“Susan is a gem, Lois. Just a gem.”
“Walter sure likes her.”
“I knew he would.” Marianne glanced back at them. She crossed her arms and looked out at the darkened pasture, just a lip of red over the flatwoods.
“You should’ve seen her ten years ago.”
“Do you like her husband?”
“He’s the best she’s ever had and, believe me, she’s had a lot.”
Marianne nodded, though she didn’t seem to be listening. She pulled her arms in as close as if it were chilly instead of the Florida-muggy Lois had never quite gotten used to.
“He’s roamed before, hasn’t he?”
“Oh, Lois.”
“Hey, listen, my husband gave me the clap, for Christ’s sake.”
Marianne shook her head. “Not for a long time.” She turned back to the window. Walter was nodding at something Susan was saying, and Marianne looked at Lois then out at the night. “Susan looks a bit like her, I’m afraid. I saw it as soon as she walked into the shop.”
“Then why invite us over, honey?”
“I think I just like to punish myself.”
“For what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. Not being good enough.” Marianne waved her hand in front of her face, and Lois knew she should move toward her to comfort her, but the night had been going so well and she didn’t want this to turn into a scene. It ticked her off that her friend felt this way, but this unquestioning loyalty to her husband, it was what made her such a good employee.
“Sorry I asked, honey. It’s none of my damn business anyway.”
“No, I’m glad you did. I’ve never talked to anyone about it before.”
“Who was she? His secretary?”
“No, I’ve always been his secretary.” Marianne glanced back through the window. Susan was listening to Walter, but she looked distracted, ready to stand and join the women outside. Marianne lowered her voice. “She was some woman he met on a plane.”
“Oh, please.”
“It went on for three years.”
“Christ, how’d you find out?”
“A credit card bill.”
“When was this?”
“The boys were in high school. But it wasn’t all his fault, I—”
“You what? Don’t give me that, honey.”
Susan’s voice was nearer now. She had stood and was nodding her head at Walter still on the sofa, then she was moving through the doorway out onto the deck. She held her empty glass but didn’t seem to notice it was empty.
“You have a beautiful home, Marianne. Thank you for such a great dinner.”
It was good, though Lois found the pork roast to be a bit dry and in need of garlic. Marianne was thanking Susan, her voice as warm and cheerful as it had been all night. Lois had seen her do this many times at the shop, too, switch herself on and off like that. Lois would be in her chair behind the register, her laptop open, looking for new estate sales or deleting junk emails, and Marianne would be dusting all their furniture, looking pensive, sad even, which always irked Lois because what did she have to be sad about? Then the bell over the front door would jangle, some potential customer walking in, and Marianne would smile immediately and her back would straighten up and she’d drop her duster and welcome whoever was standing there like she’d been waiting for her and her only, all day long.
Her little story of her husband and the woman on the plane, it surprised Lois yet it did not surprise her, for men were men, after all, but it also made her wonder, once again, if anyone could ever truly know anyone else. Everyone’s heart was so close to the skin, yet also dark and infinite and a million miles away.
THE ROAD prison was lit up like a strip mall’s parking lot. Four towering lamps shone down on the fenced-in visiting area and on the one-story concrete buildings that made up the cells, and it was good not to have to drive at night. Sitting behind the wheel in the dim glow of the VW’s dashboard, Susan’s face looked as old as it was, a fading middle-aged beauty, and Lois felt a tenderness for her she had not in a very long while. It seemed the moment to tell her how happy she was to have her here, that she loved her very much. But those words never came easy, if at all, even for Paul and Linda. How many nights had Lois lain awake aching to have said those words to her daughter more than she ever had? And here was Linda’s daughter, Lois’s very own Suzie, and all Lois could say was: “Guess what Marianne told me out on the deck?”
“She’s such a sweet woman, Noni.”
“Yeah, well, apparently not sweet enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Walter had an affair on her.”
“No, when?”
“Years ago. Some woman he met on a plane.”
Susan shook her head and downshifted past the road prison and into the curve, her headlights sweeping through the dark orange grove then over a lump of matted fur, half on the asphalt, half off it.
“Oh, it’s a dog.” Susan slowed and steered around what was a German shepherd lying on its side as if it were sleeping, a spray of blood around its head and snout. Lois looked away.
“She looks like my Lilly.”
“You should get another dog.”
“No, they die too soon.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me about Marianne and Walter.”
“Why?”
“I’d like to think that there’s at least one good marriage out there.”
“There is, honey. You and Bobby.”
Susan accelerated and upshifted, and Lois could see her tall husband’s face last Christmas, the way he stood at the kitchen stove smiling over at Susan with such love in his eyes. It was as if he really knew her and accepted all that she was and all that she was not and would never be, but Suzie, she seemed to smile back only halfway. It was like what he was aiming at her was a bright light and she was meant for the damn shadows.
“Don’t be like me, Susan.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
Lois had to swallow and her eyes welled and, shit, what was this? “Don’t push the good away. Don’t be afraid of it.”
Susan flicked on the blinker and pulled onto Lois’s long driveway. The air in the car felt thick and too close, and Lois pressed her window button and breathed in the warmer air of the outdoors.
