Excerpts
I woke to the sound of tires coming up the unpaved road. The air conditioner had cycled off and I was lying in a pool of sun, the sheets sticking to me, and I blinked at the bedside clock as the sound of the vehicle drew closer. A quarter till noon . . . I rolled off the bed, peeling the sheets away from my skin, and looked out the window.
A red Chrysler sedan, a lot shinier and more formidable-looking than anything any of Ash’s neighbors owned, slowed in front of the house. The car rolled to a halt, and after a minute the driver’s door opened and a woman got out. It was immediately obvious this person was not from Mooney or, for that matter, from rural East Texas. She had a sleek helmet of dyed-black hair, and was wearing a pricey-looking pantsuit, royal blue, with a flowered scarf and heels. Perched on her nose were sunglasses, which she lifted in order to squint at the house. She had on so much gold jewelry she looked like she’d raided a Sarah Coventry party.
The woman turned and leaned into the car, and presently the passenger-side door opened and someone else got out, a short, stocky girl dressed, in spite of the heat, in corduroy pants and a hooded sweatshirt. She stared over the roof of the car from behind lank brown bangs like she expected the house to sprout wings and take off through the ozone like a spaceship.
They seemed to be arguing. I was relieved when I saw that; I thought it was proof they had the wrong address, that they’d stumbled into my life by mistake and in a couple of minutes I’d set them straight and they’d be on their way. I yanked the top sheet off the bed and draped it around me and pattered up the hallway just as the woman stepped onto the porch and raised her fist to knock.
“Hi,” I said, jerking open the door, startling the woman on the other side of the screen with her mouth all agape and her curled hand frozen shoulder high, like a carved drugstore Indian. “You all must be lost.”
Slowly she lowered her arm, studying me through the lenses of her dark glasses. “I’m sorry to bother you. We’re looking for the home of Ash Farrell.”
I’d spent more time than I cared to admit worrying about the kind of women who might one day show up on Ash’s doorstep: the jilted girlfriends, the banished flirtations, the crushed crushes, to whom the current woman in Ash’s bed—me—would be nothing but a minor inconvenience, a blip on radar. But the woman standing there now looked so prim and officious, I didn’t see how she could be any kind of real threat, and somehow the presence of the girl failed to register. I was such a fool.
“Well, you found it,” I said. “Ash isn’t here right now, though. He won’t be home till this evening,” I added. “Is there something I can do for you?”
The woman glanced back at the girl, who was scuffing the toes of her sneakers in the dirt, then let out her breath in an exasperated little huff.
“I am Marlene Farrell,” she announced. “Ash’s former wife. And this is our daughter, Denise.”
I tried not to let my jaw drop. Ash kept an old photo of his ex-wife and baby in a drawer in the bedroom bureau; but the woman standing now on his porch, stiff and overdressed, her lacquered mouth zippered into a straight line, bore so little resemblance to the young beauty in the photo, I could not have picked her out of a lineup. I knew of Ash’s brief early marriage, the daughter in Dallas he hadn’t seen in seven years; but in the sweet lassitude of our new relationship, I’d come to think it as happening in some bygone era, in a tall castle surrounded by a moat, where they would reside forever in a state of permanent amnesia, forgetting they’d ever heard Ash Farrell’s name. Ash had told me the book was closed, and I’d been all too eager to believe him.
I pushed open the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. My sheet caught on the doorjamb and slipped a little, but I retrieved it in the nick of time, grasping it between my breasts. Marlene had dropped her dark glasses into place again, and without the feedback of her eyes, her expression was open to limitless interpretation.
“How do you do,” I said. “I’m Lucy Hatch. I’m Ash’s—”
Ash’s what? Buddy? Roommate? Concubine? I realized I had never given this—my official designation—a single thought, and now it was too late; my silence damned me, as surely as my stained and sweaty bed sheet.
“Yes, I see.” Marlene raised her glasses to take me in, from my bare toes to the top of my sleep-tousled head and every inch between. Her eyes were the brilliant, unnatural turquoise you see at the bottom of swimming pools. “How far along are you?” she asked, in a tone that was almost conversational. Her eyes focused on my hand, gripping the sheet.
“Excuse me?” I thought she was asking if I’d been in the process of something: getting dressed, going out.
“I’m sorry to speak so intimately. It’s just that, I knew the minute I saw you. I looked just like that myself, a couple of months gone.”
“Ma!” the girl said then, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. “C’mon, he isn’t here. Let’s just get in the car and go home.”
“Denise, if I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times. We are not going home. I am going to Chicago, and you are—” She cut her gaze at me. “You are staying here.”
I blinked several times to clear the spots that danced before my eyes. Incredible to believe that five minutes before I’d been tucked between Ash’s sheets, sound asleep, untroubled as a lamb. Now, with a handful of words, a few choice sentences, my life had changed in so many directions I barely knew which way to let my mind run.
“I do apologize for putting you in the middle of this, ah—Lacey, was it?” Her earlier question flashed across my memory—How far along?—and for a second I thought I was going to hyperventilate, but I didn’t. I didn’t both to correct her, either. “I tried to call Ash from Dallas, several times,” Marlene said, her voice rushed and defensive. “But he never seems to be home. Or always too busy to pick up the phone.” Her eyes bore straight through my wrinkled sheet, straight into my soul.
She began to fuss with a clasp on one of her bracelets. “Look, I hate to be rude, but I’ve got a plane to catch in Little Rock. Tomorrow morning I’m starting an internship at Payne Webber, in Chicago. I wish there were time for us all to sit down and chat about this, but there isn’t. Denise is a good girl, and it’s time she got to know her father, that he . . .” She paused, turning to consider the girl who was circling aimlessly in the dusty patch of the front yard, a mystery child who from all appearances bore no genetic link to either of her parents; she looked as much like Ash as the man in the moon. “That he sees what she’s become,” Marlene said. “I hope you’ll explain it to him for me.”
“Explain what?” I asked. “What am I supposed to—”
“Tell him I’ll call him in a few days and we’ll talk. Tell him he owes this to me,” she said, and there was a flat and bitter note in her voice that scared me a little. “Get your bag, sugar,” she said to the girl, who looked at me helplessly over the roof of the car, then reached into the back seat and pulled out a beat-up duffel bag and slung it over her shoulder.
With a jerk of her chin Marlene motioned the girl forward, and slowly she came, her eyes fastened to the ground. “Look at you,” Marlene said, tugging briskly at the shoulders of her daughter’s sweatshirt, brushing the long bangs out of her eyes. “Couldn’t you have at least combed your hair?” she said. “Was that too much to ask you to do?” I thought I could hear every one of the words that hung unspoken on the girl’s lips, choked off by the tears that swam in her eyes.
“I’ve got to hit the road, sweetie,” Marlene said. “I’ll call you in a day or two, when I get settled. Meanwhile, you know where to find me, right? Remember how to spell Kent’s last name?” The girl nodded mutely. “You be sweet for these people, will you? Remind your daddy what it’s like to have a kid around the house. It looks like he could use a refresher course.”
Marlene kissed her daughter quickly on the forehead and then smiled tight lipped at me, her turquoise eyes glittering like a snake’s over the rims of her glasses. Then she climbed into her snazzy red car, executed a neat three-point turn in the front yard, and sped away, leaving nothing behind her as it had been before.
