Their barbecue sandwiches arrived a couple of minutes after they ordered them, accompanied by dishes of coleslaw and heaps of French fries. The food grew cold on their plates while they stared out at the parking lot.
After twenty minutes the waitress came back and asked if anything was wrong with their food.
“Food’s fine,” Charlotte said. “Just having a serious conversation.”
“Well, I’ll scoot, then. You shout out, you need anything.” The waitress gave Charlotte a sympathetic smile. Damn these men.
It was almost five when Parker got up. He needed to stretch, he said, his feet were going to sleep. He wandered the deserted restaurant, reading the headlines inside the newspaper vending machine, glancing at the mass-produced Indian artwork, then studying the bulletin board by the front door.
Charlotte watched him for a while, then stirred the cold French fries with her fingertip and turned her eyes back to the parking lot. Slow afternoon at the barbecue joint. A young couple with three noisy kids sat outside along the creek. Otherwise, the place was empty.
She forced herself to draw a complete breath. Let it out slowly and did that again. She roamed her memory for a prayer, some incantation that might attract God’s mercy. But nothing came. As a teenager she’d been a Baptist for a month, a Presbyterian for two. Trying it out at fourteen to see if religion might be an escape from the hellhole of her mother’s double-wide trailer and the whiskey-driven men endlessly coming and going. Neither religion had taken root. What she had instead was fifteen years of police procedure and her philosophy lifted from the forest floor. Helpful enough for day-to-day functioning, but not much use as solace.
“You sure you heard her right?” Parker said. “Five P.M. today?”
“I got it right,” Charlotte said. “Apparently her plans changed.”
It was almost six when the waitress came over and took their plates and asked if they’d like some pecan pie or ice cream.
Parker shook his head and the waitress gave Charlotte another commiserating glance. The crap we women had to endure.
When the waitress was gone, Charlotte said, “She’s not coming.”
The words ached in her throat. But they needed saying.
“Yeah,” Parker said. “I’m afraid you’re right.”
Charlotte told him she had to use the John and scooted from the booth and located the restrooms down a long shadowy hallway.
She locked the door and in the bathroom mirror gave herself a thorough look. It’d been forever since she’d turned her critical eye to her own expression. The face she saw in the mirror was a train wreck of emotions. The heavy eyes and sagging cheeks of despair, a repressed fury pinching her brow, twitches at the corner of her mouth signaling her helpless dread.
She ran the tap and cupped a handful of water and splashed her face. Far colder than Miami water ever was. She rubbed away the last traces of her makeup, then scooped another handful and dropped her face into her hands and kept it there, let the frigid water numb her flesh.
With her head bowed, she felt a tremor in her gut working upward.
She shook the water away and pressed her palms flat to the wall on either side of the mirror, and brought up the hot bulge that had been growing in her bowels for days. It rose into her chest and filled her throat, then broke from her mouth in rumbling sobs. Her eyes burned, and she was suddenly lost in the weeping, hands against the wall, feet back, hips pressing the sink like a suspect being frisked.
She let it come. Her only child lost. Her own abilities in doubt. Her faltering love for Parker. The daily agony she’d witnessed on the city streets for years. All the losses, the regrets whirled together. But it was Gracey’s face she saw inside the storm of weeping. Gracey’s face at ten, before the diagnosis and the drugs and the voices in her head. A birthday party at the beach at Key Biscayne. Balloons and kids and a magician. Gracey smiling. Gracey innocent and smart and full of fun. And the magic white doves that appeared from the top hat and exploded into flight, lofting into a perfect ocean sky.
Gracey’s scream of delight.
Charlotte let it have its way. Purging everything she’d so faithfully stored up, years of fitting edge against edge, the neat parcels of grief. Always room for one more. And one more on top of that. They broke from her throat like that flock of white doves, sob after sob.
From far away, inside her weeping, she heard the trill of a phone.
She blinked the tears away and listened. For a moment she was lost. Like waking to a strange room, having to track back through the hours, reconstruct the route she’d taken to this moment.
She blew her nose in the towels, wadded them, dropped them in the hamper, and plucked the cell phone from her backpack and flicked it open.
“Mom?”
“Oh, God. Where are you, sweetie?”
“I’m ready to go back to Miami,” she said. “Steven thinks it’s best. This Indian stuff is so hokey. The mountains, the slow pace. It’s not filmic. It just won’t work.”
“Oh, Gracey,” Charlotte said. “Are you okay?”
The connection felt so fragile, her daughter’s throaty voice was solid in her ear, but she didn’t trust the filmy web of electrons bouncing around the unstable atmosphere, those erratic peaks and valleys.
“Jacob didn’t want me anyway,” Gracey said. “He wanted Dad.”
“Just tell me where you are, honey, and we’ll come get you right now. Just give me a landmark, anything.”
“There’s guns lying around. Right out in the open. Like any minute there could be a shoot-out or something. Which bothers me, you know, makes me nervous, then Joan, she’s been after me to check in and tell you I’m okay, but it wasn’t till Steven went off about Miami and how much better it would be for the film if we were back there, you know, that’s why I called. So you can come get me now. Or I’ll call Earl. He’ll do it. Earl was nice. You remember Earl, right? No, you don’t know Earl, do you? That was just me alone in his truck. Right? Just me and Earl.”
It was the scattered, hyper way she got when she’d been off her meds and was beginning to stagger toward chaos.
“Gracey, okay, now listen. Just give me some idea where you are, and Dad and I’ll be there as quick as we can.”
On Gracey’s end there was noise in the background, a door slamming, then an adult’s angry voice.
The phone rattled, and Gracey squealed as if she’d been struck. Charlotte called out her daughter’s name, but all she could hear was a muffled voice behind the covered mouthpiece.
Then a woman’s voice spoke in her ear, “Who the hell is this?”
“This is Gracey’s mother. What’re you doing with my daughter?”
The silence lasted for several heartbeats, then as Charlotte was summoning her hard-ass cop voice, the woman spoke.
“Where are you and Parker staying?”
Charlotte hesitated a second too long, and the woman said, “You want your goddamn daughter back or not?”
“The Holiday Inn on Route Nineteen.”
“Tomorrow sometime,” the woman said. “And if there’s any sign of cops around, or FBI, or anything that looks a bit strange, forget it. That clear?”
“I want her now, goddamn it.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Jesus Christ, what’re you doing with her?”
“She showed up at my door, and I took her in, okay? Just be there tomorrow.”
“Is this Lucy Panther?”
For almost half a minute Charlotte listened to the woman breathing. Then the connection broke.