“You need to let your husband love you, Suzie.”
Susan pulled in front of the house and turned off the engine and lights. “Why do you say that?”
“Because you’re not getting any younger, and I see what I see, that’s why.”
“But don’t I need to love him too?”
Lois pulled on her door handle and swung out her leg. “One follows the other, honey. It’s a two-way street.” Lois pushed herself up and out of her car. There were the smells of dead pine needles and oak bark and the banks of the river behind her house. She’d grown to love this place of hers, though for her, home would always be back north, the fast-talking men and women who would seem rude down here, the ocean too cold to swim in, though Gerry had waded into it in his best suit holding their daughter’s ashes.
She’d left the light on above her front door. Her porch steps were shadowed and empty, and yes, in need of a dog bounding down them to greet her.
20
SUSAN LAY curled in bed on her side, her knees drawn up, and she kept seeing last night’s pork roast on her plate, that dead dog in the road, then she was off the bed and rushing into the bathroom, flipping up the toilet lid and dropping to her knees, her abdomen jerked from the inside as last night’s dinner shot out of her into the clear, waiting water.
She spat into the toilet, thought of the guacamole in a wooden bowl on Marianne and Walter’s coffee table, how quickly its surface had begun to go brown. Maybe this was from that? But the image made her heave again, and she spat once more then flushed and stood, her nipples tender against her T-shirt.
No. Not that. It couldn’t be that. But when she reached up and touched one of them, a shiver shot into her
belly and hips, and, shit, this was just how it had felt two times before. A hot wave rolled through her abdomen. She’d brought her pills with her and took one every morning, dry-swallowing it then sipping her coffee, but had she missed any mornings back in St. Petersburg? Those horrible weeks when she’d felt nothing? For her husband, for Corina Soto, for that second graduate degree and all she’d at first thought she’d wanted to learn from it? Because this was how it had happened before. All she had to do was miss a day or two and her body would offer up a willing egg so fast it was like a barking dog straining and straining against his leash until it snapped.
Susan brushed her teeth then washed her face and hands. She dried them quickly on the towel on the rack then walked down the hall past the stairwell to the small window overlooking the driveway. She parted the curtains, but there was only her Honda parked below, the midmorning sun already on it. If Noni had gotten sick too, she wouldn’t be at the shop, and Susan let the curtain fall. She stared down the hallway. Noni’s door was closed like always to keep her room cold, but her own was wide open, sunlight spilling from it onto the floor. People get sick all the time. Maybe this was just a bug. Maybe that’s all this was.
But Noni’s car was gone and all morning Susan sat on the screened porch, her bare feet on the sash, her laptop braced against her knees, and she couldn’t work. Already her old room had become claustrophobic, and even the memory of what she’d written the day before opened a vein of self-hatred inside her that robbed her of just the kind of will she was trying to summon regularly. She should eat something, but the thought of food, even yogurt, made her stomach clench up, and she didn’t even want coffee. Beside her was a glass of water she should drink more of, but she didn’t. She needed to get back to work, but instead of writing, she checked her emails, opening the oldest, Bobby’s. The first one read:
Play that plastic sax and then come home. Love, your husband, Bobby
Bobby leaning against the stove in his faded Hawaiian shirt, an empty coffee cup in his hand, his gray and white stubble and worried eyes.
Bobby’s second email was the exact same, and she pictured his long fingers tapping the send button twice.
Noni last night telling her not to be afraid of the good. Don’t push it away. Something like that.
But when had Lois been afraid of the good?
There was an email from Phil Bradford, but Susan wasn’t going to open that one yet. It would be about her abandoned Corina, and she wasn’t up to a scolding from a mediocre novelist who wanted to get her between the sheets. It’s the last thing she needed from her “mentor,” the same kind of one-dimensional attention she’d been getting from men for years. And she wished she’d heard the rumors about him before she’d signed on to work with him, but she hadn’t and what Lois said had loosened some damp pebble that now began to roll, taking two or three more with it, and Susan knew if she didn’t start writing right this second she wouldn’t write at all. She opened her file and ignored her last sentence about Danny Rolling.
When Lois told me about my family, I’d known all along without knowing I knew. We left the strip when I was twelve, but before this, sometimes in an aisle of the IGA, a man or woman would look over at me like they knew something from a long time ago when I was a little kid and their kids were little kids and they could tell I had not been told yet and they wondered when I would be, but I’d felt it anyway.
Sometimes Noni would stop pushing the cart and she’d chat with some of them, especially the men. She’d pat her hair and stand straighter, pushing her breasts out just a bit, smiling hard when I knew she didn’t feel like doing that. It was like she was always on the lookout for the next man, a better man, and that she would never be completely safe and sound without one.
But what I’d always felt in my family was trouble, that there was something bad in me, though if this ever came to me as a full thought I’d see Noni yelling at me, calling me a slut or an ungrateful bitch, and I’d blame her that I felt this way.
I blamed her for everything.
