“He slept on the floor here last night,” Roddy said. “He can do it again. I didn’t know he was there till morning then, I don’t have to know now. Lance can fucking deal with it, then. The kid doesn’t want to be there.” Roddy shoved his bare feet into his work boots and sat down to lace them enough so he could walk.
“You want him down here?” Suzy looked around, checking the shack for evidence of herself. “Or up at Eden’s?”
Roddy did the same once-over of the room. “I think he’ll probably want to be . . .”
And then they were interrupted by the lights and the sound of another vehicle pulling into Eden Jacobs’s driveway.
“Fucking shit.” Roddy bolted up. In seconds they were both out the door and running up the hill.
Lance had gotten out of his truck and was walking quickly and angrily toward Suzy’s.
“Lance,” Roddy called as they approached, the name curt and damming, warning Lance away from whatever he was going toward.
Lance had just reached to open the passenger door of Suzy’s truck, and he stopped to peer out into the darkness for Roddy. He stood, poised there, while Squee scrunched down in the seat, curled into himself, silent.
As the scene became clear to Lance, his expression shifted. He made out Roddy coming up the hill, and then Suzy behind him. He seemed to forget entirely about Squee in the truck and let go of the handle, put his hands on his hips, and said, “Well.” He started again: “Well, what do we have here, now?”
Neither Suzy nor Roddy said anything. They kept moving toward Squee.
“Well, after all these years! Did Rodless finally get what he wanted? After all those years . . . Hey, Suze, isn’t that just about the place where you and . . . You reliving old times with Rodless, here? You give him the mercy fuck he always wanted from you, Suzy?”
“Shut your mouth, Lance! Just shut . . .” Suzy flung her hand toward Squee, hunched there in the seat, which only served to remind Lance of the mission he was actually on. He turned again to the boy in the truck, confused for a second, and looked back to Suzy running at him with Roddy beside her. “What the fuck’s he doing in your . . . ?” He flung open the door. “What are you doing in there?” he demanded of Squee. “You kidnapping my son, Suzy? You fucking bitch, are you kidnapping my son from me?”
Suzy and Roddy reached the truck and hovered there on the driver’s side. “He was on the golf course road, Lance,” Suzy said calmly. “He was out on the road in the middle of the night. I picked him up.”
This news only refueled Lance’s anger at Squee. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?” Lance slammed his fist down on the hood, and Roddy lunged at the sudden movement, the desire to protect Squee overtaking all else.
“Oh, what? Rodless gonna fight me? You’re gonna fight me, you dickless motherfucker?”
Roddy fell back immediately, hands raised in surrender. “I don’t want to fight you, Lance. The
“Oh, now you’re a fucking saint, you dickless piece of . . .”
“Lance!” Suzy screamed, just as a light in Eden’s bedroom came on. Suzy lowered her pitch. “His mother is . . . He wants to stay here. What is the problem with that?” Suzy’s voice was a low wail, one step from tears.
“Because I said he’s coming home with me!” Lance bellowed. And then he reached into Suzy’s truck, grabbed Squee around the waist, and hoisted him out of the seat.
Squee let out one cry of fear, that first, irrepressible wail of panic. It was obvious that he was crying from the way he held his hands over his eyes, but otherwise he let his body go slack, and Lance held him at his side with one arm, like a bag of topsoil. Lance opened the driver’s side door and shrugged Squee inside, then pushed in behind him, slammed the door, and backed down the driveway.
THE BLESSINGS OF HYPOTHERMIA
SQUEE SAW THE REMAINS of the laundry shack for the first time the next morning from the window of his father’s truck as they drove to his mother’s funeral. It was nine a.m., and the sun was shining through the ruins. He glimpsed it for only a moment, passing, craning back over the seat to see as Lance pealed out onto the black-top. In his mind it had looked different. He’d last seen it ablaze, in the night, and the fire had seemed so whole and so consuming that it was hard to imagine anything surviving. Over the days, thinking about it, he still couldn’t help thinking of the fire specifically as something that his mom would be so sad about, and then it would click in that she had gone with it. Squee had somehow been imagining the burnt site of the laundry room fire that killed his mother as a beautiful place. Or even just like the fire pit left over from when the waiters and housekeepers made a bonfire on the beach at night and sang and danced and held hands and kissed each other in the glow of the flames. If you went down the next morning, kicked at the embers and remains of log with your foot, underneath, sometimes, the coals were still warm, and the black of the pit was so black and so complete, you could look at it and remember what it had been like the night before, how beautiful it—everyone—had been.
This fire pit wasn’t beautiful. It was awful, a trash heap. Squee realized how much it smelled, the burn. Once, his mom had fallen asleep on the couch in their house, and her cigarette had fallen to the carpet, which melted out around it in a spreading circle. The house had smelled for days like smoking rubber. That’s what it was like. Squee’s stomach twisted on itself, made a rock rise under his diaphragm. When Lance stopped at a red light on Route 11, Squee rolled down his window, leaned out, and vomited quickly onto the pavement below. Lance looked over at him, ready to yell, then saw how Squee was taking such care to lean out far, not to hit the outside of the truck door, and he reached out and patted Squee’s shoulder.
Attendance at Lorna Squire’s funeral was not mandatory for Lodge employees, but it was “encouraged.” Gavin, Brigid, and Peg rode in Jeremy’s car to Our Lady of the Island Chapel, a few blocks from town center. The church lot
