“People all over town know she’s done worse,” Susanna said roughly.
Her mother pinched her lips and patted Abby on the thigh. “Pop up, hon. Get in the floor with your blocks or something. Mamaw’s got to refill her coffee.” Abby jumped down without a fuss and did as she was asked. Susanna’s mother had that effect on people, though it was a side that emerged well after Susanna and Ronnie were grown. It happened, Susanna supposed, after her father died. Her mother just seemed to occupy more space in the world now.
They went to the kitchen, and her mother held up the coffee carafe with her eyebrows raised. Susanna nodded.
“I’ve got a dab of two percent left if you want milk,” she said, spooning creamer into her own cup.
“Creamer’s OK.” Susanna borrowed her mother’s spoon and then set it to drip on the plastic tablecloth. The food left over from the breakfast her mother had cooked sat on a plate in the middle of the table, as it always did: half a dozen canned biscuits, two strips of bacon, a link sausage, a spoonful of scrambled egg, all soaking into a paper towel. Her mother bought the link sausages because she knew Abby liked them. Susanna tore the fatty end off a piece of bacon and nibbled it.
“You hungry? I could heat you some toast. Or there’s some sweet rolls in the bread box.”
“I’m just munching,” Susanna said.
Her mother set a biscuit on a plate and spooned some molasses and margarine on top of it. “I make too much, eat all day. I’m still cooking for four.”
“You’re scrawny. You could stand a few more biscuits.”
Her mother grunted in a pleased way.
“Tony’s sending word to some TV stations. He thinks that WBKO will run it tonight and at least one of the Nashville stations ought to pick it up. So that’s good.”
“Is it?”
“You want her found, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” her mother said. She wiped at her eyes. “I love her. Always have. She hasn’t made it easy, God knows.” She shrugged. “I just don’t like our business out for everyone to see. If she’s gone on purpose, she’s gone on purpose. She don’t want us finding her. And if she’s not—”
“If she’s not, what?”
“Then it’s all hopeless,” her mother said hoarsely.
“You sound like Dale,” Susanna said. “Nothing is hopeless. I’m her sister, Mama. I still feel her out there. She could be unconscious in a hospital or something. She could be hurt.”
“She could be dead,” her mother said.
“And what if she is?” Susanna was up now, pacing. The floor felt soft in spaces beneath the linoleum, and she remembered how Dale had promised years ago to come over here and put a new floor in, how he’d told her mother, I’ve got nothing but time come summer. “We don’t try to find out what happened to her? We don’t try to find this man and see what he had to do with it?”
“Stop fussing at me,” her mother said. She had started to cry. “I guess you know the right way to act and I don’t. You’ve always thought so. This is just moving fast, is all. Ronnie’s been taking off on me all her life. She ran away for a week when she was a teenager till your father hunted her down and beat her black and blue. I guess you don’t remember that. She might come by here to check on me once a month, and usually it’s longer than that. So you tell me she’s gone, but it don’t feel any different to me. It feels like usual.”
“It’s not usual,” Susanna said, more gently this time. “You’re going to have to trust me when I tell you it isn’t.”
“All right.” Her mother picked at her biscuit. “Now I want to ask you something. But I don’t want you getting mad at me.”
Susanna steeled herself. “OK.”
“Shelby Wilhelm told me she saw you eating lunch at Gary’s yesterday. With some colored fellow.”
“Mom, he’s black. Not colored. You can’t go around saying that. He’s black, and he’s the detective. That was Tony Joyce.”
“That’s what I told her. I told her you stayed in town to look into what happened to Ronnie, and I told her that was the guy. I remembered him from the newspaper.”
“What’s the problem, then?”
“I told you not to get mad at me.”
“Well, that’s a hard thing to promise, Mama. That’s just about out of my control.”
Her mother pinched her lips again and shook her head.
“Say what’s on your mind if you’re going to say it. I know you mean to.”
“It don’t look right. You having lunch with some man not your husband, while your husband’s out of town. Then you call me to keep Abby overnight even though you’re going to be home. At first I didn’t think too much about it, and then I did.”
