Dust by Eva Everson (epub e reader .TXT) 📕

the car—that fancy car he was so proud of—with her on his heels, until he spun around. “What?”

“You don’t have a right to be mean to me.” She took a step back. Forced the tears that threatened back to where they belonged. Back to righteous indignation. Back to the want of him. The need.

“I’m not being mean, Cindie, but I am not about to get into a war of words with you.” His tone came from a man as sure of himself as her daddy had been the night he and Lettie Mae got into their own war—Lettie Mae declaring rights as his wife and her daddy stating his love for another woman, pure and simple. “Your little tantrum at Mama Jean’s was enough for me to know right off where this is going,” Westley said, reminding her to stay focused. “If Michelle is not here, then there’s no reason for me to be.”

Cindie crossed her arms over her chest, her heart beating wildly beneath the flesh. And, suddenly now, not from the sight of him. “Who is she?”

He cocked his head, the afternoon sunlight calling out to the red undertones in his hair, drawing them to wink at life. “Who is who? The woman you saw sitting on my front porch?”

Heat rose in her, enough to ward off the chill in the air that begged her to go back inside for a coat before she could say all that was on her mind. Yet, from somewhere deep down, a shiver had begun. A shift in her life. She could feel it, even around the embarrassment. “How’d you—”

“Ali told me. She found it odd that you kept driving in front of the house, staring at her.”

“Ali?”

“Allison.” He held up his left hand, a filigreed band of white gold wrapped around his naturally tanned third finger. “My wife.”

She stepped back, her head spinning, her thoughts muddled, her fists tight. He was married. Westley was married. To the pretty girl on the front porch. She was his wife. They shared a house. A bed. A life. How stupid could she be to have ever thought—“You will never,” she spat through clenched teeth, “ever see your child again.” She ran halfway to the house, gasping. Turned again and screamed for all it was worth. “Ev-ver!”

Westley came toward her, storming, and she ran as fast as her feet allowed—because every inch of her had become dead weight—until she reached the front door. She jerked it open, darted inside, and spun to shut the door. Lock it. Away from him. Away from everything.

But he’d reached her. Shoved against the door, sending her backward. She stumbled to the floor, hitting her backside hard against floorboards that hadn’t seen a mop in a month. At least, not a clean one. “I’ll call the police,” she threatened, fear now sliding over her as she scooted back. Had she gone too far?

Westley stood with his legs braced apart, his jaw firm. He reached down, grabbed her by the wrists and righted her. “You do that,” he said before pointing toward the phone. “Go on, Cindie. Do it.”

Cindie jerked the handset from the receiver, not because she would really call, but because she couldn’t give him the upper hand. Her own daddy had done that to the mother of his children and look how that little scenario had turned out. “I will—”

He stood his ground. “All you’ve got to do is dial zero. Put your finger in the hole and pull to the right.”

“I hate you,” she screamed, slamming the phone back into its place, sending the lamp behind it teetering until it settled again to shine a ghostly light on her mother’s ashtray filled with old butts and flicked-off ashes.

Westley breathed out, slow and easy, the scent of musk and spearmint reaching her. Taunting her. “Well, I don’t hate you, Cindie. But you’re not going to threaten me with Michelle.”

“I swear to God,” she said, ire tying her jaws into knots. “You ain’t never seeing her again, you hear me? Lettie Mae already said so. She means it, too. She knows how to deal with the likes of you, Westley Houser.”

“I’m sure she does.” With that, he turned, stopping at the door to look at her again. “I’ll see you in court, Cindie. You and Lettie Mae can count on that.”

He left her then, not shutting the door behind him, making her walk across the room to keep the cold from infiltrating the barely warm room. Cindie watched him as he backed the car out of her driveway, not looking toward her, even for a last glance.

Other than her mother’s tirade and her daughter’s frightened shrieks at all the fuss Lettie Mae kicked up, she’d not heard anything since. But it hadn’t been twenty-four hours yet. The next morning, Lettie Mae met her in the kitchen with a cup of coffee in one hand and a cigarette dangling from puckered lips, her tattered robe hanging loosely about her pudgy frame. “Tell you what you’re going to do, little girl,” she said after perching the cigarette on a nearby tin ashtray. “You’re gonna get yourself put together and you’re gonna go see that DiAnn Houser first thing. Ain’t no two ways about it; that woman knows what’s what, you can count on it.”

“So what if she does?” Cindie asked, the weight of her anguish almost too heavy to get the question out of her mouth. “What good will any of it do?” She poured coffee into a chipped cup, then added two large scoops of sugar and a wide pouring of milk.

Lettie Mae slid a chair out from under the table, the scraping of metal against old linoleum sending a flinch through Cindie’s muscles.

Dear God, how she hated her life. Hated it with every fiber of her being.

“You make that woman tell you the truth. You know how to do it. As long as you got that baby, you got the upper hand.”

As long as she had the baby …