LENA

“Your mother did this to us?” I stare at Booker, slack-jawed. “Stole our letters? Lied to both of us? I can’t believe it.”

But, oh. As if his words streamed light into a murky corner, I can see all the little instances that now make sense viewed through this new lens. All those times my heart broke just a little bit more with each overheard, seemingly private conversation Booker’s mother held with others in my presence.

All planned out, apparently. I gape at her son.

Who looks literally sick to his stomach. “I can’t prove it,” Booker says dully. “But Mom has always—I don’t know—been on my side. Supported the things I’ve done.” He stares at me, and for a second I see devastation in his eyes. “Only to my face, it turns out. And here I thought I was Dad’s biggest disappointment.”

I suddenly remember the farewell hug Mr. Jameson gave him, when he’d whispered something to his son. “What did your father say to you when he hugged you goodbye?”

The aura of sorrow shrouding Booker seems to lift for an instant. “That he was sorry he’d gone about his interactions with me all wrong from my teen years onward. That all he ever really wanted for me was to succeed.”

“So, that wasn’t what made you look so ill.” I give my head an impatient shake. “No, of course it wasn’t. You suddenly looked sick to your stomach before then. What brought that on?”

“Like I said, while I felt like a constant disappointment to Dad, Mom was always my biggest cheerleader. Well, if cheerleaders were women.” Booker waves off the qualifier. “All I’ve ever heard is how proud of me she is for building a business with nothing but my own initiative and money that I earned on my own.”

Staring at me, he shoves his fingers through his hair. “Then, tonight, when Dad was raving on about the lounge, he said—and I quote—‘I can’t wait to show it to your mother. Maybe then she’ll see the Twilight Room is every bit as brag worthy as the restaurant she’s been telling everyone you own.’”

“Oh, Booker,” I sigh in concert with Will’s muttered, “Ah, shit.”

I inch closer to lean against Booker’s side, stretching my arm across his hard stomach to hug him close. “I am so sorry.”

Will, seated in his chair across from us, suddenly angles his upper body in our direction. “Are you sure there isn’t an explanation?”

Booker looks hollow-eyed. “I can’t tell you how much I’d like to believe there is. I would love a good explanation, because I just can’t wrap my head around the fact my mother did these things to me and Lena. And not accidentally, either, but with what I’m getting the impression was well-planned intent. So, what the hell could her rationalization be, Will? I honestly can’t think of a thing that would explain this away. And when I responded to Dad’s revelation with a less than brilliant, ‘Huh?’, he said, ‘You know your mother. She’s always very concerned about how things appear to others.’”

Booker gives Will a look. “He’s not wrong. I’ve lost count of how many times she urged me to take some girl to a cotillion because she was from the “right” family and I had to “think of my future”. Not to mention what you said about believing she never thought you were good enough to be my friend.” He sighs. “She probably didn’t.”

Booker rubs his forehead. “It feels like a key puzzle piece has finally fallen into place. I goddamn hate the finished picture, but it fits too neatly to be anything else. It just...clicks.” He turns to me. “I bet you know what I’m talking about.”

Reluctantly, I nod. “I do—I all but heard the same click. So many little cuts that made me bleed and bleed happened when I overheard your mother talking to someone when we were in the same place at the same time.” I, too, rub my forehead as entire memories all but swamp me. I don’t mean to add fuel to the fire but words burst from my mouth. “I would bet my bottom dollar she worked hand in glove with Matron Henderson. That’s the only way I can explain our missing letters.

“Come to think of it, the foundling home did have a few improvements during those years. Nothing huge, mind you. But a number of small but not minor things that made life a little easier. Our bellies a little fuller. God.” I blow out a breath. “This is crazy.”

“It is. Yet it feels right.” The stricken expression on Booker’s face breaks my heart. “No. It feels like shit. But so many things that never made a lick of sense—well, now do, in a bollixed kind of way.” He scratches his chin, the rasp of his thumbnail over the stubble that’s beginning to make an appearance the only sound in a room gone quiet. Until Booker adds softly, “Why then, though?”

Will and I must stare at him blankly because he gives his shoulders an impatient hitch. “I was gone for almost two years at that point. What made her offer you money at that that particular time?”

“I’d turned eighteen,” I say hesitantly.

“And didn’t you tell me,” Will asks Booker, “that you wrote home a week or two before the war ended to find out what Lena was doing?”

Booker sits a little taller. “I did. Maybe Edna thought I was going to come home to find the answer for myself.” Staring blindly down at his hands clenched on his knees, he breathes a dispirited, “Hell.”

“What are you going to do?” Will asks.

Booker raises a long-fingered hand that spans his forehead as he massages his temples with his thumb and ring finger. “I have no fucking idea.” Glancing at me, he grimaces. “Sorry, Lena.” As he stiffly climbs to his feet, I get a glimpse of how he might look decades down the road.

Then he draws in a deep breath and straightens. “For now,” he says to Will, “we’ll get out of your hair. Thanks for letting me come over. This is all balled up, but I imagine it’s better to know the truth than to always wonder how all our letters just vanished. I can’t say I’m anywhere near the “better” part yet, but I’ll get there eventually.” His focus on our friend sharpens. “You grasped the unlikelihood of the missing letters far more quickly than either Lena or I did.”

