Page 99 of The VIP Doubles Down
“You didn’t know about these?”
He forced his voice past the fist trying to close up his throat. “My father must have intercepted them.” The implications slammed the breath out of him again. “I—”
And then Allie’s hands were guiding him down into the desk chair. “You need to sit. I’ll call for something to drink.”
He slumped into the chair, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, while hatred for his father boiled up in a cloud of black, greasy smoke. He gasped as it nearly suffocated him, dimly aware of voices and movement around him.
Then someone put a glass in his hand and wrapped his fingers around it. He grasped the glass and pulled himself out of the choking haze. Allie knelt beside him, her hand on his thigh, her red hair streaming over one shoulder like a cheerful banner.
“It’s brandy,” she said.
“That bastard,” he said, lifting the glass and swallowing the entire contents in one gulp. It scorched down his throat. “That cruel bastard.”
Allie stroked his cheek. “It seems horrible, but maybe he had a reason for what he did.”
“A reason for making a child believe his mother didn’t give a damn about him?” The dark void of abandonment yawned inside Gavin. He twined his fingers into the bright rope of Allie’s hair and held on while the old, familiar sense of being so worthless that his mother had walked away without a backward glance welled up and tried to crush him into nothingness.
“Don’t think about him.” Allie’s voice came from miles away, but he followed it. “Think about your mother, who sent you all these cards. Who never stopped, even though she got no response.”
He reached for her words, clutching at them and hauling himself out of the yawning hole inside his soul.
“Gavin?” Allie was there, her eyes lit with something that calmed him. “She cared about you. Always.”
He shoved the glass onto the desk and reached for the bag, fumbling at the stubborn ziplock fastening.
“Let me.” Allie inserted her fingernail between the plastic edges and peeled the baggie open, sliding the rainbow of brilliant envelopes onto the leather desktop. Gavin scooped up the top one.
The postmark date was a week before his tenth birthday—the year she left—and the location was somewhere in California. There was no return address. The envelope had been opened. He sat with the card in his hand, staring at the ragged edge of the torn flap and trying to force himself to pull the card out.
He was grateful for the slight weight of Allie’s hand on his shoulder, the stir of her breath in his hair, the warmth from her body beside him. He slipped the card out of its gaudy covering. “YOU’RE10!” it exclaimed in large letters above an excited puppy. As he flipped it open, a folded five-dollar bill fluttered onto his lap.
A gift from his mother.
He touched it with his fingertip, as though it would disintegrate like a dried butterfly’s wing if he put any pressure on it.
Allie squeezed his shoulder. “My grandma used to give me five dollars for my birthday when I was a kid. It was one of my favorite presents because I could buy myself a book with it.”
“My father didn’t even give the money to me,” Gavin said. “He could have claimed it was from some other relative. Or from him.” Gavin might have bought a book, too, or the fancy silver roller-ball pen he’d coveted in the town’s five-and-dime store.
Suddenly, he couldn’t get the card open fast enough. “Dear Gavin.” His mother’s writing flowed across the top, above the printed verse. Below it she’d written:
Double digits! You’re so grown-up now. Don’t put this in your piggy bank! It’s celebration money, which means it must be spent on you. I wish I could help you blow out all those candles. It will look like a bonfire because you’re such a big boy. I love you, lightning bug, and don’t you ever forget it.
XOXOXOXOX, Mommy
“She cried on it,” Allie said, pointing to a splotch of discoloration on the turquoise paper. “She missed you.”
“For how long?” Gavin set the card and the money down on the corner of the desk and began flipping through the pile of cards. “How long did my father block her communications?”
“They’re in date order,” Allie said, watching over his shoulder. “Christmas, Easter, your birthday, Halloween, Thanksgiving. Look, that one has a return address on it.”
He stopped his mad sorting to read the envelope. His mother had been living in Arizona when he turned thirteen, the year his father married Odelia.
“I’m guessing this was your mother’s first permanent address,” Allie said. “The others were from all different places. She couldn’t offer you a stable home.”
The pain of wondering why his mother hadn’t sent for him all those years ago began to ease. He should have realized that she had no way to support a child. But his younger self hadn’t thought of that. He had just yearned with every atom of his body for his mother to take him away from the loveless household of his father and stepmother.
He resumed his examination of the envelopes. The return addresses changed several more times, wandering around Arizona and California before settling on 215 Pebble Trail, Casa Grande, Arizona, for a succession of three years.
