SUSAN FOLLOWED her husband’s car into the small gravel parking lot behind Lois’s shop. It had to be after five, and there Marianne stood under the fire escape locking up the back door. She wore a pressed blouse and skirt, and she turned at the sound of both cars and looked tired until she saw Lois’s VW. She smiled and waved but appeared confused when Susan waved back. Then she seemed to see Lois sitting next to Bobby in his Kia, and Marianne stood there and waited, her purse and keys in one hand, her other smoothing her skirt.
Lois’s door opened first. She grasped Bobby’s roof and pulled herself up and out, her eyes on Susan for only a moment before she turned and jerked out her pocketbook and slammed the door and marched behind Bobby’s car to her only friend and employee. Bobby was out now too. He glanced over at Susan and raised his eyebrows, smiling sideways at her the way he did in the face of the indecipherable, which was what he believed life was anyway and baby, just accept it and ride it out and don’t try to shape it too much.
She felt queasy again. Following Bobby’s car down Pinellas, she’d looked for Gustavo’s old house, but it was gone. A swirl of ragged heat was gathering in her belly, and she needed a cold Coke.
You’re the smart one, aren’t you? I’m just the old woman who gave you her entire lifes.
And what did he do? Her “father”?
Did she really need to see him enough to hurt Noni this much?
Now Lois was whisking her hand at Marianne to unlock the shop’s door, and Bobby was looking out over the lot to Susan. He winked at her like she should come inside for a minute, but she didn’t want to go inside that dark morgue. She wanted to go back home and go to bed. She wanted to curl up and sleep. Sleep until everything had blown over. Lois’s hurt and predictable rage. The echoes of her father’s letter, the echo that he’d tried to find her, too. He said he’d taken a bus as far south as Georgia but then changed his mind because he didn’t want to “bother” her. Well, he was sure bothering her now, wasn’t he? And weren’t these just words? And crazy words, at that? Comic-book-character references and third-person references to himself and never, it hit her now, never one word or phrase of atonement. The closest he came to this was his writing that he had no right to call her his dear daughter. And later in the letter was him saying that Danny got everything he deserved and more. But never, never one apology.
Bobby was following Marianne and Lois into the shop. It was like watching something essential slip away, and Susan climbed out of Lois’s VW and yelled, “Bobby! We need to go! We need to go right now!” Her voice and tone was Lois’s. Wasn’t that funny? She sounded just like her grandmother.