“And then you did. And what did you come up with, Mama?”
She averted her eyes. “That it didn’t look right, is all. And I thought about how Dale’s going to come back here today, and if Shelby can tell me then someone can tell him. I worry about you. I’ve seen Ronnie make enough mistakes to not want you going down the same path.”
“Dale knows why I stayed home, and he knows who Tony is. Unlike the old hens around here, he realizes that a grown woman can have lunch with a man who isn’t her husband and not have to sew a scarlet letter to her chest.” Susanna’s anger was genuine, as if she truly had nothing to hide. “God, I hate this town sometimes.”
“There’s no call for all that,” her mother said. “And I don’t appreciate you calling me an old hen.”
“It burns me up,” Susanna said. “It burns me to think that you’re worried more about who I’m seen having lunch with than where Ronnie’s gone to.” She realized that she was still holding a piece of bacon and tossed it on the table. “If I up and left Dale tomorrow, told him I wanted a separation, that would be my own damn business and no one else’s, and it wouldn’t be the end of the world. It wouldn’t be life or death.”
“It would be Dale’s business,” her mother said. “And it sure as heck would be that child’s business.” She jerked her chin toward the living room.
“Oh, yeah,” Susanna said sarcastically. “A girl needs a father. Just like Ronnie and I needed an old drunk to beat us black and blue.”
“That old drunk kept a roof over your head.”
Susanna laughed and looked around. “Yeah, a real palace.”
“I’ll tell you right now, little girl, there’s worse. I’ve lived it.”
“Well, guess what, Mama. I’m not you. I have a job of my own and a mind of my own, and I’ll do what I know is right. For me and Abby, both.”
“So you are leaving him,” her mother said. She looked bitterly satisfied.
Susanna sat down heavily, feeling tricked. “What? No.” She gulped her coffee, grimaced. Her mother always made it weak, and it had cooled quickly. “No one’s leaving anybody. I’m just trying to make a point here. I’m speaking in the hypothetical.”
“You’re awfully riled up about a hypothetical.”
“You get me that way.”
“I reckon I always have.”
They sat silently, long enough for Susanna to follow some of the dialogue in the cartoon in the next room, long enough for the house to shiver as a jet flew overhead.
“I’ll be honest with you,” her mother said. “I never cared much for Dale. I thought the first time you brought him home that he was full of himself. A snoot.”
Susanna barked a laugh.
“He’s still a snoot, far as that goes,” her mother said. “But his heart is in the right place, and he loves that girl. And he’s not a drinker.”
“Which makes him Prince Charming around here, I guess.”
“Maybe you think I was too stupid to want better than your father, that I never thought about taking off with you girls. Well, you’re wrong. I thought a lot about it.”
“What stopped you?”
“This and that,” she said. She was sixty and looked it, and her hair, which she dyed to a darker shade than her youth’s brown, onl
y exaggerated the toll of years. “Mostly, I figured out that nothing I could do would make my life easier or better than it was. I’d just be trading one kind of hurting for another. And I’d be better off with the hurt I knew than the hurt I didn’t.”
Susanna took a shaky breath, thinking of the hurts she’d known in this house. The screaming, the punishments. Her father, nude and unconscious on the living room sofa. Yet this was still, perversely, home to her, more a home than her place with Dale ever would be. She remembered the time her father came home with this very dining room table and chairs, scavenged from a dump site, none of them with seats, and how he’d spent a long Saturday in the kitchen, beer near at hand, braiding new seats patiently and neatly from a spool of jute. One good memory among a host of bad ones, but it was there, and the power of it made her momentarily weak.
“Is that supposed to be a pep talk?” Susanna said. “ ‘Stay with your man’? ‘He could be worse’?”
Her mother shrugged. “Since you’re such a modern woman, and since you already know more about the world than I ever did, let me put it another way: if you’re going to leave what you’ve got, you better know what you’re getting.”
Chapter Eighteen
1.
