A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

by Joshilyn Jackson

  After, we lay together in a tangle. My company panties were hanging from his plain IKEA floor lamp like a cheery pink flag. The top sheet was a twist at the foot of the bed. I pul ed it up over us and then put my head on his chest, listening to the thump of his big heart, trying to tel myself this hadn’t solved damn-al . But I couldn’t help feeling good.

  He said, quiet, “So much for doing it right this time.”

  I laughed. “Trust me. You did it exactly right.” I lifted my head and rested the point of my chin on his chest. “This is your real bed.”

  “Yeah,” he said. I raised my eyebrows, asking, and he said, “When Sandy came home, she wanted us to get a new one. She said this one wasn’t hers anymore, and she was right. We got a sleigh bed, and I put this one up in the attic. It’s the only thing I moved over here from the house.”

  I nodded, digging my chin into his chest, and he blinked a long, slow blink. I remembered this, how he got so slow, lol ing around like a sleepy zoo tiger after, while I always wanted to get up and bake bread or garden or go dancing.

  Panties aside, I hadn’t planned this. But my chaperone had apparently had another agenda, and so had my body, and I’d landed here. My jumbled feelings were one thing, but I’d come for a reason. I found myself stil wil ing to use him and this glowy aftermood, both.

  “So what direction is the investigation going?” I asked, as if our conversation had never been interrupted at al . Meanwhile my finger was tracing a pattern in his chest hair.

  He smiled and said, “I told you I can’t share details, Ginny. How many commandments do you want me to break today?”

  I realized that the pattern I was drawing on his chest was a little heart, over and over, like a teenage girl doodling in her notebook. I stopped myself and sat up. “You know I’m not asking so I have the best gossip when the PTA meets. I’m asking because I’m worried about my kid.”

  His smile went down a notch, and he propped himself up on an elbow. “If I thought Liza was in trouble, I’d tel you. I’d have told you myself, before this, if I thought you had reason to be worried.”

  Al at once I didn’t like being naked. I reached over and snapped my happy panty flag down. I turned away from him to put them on.

  “Is that a fact,” I said, but not like a question. I got up and started struggling back into my dress. “I have to get home. Mosey has a friend over, and I don’t like to leave her.”

  His eyes had reset to wary. “Want me to help you get Liza to the car?”

  “I think Liza probably feels real y quite rested now.” My voice was hard and sharp.

  I checked the mirror, frowning helplessly at the dark riot of auburn curls my careful y blown-out hair had become. I started for the door, but his voice stopped me.

  “Ginny,” he said. “I’m serious. I would have been on your doorstep long before this if I thought Rick Warfield was barking up your tree.”

  I paused. I found I believed him. After al , the day Tyler had taken out the wil ow, Lawrence had come by to chase the looky-loos from the yard. But he hadn’t rung the bel . I said, “I don’t want to dig al this up, but, Lawrence, you left your wife months ago. I haven’t noticed you showing up on my doorstep, no matter what trouble came my way or didn’t.”

  “I was going to,” he said, earnest, sitting al the way up in the bed so the sheet fel from his chest and puddled in his lap. “I was going to cal you.

  November fifteenth.”

  My eyes narrowed. The whiteness of his bare wal s was bothering me. His words sounded truthful, but who could tel in such a stark, bare place?

  The room seemed too whol y unfinished to have corners and nooks to hide things in, as if anything he said must be plain speaking. I asked, “What’s so al -fired special about November fifteenth?”

  “It’s my court date. I’l be divorced.”

  That hit me in exactly the wrong way. I took a step toward him, and my words came out so forceful it was like I hissed them. “You were waiting on the paperwork?”

  “Not the paperwork,” he said, terse. “Waiting to be free.”

  “Seriously? ” I said, like Mosey in a snit. “That didn’t stop you last time.”

  “Yeah. See how wel that turned out?” he said, his own voice rising now.

