This Must Be the Place: A Novel (27 page)

She grinned at Amy. “Guess that’s a yes,” she said, and slid an already-plated slice across the counter. Amy folded it in half and bit off the point.

“I can see
you
had a good day,” Amy said. She wasn’t really paying attention or expecting a response, Mona could tell; she was scouting the location, eyes wide and unblinking, taking it all in: the bright red counter and tabletops, the smudged murals of Venice, Rome, maybe Tuscany that covered the two walls that weren’t the counter or open to the boardwalk. Amy sniffed.

“Pizza’s not bad,” she said. She licked a drop of brilliant orange pepperoni grease from the corner of her mouth. “God, I was starving. I would’ve eaten cardboard with a little mayo on it.”

“You didn’t eat all day?” Mona leaned against the cash register. Her cash register. That she’d mastered in less than twenty minutes. She felt so stupidly proud of herself.

“I was busy,” Amy said. “Got a job. Good one! Waiting tables at this sit-down place close to the condos up the beach, other end of the boardwalk. Trained with this funny little woman who’s been working there since she was our age, I’m sure.” She folded the rest of the crust into a pizza origami and stuffed it in her mouth. “Ev’thin’ gon’ ’e fine, li’ I tol’ you.”

David Danger chose that moment to appear with two fistfuls of clean shiny knives and spatulas. Mona watched Amy’s eyes bug—an
involuntary reaction she held just long enough for Mona to anticipate the conversation they’d have that night back at the motel. Amy swallowed, the lump of pizza visible as it disappeared down her long throat. They both watched David replacing the cutlery around the prep board, white shirtsleeves glowing as they exposed his tanned and sculpted arms. He kept brushing his hair back with the back of his hand—he’d done it all afternoon—shaking it out of his eyes. His eyes were blue, as Mona had discovered when he was explaining the cash register: blue and deep as the ocean on the other side of the boardwalk.

“Mona,” Amy said. Her voice sounded so far away. “Please don’t do anything stupid.”

She still didn’t tell Arthur everything. She hit the high points—running away, the motel, meeting David Danger—and focused on her fondant daisies, steeling herself for the questions to come.

“Why?” Arthur began. He held a sugar daisy in each palm like he was suffering from pastry stigmata. “Why there? Ocean City, New Jersey?”

Mona pressed a neat row of daisy shapes into her sheet of sugar.

“The summer before her parents died, they went there as a family. On vacation. Her parents met on the Jersey shore, actually, when they were kids. Amy had a picture of the two of them as teenagers, standing in the ocean holding hands.”

Arthur gasped. “I’ve seen it,” he said. He smiled wide. “It’s in her shoebox. They look like—”

“An M,” Mona finished for him. It was the only sentimental object Amy took when she ran away. She’d taped it to the spotted mirror in their hotel room, in the upper right corner, so that every time Mona smoothed her hair in anticipation of David Danger mussing it up all over again, she’d see Amy’s parents watching over her. She thought they would approve. They looked too happy together to disapprove of anyone else who had found someone to love—and make out with.

“Why run away at all? Why that summer?” Arthur asked.

“It was as good a summer as any,” Mona said. “She’d had it with this town. It was time for her to start her life, time to get out and get on with
it, and finally making that decision? Made her so happy,” she lied. She raised her eyebrows. Careful there, Mona. “How many flowers we got so far?”

Arthur collected his scraps of fondant and began rolling them into another ball.

“She never talked about Ruby Falls,” he said. “Never.”

“There’s a shocker.”

“I met her grandfather once. He seemed like a nice enough man—very quiet. Stuck in his ways.”

“I think he said a total of five words to me the whole time Amy and I were friends.” Mona carefully pinched one of the flat daisy shapes at the base of each petal. It bloomed in her hand. “Hello. Good-bye. How’s school? Be careful.”

“That’s six words,” Arthur said. “And good advice.”

“A little too general to mean much to a teenager,” Mona said. She pinched another flower.

“I don’t understand why she never mentioned you,” Arthur said.

This had never occurred to Mona.

Not that she had spent the past sixteen years of her own life telling everyone about her friend Amy Henderson—but she
had
told a few people, because Amy was part of her story. Amy was part of her life. And Amy hadn’t mentioned to the man she ended up marrying that Desdemona Jones even
existed
?

“Are you kidding?” she said. It hurt—it hurt terribly, because she’d never seen it coming. But of course, it made sense.
Amy never told anyone anything
. And Mona was just another anything, just a person Amy had known, had been a kid with. In a life and a world that didn’t matter once Amy got what she wanted: once she got to Los Angeles and started her real life. It could only have hurt more if Amy had actually stabbed her in the chest.

Arthur seemed to have realized, too late, what he’d done. “I only meant—you’re—great.” He set his fondant down. “Sorry.”

Mona shook her head. “It’s not your fault, Arthur. Don’t apologize.”

“Can you hand me the rolling pin?” he asked quietly.

“So basically—if I had died instead of Amy, if my nonexistent husband lost his marbles, traveled across the freaking country to harass
her, would she have
anything
to say to him?” She squashed a daisy in her hand. “It’s not important. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

She felt ridiculous.
So Amy made a fool of me too
, she thought,
me and everything I ever did for her. Everything I might have ever meant to her, which couldn’t have been much
. Mona was pissed at Amy—actually
pissed
, over a decade too late, at a dead woman. What kind of loyalty did she owe a corpse that hadn’t even thought to mention her
name
while it was living?