I blamed her when my skin was bad, my cheeks peppered with zits. I blamed her when one minute I loved everything—the gurgle of Bone River, the way the sunlight lay on the pine needles, the smell of Crisco melting in Noni’s frying pan on the stove—and then hated everything: my face; our small house on the county road; Lois’s old cigarette smoke in all the drapes and furniture; and that same gurgle of Bone River; the same damn sunlight and melting fucking Crisco—it all disgusted me and she disgusted me, and when she’d call me down to supper I’d yell down that I wasn’t fucking hungry. “Not everybody has to eat like you, you know!”
Sometimes Lois would take this, but most times she wouldn’t. She’d come rushing up the stairs and barge in, her hair coming undone, sweat ruining her foundation, her voice shaky because she couldn’t quite get her breath. “Don’t you dare talk to me like that, you spoiled little bitch! You think you’re too big to spank? Well, you’re not. Now get your ass down to dinner right this damn minute.” Sometimes I would and sometimes I wouldn’t, but she’d be done with it all and would eat down there alone.
Once I got my door locked before Noni could get up the stairs, but she busted it open, splintering the wood. “I’ve had it. You want to live with your father’s family? Do you? Because I’ll pack your bags right now!”
It was something I’d thought about many times.
I had one photograph of my mother but none of my father. Whenever I’d ask Lois about it, she’d go all quiet and say something about my father’s family being poor and not owning a camera. This made me love him more. He’d died young with the woman he’d loved when his life was just starting to get good. Noni had a lot of pictures of my mother, a whole album full of them.
When I was fifteen or sixteen I came home from school and found a photograph propped on my bureau. It was a picture of my mother I’d never seen before, and Lois had put it in a wooden frame that looked new for once. In the picture, my mother is outside on the strip I still remembered. It was a close-up of her face. Behind her right shoulder are the blurred white lights of a cotton candy vendor, and above that just the corner of a pink sky. My mother’s hair is long and dark and swept off her shoulders, which are bare because she’s wearing a halter top. Around her neck is a thin gold chain. She’s wearing eye shadow and too much mascara, and her cheeks are fake rosy with blush she applied to hide her bad skin the way I used to hide my bad skin. She’s smiling, but it’s an embarrassed, barely tolerant smile.
My mother was beautiful, but the thing is she looked poor and cheap and like she’d sleep with any boy who would talk nice to her.
But I couldn’t stop staring at the photo. In it, she was fifteen or sixteen, and I was fifteen or sixteen. When Noni got home from the shop, carrying in two bags of groceries, I thanked her for the picture and at first she looked at me like she didn’t know what I was talking about. Then she smiled and said, “You look just like her, you know.”
That may have been one of the rare times I didn’t say what I was thinking: But she looks cheap, Noni.
I helped her put away milk and butter and cans of soup, and I asked her questions about my mother I must have asked before, but now, that picture of her up in my room like some dark twin of me, I wanted to hear more.
Things Noni told me about my mother:
She loved the beach. Once, when she was six or seven, she ran into the waves and a rip current caught her and my grandfather barely grabbed her in time.
She hated rain and the fall, though she liked snow. She said the strip looked soft and clean then.
When her little brother was born she liked to hold him, though when he got older she started bossing him around. Telling him to wash his face. To pick up his toys. “Don’t talk when you eat.” Noni said she said that all the time.
People’s mouths disgusted her. She couldn’t stand when her father chewed gum or brushed his teeth standing in the kitchen. She would tell him he was “gross.”
S
he didn’t eat much. “Like you,” Noni said. “You eat like a bird.”
She hated it when Noni and Gerry fought. She’d come running from her bedroom and yell at them to stop. Just stop it!
Noni said that Gerry would disappear for a few days and when he came home my mother would sit really close to him on the sofa in front of the TV. She would bring him a can of beer if he asked for it.
She stayed in her room a lot, and she hated that she had to share it with Paul. The floor was concrete, and she painted a red line between their beds. One side was Paul’s, the other was hers, and if even one of Paul’s socks fell over the line she started screaming.
She screamed a lot. Noni said “she went from ice to fire” just like that. But mainly at them. Outside the house she was quiet.
She loved to read, but she hated school, then she quit school, though she never told Noni or Gerry. Every morning for a week she’d walk to the bus stop then keep walking. She’d sit on the covered porch of one of the summer rentals that had closed for the season and read all day. When a notice from the school came in the mail a week later, Lois confronted her daughter about it, and my mother said, “You need help with the arcade, Ma.”
Noni’s eyes welled up telling me that. And she told me that more than once. My grandfather was sleeping with another woman then and was doing business with bad men. That’s what Noni called them. She also called them shady. She always believed that’s how he’d met his end, but in my thirties, hungover on a Sunday and living with Brian Heney or Tony Riccio, I spent some time on the Internet and found my grandfather’s obituary. He’d died not long after Noni and I moved down here. Gerard L. Dubie, formerly of Salisbury, Massachusetts . . . he was fifty-nine and died of a heart attack in his home in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. He had a wife named Jean Marie. They listed his three stepchildren, and then they named Paul and my mother, the daughter who had “predeceased” him, then his four grandchildren. I wondered if I was counted in one of those four. I printed it out and sent it to Noni. A few days later I got an email from her:
Gone So Long Page 18
