This Must Be the Place: A Novel (31 page)

“I bet that works on all the ladies at the old folks’ home.” She didn’t look up from her tiles. “You go first,” she said.

The game of Scrabble, as Arthur had always played it—and he had
always
played it; all Rooks had, at the insistence of his mother, who lived and breathed for crosswords and acrostics and anything having to do with the ingenious placement of letters and words—was a battlefield that said more about the players than the tiles they’d been dealt. His imagination-challenged brother never played a word longer than three or four letters, frequently pluralizing tiles already in play; his father, who felt the need to justify every action he ever took, played with one thumb in the official Scrabble rule book, ready to riffle to his defense. Since her cancer, his mother had taken to playing fast and loose with rules she had once considered unimpeachable and would occasionally accept a proper name, depending on how cleverly it was employed. But Arthur’s weakness had always been playing words that occurred naturally on his tile bench, that didn’t have any definition that he knew of but that were too funny not to use:
MURDLET, QUINK, DOXEN
.
Choose your words carefully,
his mother would say, sitting across from him.
Make sure they’re real.

RUN
was his first word, which, considering his recent history of flight—and the history of his present company—seemed plenty real enough.

“Do you mind if we don’t keep score?” Mona asked. “I just like playing with the words.”

Arthur nodded. “Sure,” he said. “But how will we know when I beat the pants off you?”

“When I am no longer wearing pants,” she said, and played the word
NYMPH
off the
N
.

He nodded again, appreciatively, and frowned at his own tiles. Mona sat back, stretching her arms over her head, and Harryhausen yawned and stretched sympathetically.

“Ha. I made your cat yawn.”

She inhaled. Harry rolled on his back and began to clean his bib.

“Amy’s cat,” she murmured.

“Tell me something,” Arthur said—not too abruptly, he hoped. He was weary of Amy at the moment; it was so much more fun to understand his wife through Mona. “Word association. With the word.” He laid down
TIPS
.

“Frosted.”

“Right.” He spun toward her.
“What?”

“You know. Prominent among boy bands of the early aughts,” she said. “I once had a thing for Lance Bass. Don’t judge.” She played
MATCH
.

“Us,” Arthur said, without thinking.

Mona froze, her hand still over the board. “Did this just get weird?” she said.

“No—I mean.” He looked over at Harry, who had paused mid-lick to throw him a stone cold glare that clearly meant
Don’t be a pussy
. “I just thought—we’re a set. A widower and a widow. That’s what I meant.”

“Oh,” she said.

They both looked at the board and, when they spoke, talked over each other.

“I’m—you go,” said Arthur.

“I’m not a widow.”

Arthur hadn’t realized until that moment how much of what he knew about Mona Jones he didn’t actually know. Until very recently, in fact, all they had talked about was Amy, and all he had learned about Mona was
relative
to Amy. This feeling that he knew her, then, was only an illusion, perhaps a residual of his concussion or a substage of grief. But he
did
feel as though he knew her: he could see her, couldn’t he? He tried to remember why he thought she was a widow, and stirred up a dim memory of a conversation several days ago; all conversations, it seemed, slipped behind a curtain of fuzz these days. Had it been purely
his own assumption that the only reason Mona was alone—Mona, who had once been with someone seriously enough to produce a child that she then raised with love—was on account of that same someone’s untimely death?

“I’m—” His brain skipped ahead to the logical conclusion. “So is Oneida’s father still—” God, he didn’t even know how to say he was sorry.

Mona looked down at the board and puffed out her cheeks. “I believe so,” she said. “Yes.”

Harryhausen sighed audibly.

Arthur watched Mona blink, silently, at the board. She pushed her hair out of her face and over her ears and he thought,
Mona has big ears
. Large rounded ears, the tops neatly folded over; with two small piercings in the lobes but no earrings. He hadn’t noticed that before. He would have to look even closer than usual, apparently, to know her.

It was his turn. Around the
T
in
MATCH
, he built
PLZTELMI
.

