“I’ve already been late sixteen times this year. What’s one more?” she said but grabbed her socks and slipped them on. “I can walk home. It’s not far.”
At most it was a ten-minute walk, a trek Amy and I had made hundreds of times, Holman Beach a safe community, or so we had thought. A few days earlier I would have let her walk home in the dark by herself, no problem, but now the world seemed akin to one giant threat, the cigarette butt in Amy’s driveway proof enough that one never really knows what might be lurking.
. . . . .
I dropped Jill at the house, resisting her attempts to draw me inside to spend time with her mother, or have a cup of tea, or just say hello; really, all I had to do was stay one minute.
“Please,” Jill said, but I could recognize a bad idea, sometimes. I waited until she was safely inside before driving off.
Going back to the B&B, with Kelly gone, seemed eminently grim, so I drove around Holman Beach with no direction in mind, just coasting down the streets, letting coin flips decide if I should turn left or right. For once I was grateful Amy and Clyde had burned down Mr. Ronan’s house; seeing the new house built in its place was bad enough. I drove past Sarah Carpenter’s house, which looked so much better than it had when she and Laura had lived there. During the real estate bubble, before the big crash, someone spent major bucks on an overhaul, new shingles and windows, a wraparound porch. The renovations looked top-notch, but I preferred it the old way, with Sarah inside.
After Sarah drowned, Laura didn’t stick around for long. From what I’d heard, she hadn’t moved far, just a few exits down the Parkway, her address changing from year to year. Occasionally Amy or Uncle Dan mentioned seeing her looking pretty haggard at the Ocean County Mall. At one point she did thirty days in the county lock-up for a DWI. I was in Los Angeles, working on a spec script, but she tracked me down and sent a letter asking for 3K for legal fees and fines. Though I was running low on funds, I sent the check anyway, which came back cashed, as always, with Fuck You written in the memo line.
My third time around town I started yawning, and pulled over, certain I’d be asleep within minutes. I’d slept in cars plenty of times, knew I’d wake up stiff-necked and cramped, but it seemed a better option than a night at the B&B, where Kelly’s things were waiting where she had left them—her suitcase still propped on the ottoman, her new guitar leaning beside it, her nightgown folded on the left side of the bed, Kelly’s side, her calico slippers waiting on the floor by the nightstand. I was certain those slippers would break my heart.
-15-
I was packing up Kelly’s things, my hands lingering over all that soft cotton, when the phone rang—Kurt Cobain and good old “Lithium,” a ringtone I really needed to change.
“Hey, I’m thinking of buying a dog,” Amy said. No “hello” or “how’s it going?” I could hear the pot of coffee racing through her voice. “Some mean big-ass pooch who’ll scare the hell out of everyone except Jill and me, like a Pitbull or my grandfather before the Alzheimer’s. What do you think?”
“If you’re getting a dog, you should adopt,’ I told her. “But I think you’re more of a cat person.”
“You mean pampered and lazy?”
She wanted to play, but my heart wasn’t in it.
“We should talk,” I said.
“We should talk,” she mimicked, her voice deep and gloomy. “Let’s be serious and talk.”
“We need to…”
“Jesus, when did you become a Lifetime movie?” she said. “We can talk, but we’re not turning this into a ‘very special episode,’ okay? I kept my mouth shut all these years for a reason. Come to the house tonight. We’ll watch a movie and maybe we can talk. Bring Chinese—no pizza, okay? I assume the California Girl likes Chinese.”
“She does, but…she won’t be joining us.”
“Trouble in paradise?”
“She flew home yesterday.”
“Interesting.”
“No big deal,” I said, trying to sound casual, which Amy saw right through.
“I’m sorry, Duck. But what the hell were you thinking bringing her here?”
“I’m not sure. She said she wanted to see New Jersey.”
“And you believed her? No one wants to see New Jersey. Couldn’t you have bought her a Bonjovi album and watched The Sopranos?”
“She didn’t leave me,” I said. “She just went home.”
“The eternal optimist; that’s why I love you, Donnie. How about seven o’clock? Bring Chinese, and remember, spring rolls, not egg roll, and extra duck sauce. Jill loves the stuff.”
. . . . .
“Okay, gang,” Amy said. “Showtime.”
We sat in the living room, Amy and I on the couch, Jill and Maddie cross-legged on the floor on opposite sides of the coffee table, the girls trading open white cartons of lo mein and fried rice while they struggled with their chopsticks, stray dumplings rolling off plates and tumbling into their laps. I speared a stalk of broccoli with a cheap plastic fork and dipped it into the soy sauce.
Amy pointed the remote, and the TV snapped to life.
“What are we watching?” Maddie asked.
“Probably something boring,” Jill said.
“Not at all,” Amy told them. “It’s an indie film from twenty years ago—very low budget, but you’ll recognize one of the stars.”
I wracked my brain. Micro-budget—maybe “Dazed and Confused” or that lodestar for every film geek from New Jersey, Kevin Smith’s “Clerks.” Back in high school if we weren’t at the Jaybird we’d hang out at the Film Shack, a video store on Ocean Avenue that offered dollar rentals off-season and had a decent inventory of the eclectic stuff we preferred: French New Wave, David Lynch, British TV like The Prisoner and all those great Nineties films like Slacker and Sex, Lies,
