“I can’t even remember what she looked like,” she said, trying to shore up one lie with another.
“It shouldn’t be this hard. Just think of Eleanor.”
She jerked around and smacked her coffee cup into the sink, breaking it. Surprise became anxiety, then dismay, finally despondence.
“How did you know?”
“Saw some old photographs. There’s really not much doubt.”
“Oh, God.” She gave a mighty shiver. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
“Crystal,” I said as kindly as I could. “We’ve got to stop the lies now. Get your husband in here so we can talk it out.”
“No!…No. We don’t talk about these things to Gaston.”
“We’re gonna have to start. It can’t stay buried any longer.”
“Oh, don’t do that. Please don’t do that. Ask me…whatever you want, ask me.”
“Why would Gaston Rigby raise Nola Jean Ryder’s daughter?”
She gave a little cough and took off her glasses. Dabbed at her eyes with trembly hands.
“Crystal…”
“Why do I get the feeling you already know these things? You ask the questions but you already know the answers.”
“There’s only one answer that makes sense. Grayson’s her father.”
She looked out at the shop and said nothing.
“What did Gaston think when she started to grow up? When every time you looked in her face you saw this evil woman you all hated?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
She turned and looked at me straight on, wanting me to believe her.
“Truly,” she said, and I did believe her.
“Then tell me how it was.”
“I don’t know if I can. You’d have to’ve been part of it, watched them together when she was growing up. She didn’t look anything like Nola then, all we could see was Darryl in her face. And Gaston thought the sun rose and set on that child, she just lit up his life. I’ve never heard that song ”You Light Up My Life“ without thinking of Gaston and Ellie. He loved her to pieces. Read to her nights, took her over to Seattle to walk along the waterfront. He was so crazy about that child, I actually envied her sometimes. He’d take her walking and later tell me it was like Darryl himself was walking with them. So that’s how it was. She’s ours but she came from Darryl, the last living part of him. It was like he’d made her, like a book, without any help from any woman, and left her here for us. And what’s in a face? I mean, really, who cares what someone looks like? Ellie’s really nothing like Nola Jean in any way that counts. She didn’t get her heart from her mamma, or her mind…we all know where that came from. And when she started to grow up and look like Nola, Gaston didn’t seem to notice at all. To him she was Darryl’s little girl, and I don’t think he ever worried or even stopped to consider who her mother was.”
“What about you, Crystal? Did you think about it?”
She didn’t want to answer that. She had thought about it plenty. “She’s got nothing to do with Nola Jean Ryder anymore. You can’t raise a child from the cradle and not love her.” She fidgeted with her hands. “Only two things have mattered in my life—first Gaston, then Eleanor. Anybody who thinks I didn’t love that child is just full of it, and they’d better not say it to me. I had her almost from the day she was born. Nola never cared: as soon as Ellie was born, she was out of here, gone on the road with some bum she met down at the tavern. We started thinking of Ellie as ours, right from that first winter. Even when Nola came back here in the spring and took up with Darryl again, she couldn’t care less about her daughter. And after Darryl died, she never came back.”
We looked hard at each other. I leaned across the table so she couldn’t escape my eyes. “I hate to break this to you, Crystal, but you’re still lying to me.”
Another shock wave rippled across her face. She touched her lips with her fingers and seemed to be holding her breath.
“You keep talking about Darryl Grayson as if he’s really dead.”
“Of course he’s dead. Everybody knows that.”
“I think he’s alive and well.”
“You’re crazy.”
“I think he’s alive and still working after all these years.”
She shook her head.
“And you and Rigby and maybe Moon have devoted your lives to his secret. You’ve created a safe haven where he can do his stuff in peace and seclusion, back there in that shop, in that back room where nobody ever goes.”
