. He’s used to shuttling kids.” And thought, Wherever he is. That he hadn’t called the night before still bothered her. There were so many things she needed to tell him, so many things they needed to talk about, starting with the fact their foster daughter’s behavior was spinning out of control.

Mrs. Harris thanked Marybeth and said something about the unseasonably warm weather, and Marybeth nodded with distraction as if the vice principal could see her, said “Bye,” and disconnected the call.

She placed the phone in the charger and asked Sheridan, “What is she doing, that girl? Where is she going and who is she with?” Putting Sheridan into the tough decision of ratting out her foster sister or maintaining the shared silence of the sisterhood.

“Do you know what’s going on?” Marybeth asked. “It’s for her own good. . . .”

Sheridan took a deep breath and prepared to say something when Missy knocked sharply on the front door.

“Later,” Sheridan said.

Marybeth thought she knew what was going on: Sheridan and April were battling. And it was going beyond normal sibling rivalry into full-fledged war. In the past year, Sheridan had assumed the old pecking order—with her in the top spot because she was the oldest and most responsible for April’s return—would resume. But April had come back with a trunk full of adult trauma and experience with which she challenged Sheridan. And everyone else. It was not the idyllic situation Marybeth had assumed it would be. And, Marybeth thought, as April herself thought it would be.

“For now,” Marybeth said dourly. “Later, we talk.” She gestured to the front door. “Would you please let her in?”

Sheridan welcomed the reprieve and shouted over her shoulder to her thirteen-year-old sister, “Lucy, there’s somebody here for you!” and ducked back down the hallway with a satisfied smirk.

“I WAS SURPRISED to see your car home on a Wednesday,” Missy said, sweeping into the house with a kind of full-sized presence that belied her sixty-four years and petite figure. She wore a black silk pantsuit embroidered with the silhouettes of dragons, a purchase from China when she’d attended the 2008 Summer Olympics with her fifth husband, Earl Alden, known as the “Earl of Lexington,” who was a multimillionaire media mogul with a ranch outside of town and homes all over the world. With each husband, Missy had traded up. Her last husband, Bud Longbrake, had lost his ranch to her in the divorce when he’d discovered the handover was in small print in the prenuptial agreement he’d signed when he and Missy got married.

“I took the day off,” Marybeth said, looking around for either of her daughters for help or support. But Sheridan had slipped out the back to go to work and Lucy was hiding behind the door she’d been tricked to open to let her grandmother in. “Joe will be back the first of next week, as you know. I’ve been putting boxes of the girls’ things in his office and I needed to clean it all up.”

“Oh,” Missy said, “Joe. I’d so forgotten about him. I’ve gotten used to just you and the girls.”

“I’ll bet,” Marybeth said.