7

BOBBY WAS leaning against the stove in one of his faded Hawaiian shirts. He held an empty coffee cup in his hand and still hadn’t shaved. It was midafternoon, and the gray light coming in from the window made his skin bluish. He looked pathetic to her. God, what was she doing? But wasn’t this a good sign? That she was starting to care again?

“I’m afraid you won’t come back.” He smiled down at her and shook his head and she stepped to him and he hugged her too hard for too long, his cup clattering to the floor. The skin of his neck smelled vaguely sweet, like fruit right before it starts to turn. It was a scent that had never pulled her closer to him or pushed her away, either, and there was the floating sense that she was watching this moment rather than living it. She pulled back, but her husband’s big hands were still on her hips. He was staring at her shorn hair. “My muskrat.”

She kissed his cheek. She grabbed her computer bag and stepped through the open doorway, the smells of dried palm fronds in the air, her tall, stoop-shouldered husband standing on the threshold, watching her walk quickly to her car.

Soon she was driving onto the Skyway Bridge, Tampa Bay stretched out to her left and right. A freighter ship was moving slowly out to sea, its cargo containers yellow-and-rust-colored under the sun. There were Lois’s words to her. This is your home. But leaving her husband behind, driving toward the floodplains and cattle country of Arcadia, her laptop zipped up in its case in the backseat, it was as if Susan were on that freighter ship herself, curled up in the dark in a steel container heading who knows where. But at least she wasn’t giving in this time. At least she was trying to do something about it.

SUSAN SAT on the top step of her grandmother’s front porch, waiting for her. It was close to five but still hot, the air heavy with the smells of dead pine needles and the long dirt driveway she’d steered down nearly thirty minutes ago. She was sweating and wished she hadn’t worn jeans and, of course, the front door was locked, as was the one to the back screened porch. When she’d checked it a few minutes ago, she was tempted to walk down through the pine and oak trees to the clay banks of Bone River, but there was that cottonmouth she’d written about yesterday morning, the ghost of her fifteen-year-old self dropping her smoking cigarette and running barefoot back home.

Home. It had never really felt like that to her. Living with her grandmother in this glorified camp in the woods from twelve to eighteen had felt strangely temporary, as if they were both on the run and it was only a matter of time before they would get caught.

She should write that down. She’d pulled her Honda up onto the grass to give Lois her parking space, and now Susan leaned into it and pulled her notepad and pencil off the passenger’s seat. She drank warm water from a plastic bottle, the taste of it like the bottle itself. She flipped the pad to the notes she’d already begun to take, impressions, really.

•  the high school is the same yellow brick and looks like a prison

•  the Taco Bell is now a Lowe’s. All the palm and acacia trees are gone

•  Gustavo’s old house is just a field of weeds behind a rusted chain-link fence. Half of it is leaning toward the ground like a car drove into it and drove off

•  The citrus workers’ houses still look like shit, though some of them don’t

•  The Bone River Campgrounds? Doing it w/Gustavo in his car? Getting caught by Lois

•  The orange and lemon groves stretching out around this shit town on all sides? How beauty is free unless you can’t see it? I could see beauty, but I always felt so trapped.

•  By Noni? Yes. And by my enemy.

•  Books helped. Books always helped

Susan wrote: Living with Noni felt like living on the run. No, not on the run. In exile. Like we’d both been exiled.

Susan set her notepad back on the passenger’s seat. She needed to pee. Some kind of bird shrieked out in the woods behind the house. If Lois didn’t turn down that driveway soon, she was going to call her. No, she shouldn’t be too pushy or expectant in any way. With Lois it was best to lie low and let her direct things. It’s what Lois did. It’s what she always did best.