A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (34 page)

Patti nodded, and Big hol ered again, sounding real mad, “Mosey!”

Her voice was coming from the back door. I didn’t want her to see me hopping the fence and know Patti and me had been out in the woods. I ran around the outside of the fence to the front door. She’d quit cal ing by the time I got there, so I went into the den yel ing, “Big? Big?”

Almost immediately, she poked her head out from the swinging door to the kitchen and said, “Mosey Wil ow Jane Grace Slocumb, do not yowl at me like I’m your maid. Come in here.”

Her head disappeared back into the kitchen, but I stood there blinking for a second before I fol owed, because she’d been wearing lip gloss. Not ChapStick either, but shiny cranberry-colored stuff.

Liza was sitting in her usual place at the table, and Big was pul ing a pan out of the oven. She had on her favorite navy cotton skirt with the silvery threads shot through. She’d blown her hair out straight as it would go, though it was already springing into waves on the ends.

I asked, “Where are you going?” I couldn’t think of a place Big could go where she would need her lips to be so glossy.

“Errands,” she said, but she’d already gotten the groceries and stuff this morning. “Can you please stay with Liza? If I run late, I’l need you to help her to bed.”

My eyes narrowed, and I stepped closer. Sometimes Big got set up on blindies or had a dinner invite, but she always met the guy out. She said she didn’t want me getting attached if it wasn’t going to be serious, which she acted like meant she was thinking marriage, but I thought it was code for sex. Either way, with Big it never turned out to be serious.

I said, “Big, when you say ‘errands’ like that, al weird, does that mean there’s a guy?”

Big pushed her hair behind her ears, nervous like. “When I say ‘errands’ al weird like that, I mean errands.”

I snapped, “God, you can just say if you have a date, you know.”

Big startled like a horse and said, real y loud, “It’s not a date.” Then she flushed so hard that of course I knew it had to be.

“Whatever.” I couldn’t believe she was going off to eat at Applebee’s with some balding accountant and talk about whatever boring crap old people talked about on dates, like everything was normal. Like Liza was stil Liza and I was stil me.

Patti came through the swinging doors. She glanced at me, then did a double take and said, “You look like you ate bees.”

I rol ed my eyes at her. “You talk so weird.”

“Oh, she does not,” Big said. “You do not,” she told Patti. “You want to stay for supper? Just Tuna Surprise and a pot of green beans, but I made plenty.”

“Sure,” Patti said.

“I have to run,” Big said. “I’m late.”

“For your
errands
,” I said.

“For my none-of-your-beeswax,” Big answered, tart. As she passed by us on her way out the swinging door, she gave Patti’s hair a quick rumple.

Patti leaned into it and looked up at Big in that same starvey way Bogo looked at Liza. Big breezed out past, not even noticing.

Al at once I was sick, so sick in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t imagine putting a single bite of that casserole in my mouth, even though it was the good kind I liked, with the chips on top.

Because what was I to Big, real y? Just another little stray like Patti, and if she knew, maybe that’s how she would touch me, too. A quick head rub and a smile, like I was a broken-y dirty dog and she was setting out to be kind to me. Not like I belonged to her. I didn’t belong to anyone, except maybe whoever halfcocked57 was.

After Big left, I did al the right things. I made plates for us and Liza, and we ate them in front of the TV so I didn’t have to talk much. I especial y didn’t want to talk to Liza, so when Patti left, around nine, I went ahead and helped her to bed early. Big stil wasn’t home. She was off on her none-of-my-beeswax, and I guess nothing she did was my beeswax, real y. That meant nothing I did was her damn beeswax either.

I looked under the bed, and sure enough there was the netbook, charging. I pul ed it out and sat down with my back braced against the door so Big couldn’t come in and surprise me, if she even bothered to come home. I pirated onto our neighbor’s wireless and jumped right to Hotmail.

Liza had a new e-mail.

I gulped. I couldn’t breathe wel . I went to the in-box, and sure enough it was from halfcocked57.

