“Clyde took the gun from her,” I said. “I’m pretty sure we’re safe.”
“Pretty sure doesn’t cut it.”
What could I say without it meaning I love Amy more than I love you?
“If you want me to go home, I will,” Kelly said. “I understand that you have…unfinished business here, with her.”
“I don’t want you to leave,” I said. Equally true: I didn’t want to leave Amy’s house. No matter how much trouble she could be, the proximity felt right. The revolving heart, I thought. Even if the play itself was crap, I was onto something with the title.
I leaned over the bed and kissed Kelly’s beautiful mouth. “I’m anticipating a happy ending.”
“Good luck with that,” she said, but still kissed me back.
I grabbed my sneakers, laced up, and headed downstairs, but as I passed Amy’s bedroom, the door wide open, I spotted the manila folder from the hospital, the drawings from Art Therapy.
Clyde’s words echoed in my head. Ask her what happened in Art Therapy. I assumed she had drawn something troubling, perhaps an image of Sarah Carpenter drowning or even worse, Sarah’s corpse being mauled by Captain Sick. I needed to see what was in that folder—it felt important that I know—yet my body froze by the mouth of the door. I stood there as if already asleep, stepping neither back nor forward, my eyes on the folder but not yet ready to see, and I felt relieved, even saved, when Amy started calling from downstairs. (“Hurry up, Donnie! The bugs are getting in!”) I could always sneak a look at those drawings in the morning, I assured myself, or even the day after that. There’s no hurry, I thought, procrastination a useful character flaw against all those sticky things I hoped to avoid.
-11-
It was Amy’s first day back at Victoria’s Secret and I had agreed to drive her to the mall after we dropped Jill at school, Amy’s medication chock full of heavy machinery warnings and Jill too much the diva to take the bus. As a peace offering, it had softened her annoyance over the news that Kelly and I were hotel bound. She was still pissed, but at least she had eased up on her sad-puppy pout and dialed back her middle finger.
We idled in the parking lot of my former high school, good old West Ocean Regional, while Amy and Jill checked their lipstick in their compact mirrors, all those last-minute female adjustments that always seemed so unnecessary, as if an errant quarter-inch of glossy red could detract from the lure of their lips. Amy capped her lipstick tube and dropped it in her purse, then punched me in the arm, a jab more than a knockout punch, but clear in its intent.
“Abandoning us within the first twenty-four hours,” Amy said. “You can forget about getting your security deposit back.”
“I’m not abandoning you.”
“What about the stalker? You heard Jill—I’m not making it up.”
“She’s not making it up!” Jill said.
“You’re just going to leave us unprotected, a defenseless single mother and her vulnerable teenage daughter?”
“Defenseless? Really? I thought you still had a .22. Trust me: it’s better this way, more space for everyone.”
“The fucking Beach House Inn. I knew you had money.”
“I’m just borrowing it from the bloodsuckers at VISA.”
“That’s a sweet deal, being California Kelly. Is she spending the day at DePasquale, too?” she said, name-checking a high-end spa.
“No,” I said, although Kelly had mentioned something about a pedicure. “Hey, she’s entitled. She’s a struggling civil servant, an unemployed teacher.”
“…with a sugar daddy setting her up in a beach-front suite.”
“Sugar daddy? At best I’m a single packet of Splenda.”
“Wow, such blazing wit. It’s hard to believe you never won a Tony.”
Jill leaned in from the back. “He was nominated for an Obie.”
“He lost to a bunch of vaginas,” Amy said, capping her lipstick and zipping up her purse.
“How many awards have you been nominated for?” Jill snapped.
“Only one: for my continuing role of the mother to a smart-mouth pain in the ass.”
“That’s a supporting role,” Jill said, all teenage snark as she finished combing her hair. “Everyone knows that the smart-mouth pain in the ass is the real star!”
She kissed the side of her mother’s head and opened the back door. “Thanks for the ride, Mr. Donatello Marcino. Ms. Vaughn will flip when I tell her you drove me to school.”
Amy and I watched through the windshield as Jill rushed off toward a pack of other girls, all of them furiously tapping their smart phones, the parking lot filled with teens slouching toward the school entrance, half of them animated and energetic, the other half zombies, just like when Amy and I had made that same walk each morning twenty years earlier. Jill looked back and waved, then dropped her arm over the shoulder of some chunky girl in black leggings and a short pink dress.
“She’s quite precocious,” I said. “Your genes must have beaten the hell out of Clyde’s DNA.”
“Assuming he’s the father.”
“He’s not?”
“There are other possibilities,” Amy said. “I wasn’t exactly chaste that year.”
Except with me, I thought, but didn’t say it. “I always assumed you married him because you were pregnant.”
“I was pregnant, and when I told him, he proposed and I said yes. He could be her father. He probably is. I know you hate him, but for all his hard-ass attitude, he’s a good guy. Those first few years with Jill, I couldn’t have done it alone.”
“You could have done it with me,” I said, the words slipping out before I could reel them back in.
“I couldn’t have done that to you,” she said. “You were destined for better things. Maybe if I’d known you were going to blow it and end up making pizza again… hey, I’m kidding. I couldn’t have tied you down like that. I loved you
