She gave me a look. The “duh” was unspoken.
“Okay, that’s the point, I get it. And that might seem like a good plan now, but what about in six months, or a year? You end up cutting yourself off from your own community.”
“I hate her,” Kelly said under her breath.
“Who? Is it a girl who’s been calling you names?”
“Mom,” she said. “I hate Mom.”
I swallowed hard. I’d tried hard to keep my feelings of anger to myself, but why was I surprised Kelly felt betrayed as well? “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”
“I do. She left us, and she got in that dumb accident so everybody hates me.”
I squeezed the steering wheel. If it had been wood, it would have snapped. “Your mother loved you very much.”
“Then why’d she do something so stupid and ruin my life?” Kelly asked.
“Kelly, your mother wasn’t stupid.”
“Wasn’t getting drunk and parking in the middle of the road stupid?”
I lost it.
“Enough!” I made a fist and bounced it off the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, Kelly, you think I have the answers to everything? You don’t think I’m going nuts trying to figure out why the hell your mother would do such a dumb thing? You think this is easy for me? You think I like that your mother left me to raise you on my own?”
“You just said she wasn’t stupid,” Kelly said. Her lip was quivering.
“Well, okay, what she did, that was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was as stupid a thing as anyone could do, okay? And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, because your mother would never, ever, drink and drive.” I banged the steering wheel again.
I could imagine Sheila’s reaction, if she’d heard me say that. She’d have said I knew that wasn’t exactly true.
It was years ago. We weren’t even engaged. There’d been a party. All the guys from work, their wives, girlfriends. I’d had so much to drink I could barely stand. There was no way I could drive. Sheila probably would have failed a breath test, but she was in way better shape to drive than I was.
But it wasn’t fair to count that. We were younger then. Stupider. Sheila’d never have done anything like that now.
Except she had.
I looked over at Kelly, saw her eyes welling up with tears.
“If Mom would never do that, why did it happen?” she asked.
I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. “Come here,” I said.
“My seatbelt’s on.”
“Take the damn thing off and scoot over here.”
“I’m fine here,” she said, hugging the door. The best I could do was reach over and touch her arm.
“I’m sorry,” I told my daughter. “The thing is, I just don’t know. Your mother and I spent a lot of years together. I knew her better than anyone else in the world, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world, at least until you came along, and then I loved you just as much. What I’m saying is, this doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you.” I stroked her cheek. “But please, please don’t say you hate her.” It made me feel guilty when she said it, because I believed my feelings were rubbing off on her.
I was furious with Sheila, but I didn’t want to turn her daughter against her.
“I’m just so mad at Mom,” Kelly said, looking out her window. “And it makes me feel all sick inside, to be mad, when I’m supposed to be sad.”
THREE
I put the truck back into drive. A short distance later I hit the blinker and turned down Harborside Drive. “Which house is Emily’s again?”
I should have been able to spot it. Emily’s mother, Ann Slocum, and Sheila had met six or seven years ago when they’d both signed up the girls for an infants’ swim class. They traded tales of being new mothers as they struggled to get their girls in and out of their bathing suits, and had kept in touch since. Because we lived not too far from each other, the girls ended up in the same class at school.
Chauffeuring Kelly back and forth to Emily’s house had usually been a duty that fell to Sheila, so I didn’t instantly know which place was the Slocums’.
“That one,” Kelly said, pointing.
Okay, I knew this house. I’d dropped Kelly here before. A one-story, built mid-sixties, would be my guess. It could have been a nice place if it got some attention. Some of the eaves were sagging, the shingles looked to be nearing the end of their lifespan, and a few of the bricks near the top of the chimney were crumbling from moisture getting into them. The Slocums weren’t alone in putting off household repairs. These days, with money tight, people were letting things go until they couldn’t be ignored any longer, and sometimes even then they weren’t dealing with them. A leaky roof could be fixed with a pail a lot cheaper than new shingles.
Ann Slocum’s husband, Darren, was living on a cop’s salary, which wasn’t huge, and probably even less than it used to be since the town started clamping down on overtime. Ann had lost her job in the circulation department at the New Haven paper sixteen months ago. Even though she’d found some other ways to make a living, I could imagine money was tight.
For about a year, she’d been running these so-called “purse parties” where women could buy imitation designer bags for a fraction of the price of the real ones. Sheila had turned our place over to Ann one night not long ago to run one. It was quite an event, like one of those Tupperware things-or at least what I imagine one of those Tupperware things are like.
Twenty women invaded the house. Sally, from work, came, as well as Doug Pinder’s wife, Betsy. I was particularly surprised when Sheila’s mother, Fiona, showed up, with her husband Marcus in tow. Fiona could afford a genuine Louis Vuitton if she wanted one, and I couldn’t see her carrying around a bag that wasn’t the real deal. But Sheila, worried that Ann would get a poor turnout, had begged her mother to come. It was Marcus who finally persuaded Fiona to make the effort.
“Be sociable,” he’d apparently told her. “You don’t have to actually buy one. Show up and support your daughter.”
I hated to be cynical, but I couldn’t help wondering whether his motives had little to do with making his stepdaughter happy. An event like this, you had to figure there’d be a lot of women there, and Marcus liked to check out the ladies.
Marcus and Fiona got to our place first, and when the women started arriving, he made a point of greeting them as they came through the door, introducing himself, offering to get each a glass of wine, making sure they all had a place to sit as they began to drool over leather and fake labels. His antics appeared to embarrass Fiona. “Stop making a fool of yourself,” she’d snapped, taking him aside at one point.
Once Ann’s sales pitch got under way and Marcus and I had retreated to the back deck with a couple of beers, he said, somewhat defensively, “Don’t worry, I’m still madly in love with your mother-in-law. I just like women.” He smiled. “And I think they like me.”
“Yeah,” I replied. “You’re a stud muffin.”
Ann did pretty well that night. Made a couple of thousand dollars-even knockoff purses could run several hundred bucks-and for hosting the event, Sheila got to pick any bag she wanted.
Even if the Slocums couldn’t afford repairs to their house, purses and policing were paying well enough for Ann to drive a three-year-old Beemer sedan, and Darren had a Dodge Ram pickup that gleamed red. Only the pickup was in the driveway as we approached the house.
“Is Emily having any other friends sleep over?” I asked Kelly.
“Nope. Just me.”
We stopped at the curb.
“You okay?” I asked her.