The message was short. How do you forget my address, asshole? And then under that, 91 Fox Street. No city or state, so halfcocked57 must think Liza would remember those things, but there was a chain of five numbers that had to be the zip code.

I put the zip code into Google and came up with Montgomery, Alabama. That meant halfcocked57 was only about four hours away.

I was trembling so hard I couldn’t hardly get my phone open. I texted Roger the address, just that, and then sat there, waiting for him to text back. It took him about thirty seconds, like he’d done nothing but sit in the basement holding his breath and the phone until this moment.

Whoop, there it is. So. Mosey. We going to check it out?

I swal owed, unsure. But my thumbs decided to click and send words back to him al on their own, while I sat there shaking.

O. Hel z. Yah.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Big

MELISSA RICHARDSON. THAT girl was poison from day one.

She was blond and so tal that she always looked older than she was, with the kind of model’s body that was made to show off clothes. She had the clothes to show off, too, and she was quite pretty, though not half the beauty her mother was. Her eyes were set too close together, and the things that made Claire’s face so elegant—razor-blade cheekbones and that long, thin Meryl Streep nose she loved to look down—were blunted on Melissa.

Liza and Melissa were the very devil in middle school, but that was just the start. By ninth grade the only person with any control or influence over either of those girls was the other. I remembered Melissa standing in a slouch on my front porch wearing her signature bright blue eyeliner. She put it on so thick it was like she hoped her icy pale eyes would leach color from it. Or maybe she wanted to distract me from noticing how red the whites were. Either way, it wasn’t working.

Liza answered the door, but I’d fol owed her. I stood right behind her with my hand on her shoulder, like that could hold her with me.

“Hey, Liza. Ms. Slocumb.” Melissa gave me the insincere smile of a dog who has already been down to the henhouse to suck every egg you’ve got. She was wearing leggings and a baby-dol dress that probably cost more than my whole week’s paycheck, yet she looked like second place beside Liza in her tatty jeans. Her pale gaze stared right through me. “I wanted Liza to go down to DQ with me for a cone.” She wasn’t real y asking for permission, or even informing me as a courtesy. She was speaking in code to Liza.

I said, “Melissa, you know she’s grounded. Quite frankly, I’m surprised you’re not grounded, too.”

“Oh, I am,” Melissa said. She tossed her hundred-dol ar haircut. “I think it means something different at my house than it does here.”

“Wel , here it means you’re actual y grounded.” Melissa gave me a quick-flash grin, like I’d scored a point in some game I wasn’t playing. I stepped up, practical y between them, and started swinging the front door closed. “Good-bye, Melissa.”

Through the narrowing crack, Melissa cal ed, “Check ya flip side,” to Liza. They exchanged a speaking glance that lasted barely half a second, but it held a thousand cues.

Liza and I went back to doing laundry. I sorted darks and lights, and Liza carried the basket of socks and underthings to the nook in the kitchen. I heard the washer start, but a minute passed and Liza didn’t come back. I ran to the kitchen. The back door was hanging open, and Liza was already gone.

When she got home, I’d scream and cajole in turns. I’d ground her again. I’d try a thousand different ways to get her to open up and talk to me.

She’d look hangdog sorry when I shrieked at her. She’d promise to be better when I wept. She’d accept whatever punishment I handed out. But when it came down to it, yel ing meant nothing. Crying meant nothing. Punishment meant nothing. The second my eyes were off her, she was gone, doing whatever Melissa wanted.

I tried taking away her favorite clothes and items, but any beloved object I took away, Melissa replaced. Claire Richardson kept her kid wel funded. And stil Claire blamed Liza for the drugs. It never seemed to occur to her that she, Claire, was paying the tabs that let our kids get high.

Liza was too constantly on restriction to get even her meager al owance. Granted, Liza was so pretty and Melissa was so stylish that I bet they rarely paid for drugs, but Melissa paid for taxi rides and concert tickets, cover charges and fake IDs, a new one every time I ferreted out Liza’s and destroyed it.

