SITTING IN the passenger’s seat of her own moving car, Lois stared out at fields of palmetto scrub under a sky the color of urine. Susan had tuned the radio to a news station, the kind at the lower end of FM where all the broadcasters sounded like college professors, and Lois never listened to it because she felt talked down to, but it was better than sitting in this quiet car because neither of them had said one word to the other since St. Petersburg. It was Lois who got in the last one. “If you won’t think of me, then think of your mother, Susan. Think about her.”
No, it was Susan, because she said, “I can’t believe you just said that.” She shook her head, her eyes on the road, and she looked like she was going to say more, but she did not. Now the air had grown thick and still. In her side-view mirror, Lois could see Bobby’s black Kia following them, Susan’s husband sitting so tall behind the wheel. It was Lois’s idea to go back home, but being driven and escorted like this made her feel like a child who’d broken the rules, and there was another feeling too, that what she’d worked so hard for since she was a young woman was slipping away, that Susan would do just what she wanted to whether Lois liked it or not, and you know what? So be it. Lois was too damned old and too damned tired to fight any longer. So damn be it.
“I give up.”
“What?” The radio broadcaster was saying something about Syria. Susan turned him down. “What did you say, Lois?”
“So now I’m Lois. When I’m not trying to ”control’ you, I’m Noni, but the rest of the time I’m Lois. Nice. I said I give up.”
Susan glanced over at her. In the late afternoon light, after this day of rain and sun, Susan’s skin looked sallow, and Lois almost wanted to take back what she just said. The man on the radio said ISIS, and Susan turned him off. “Give up what?”
“Worrying about you, that’s what. What do you think?”
That came out harder than Lois meant it to. She looked straight ahead at the rushing hot-top road that led back to her old town and old shop full of old things. She hoped Marianne would still be there. She wanted to apologize to her for having been so short with her at the hospital, and she hoped Marianne would be up for a drink and a bite somewhere because Lois needed to talk. She needed to tell her that the murderer of her child had sent her granddaughter a letter. That he was coming to see her.
“It hasn’t always felt like that, you know.” Susan said this with her eyes on the road, both hands on the wheel. Lois was about to ask her how the hell she would know what her worrying felt like, but Susan said, “I’ve always felt like part of you hated me, Noni.”
“Oh, Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—”
“No, it’s true. And then when you told me about my parents everything started to make sense to me.”
“How can you even say that?”
Susan looked over at her. Her eyes were dark, and her lips were parted like whatever she was about to say next was coming to her right now, and she was being made small and quiet in the face of it. “Because half of me came from him.”
Lois’s cheeks began to burn. She had to look back out at the fields. In the distance a lone white farmhouse was surrounded by five or six live oaks, Spanish moss hanging from their branches like a lingering sickness that would never go away. Lois made herself swallow. She made herself turn to her granddaughter and say, “If you don’t know what I feel for you, then I don’t even know what.” But Lois felt like part of her was holding something back, that part of her was lying.
“See? You can’t even say it, Noni. Because you know I’m right.”
“Oh, yes, Suzie, you’re always right, aren’t you? Miss High-and-Mighty reading all her damn books. Miss College Professor. You’re the smart one, aren’t you? I’m just the old woman who gave you her entire life. Pull over, I want to drive with Bobby.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Susan. Pull over right this damn minute.”
Her granddaughter stared at her like she was a crazy woman, and maybe she was, but she was not going to sit in her own car any longer being told what she did and did not feel.
“Fine.” Susan drove onto the gravel too fast, small rocks pinging under Lois’s car like bullets.