Gwen chooses her words with care. “We had a lot of freedom. Sometimes I think we were the last generation to live that way. These days, we live near a state park, very pretty and bucolic, and I would never dream of letting my daughter play there, unsupervised.”
The “we” is a lie, used for convenience’s sake but it gives her a pang.
“Gordon was real paranoid about our girls, too. He didn’t even like them to be in our fenced backyard by themselves.”
“I saw them at the funeral. They’re beautiful little girls.” Gwen is not being polite. The girls are beautiful, as is their mother-blue eyes, blond hair, fair skin. Go-Go, for all his rough-and-tumble ways, always liked beauty, respected it. He had high standards, too. He clearly thought Tally Robison exquisite, he loved to look at her, grab her. Gwen, even after her transformation, did not impress him.
“My mother-in-law blames me for his death,” Lori says. Her tone is matter-of-fact, as if commenting on the weather, but she has to know this is a shocking thing to say. Neither Tim nor Sean mentioned it to Gwen. But then-Tim and Sean are a long way past the time when they felt obligated to tell Gwen things.
“Oh, people say all sorts of things when grieving-”
“She’s not entirely wrong.”
An older woman jostles Gwen to get to Lori’s bags, but that is the point of the craft fair, after all. She paws the little bags, snaps them open, runs the zippers up and down, fingers the lining. The bags deserve kinder hands, but if the woman is a buyer, Gwen doesn’t want to come between Lori and a sale. Lord knows if Go-Go had a life insurance policy, or if it paid off, given the uncertain circumstances of his death. Gwen digs through her own shoulder bag and finds her card, adds her cell and the landline for her father’s house.
“If you want to talk,” she says. “About anything.”
She assumes, hopes, Lori won’t follow up. Go-Go’s secrets are, in part, Gwen’s, although she likes to think she is the least guilty of the five, the sole bystander. All Gwen did was agree to go along, to let Sean be the spokesman and not insist on including the troubling details that might complicate their story when they told their parents. No, Lori will think better of it, decide she doesn’t want to talk, not to a virtual stranger. But if Lori does confide in Gwen, is Gwen obligated to tell her there are all sorts of reasons why Go-Go might have driven into that concrete barrier, none of which have anything to do with his second wife kicking him out? No need to worry. Lori won’t call. Even if she does, Gwen owes her nothing.
Yet several hours later, when Gwen places her cell phone by her girlhood bed, there is a text from Lori staring up at her.
I REALLY WOULD LIKE TO TALK TO YOU. SOON?
It’s the question mark-unsure, pleading-that makes the request impossible to ignore.
Chapter Twenty-six
It has taken several days, many promises, and a few threats, but Tim has finally corralled all three daughters and taken them to his mother’s house for Sunday lunch. “What about Mass?” his mother asked when told of the plan. He couldn’t bear to let her know her oldest two granddaughters are basically heathens, so he made up a story about the SATs and a sleepover and sent Arlene to Mass with his mother as the family’s sacrificial lamb. In old age, which seems to have fallen on Doris suddenly and even a little precociously-she’s barely in her sixties-she is as distractible as a baby.
The house on Sekots Lane was a desired destination when the girls were younger, a place they clamored to visit. It had a doll’s house feel to them-smaller in scale than the houses in their Stoneleigh neighborhood, and full of wonders. The carpet sweeper, a waist-high freezer in the basement stocked with Good Humor bars, Grandma’s “goodie jar,” the dogs. But the house and its inhabitants long ago ceased to entertain the girls. Lunch finished, the three sisters slump on the sofa in the downstairs rec room, watching the flat-screen television, a gift from Tim and Sean, connected to cable, a bill that Tim pays monthly, dismissing Doris’s protestations that she doesn’t need it. If not for cable television, the girls would never come here, but he doesn’t want to spell that out for his mother.
Yet even the television barely holds their interest. The older two are bent over their phones, texting, texting, texting, while the baby, as he still thinks of eight-year-old Karen, twirls her hair and watches them covetously. She has been told she can have a phone at age twelve, a decision she challenges daily, sometimes with fresh arguments, more often with mere petulance. Yesterday she told Tim she should have a phone because it would keep her safe from child molesters.
What could the older girls be texting about on a Sunday afternoon? And to whom? Only last week, Lisa left her phone unattended and Tim seized the chance to read every text still in it, rationalizing that he was right to violate her privacy because of the Dani/joint incident. Yet the conversation, such as it was, revealed almost nothing. The only topics were location (at mall/at McDonald’s/at skate park) and mood. Everything is lame. Everyone is lame. Parents, friends, school, any activity. The jokes of the other texter are lame. Lord, is it any wonder that zombies are enjoying a resurgence in pop culture? This generation is the new walking dead, except they lumber
“Some help with the dishes?” He tries to make it sound like a suggestion, yet one that cannot be ignored.
“Sure,” Michelle says.
“In a minute,” Lisa says.
Nothing moves except their thumbs. He thinks of the heroine of Tom Robbins’s
“Leave the girls alone,” his mother calls down the stairs. “There’s not that much to do. And it’s easier to clean up when there aren’t so many bodies in the kitchen. Do the girls want some more cookies or chocolates?”
They look up, dazed. Certain words, such as
“Well, you can at least go upstairs and get them yourselves,” Tim says.
A pause. “That’s all right,” Michelle says. “I’m not really that hungry.” But Doris is already bustling downstairs with her “goodie” jar, a huge Tupperware container that holds opened bags of cookies and a selection of miniature candy bars. The goodie jar is a long-standing tradition in her household, but Tim has noticed on recent visits that sometimes the items are quite stale. This was true even before Go-Go died, but it troubles him. He asked the girls not to mention it. They said they hadn’t noticed.
Doris spoils all her grandchildren this way. To be fair, she spoiled her sons almost as much. They had few responsibilities in the house and only marginal ones in the yard because their father loved his lawn mower and did not want to entrust it to them. They were savages. Or so Arlene said in the early years of their marriage, when she discovered that Tim did not know how to do anything domestic-wash his clothes, sew a button, scour a pan, run the vacuum.
He did not think Arlene should have been surprised. She had seen his apartment, after all, even pretended affection for his bachelor ways. But Arlene, like a lot of women, had one set of standards for her boyfriend, another for her husband. The difference was that Arlene really did manage to change him. Everyone said that people couldn’t be changed and perhaps it was all semantics, perhaps Tim had chosen to change. Still, he believed that Arlene transformed him by the simple act of loving him. Despite being raised in a household where nothing was expected of the males and everything was given, he learned to shoulder household tasks and, when the time came,
