Chapter 13 - What the Town Already Knew
The truth about the Radfords didn't come out because I told my side. It came out because I didn't have to.
Hollis Bend was a small town. People noticed things. They noticed the cookouts going from twenty-five guests to eight to none. They noticed Wesley looking like he'd aged five years in one. They noticed Gloria dropping out of the church bake sale and the Christmas bazaar, events she'd run for a decade. And they noticed that the person who'd always been in the background of every Radford gathering, carrying trays, setting tables, cleaning up after, was simply gone.
Peggy Alcott and Sharon Devlin, two women who'd sat at Gloria's table and eaten my macaroni salad for years, reached out to Renee on their own.
"We'd like to talk to Nora," Peggy said. "We saw how Gloria treated her. We should have said something. We didn't, and we're ashamed of it."
Renee passed along the numbers. A week later I texted Peggy: *Thank you. That means more than you know.*
She wrote back: *We're praying for you, honey. And we stopped going to Gloria's. Didn't sit right once we admitted what we'd watched happen.*
Danielle and Gloria finally turned on each other. It was inevitable. Two people who bond over a shared target don't have much left when the target removes herself from range.
Renee got the details from a Shaw's cashier who lived on Gloria's street. Danielle had been staying in the room Wesley and I used to share, the one that looked out over the backyard and the dead grill. They'd been fighting for weeks. Danielle wanted to run a meal-prep side hustle out of the kitchen. Gloria said her kitchen wasn't a cafeteria.
"This is your fault," Danielle said during the last fight. "You ran her off. You drove away the one person who kept this family working, and now everything's falling apart while you sit in your chair acting like you're still in charge of something."
"Don't you dare blame me," Gloria snapped. "I held this family together for twenty years."
"You held it together by making everyone scared of you," Danielle said. "And now there's nobody left to scare."
Danielle moved out the next day. Two garbage bags of clothes and a friend from her gas station days.
Then Uncle Ray had a health scare, a minor cardiac episode at the grocery store, and an ambulance to the ER. Gloria visited. She sat in the chair beside his bed and tried to talk about the weather.
May you like
Ray looked at her and said, "You know, Gloria, if you'd been half as nice to that girl as you were to your daycare kids, maybe I'd still have somebody to drive me to my appointments."
Gloria didn't answer. She drove home, parked in the driveway, and sat in the car for forty minutes before going inside to a house with one other person in it: Harold, in his chair, television turned up loud.