  “If you real y wanted—” Then, al at once, I got it, and even my knowing that Liza was a few feet down the hal couldn’t keep my voice from going louder and higher with every word. “Oh, holy shit, it’s because of God. No, not even God. That I could maybe see. But you were worried what that stick-in-ass whispery pack of vicious Baptists down at your church would think of you if—”

  He swung his legs around, out of the bed, this time sitting up for real and talking over me. “Wait a second, now—”

  I didn’t so much as pause. “—if you took up with the other woman again right after leaving your wife. But I was never the other woman, never.” He didn’t want to be naked then either, and he hunted up his boxers while I kept on, snappy as a harpy. “Sandy was gone off busting her marriage vows sixty ways from Sunday before I ever laid eyes on you, and I never so much as kissed you good-bye when she came back and you had made your choice.”

  He was holding up his hands, pushing the air at me like this could shush me. The second I finished, he was talking back, low but intense, and just as angry. “I know that your parents and their church were awful to you when you got pregnant, but don’t you judge my friends, my church, by them.

  This has been so hard on Max and Harry. It’s not a cakewalk when your parents split, no matter how grown up you are. My church has been nothing but good to me and them, and Sandy, too.” He jerked his pants on, one leg at a time, as he spoke. “Yes, I wanted to wait until I was divorced. I wanted to do it right this time. I deserve it to be right, and you do, too. Believe it or not, being Baptist can sometimes mean only that you try your damnedest to do right by people. ‘Baptist’ isn’t a word that means ‘out to screw Ginny Slocumb.’”

  “Even so,” I said, cold, “you managed.”

  “Wasn’t that hard,” he shot back, and I wheeled out of the room, stomping along the hal way. I found Liza sitting up, alert and clearly listening to us yel over the buzz of CNN. She looked as pleased as any dozen cream-eating cats.

  “You are stil you, and I should have paddled you more when you were little,” I said to her, fierce and soft. “Let’s get out of here. Warfield isn’t looking too hard at us, so that’s one good thing.” I grabbed her walker and brought it over, and she pul ed herself up into it with very little help from me. She had this smug look on her face, like mission accomplished, but I wasn’t sure whose mission she was so happy over, hers or mine.

  We were headed toward the door when Lawrence came in. He’d taken the time to stuff his feet into Top-Siders and pul his shirt back on, but the buttons were done up wrong.

  “Don’t,” I said to him, and we kept going for the door, much too slow to be at al satisfying.

  “I am going to cal you, Ginny,” he said, firm and mostly calm, though he’d been at least as angry as I’d been. “November fifteenth.”

  “You do that,” I snapped over my shoulder. “I think I’m busy that day, dating every single man who asked me out this whole last stupid decade.”

  “Ginny…” he said.

  I stopped and wheeled on him. “Don’t you ‘Ginny’ me, Mr. Rules. November fifteenth and wait and patience and you’l do it with me but you won’t even talk to me, Lordy—” I let my voice go al officious and deep, mocking him. “‘I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.’”

  He spread his hands wide and said, “Al right, al right, look. There are good reasons for that.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” I said, snotty.

  “There are. Things are going strangely. Rick doesn’t have the budget for al the things that need doing to solve a case this cold, especial y since he isn’t sure there’s a crime there, past an improper burial. But a top-notch private lab is running DNA from the teeth that were left”
—I flinched at that phrase—“and when I asked Rick how the department could afford it, he said…Ginny, someone else is paying for this. Which is ethical y gray.

  Rick is only al owing it because the couple paying came in and asked to be tested. They think the bones belong to their lost baby. I don’t want this getting out— Is she okay?”

  Liza had her back to him, braced in her walker, so he couldn’t see how her jaw swung open and then pulsed, like a landed fish gulping and drowning in air. But he’d heard her sharp intake of breath, saw her sway. He ran and caught her as she started to slide down her walker for the second time today, and this time she wasn’t faking.

  She didn’t col apse, though. I saw her wil rise, saw her ral y, and her hands reached again for the front bar of her walker, shoving at it, trying to move to the door.

  “I need to get her home,” I said to Lawrence.

  He nodded, al business, and said, “I shouldn’t have been yel ing.…”

  But I didn’t think our fight had upset her. In fact, she’d enjoyed that part, if I knew my girl. It was what he’d said about the investigation, even though the news that Rick was so off track should have reassured her.