The hospital lobby was chilly from the opening and closing automatic doors, so Sarah brought Wyatt’s wheelchair to a rest by the gift shop, where they still had a view of the front drive. Morris Houchens had gone to the parking lot to bring around his truck. Wyatt, to his surprise and deep embarrassment, was getting blubbery again.
“Oh, hush,” Sarah said. Her hands left the handles of the wheelchair and rested on his shoulders. “You’re supposed to be happy to leave the hospital. You’re going to sleep in your own bed tonight. You’re going to see your dog.”
“I know,” Wyatt said hoarsely.
“And you know I’m coming over to visit just as soon as my shift ends,” she said more softly. “You know that, too, right?”
Wyatt nodded hard and with his mouth pinched closed, as a child would.
“It’s the medication. It has your chemistry all out of whack.”
And that was probably true. But what Wyatt was feeling, on this threshold between his hospital room and the waiting world, was the terror of exposure. In the bed, plugged into machines and drips and watched over by Sarah, he had been protected—hidden. This homecoming was too much, too quick.
A red Chevy pulled up and stopped. A few seconds later, Morris crossed in front of it and opened the passenger-side door.
“Here we go,” Sarah said, rolling the wheelchair forward and out the hospital doors. Wyatt hastily wiped his eyes with his shirt cuff.
Wind was whipping hard through the cul-de-sac out front and whistling against the shelter roof above them as Sarah locked the wheels of the chair and gave him an encouraging, motherly thump on the back. “OK, do what God gave you legs for,” she said, and Wyatt placed his palms against the wheelchair arms and his feet between the footholds, then trembled to a stand. Morris was holding out an uncertain arm.
“You got it?” Sarah said in her bright, no-nonsense nurse’s voice.
Wyatt removed his steadying fingertips from the arms of the chair and took a small step forward. “Yeah,” he said.
He felt weak, and his joints ached from so many nights in that stiff bed, where the tubes and wires chained him from rolling over or making adjustments for comfort. But he was doing better now than he had expected to be. He had walked a few moments each day in the hospital, dragging the IV rack behind him, and now he was walking to Morris’s truck, and the process was still just putting one foot in front of the other. No more and no less than that. He was even stepping up, climbing into Morris’s elevated cab. Life went on.
Sarah leaned close to him as Morris was striding around to the driver’s seat, and Wyatt inhaled, as if he wouldn’t be able to again, her vanilla perfume. “I’ll see you before you know it. Keep a light on for me.”
“I will,” he said.
She stepped back and closed the door, then wiggled her fingers in good-bye. The cab of the truck was toasty warm, and Wyatt put his hands out in front of the vents, sighing a little at the small pleasure. They were pale hands, almost translucent, with blue and yellow bruises from the IV needles.
“She seems nice,” Morris said. “Seems like y’all know each other from sometime before.”
“A little bit,” Wyatt said. He hesitated, not wanting to mention Nancy’s Dance Hall.
“That’s good,” Morris said. “It’s good to have people when you’re going through a tough time.”
Wyatt watched the town unfurl outside his window, marveling at how alien it all seemed, as if he had been shut away for months rather than a bit less than a week. They passed the country club’s golf course, which was predictably empty on a day as cool and gray as this one, and the warehouse housing the aluminum recycling facility. A dump truck outside of it belched black smoke. They passed the town’s main cemetery, which stretched a few acres back on both sides of the road. They passed the Roma Dairy Dip, where Wyatt sometimes picked up a sack of burgers after getting off of work. He could smell, even through the closed window, its distinct fragrance of frying grease and grilled meat, and his stomach rumbled in a way that might have been hunger or nausea.
“What I figured,” Morris said, breaking the silence, “is that I could drop you off at home, then go back out to pick you up whatever groceries and things you think you need.” He was restating the plan they had already made, just trying to fill up dead air. Wyatt opened his mouth to agree, then closed it again. Then he said, “Can we run back to the Dairy Dip for a minute? I have a hankering for a milkshake.”
“Well, OK,” Morris said. “You sure you ought to have anything like that right now?”