“That’s not a—oh.” She smiled halfheartedly and said, “Nice use of all your tiles.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“You ever write songs for Prince?”

“Mona,” he said, trying not to laugh, “you don’t have to be so serious all the time.”

She chewed her lip again and rearranged several of her tiles. “His name was Ben,” she said. “Tennant. He rented a room in this house when I was in high school. He was a teacher, a drama teacher. A director and an actor.” She still hadn’t looked at him.

“He was . . . I don’t think he was a bad person.” Her brow furrowed, as though she were reevaluating truths she had long held to be self-evident, reassessing them in new contexts. “He was young. Talented. People
loved
him.

“I don’t think he knows . . . about his daughter.” Her brow furrowed deeper. “I told my mother, years after, and she wanted to press charges, skin him alive, roast him over a hot pit, you know, really make him suffer—until I convinced her that there was no point. There would be no purpose. It was done, and Oneida was here, and she was healthy, and
she was mine. I don’t know where he is now because I don’t want to. I believe that he cared. That’s enough.”

“You cared,” he said.

She bobbed her head.

“I think you loved him.”

Finally she looked at him, through sad, squinted eyes. She held her thumb and index finger half an inch apart. “I loved him a little,” she said, “about this much.” And she didn’t look away when she said, “Amy loved him more.”

Arthur didn’t hear it at first. Well, he
heard
it, but he didn’t immediately grasp it for what it was: the reason he’d been looking for, the solution to the mysterious disappearance of Desdemona Jones from the life of his wife. It snuck into his brain gradually, so that when it finally arrived, all Arthur could do was open his mouth. “Oh,” he said.

Mona crossed her arms over her chest.

“I—” His throat was dry and he swallowed. “I see.”

Mona leaned forward, clearly intending to dump all her tiles in the box top. “Sorry,” she said. “This got weird.” She paused. “Weirder.”

Arthur’s brain was doing curious things. It was accepting and understanding information, but it wasn’t sending any signals to any other part of his body that might give him some indication as to how he
felt
about all this. What it meant that Mona—as a girl—had had a child by a man that Amy had loved, also as a girl. What it meant that Amy had never told him anything about this. Not that he was numb, far from it; he felt plenty. He was at home on this couch in the light autumn chill, his stomach was full and happy—Thursday was meat loaf night—and even the scrape on his knuckle from the vegetable grater didn’t hurt so much as remind him, pleasantly, of good work he had done.
It’s only information,
his brain said.
The important thing is just that you have it. Deal with it later. You’re on vacation.

“Don’t apologize,” he said to Mona. “Tell me more.”

“What makes you think there’s more to tell?”

“There’s always more,” he said. “And we’re not finished with the game. I can tell because you’re still wearing pants.”

Mona wrinkled her nose. She set her tile tray back on the table in
front of her. “This isn’t weird,” she said. “Not one little bit. Totally normal.”

Arthur felt so good, sitting next to Mona. “What are you trying to say?” he said, and smiled.

“Oh, nothing,” she said, and played
STRANGER
, off the
R
in
RUN
.

“Nice use of all your letters,” he said.

14
Marriage and Love

Mona’s attitude toward weddings was complicated. She didn’t dislike them, though it would probably be a lie to say that the opposite was true. She’d baked two hundred cakes over the past ten years, and while the majority had been received by happy, smiling, gracious people, she had seen enough sobbing brides, disgruntled caterers, and hideous bridesmaid gowns to have a disproportionate fear of weddings-gone-wild: of a simple happy ceremony’s propensity to metastasize into the equivalent of a hydrogen bomb with taffeta. She’d had a piece of her own perfectly delicious cake mashed into her hair. She’d been stiffed, insulted, and, once, contacted by a lawyer for her “flagrant disregard of her client’s color palette.”

There were plenty of valid reasons for her to dump her cakes, snatch payment, and get out before the DJ ever had a chance to cue the Electric Slide. She never stayed, even though she was occasionally invited to do so. The invitations were always verbal and came at the last minute, as though they had been contingent on her showing up with a dessert that didn’t look like crap. Mona would decline, tuck her payment away safely in her back pocket, and drive home, her meticulously constructed cake forever whole in her memory.