  Lawrence was stil talking to Liza. “Let me help you.” She let go of the bar, and he swung her easily up into his arms. I grabbed the walker and fol owed him to my car. He got Liza settled in the passenger seat, and I took over from there, buckling her in. I checked her pulse while I leaned over her, and it was strong and not fast enough to be truly worrisome. But she seemed torpid. Shut down and gone.

  I closed her door and headed around to the driver’s side. Lawrence stepped away and let me.

  “Thank you for your help with…” I gestured at Liza, sounding so stiff and formal that it was like I was a mee-maw after al , thanking a Boy Scout for helping me across the street.

  His gaze was level and grave, and he said quietly, “November fifteenth,” and that pissed me off al over again. My body felt like it had whiplash, stil glowing with the aftermath of sex that had been such a long time coming and yet awash in anger with him and fear for my kid. I was in a swamp of feeling things, and I gave up on sorting any damn bit of it out and got in my car without so much as a nod and started driving.

  “Liza,” I said. “Liza,” but she was staring out the window. Every trace of the woman who had played possum and tricked me into Lawrence’s bedroom was gone. I decided we could do without a grocery run. I had to get her home and let her recover, try to find a way to understand what Lawrence could have said that disturbed her so deeply. She’d disappeared al the way to the deep downs inside herself.

  When I final y pul ed in to our gravel drive, Raymond Knotwood’s car was stil parked in front of our house.

  “Oh, just damn,” I said to Liza. She stayed slumped, staring unseeing out the window.

  I got the wheelchair out of the trunk instead of trying to make her walk more. She’d had enough today. It was al I could do to rouse her to where I could get her into it. I pushed her up the walk and inside, but Mosey wasn’t in the den. I assumed they must be out in the tree house, and that made me flat tired. I didn’t feel like going out back to rout that big-headed little booger so I could have a quiet house. But as I wheeled Liza into the den, I heard a strange sound, and I felt my eyebrows come together.

  It was splashing. Shower sounds, coming from the bathroom.

  Liza was oblivious, but my mouth dried up.

  I took off running for the hal , which was useless, because I already knew what I would find. There was only one reason for a boy and a girl to be in a bath together. I’d been so stupid. I’d left her here, thoughtlessly, even while Lawrence was reminding me exactly how powerful a thing sex could be. So maybe Raymond Knotwood wasn’t my idea of a heartthrob; that kid carried a torch for Mosey so big and bright it was a wonder he didn’t set his own hair on fire.

  I ran, already too late, my heart cracking open inside me, because she was too young to be doing this, way too baby young, and how could she not know the damn consequences? She was the consequences. She was living the consequences. And that big-eyed, blinking, overinnocent evil fetus of a boy! By the time I reached the bathroom hal way, I was charging, my hands reaching out like claws for the door, ready to tear open Raymond Knotwood’s skinny throat.

  I jerked the door open, and Mosey screamed.

  I stopped there in the doorway, shocked to stil ness. Mosey was ful y dressed. So was Raymond. They were on their knees, side by side, bent over the tub, where al four of their hands were on a slippery wad of soap and pure, living ugly. I had a heartbeat, maybe less, to take in its wrinkled skin, its scant tufts of splotchy fur. It looked like an enormous, leprous rat.

  Mosey and the boy were so surprised they lost their hold on the awful little creature. It came leaping over the tub edge, trailing soap and splashing dirty water, black eyes rol ing. It barreled right at me.

  I jumped back and screamed louder than Mosey. The thing tore past me, howling like the tiny, wet damned.

  “Oh, my God, Big!” Mosey shrieked, and she jumped up and shoved past me, too, arms foamy to her elbows. Raymond knelt there, gaping at me, his whole front soaked by the passing of whatever the hel it was.

  I left him there and ran after Mosey.

  I caught up to her in my living room, where the animal was shaking filthy water al over my sofa, yammering in a panic.

  “Hush, Pogo! Hush,” Mosey said, panting and trying to sound soothing at the same time.