Will grimaces. “Not a swell accomplishment if it leaves you feeling this bad.”

“Still.” One of Booker’s shoulders hitches.

“Still,” Will agrees. “It’s a helluva lot easier to see when you’re not directly involved. I hate like hell this horseshit rained down on you two. Neither of you deserve it.”

“Yeah...well.” Booker shrugs fully this time. “Neither did you.”

“Booker, she gave me money I needed,” Will replies mildly. “It’s hardly in the same category.”

“I guess.” Booker turns to me. “You ready to go?”

I nod and give Will a silent hug. Then I follow Booker out into the fast-approaching dawn.

* * *

Since learning of Mrs. Jameson’s betrayal three nights ago, I have wanted to rant and rave and call her awful names. Every time I think about how she kept Booker and me apart for all those lonely years, I want to howl and smack that woman upside her head. But this is Booker’s mother we’re talking about. The sheer pain I hear in his voice when he speaks of her now, which he is trying to do as little as possible, paints a clear picture of how much the revelation is killing him.

So, I make it my job to be fair. I assure him one thing may have nothing to do with the other—that it’s pure speculation at this point. I hold him and sometimes sing to him softly. But it both enrages me and tears me up inside to bear witness to the way the one person he counted on most to be on his side didn’t think twice about breaking his heart.

And to hell with being fair and objective about that.

At the Twilight Room, Booker has been even more businesslike than usual. I’ve watched him shut down any hint of playfulness or even the garden variety friendliness I’ve occasionally seen him display with his employees before this hit the fan. I doubt anyone except Leo and I have noticed, but it saddens me. Here in his own home—maybe because it’s the one place he’s never had to put on a professional face—it’s harder for him to hide his struggle.

Clearly, he doesn’t want to believe Mrs. Jameson is capable of what we suspect. Heck, who can blame him? I don’t know if it’s a distraction to keep from having to think about the whole big, nasty mess for a short while, but he’s been keeping me up in the waning dark hours after work. Making love to me with a fierce aggression that at once disturbs and excites me.

I would so like to talk to Dot and Clara about all this, but of course I can’t. It isn’t my story to tell. And the Booker I once knew has become an intensely private man. Could be war related, I suppose. Or not. His more guarded personality may simply be the newer, more mature model than the outgoing boy I knew back in our home town. I have no idea. Because, he won’t talk to me.

Okay, fine. He talks to me.

But not about the thing that hurts him the most. I wish, wish, wish he would let me in. I want so badly to help him, but he’s gone somewhere I can’t follow.

Thursday morning—okay, actually one in the afternoon, but that is the night-owl worker’s version of morning—Booker and I are in his living room. It’s the lull before having to get ready for the rush of work and we’re still lounging around, drinking our post-breakfast coffee and discussing a song I’m debating adding to my act, when the doorbell rings. See? We’re talking.

Booker goes to answer it and I’m just rising to my feet to fetch the coffee pot from the kitchen to pour refills, when I hear a hysterical female voice in the foyer.

A second later, Booker’s mother storms into the living room, Booker hot on her heels. When she catches sight of me, however, she stops as if she’s run head on into an invisible wall. “You!”

It’s not easy keeping a civil tongue in my head, but I manage a calm, “Hello, Mrs. Jameson.”

“Don’t you Mrs. Jameson me, you two-bit slut!” she screeches. “Not after you ruined my son’s life and tarnished the Jameson name. How dare you talk him into running a speakeasy!”

I’m still struggling to close my sagging jaw when Booker comes over and slides a possessive arm around me, snugging me against his side. “I started the Twilight Room long before I hired Lena to sing in it,” he says coldly. “And according to Dad, the fine folks of Walla Walla don’t even know my Twilight Room is a speakeasy.”

“They do now!” Mrs. J is all but spitting nails. “Your father is bragging about it all over town as if it’s not an illegal blot on the family name. He’s also talking about how she—” she thrusts an accusatory finger at me “—is growing the business with her so-called brilliant voice!”

Booker’s eyes soften as he looks down at me, and he gives me a little smile. “Yeah, she is doing that,” he agrees. Then he looks back at his mother and his expression turns arctic once again. “You, on the other hand, are a damn liar.”

Mrs. J’s hand slaps over her breast as if he’s mortally wounded her. “I beg your pardon?”

“We know all about what you’ve done, Mother. We know how you and Matron Henderson kept our letters from us—how you literally tampered with the U.S. mail.”

“Oh, the U.S. mail be damned,” Booker’s mother snaps. “I saved you from this floozy and I would do it again!”

“Is that a fact?” Making a deep-in-his-throat noise suspiciously close to a growl, Booker towers over the older woman. “Well, who’s going to save you and the dragon of the Blood of Christ from spending the rest of your lives in the state penitentiary when I press charges against you? Stealing U.S. mail is a goddamn federal offense!” He leans into his mother’s face. Says silkily, “Luckily for you, the penitentiary is located right in our home town. So, you don’t have to worry about all your important friends not coming to call. They only have to travel a couple miles to visit you in The Hill.”