“It won’t kill me,” Wyatt said wryly. “And I guess I just want to stretch my legs and get some air before being shut up again.” That much was true. He felt something like sorrow at the thought of handing Morris his shopping list with its doctor-approved choices of steel-cut oats and skinless chicken breasts and green vegetables that he wasn’t even sure how to cook if they didn’t go into a pot with a ham bone and a hunk of butter. He also felt a deep dread at the thought of his house and even of Boss. Of the prospect of hours alone.
Morris parked in a spot close to the order window. “You sure you don’t want me to get it for you?”
“Nah,” Wyatt said. “I’ll be all right.”
He climbed down carefully from the cab of the truck and walked to the order window, unfolding his wallet as he went. A teenage girl slid over a glass partition and spoke to him through the opening. “Help you?”
“Yes, please. I’d like a—” He scanned the menu. “A banana milkshake, please, miss. A small.”
He put a dollar and a quarter through the opening, and she handed him a nickel’s change. She turned her back to him and pressed a silver handle, measuring a ribbon of soft-serve ice cream, turning the RC Cup with brisk efficiency. Wyatt’s gaze wandered to his left, where business cards and advertisements had been taped to the inside of the glass.
What he saw almost immediately was his own face. HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? spanned the top of the sheet of paper in bold print, and below the image, in smaller letters, it read, “Person of interest in the disappearance of Veronica ‘Ronnie’ Eastman. Seen together at Nancy’s Dance Hall in Sylvan and the Fill-Up gas station in Roma on October 23. Age: 50–60. Height: 5'8"–6'. Weight: 190–230 lbs. Wanted only for questioning.” An officer’s name and phone number followed.
Wyatt started shaking. The image—it wasn’t exactly right; even in his panic he could admit that. The person who had drawn it had exaggerated his receding hairline and elongated his face. His mustache was thicker than he normally kept it. But the artist had also captured something recognizable and true about Wyatt, and the sight of the face with its sad, haunted eyes and its pursed, self-pitying mouth made Wyatt want to rip the poster down, run, hide. The young woman came bac
k with his milkshake and thrust it through the open partition at him. Her expression was blank, disinterested. When Wyatt did not at first take the cup, a flicker of irritation, evident in nothing more than a microsecond’s tightening of the brows, flashed across her face.
“Sir?” she said, shaking the cup a little, and he took it from her. Then she slammed the partition closed.
2.
Think. Think.
He was home. Morris had already been to the store and back, and the groceries were stowed neatly in the cabinets and refrigerator. Boss was stretched out in the middle of the living room floor, napping, amiable enough—as if Wyatt were a roommate that he got along well with but wasn’t all that close to. Sarah had promised to walk him when she came over later. The milkshake, still mostly full, was sweating beads onto a coaster near Wyatt’s right hand. Any appetite he had was long gone.
Think, goddamn it.
But thinking was hard with the exhaustion and the meds. What he wanted to do was recline his chair, shut off the lamp, and nap until Sarah arrived. His brain was hostage to his body. What it registered was a panic that occasionally leveled into blurry anxiety as he momentarily forgot the source of his problem. Then the drawing of his face on that poster would come to him with full force, and he set back out on the same uncertain mental zigging and zagging, wondering if the time hadn’t come for him to simply get in his truck and drive out of town. But Sarah—what about Sarah? Any life without her, he decided, was not a life worth preserving.
He rose, walked as quickly as he could to the kitchen, and bent over the sink. He splashed cold water on his face. Without bothering to towel himself dry, he pulled a glass from the cabinet and found, in the back of his refrigerator, a half-full two-liter of Coca-Cola, probably already flat. He poured a couple of inches into his glass and knocked it back like whiskey, grimacing at the sweet blandness. Then he went to the window and shoved it up a couple of inches, so that some cold air could leak in. At last—perhaps as much for rousing himself with the motions as the actions themselves—Wyatt’s mind cleared a little. He remained standing by the window, legs trembling, and thought.
The Next Time You See Me Page 21