  “What is that thing?” I asked. It stil looked like a wet, awful rat to me, mostly bald, with big red sores on pasty pink skin.

  “It’s a dog, what do you think? I rescued it.”

  “You rescued it?” I said, incredulous. “From where? Dog hel ?”

  “Yes,” Mosey answered, loud but quite sincerely. “Roger and me rescued him from dog hel . He’s been at the vet. He had ticks and needed shots and stuff. We went and picked him up after you left, and we were trying to get him cleaned up good before you came home. We wanted him to look nice when you met him.”

  I blinked, thinking that would take more than a bath. So much more. Like a ton of plastic surgery and a miracle.

  “You rescued it,” I repeated, and my head started shaking side to side, shades of Liza fil ing up the room. “Not just no, Mosey. Hel no. You think this is what we need right now?”

  The dog thing was running back and forth across the sofa, stil panicking, its black eyes rol ing. I expected it to start spewing rabies foam any second. I’ve always thought of myself as a dog person, but this looked more like an animatronic mini-monster that might appear in a scary movie, living in the sewers and popping out to eat up people’s reasonable-looking pets.

  Raymond Knotwood appeared in the doorway, saying, “Mosey? Maybe we could—”

  “We are so not taking him back,” Mosey said, talking over him. The dog caught her mood, and its worried yammer changed to barking, an unending string of shril yaps.

  I yel ed to be heard over al of them, saying, “Then I wil , because there is no way we can handle that thing on top of—”

  I was flat-out yel ing, but somehow, underneath my own yel ing, I heard Liza say, “Bunnies.”

  I stopped like my vocal cords had been neatly snipped in two. It was the wrong word—she was cal ing a singular dog a whole bunch of rabbits—

  but it shut me up anyway. She was back, head up and alert in the chair. The s blurred, but I could hear how hard she’d worked to shape this word,

  “Bunnies,” in her broken mouth.

  Mosey had heard it, too. She was staring at her mother with her eyes gone wide and hopeful.

  “Bunnies,” Liza said again, loud, over the dog’s barking.

  I understood then. It wasn’t the wrong word. Not at al . She’d had a foster once named Bunnies, the only dog I’d ever seen who looked as bad off as this one.

  Liza braced her good hand against the chair’s armrest and put her feet on the floor, moving down to the carpet in
a control ed slide. Her eyes, both of them, were al lit up from the inside.

  The dog stopped tearing back and forth once the room was quiet. Liza’s good hand patted the floor, and I stood there with my mouth hanging open and my eyes fil ing up with tears at how dumb I’d been and how wise my Mosey was turning out to be. I’d been pleased with myself for using Liza’s favorite sins to cal her, but here was Mosey using Liza’s own best goodness. My attempt had ended with Liza locked up tight in that dark place inside herself, but here was Mosey lighting up the pathway to that door.

  “His name is Pogo,” Mosey said, whisper-soft. The dog’s ears cocked at the word.

  “Bunnies, come,” Liza said again. Slurred, but it was stil perfect. A whole perfect sentence that made sense, with a noun and a verb. “Bunnies, come,” she said again, and patted the carpet with her good hand. Pat, pat, pat, rhythmic and gentle, and that awful little ruined dog, just as broken as she was, did what every damaged dog I’d ever seen always did. He went right to her, bel y low and tail down. Scared and hopeful he went, al the way to her, and he put his sorry head into her hand.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Liza

  LIZA WALKS. SHE lifts and clicks her walker forward, then her good foot, then a desperate mental shoving to make the bad foot go. Rockettes.

  She knows the way. She’s been this route a thousand times in the swel ing, ebbing past that washes al around her, a past that is so much larger and realer than the now. This is the way to Melissa Richardson’s house.

  That man, Lawrence, the one Big loves, he tried to tel Big. Big didn’t hear or understand.

  This is Liza’s fault. Big couldn’t understand because she only has the cup. Noun. Subject. Big has the cup, and it is up to Liza to give Big the verb.

  The verb is at Melissa’s house, and Liza knows the way. She must lead Big there.