No Time For Goodbye

She snapped her gum. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“What do you care?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do you care? About what I read, about my writing, that shit.”

“You think I’m a teacher just to get rich?”

She looked as though she was almost going to smile, and then caught herself. “I gotta go,” she said, and did.

The lunch crowd had thinned by the time Rolly and I got to the Stonebridge. He ordered some coconut shrimp and a beer to start, and I settled on a large bowl of New England clam chowder with extra crackers, and coffee.

Rolly was talking about putting their house on the market soon, that they’d have a lot of money left over after they paid for the mobile home in Bradenton. There’d be money to put in the bank, they could invest it, take the odd trip. And Rolly was going to buy a boat so he could fish along the Manatee River. It’s like he was already finished being a principal. He was someplace else.

“I got stuff on my mind,” I said.

Rolly took a sip of Sam Adams. “This about Lauren Wells?”

“No,” I said, surprised. “What made you think I wanted to talk about Wells?”

He shrugged. “I noticed you talking to her in the hall.”

“She’s a wingnut,” I said.

Rolly smiled. “A well-packaged wingnut.”

“I don’t know what it is. I think, in her world, Cynthia and I have achieved some sort of celebrity status. Lauren rarely spoke to me until we appeared on that show.”

“Can I have your autograph?” Rolly asked.

“Bite me,” I said. I waited a moment, as if to signal that I was changing gears here, and said, “Cynthia’s always thought of you like an uncle, you know? I know you looked out for her, after what happened. So I feel I can come to you, talk to you about her, when there’s a problem.”

“Go on.”

“I’m starting to wonder whether Cynthia’s losing it.”

Rolly put his glass of beer down on the table, licked his lips. “Aren’t the two of you already seeing some shrink, what’s-her-name, Krinkle or something?”

“Kinzler. Yeah. Every couple of weeks or so.”

“Have you talked to her about this?”

“No. It’s tricky. I mean, there are times when she talks to us separately. I could bring it up. But, it’s not like it’s any one thing. It’s all these little things put together.”

“Like what?”

I filled him in. The anxiety over the brown car. The anonymous phone call from someone saying her family had forgiven her, how she’d accidentally erased the call. Chasing the guy in the mall, thinking he was her brother. The hat in the middle of the table.

“What?” Rolly said. “Clayton’s hat?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Evidently. I mean, I suppose she could have had it tucked away in a box all these years. But it did have this little marking inside, his first initial, under the lining.”

Rolly thought about that. “If she put the hat there, she could have written in the initial herself.”

That had never occurred to me. Cyn had let me look for the initials, rather than take the hat away from me and do it herself. Her expression of shock had been pretty convincing.

But I supposed what Rolly was suggesting was possible.

“And it doesn’t even have to be her father’s hat. It could be any hat. She could have bought it at a secondhand store, said it was his hat.”

“She smelled it,” I said. “When she smelled it, she said for sure it was her father’s hat.”

Rolly looked at me like I was one of his dumb high school students. “And she could have let you smell it, too, to prove it. But that proves nothing.”

“She could be making everything up,” I said. “I can’t believe my mind’s going there.”

“Cynthia doesn’t strike me as mentally unbalanced,” Rolly said. “Under tremendous stress, yes. But delusional?”

“No,” I said. “She’s not like that.”

“Or fabricating things? Why would she be making these things up? Why would she pretend to get that phone call? Why would she set up something like the hat?”

“I don’t know.” I struggled to come up with an answer. “To get attention? So that, what? The police, whoever, would reopen the case? Finally find out what happened to her family?”

“Then why now?” Rolly asked. “Why wait all this time to finally do this?”

Again, I had no idea. “Shit, I don’t know what to think. I just wish it would all end. Even if that meant we found out they had all died that night.”

“Closure,” Rolly said.

“I hate that word,” I said. “But yeah, basically.”

“And the other thing you need to consider,” Rolly said, “is that if she didn’t leave that hat on the table, then you actually had an intruder in your house. And that doesn’t necessarily mean it was Cynthia’s father.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve already decided we’ve got to get deadbolts.” I pictured a stranger moving about through the rooms of our house, looking at our things, touching our stuff, getting a sense of who we were. I shuddered.

“We try to remember to lock the house up every time we go out. We’re pretty good about it, but the odd time, I guess we must slip up. The back door, I guess it’s possible we’ve forgotten that once in a while, especially if Grace was in and out and we didn’t know it.” I thought about that missing key, tried to remember when I first noticed it wasn’t on the hook. “But I know we locked everything up the night we met with that nutjob psychic.”

“Psychic?” Rolly said. I brought him up to speed.

“When you get deadbolts,” Rolly said, “look into those bars you can put across basement windows. That’s how a lot of kids get in.”

I was quiet for the next few minutes. I hadn’t gotten to the big thing I wanted to discuss. Finally, I said, “The thing is, there’s more.”

“About what?”

“Cyn’s in such a delicate frame of mind, there’s stuff I’m not telling her.” Rolly raised an eyebrow. “About Tess,” I said.

Rolly took another sip of his Sam Adams. “What about Tess?”

“First of all, she’s not well. She told me she’s dying.”

“Ah, fuck,” Rolly said. “What is it?”

“She didn’t want to get into specifics, but I’m guessing it must be cancer or something like that. She doesn’t look all that bad, mostly just tired, you know? But she’s not going to get any better. At least that’s the way it looks at the moment.”

“Cynthia’ll be devastated. They’re so close.”

“I know. And I think it has to be Tess who tells her. I can’t do it. I don’t want to do it. And before long, it’s going to become obvious that something’s wrong with her.”

“What’s the other thing?”

“Huh?”

“You said ‘first of all’ a second ago. What’s the other thing?”

I hesitated. It seemed wrong to tell Rolly about the secret payments Tess had received before I told Cynthia, but that was one of the reasons why I was telling him-to get some guidance on how to break this to my wife.

“For a number of years, Tess was getting money.”

Rolly set down his beer, took his hand off the glass. “What do you mean, getting money?”

“Someone left money for her. Cash, in an envelope. A number of times, with a note that it was to help pay for