The Next Time You See Me (26 page)

If he had wanted to hurt her—or maybe himself—he would have asked her what became of that drawing she’d done of him. He wondered if she even knew. If she realized it mattered. But instead, when she leaned toward him, determined to take the chance she had once denied herself, he met her halfway and put his hands on her jaw the way that he knew women liked, the way that made a kiss seem like an act of love instead of lust. He didn’t know what he felt. It might have been love or it might have been anger, and the Darvocet dulled him so that he couldn’t track where one emotion left off and the other began. Her mouth tasted like the sour wine.

Chapter Seventeen

1.

On Sunday morning, when she normally would have been driving with Dale and Abby to church, Susanna was heading to her mother’s place to pick up Abby. It was cold but achingly bright, and the sunlight through the windshield was almost hot on Susanna’s nose and cheeks. She felt energized, a little jittery, like she could lace up her old sneakers and sprint around the block a few times or jump double Dutch, which she’d never had the speed or grace for as a girl. An image popped into her mind, absurd: Abby at one end of the ropes’ handles, Ronnie on the other, Susanna in the middle, legs pistoning, soles of her shoes smacking cement. All of the songs they had sung then were about babies.
Fudge, fudge, call the judge. Mama’s gonna have a newborn baby. Wrap it up in tissue paper, send it down the elevator.
And then the chant, everyone’s emotions intensifying as the stakes climbed:
boy, girl, twins, triplets.
Girl was better than boy, and triplets were best of all. Susanna had never gotten farther than “paper,” but Ronnie, when she still deigned to do it (and by the age of ten, she no longer did), was a jump-roping whiz, and her friends’ arms usually gave out before she did.

Susanna’s mother still lived in the house where Susanna grew up, a subdivision over past Harper Hill. It was a ranch house with a gable roof and a picture window; a fine crack, running diagonally
across the window, had been held together for years with three bands of electrical tape. The shell of the house was brick, a yellowish color that Susanna’s father had called Piss Poor when he was still alive to complain. That was the home’s most decadent touch. There was an oil-stained carport—empty now, because Susanna’s mother didn’t drive. This was the reason Susanna depended on her mother to keep Abby only when she was in a tight spot or in situations when Susanna knew she could come over at a moment’s notice.

She pulled into the carport, turned off the engine. She looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror and put the backs of her hands up against her pink cheeks to cool them. She had been waiting all morning to feel guilty, to feel sad, to feel like a bad person, but there was only this energy, vibrating so strongly through her that her leg kept jogging. Sitting under the roof of her mother’s carport, pulling her handbag out from the backseat, she thought suddenly of that first kiss of the previous night, Tony’s hands on her jaw and his thumb grazing her pearl earring, the coarse brush of his goatee on her chin. There had been the slightest bitter edge to the taste of his tongue, as if he had swallowed an aspirin, but it wasn’t unpleasant, exactly, and it was just the sort of detail that made the kiss real for her now, the kiss and what followed. Clutching her purse, she needled herself, put things in the worst possible light, allowed for no mercy:
I’m picking up my daughter and thinking about the man I cheated on her father with. I betrayed the father of my child. I betrayed Dale.
But she couldn’t make herself feel sorry, truly sorry in her heart. At the very least, she needed to stay smart and stop getting lost in her thoughts like this, as her eighteen-year-old self, drunk on first love, had done. If she couldn’t be sorry, she could be smart.

She went in through the side door without knocking. “I’m here,” she called. She passed through the kitchen to the living room, where she found her mother and Abby in her mother’s big recliner, a blanket spread across both their laps. Abby, watching some kind of Japanese cartoon, waved absently. She was still in her pajamas. Susanna’s mother blinked as if she might have been sleeping.

“Morning, sweet pea,” her mother said. Susanna bent down to kiss her cheek, then grasped Abby’s chin and turned her daughter’s face away from the screen. Abby’s eyes pulled to the right, to the sight of some kind of warrior transforming into a dragon.

“I’m going to smooch on you,” Susanna said, and Abby giggled in a polite but distracted way. Well, Susanna could understand distraction. This morning more than most.

“Thanks for keeping her all night,” Susanna said. “It was a big help. We were able to get the drawing up all over town this morning.”

“Did you bring one for me to see?”

“Yeah.” Susanna pulled a folded-up sheet of paper from her purse and spread it smooth on the arm of the recliner. Her mother put on her glasses and peered at it around Abby’s shoulder.

“He looks practically my age,” she said. “Lord, Lord. I don’t know about that girl.”

Susanna, hunched down beside the chair, shifted uncomfortably. “Tony turned up a lot of information last night. A bartender at Nancy’s said that the guy”—she tapped her finger on the drawing—“was in really bad shape. Some people he came with pranked him and left the bill, and then they split on him. It sounds like Ronnie was trying to help him out.” She didn’t see any reason to mention the fight Ronnie got into at the Salamander.

“That was always Ronnie,” her mother said. “Mean as a snake to anybody who tried to help her and sweet as pie to the no-accounts.” She peered at the finer print on the page. “You put the part about the dance hall on here? Just what I need is people all over town knowing my daughter goes to that place.”

“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, only 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.