Chapter Seven

Celeste

 

“What’s wrong with you these days, Celeste?” I don’t know why my mother thought anything was wrong with me. I was feeling happier than I had in years.

“I know what’s wrong with her.” Of course my sister had to walk in.

“Shut it, Clancy.” I gave her the evil eye while I walked around my mother and poured a cup of coffee. I had just dropped Veeta at pre-school and was needing coffee. If anything was wrong with me, it was that I wasn’t sleeping well.

Thoughts of Skeet were keeping me awake.

I kept picturing him pulling up in front of my house on his old vintage motorcycle wearing his usual outfit; a pair of faded denims and a white shirt. He looked so sexy with windblown his hair and dark sunglasses. In my vision he didn’t have a helmet on but in reality he never rode without one and made sure he had one for me.

The first time he came to pick me up at the house Conrad made him ride me up and down the driveway so he could see if he could handle me on the back of it. Little did my brother know, I had already been on the bike and Skeet had taught me how to hold onto him and lean with him into turns. I loved being up against him. To feel the rumble between my thighs. He and his leather jacket smelled so good.

Over the years when I thought of him, he was always on his motorcycle. Maybe that was because the last time I had seen him was when he was riding out of town.

“It’s because he’s back in town.” Clancy couldn’t shut her trap.

“Who’s back in town?” One thing my mother was not—a gossip. Maybe because she rarely left the farm and when she did it was with my father. They liked to go away to resorts to unwind with couples’ massages and good food. They were a cute couple.

“Skeet Remington. And he’s taking her out on a date this Friday night.”

How the hell did my sister know that? I wondered if she had been spying on us.

“Are you going to tell him about Veeta?” I couldn’t believe my mother would ask me that so casually like it was even possible.

“God, no!”

“He has a right to know at some point. She’s getting older. Someday she’ll want to know who her daddy is...she’s smart and inquisitive.” We all knew that.

I wanted to avoid the subject of Veeta.

“He followed us home from the ballpark with Dale. I think he followed us to the park. He would never be at the park and he was only a few rows behind us.”

“Are you going to let him think that Veeta is Dale’s? That’s so wrong.”

“Really, Clancy?! Do you think I would do that? Besides she looks nothing like him.” I had no problem with avoiding the truth and telling a few little white lies but I would never use Dale. Besides, the thought of having sex with Dale was so gross—I could never imagine doing that with him in all of my wildest dreams.

“He would never let you go if you told him the truth.” My mother was shocking me with her comments.

I clearly remembered when Conrad got his girlfriend pregnant that my mother called her a million names behind her back. Included in her rants were words about trapping a man being so wrong. She told us that we’d better never do that. How could her tune have changed so drastically years later when it involved me and Skeet?

“Good thing Veeta doesn’t look like him or he would’ve asked you right away.”

“She looks exactly like her mother,” I said sadly under my breath.

I was never sure about the stories I had heard over the years because they sounded like something out of a movie. But there were always whispered rumors about Martina’s family being distantly connected to a well-known crime family. Martina said she knew they were bootleggers. I told her about my family making the peach liqueur before it was legal and brushed off the stories like they were no big deal.

Apparently there was more to her family. They had moved on to running drugs and guns and the competition between families was fierce. They tried to push each other out of the business—even turning each other into the Feds. Things got nasty and family members went missing.

I was never allowed anywhere near Martina’s house once her parents were killed in a suspicious auto accident and her grandfather Vito came to live in her house. She said her grandfather was one of the few that never got involved in the so-called family business. When he had a stroke and went to live in a home, Martina pretty much lived at our house.

Then one day Martina asked me to keep Veeta and that she was taking her grandfather to some family reunion. A day later, I found a note addressed to me written in Martina’s handwriting in the diaper bag and I didn’t understand it:

Keep Veeta safe. If a locket appears, the coast is clear.

Then we learned that Martina and her grandfather had been killed in a bizarre explosion that took out an entire city block.

Veeta was only three months old and alone in the world. Five years later, the locket had yet to appear. I had to keep her safe. I couldn’t lose her.

“He needs to know at some point.” My mother was adamant.

“He could take her away from me.” My greatest fear.

“He would never do that. And you, certainly, wouldn’t let him without a fight.”

I had nothing legal that allowed me to keep her. I had to just hope that he truly loved me enough to let me still be Veeta’s mommy. But I had no intention of telling him the truth about her any time soon. I needed to make sure he would be sticking around because he truly wanted to...and wanted me. He left once, he could do it again.

It could be his turn to be hurt and find me not trustworthy.