She didn’t get into cakes for the proximity to ceremonial wedded bliss: she liked baking and she needed money, and weddings were more lucrative than bake sales. Her mother, who knew everyone in Ruby Falls (and everyone’s sons and daughters), was instrumental in spreading the word that Mona was now a baker for hire—and not only could everyone in Ruby Falls show their social solidarity by contracting with the fallen daughter of the house of Darby-Jones, her cakes were good.
Magnificent, really. Baking was a talent she’d never suspected she possessed, a talent that, once discovered, completely overhauled Mona’s idea of herself. She had never thought of any of her personality traits as useful before; they had just been parts of a whole that did homework, hung out with Amy, and daydreamed about making out with her juvenile delinquent
du jour
. To have a talent, though—a skill, a gift—was thrilling. It was like discovering she’d had an invisible arm stuck to her side her entire life, just waiting for her to figure out how to use it. Despite everything, she felt ridiculously lucky to have gone to Ocean City, to have met David Danger. If she hadn’t, she might never have known all the pieces of who she was: Mona Jones, Funny Girl, Baker. Mom.

Her feelings about love—which, beyond the party line, had very little to do with weddings—were no less complicated. Mona had never seen her own parents while they were in love with each other. By the time she was old enough to notice, they had reached a sort of static fondness that would characterize the mid to late years of their marriage and their lives. They were like brother and sister, Mona used to think, listening to them talk over dinner about repairing the eaves of the Darby-Jones or fixing the broken chain in Bert’s toilet. They never held hands; they never kissed—really kissed, beyond a quick peck that usually meant
drive safe
or
thank you for my Christmas presents
; and God knows, they’d only had one child. Surely, that wasn’t love. Mona, at sixteen, didn’t want it to be.

Mona, at sixteen, only knew the joys of the crush: the giddy highs of unexpected meetings; the delights of flirting, teasing, tickling each other’s minds; the hours of pining with a smile on her face, imagining how and why and where and when that very first kiss would come to pass. Her follow-through was terrible—she would lose interest in the object of her crush as soon as he proved to be less than imagined or someone better rolled around—but Mona thrived on the search for Great Love. She was absolutely certain there was a person in the world who would never disappoint her or be one-upped by someone else, who would be an alpha-and-omega deal: an eternal crush, that incandescent high captured forever in the space between two specific people.

She had made few concessions to reality by the time she met David Danger. Logically, she understood dependability and companionship
were good things—but wasn’t that why you had friends? Wasn’t your boyfriend supposed to be something a little better, a little bigger, a little more magical? She’d kissed Eric Cole at the sixth-grade dinner dance, and she’d let Tony Littleton, who was suspended for lighting a music stand on fire with breath spray, get to second base during a basketball game in eighth grade. But neither Eric nor Tony held a candle to David Danger, whose casual, constant flirtation kept Mona delirious with fantasy, visualizing the moment when she and David would reach to fill the same empty shaker with red pepper flakes and end up with their tongues tied instead—which was precisely the way it happened, one night after closing.

That June on the Jersey shore was one of the best months of her entire life, though David Danger was only a part of it. She remembered everything with a clarity that was almost painful, as though those thirty days had flared bright enough to scorch her, leaving a permanent sunburn in her mind. Beyond her attraction to boys who weren’t necessarily nice and/or sane, Mona had never been particularly willful or rebellious, probably because she had never had to be. Her parents had expectations about her grades, but she had no strict curfews or irrational edicts, which Mona realized in hindsight had less to do with their faith in her than the dearth of available trouble in Ruby Falls. In Ocean City, drunk on independence, Mona felt the incalculable folly of her tiny life. There was a whole world that stayed up late and served you whatever you asked for, so long as you could pay for it; and Amy, who had somehow known this the whole time, shared Mona’s delight at discovering it for herself.