“We need to fix this,” I said, finally.
“It’s not going to be fixed, Libby, not unless they find who did it.”
“Well, you need some new lawyers, working on the case,” I reasoned. “All the stuff they can do with DNA now …” DNA to me was some sort of magical element, some glowing goo that was always getting people out of prison.
Ben laughed through closed lips, the way he did when we were kids, not letting you enjoy it.
“You sound like Runner,” he said. “About every two years I get a letter from him:
“You know where he is now?”
“Last letter was care of Bert Nolan’s Group Home for Men, somewhere in Oklahoma. He asked me to send him 500 bucks, so he could continue his research on my behalf. Whoever Bert Nolan is, he’s ruing the day he let goddam Runner into his home for men.” He scratched his arm, raising his sleeve just enough for me to see a tattoo of a woman’s name. It ended in
“Ah this? Old flame. We started as penpals. I thought I loved her, thought I’d marry her, but turned out she didn’t really want to be stuck with a guy in prison for life. Wish she’d told me before I got the tat.”
“Must’ve hurt.”
“It didn’t tickle.”
“I meant the breakup.”
“Oh, that sucked too.”
The guard gave us the three-minute signal and Ben rolled his eyes: “Hard to decide what to say in three minutes. Two minutes you just start making plans for another visit. Five minutes you can finish your conversation. Three minutes?” He pushed out his lips, made a raspberry noise. “I really hope you come again, Libby. I forgot how homesick I was. You look just like her.”
Patty DayJANUARY 2, 1985
11:31 A.M.
She’d retreated to the bathroom after Len left, his livery smile still offering something unsavory, some sort of help she knew she didn’t want. The girls had flooded out of their bedroom as soon as they heard the door shut, and after a quick, whispery caucus outside the bathroom door, had decided to leave her alone and go back to the TV.
Patty was holding her greasy belly, her sweat turned cold. Her parents’ farm, gone. She felt the guilty twist of the stomach that had always made her such a good girl, the constant fear of disappointing her folks,
They’d have to move to an entirely different town. Kinnakee had no apartments, and they were going to have to cram into an apartment while she got a job in some office, if she could find one. She’d always felt sorry for people who lived in apartments, stuck listening to their neighbors belch and argue. Her legs puddled and suddenly Patty was sitting on the floor. She didn’t have enough energy to leave the farm, ever. She’d used the last of it up these past few years. Some mornings she couldn’t even get out of bed, physically couldn’t make her legs swing out from under the covers, the girls had to drag her, yanking her with dug-in heels, and as she made breakfast and got them somewhat ready for school, she daydreamed about dying. Something quick, an overnight heart attack, or a sudden vehicular clobbering. Mother of four, run down by a bus. And the kids adopted by Diane, who would keep them from lying around in their pajamas all day, and make sure they saw a doctor when they were sick, and snap-snap at them til they finished their chores. Patty was a slip of a woman, wavery and weak, quickly optimistic, but even more easily deflated. It was Diane who should have inherited the farm. But she wanted none of it, had left at eighteen, a joyful, rubberband trajectory that had landed her as a receptionist at a doctor’s office thirty mere-but-crucial miles away in Schieberton.
Their parents had taken Diane’s leaving stoically, as if it had always been part of the plan. Patty could remember back in high school, them all coming to watch her do her cheerleading thing one wet October night. It was a three-hour drive for them, deep into Kansas, almost Colorado, and it rained lightly but steadily the whole game. When it was over (Kinnakee lost), there on the field were her two gray-haired parents and her sister, three solid ovals, encased in rough wool coats, all rushing to her side, all smiling with such pride and gratitude you’d have thought she’d cured cancer, their eyes crinkled behind three sets of rain-speckled glasses.
Ed and Ann Day were dead now, had died early but not unexpectedly, and Diane was now a manager in the same doctor’s office, and lived in a mobile home in a tidy trailer park bordered with flowers.
“It’s a good enough life for me,” she’d always say. “Can’t imagine wanting anything different.”
That was Diane. Capable. She was the one who remembered little treats that the girls liked, she never forgot to get them their yearly Kinnakee T-shirts: Kinnakee, Heart of America! Diane had fibbed to the girls that it meant Magical Little Woman in Indian, and they’d been so gleeful about it that Patty could never bring herself to tell them it just meant rock or crow or something.
DIANE’S CAR HORN intruded on her thoughts with its usual celebratory honkhonkhonk!
“Diane!” screeched Debby, and Patty could hear the three girls racing toward the front door, could picture the mass of pigtails and muffin-bottoms, and then imagined them still running, straight out to the car, and Diane driving away with them and leaving her in this house where she would make everything go silent.
She pulled herself off the floor, wiped her face with a mildewy washcloth. Her face was always red, her eyes always pink, so it was impossible to tell if she’d been crying, the only advantage to looking like a skinned rat. When she opened the door, her sister was already unpacking three grocery loads of canned foods and sending the girls out to her car for the rest. Patty had come to associate the smell of brown paper bags with Diane, she’d been bringing them food for so long. That was the perfect example of the fall-short life Patty had made: She lived on a farm but never had enough to eat.
“Got them one of those sticker books, too,” Diane said, flapping it out on the table.
