Merrily’s mom closed the door and pressed her back against it.
“What was that about?” Merrily said. She thought she’d heard—
“Nothing,” her mom said, but her accent was thicker than normal. Her accent got thick when she was nervous or sad, whenever she had to talk to someone on the phone she didn’t know, whenever she was sure someone was looking at her and dismissing her as a foreigner, questioning her right to stand on this ground. Then the accent became impenetrable, until it might as well be Spanish, and then it was. “Is nothing but some door-to-door salesman—”
“She said Rick’s name,” Merrily said.
“Saleswoman,” her mom said smoothly. “They thought he lived here still. They sell to him . . . magazines.”
When she lied, too, the accent. “Mamá, who was that lady?”
Lady? Merrily went to the window and watched as the tall woman crossed their yard back to her car. She walked as though injured, with one hand held across her stomach. She was only someone her own age. She started for the door, but her mom wouldn’t move. She curved her spine and ducked her head, compressing herself. Protecting herself as though from an attack.
“Mamá, stop it,” Merrily said. “What if she knows about Rick?”
“Knows what?”
“Knows— Move! Knows where he is, what’s happened to him.”
“She won’t know anything,” her mom said, but stepped away. “She won’t know as much as you, even.” Merrily flung the door open and yelled through the screen. The woman in the yard turned. The two regarded one another.
I know who you are.
“Come back,” Merrily yelled.
THE WOMAN’S FRIENDS came with her, and that was too much to put her mom through, so Merrily took them around to the backyard. Now the woman who’d come to the door—Alice, she’d said—stood looking at her mom’s garden. Merrily found herself protective of it, though she hadn’t planned or planted it, had never dug a hand in its soil. It needed weeding. This bitch better not say so.
Now Merrily considered staying on with her mom another night, tidying the garden, helping with the yard. But she’d already stayed two nights this week, curled up in her old single bed. There was something in that, how easily she let herself be talked into sleeping in her childhood bed. She didn’t want to think about it.
The older woman caught up with them, breathing heavy, and helped herself to the garden bench, filling it. The last woman, who had kindly shuffled along with her friend, now held out her hand and smiled, warm. Merrily didn’t need to be invited to like her; she just did. “I’m Juby,” she said. “Thanks for talking with us.”
“I’m not sure I can be much help,” Merrily said, looking toward Alice. “But you said his name. You said ‘Rick Kisel.’ Didn’t you?”
“Rick,” Juby said softly, trying it out. “You’re friends with him?”
“He was my— It’s hard to explain,” Merrily said. “My mom dated him for a while when I was young, and he’s always, you know, been around.”
Alice turned stiffly. “Around? Around you, as you grew up?”
“Well, not actually around,” Merrily said. “I only met him once when I was old enough to remember. But he texts and stuff, to say hi, happy birthday . . . stuff like that.”
The women glanced among themselves.
“What?” Merrily said. “Where is he?”
“You haven’t seen him?” the older woman said. Her voice was thin, almost a whistle.
“I thought that’s why you were here.” Would she know him? He was a stranger to her, really. Would she recognize him if he walked into the yard right now, his arms open to her? If he said, Hey, kid, and wrapped her in a hug? They were not the affectionate sorts, she and her mom. She couldn’t imagine making room in her life for someone who might be.
The other women hadn’t filled the silence.
Merrily took a deep breath. “I haven’t seen him in twenty years. I don’t even know what he looks like now. I have mostly old photos, him, my mom. Some of his old girlfriends.” She looked at Alice for a long moment. There were things she could tell them about Rick—the three kids with three different wives, the burned-out house. How much did they already know, though? “Are you— Why are you looking for him?”
Juby and the older woman seemed to retreat into themselves. Alice stepped toward Merrily. “I knew him when I was a kid,” she said, “and then this week I heard he was missing— I guess I wanted to help. We’re volunteers for a website that helps find missing people.”
