I'll Take Care of You by Caitlin Rother Read Free Book Online Page A

suspicions about her already.
    â€œHe’d always told me that she was a little too aloof,” Sandy said.
    Bill had apparently complained to Ken about Nanette’s lack of involvement in his kids’ lives and in McLaughlin family get-togethers that past year.
    â€œMy dad’s impression of her from the get-go was that her background didn’t add up—the whole story about the basketball scholarship and [being a] child prodigy,” Sandy said. “His impression was that she was a gold digger with two little kids, trying to find a rich guy to latch onto.”
    Sandy’s father told her that he’d never discussed his impressions with Bill because he felt it wasn’t his place. Sandy hadn’t said anything to Bill about her perceptions either. However, she, Kim, and Jenny often joked among themselves about Nanette’s antics and malapropisms, mocking her boasts that she’d scored a very high score on the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), for which the best possible score was only a fraction of the number she cited.
    Nanette also told them she’d graduated early from high school in Phoenix after playing on the basketball team, then got a basketball scholarship to attend Arizona State University (ASU). There was some photo floating around of her playing basketball, Sandy said, but the girls didn’t believe much of that talk either.
    â€œThe tongues would wag behind the scenes when Bill wasn’t in earshot,” she said. “Kim and Jenny just couldn’t stand sitting at the table with her. It was eye-rolling time, because Nanette would try to hijack the conversations and it was usually to talk about her kids or that she could bench-press four hundred pounds.” If everyone else started talking, “she would just sort of pout.”
    To Kim, Jenny, and Sandy, Nanette never seemed very cerebral, which was a marked and rather disturbing contrast to Bill.
    â€œNanette didn’t have much intelligent to say at the dinner table or anything, and my dad was a real smart, bright man, and he would love to philosophize and pontificate,” Kim McLaughlin Bayless recalled recently. “People would come to our dinner table to discuss business with him because he was very well-respected in our community and with our friends, and he liked to take risks.... I thought it was odd that Nanette didn’t take part in many of those conversations. She didn’t really say much at all. Maybe she was intimated by us kids, I’m not sure.”
    Other than the obvious physical attraction, Bill’s adult children just didn’t get what he saw in Nanette. But he’d never said a harsh or critical word about her, and he spoke just as highly of her kids as he did of his own.

    Nanette wanted to go grocery shopping that Saturday evening to buy some food for the beach house, so Sandy went with her to Lucky’s, still trying to support the woman she assumed was grieving and eventually would need some comfort. She figured Nanette’s flat affect was just a mask to cover deeper emotions.
    The poor thing, she’s going to explode.
    Looking back later, Sandy said that Nanette seemed “kind of glazed over. It was almost an act.” But at the time, Sandy was simply puzzled by it.
    â€œAt the very least I expected her to be, by that time, upset that her kids had been so close to that kind of danger.”
    Sandy just nodded as she listened to Nanette engage in what seemed like “pointless banter.” Nanette said nothing about Bill’s death, and made “robotic-like” conversation about her own situation as she threw a box of cereal into the shopping cart for the kids, who were still staying with her ex-husband.
    â€œWhat am I going to do?” Nanette asked rhetorically. “I just don’t know what to do next.”
    But there was no needy hug, and no emotional explosion.
    Well, that was a goddamn waste of time, Sandy thought as