Not that Liza was a blameless lambkin. They egged each other farther down every bad path than either girl would have gone alone. They’d been a bonded pair, right up until Liza got pregnant and Melissa had decided that meant she wasn’t fun or useful anymore.

Now Liza had said her name, twice, but she’d been looking through me with a thousand-year stare. It wasn’t easy to believe that Melissa Richardson had risen out of whatever hidey-hole she’d been stashed in al these years. Would she risk exposure, maybe arrest, to come back to Immita and poison Liza for some ancient slight?

But the name sure had made me rethink. At that Calvary luau, Liza had worn her best white silk blouse, lined her eyes, and put on lipstick. She knew damn wel the fel ows liked her plenty in an old T-shirt with her hair wild, bare skin glowing, maybe some Burt’s Bees to make her mouth shine.

In the past she’d fluffed herself up for female rivals in a way she never needed to for men. She’d been meeting someone, al right, but not a man, and not the long-gone Melissa either, though that was closer.

Liza had gone to meet Melissa’s mother, Claire. It had to be.

Liza had been standing by Claire Richardson when I first arrived at the luau. When Liza col apsed, Claire had ignored my seizing kid and gone to help the woman with the splashed sandals. That would have struck me as odd if I hadn’t been panicking. It would have been more in character had she snapped her fingers and cal ed for janitorial. Now I thought she’d bent to help that woman clean up her shoes for cover, so she could grab the Dixie cup and dispose of it. I’d swooped in and snatched it up first.

I was hoping the cup would give me some answers, but when I cal ed Lawrence, I got his machine. The beep came and went, and I stood there breathing into the phone like a pervert, not sure where to begin.

Final y I said, “I need to see you. Can you meet me at Panda Garden?” and hung up.

On Friday he left a terse voice mail for me, saying he was up visiting Harry at his col ege and he thought we’d agreed that he would cal me
after
, in November. Ten minutes later he’d cal ed back and left another voice mail. This one he talked sweeter.
“I keep listening to your message. Your
voice sounds…something. Are you in trouble? I get back Saturday evening.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have picked Panda Garden, considering the history. It was the place where he’d blurted out, “I’m stil married,” and the way he’d said “stil ” had kept me sitting there with him. On the other hand, there wasn’t a memory-soaked queen-size bed set up by the fish pond or the big gold Buddha statue, so it wasn’t the worst place I could have chosen.

Even so, when I walked in and saw him sitting in the exact same booth that we’d started in, with his hair brushed back and his big, square hands folded on the table in front of him, sex reared up inside me and started battering at my insides like a homeless animal. It wanted to run at him, eat him up, then lay its head down, tame and sweet, in his warm lap. It didn’t care how much I had on my mind. It only cared that Lawrence had come when I’d cal ed, just because my voice had sounded “something.”

Our booth’s window faced the parking lot, and Lawrence had his face close to the glass, peering into the lot like he was watching for me. It wasn’t dark out yet, but the sun was going down. He must have missed me coming in.

I slid in across from him. He glanced up and said, “Hey,” but then went right back to looking out the window.

“Are you on some kind of Panda Garden stakeout?” I asked, a little irky to see he hadn’t been watching for me after al .

He shook his head and turned to face me, settling back into the booth. “No, this guy out here— Ah, probably nothing. I’m off duty. What’s going on?”

“Straight to business, Lawrence?” My voice stayed tart for no good reason. I wanted to get to business myself. I just didn’t want him to want to.

“Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot I want to say to you, Ginny, that doesn’t have damn-al to do with any kind of business. You know that. But what else can I say right now?”

I thought he could try,
I can’t keep breathing with you this close and me not touching you. Let’s go out to my cop car and climb in the cage and
break some public-decency laws, and I will never let you go, and if it turns out the Richardsons are truly coming after your family, I will take my
big cop fists and beat them until they stop.
That seemed to me like a great start, but he didn’t say any of those things.