Mrs. Jameson’s face goes stark white although she must know The Hill, as the locals call the oldest operating prison in Washington State, is strictly for men.

I can tell the instant she remembers. Mrs. Jameson’s chin shoots up. “Very funny,” she says coldly. “Washington State penitentiary is a men’s prison.”

“It was,” Booker agrees calmly. “Until they made an exception for that quack doctor, Linda Hazzard.” He watches impassively as Mrs. J’s face loses all color once again. “I’m sure they can make room for you, as well.”

“That’s enough, son.”

From the way we all gape at Booker’s father, I’m guessing none of us heard the door open again. Yet, there he is, standing in the opening between the foyer and the living room. I’d like to say the sight of him calms Booker down. No such luck—he is every bit as spitting-nails furious as his mother.

“No, Dad,” he says flatly. “It isn’t nearly enough. I’m just getting started.” His face is leached of color, his lean jaw bunching and releasing as if he’s grinding his back teeth down to stubs. “Did you two come together?”

“Yes. Your mama went a little crazy after I told her about our nice get-together at your club. So, when Smith told me she’d ordered him to drive her here, I thought it best to bring her myself. I really believed she had settled down during the long drive.” Mr. Jameson looks at his wife. “I told you to wait for me while I parked the car, Edna.”

“Oh, we all know how wonderful, wonderful you think this all is, Clyde Jameson,” Booker’s mother says bitterly. Then she pins me in her sights. “And her! Standing there gawking at me as if it doesn’t stink when she passes wind! Why, she’s just a little no-name, guttersnipe gold-digger who’s been trying to get her claws into Booker since high school!”

“That’s enough!” Clyde Jameson snaps at the same time Booker roars, “Get her the fuck out of here!” He shoots a glance at me. “Sorry, Lena.”

Mouth agape, Edna Jameson stares at her son. “Well, I never! You apologize to your whore for using disgusting language? I would have thought her the most likely to have taught it to you!”

“No, mother, that would be the war. You remember the war, don’t you? Where I spent day after day in muddy trenches, fighting to stay alive? Seeing men from my company get blown up or strafed around me—and wishing more than anything I would get a letter from Lena. Dying a little inside because I believed she’d forsaken me.” His face goes stonier than those heads of the four presidents the papers are all saying will be carved into Mount Rushmore next year. “Oh. But that’s right. She did write me—damn near every day Lena wrote me. But you and Matron Henderson know that better than anyone, don’t you? Considering the two of you stole her letters to me and mine to her. Did you read them as well?”

Mr. Jameson stares at his wife as if he’s never seen her before. “You interfered with their letters to each other, Edna?” he asks at the same time Mrs. Jameson says, “Don’t be ridiculous,” in response to her son’s question.

She sniffs disdainfully. “As if I’m interested in the scribblings of an uneducated little nothing like her.”

I’ve been biting my tongue, but now I snap upright. “Excuse me?” I all but dance with ire. “You certainly have a lot of opinions about someone you have never even had a beginning-to-end conversation with. I went to the same high school as Booker, Mrs. Jameson, and I graduated with straight B’s except in science and math. Even in those I scored solid C’s.” Okay, so my math grade was a C minus.

Still a C.

Booker’s mother gives me a tight-lipped, condescending smile. “Yes, I’m sure even trained monkeys can get it right sometimes.”

“Shut. The hell. Up,” Booker says in the grittiest, most glacial voice I have ever heard. He looks at his father. “Get her out of here,” he says, “before I do something I might regret. I will always be happy to see you, Dad. I hope you’ll stop by whenever you can.” Then he looks at his mother. “You, on the other hand, are dead to me. I will never again step foot in the house I once considered my home.”

As he stares at his mother, the saddest expression crosses his face. “I always thought you were the loveliest, most gracious woman in Walla Walla,” he says slowly. “And I was so proud to be your son. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? You’re only lovely and gracious to those you deem worthy to be your equal, or, as in the case of Matron Henderson, when it directly benefits you. It turns out the real Edna Jameson is a self-absorbed, mean-spirited bitch, and I want nothing to do with her.”

For the first time his mother looks concerned. Then she shakes her head. “Nonsense. You don’t mean that. You’ll get rid of this low-class bit of baggage and—”

“I mean precisely what I said,” Booker interrupts firmly. “You just shattered everything I ever believed about you. Unless you change your attitude, I can’t be around you.” He looks at his father. “Dad, please escort Edna out of my house.”

“No!” Edna tries to shake her husband’s hand from her arm, but he retains his light, but firm, grip. “I have a great deal more to say!”

“It sounds as if you’ve said more than enough already, Edna,” Clyde says wearily. “I don’t think you comprehend just what you have destroyed here today.” With a sad smile at me and a soft, “I’m sorry, Booker,” to his only child, he hustles her from the house.

Leaving their son standing lost amidst the emotional wreckage, with only me to bear witness.