Mona flattened the fondant before her with her fist. Arthur flinched. She’d actually felt privileged to share her childhood with Amy, who, for all her faults, had changed Mona’s life in ways she would never be able to quantify. And there was nothing, absolutely nothing, in the world that would convince Mona that she hadn’t meant anything to Amy. Would it have killed her to admit it? Would it have killed her to say
I remember you? You were there? We were there together?

She was so tired of fighting with Amy’s nature. Because it was Amy’s nature to be unknown and unknowable, just as it was Mona’s nature to want more than people ever seemed to be able to give her.

“I really don’t get it,” Arthur said. “Why she didn’t keep in touch.”

“Then you didn’t know Amy Henderson,” Mona said.

Arthur recoiled, slapped harder by her words than by any hand. And there were other things she could have said—other things that could have hurt him more. It was tempting to tell him all those other things about his enchanting, enchanted wife; tempting to cross the field of fondant daisies between them. But Mona didn’t get beyond an open mouth. She was stopped by the realization that she wanted to hurt him—really hurt him. Shake him. Smack him. She was sick of all this bullshit, she was tired, and she wanted Arthur to grow up and get over it and realize that Amy Henderson had been a human being after all: a human being who could be mean and cowardly and inscrutable and not the essence of eccentric perfection, lost forever. But on the heels of that came another, more disturbing, revelation: she wasn’t really mad at Arthur, she was mad at Amy, and Arthur was just her hapless undeserving patsy.

But was she actually mad at Amy? It hadn’t been for Amy that she’d been keeping secrets all those years; it never had been, really, and she
knew it.
Let’s not think you’re so special,
she reminded herself.
Let’s not think you’ve been so very betrayed, or that what you felt was loyalty.

“That wasn’t fair,” she told Arthur, catching his eye and holding it, “but it was true.”

They made fifty more fondant daisies in silence. After he’d helped her wipe down the kitchen table, Arthur went up to his rooms and didn’t come down until dinner, and when he spoke, all he asked was for her to pass the mashed potatoes.

Mona, exhausted, spat toothpaste into the sink. It was only nine o’clock, but it felt like she’d been up for days. The face that stared out of the bathroom mirror looked older than the one she’d seen that morning: the skin around the eyes was looser, baggier. Mona had never given much thought to aging. Her body had always been an indestructible marvel, flexible and pliant to her wishes. She was both aware and not aware that, in this regard, she was lucky—she read enough magazines to know that the campaign against crow’s feet was a major battle for most women, and yet it was a battle she had never taken up. She still got carded at the liquor store. Getting old—specifically, having her body change—was something she thought she wouldn’t have to deal with for years. But apparently that wasn’t true. The proof was matching her every move in mirror image, looking old and tired and reaching for dental floss.

She hated herself tonight. It was an unusual state of mind for Mona. She hated how angry she was at Amy, and how hurt. She hated caring so much, so many years later. She hated herself for being the kind of friend that Amy could put on a shelf, or in a shoebox, and forget.

But she trusted me once,
she thought, sliding the floss between her top molars. She trusted Mona enough to run away with her.

Or maybe she didn’t trust Mona to stay behind and not tell anyone where she went.

She’d flossed too hard and spat a ruby polka dot on the toothpaste in the basin.

Oneida entered from her connecting bedroom door, index finger marking her place in a yellowed school copy of
The Scarlet Letter
. She
one-handedly squirted a drop of toothpaste on her brush. Then she sighed and caught Mona’s eye in the mirror.

“What’s up?” Mona asked. Oneida had been quiet and withdrawn all night, but no more so than she’d been for the past week or so. She’d decided to let her daughter come to her in her own time, and her heart fluttered at the possibility of having made precisely the right decision. Mona had terrible instincts for motherhood, despite years of ostensible practice. Each tiny victory seemed more a product of dumb luck than skill. “Something’s bothering you, huh?”

Oneida nodded. She dropped
The Scarlet Letter
on the counter.

“Is it the book?” Mona asked. “I remember being forced to read it. Certainly sapped
my
will to live.”

A smile skipped over Oneida’s face and just as quickly disappeared. She frowned, as though she suddenly remembered to be upset about something else entirely. Mona tensed; there were tiger traps everywhere these days.

“It’s not the book,” Oneida said.

Still watching her daughter’s reflection, Mona could see her brain working, her eyes narrowing, and her furry eyebrows drawing closer together than they already were. It was the face she made whenever she couldn’t figure something out—a face Mona saw seldom enough for it to be an immediate cause for concern. She was wearing an old flannel nightgown Mona remembered buying on sale at JC Penney’s years ago. It was threadbare in the elbows, and the hem that had once been floor-length was skirting her knees and coming undone, threads floating like fringe around her calves.

Mona felt even older.

“There’s a . . . guy,” Oneida said. “Today at school, he did—it’s hard to describe, actually, what he did.” She frowned again and pushed her glasses up her nose.

“Do I know who this guy is?” Mona asked. She was painfully aware this was the first conversation, practically speaking, she had ever had with Oneida about real boys. Not abstract boys, and the mechanics of abstract sex: real boys, who would be interested in real sex. She set her toothbrush down with a clack of plastic on tile.

Oneida shrugged. “That’s not the point,” she said.

Mona’s skin prickled. “What did he do?” she said.