It was a breezy, rehearsed story that smelled like a lie in every way. There was more to it, Merrily didn’t have to be told. “Family friend?”
“Yeah,” Alice said, without much conviction. “Family friend.”
Merrily rolled her eyes at the grass at her feet. She was still wearing the short pants from her old closet, the cast-off T-shirt, no shoes. She’d slept in them and hadn’t yet changed back into her clothes from yesterday, now clean. Every time it mattered, she was wearing someone else’s clothes, a costume. They thought she was some bumpkin, some kid. She folded her arms across her chest. “I met someone who thinks Rick’s been buried as a John Doe in their local cemetery for the last two decades. Who do you think that is?”
No one moved.
If you could see your faces, Merrily thought. “A fire. The guy who lived there died.”
Juby broke the spell. “Do you think it’s Richard—Rick?”
“My mother says no way,” Merrily said. Over Juby’s shoulder she saw movement at the kitchen curtains. “And all those texts he sent me—”
“They could have been sent. By someone else,” said the wheezing woman.
“Your mother, in fact,” Juby said.
“She wouldn’t go to the trouble,” Merrily said. “Not for Rick.”
“But for you,” Alice said, her voice strained.
Merrily had to look away from the raw ache on Alice’s face and the feeling in her own gut. Her mom would do anything for her, it was true. “I got the feeling she regretted giving Rick my number,” Merrily said to her toes. “If someone offered her the chance to kill him off to get him to stop texting me, she would have taken it.”
The silence was thick. Merrily looked up. “I didn’t mean really kill him. I meant, tell me he died in a fire to get out of having to deal with him.”
At everything she said, the other women exchanged glances. It was tiring.
“Where was this cemetery?” Alice asked.
They sat on the deck and compared notes. After a few minutes, Merrily knocked at the back door. When her mom opened it—after a brief delay, Merrily noticed, as though she hadn’t been right there watching them—she slid inside and reached for the drawer under the phone.
“What now?” her mom demanded.
“Looking for a pen that works,” she said. “And a notepad.”
Her mom brushed past her and opened a different drawer roughly. “Don’t bring those people inside the house.”
“What if they—”
“Make them go to the gas station, or home,” her mother spat. “It’s a long drive. She’s not welcome here.”
Merrily dug out a notepad and pen and returned to the deck, listening to the click of the lock behind her. She wondered if the inn was closed to her, as well. Disobedience punishable by withheld access to her clean clothes, her birthday cake.
Outside, Juby sat on the edge of the deck, hunched over her phone and swinging her brown legs in the sunshine. Alice sat at the café table on the deck, where Merrily and her mother often had dinner in warm weather. The umbrella hadn’t been put up yet, though. Maybe I should visit more often, she thought, remembering the ache on Alice’s face when they’d touched on the topic of mothers. She sometimes forgot how lucky she was to have a mom who would fight for her, who had fought for them when no one else would.
Merrily realized too late she should have brought out some cake. Maybe some lemonade. But then they’d have needed the gas station bathroom sooner, and she wasn’t ready for them to leave.
“We need a timeline,” the older woman said. “Juby, what’s our first dot on the map?”
Juby started to speak but Alice rushed in. “When did your mother date Rick, Merrily? Let’s start there.”
Merrily almost didn’t hear her. She was back in the kitchen, even as she sat in the chair next to Alice on the deck, the notebook and pen slipping from her hand, the idea of lemonade fading. Her mom had said—
“What?” Merrily said. But she wasn’t calculating the year she’d had a father figure. She was calculating which “she” her mother meant wasn’t allowed in the house. There were three women, and yet only one of them needed to get home, a long distance away. Merrily knew which one was meant, felt herself agreeing that Alice shouldn’t be allowed to get too comfortable here, shouldn’t be allowed to take everything she wanted without offering anything in return. Merrily thought of the box of mementos back at her apartment, like a nest of treasure she had made for herself. For herself, not these women.
But most of all Merrily wondered, before she settled in to share information: How had her mom known how far Alice was from home?