69

BOBBY WAS talking. There was acceleration and there was braking, there was the car turning left then left again, and there was his voice in the air like a bird flapping itself over the front and backseats. Like a fluttering madness. Like an unleashed sickness. But the madness and sickness were hers. Her husband was saying something about her father not being a registered guest, about how “wild” it was they’d parked right next to his “vehicle,” another word she’d never heard him use before, his voice as impassioned now as when he’d first sautéed spinach for her in hot olive oil in his red kitchen, when he’d smiled sideways at her and told her all about the genius of Coleman dispensing with recurring chords altogether, that nothing has to have a shape and form, that nothing comes back to where it started.

Except he was wrong. She’d seen her father, and now, as she lay back in her seat, one arm across her forehead, she was small again, riding on his shoulders through all the loud bright magic that smelled like ketchup and cotton candy, like cigarette smoke and dead seaweed and fried dough. There was how she never wanted to let go of him. Ever. And there was how she wanted to run. His screaming. His loud voice when he yelled at—who?

Mommy. Mommy, look!

Her mother’s face. Her beautiful mother’s face, her eyes narrowing into slits. “Get away from me!” And she picked Susan up and carried her fast down the street and Susan only wanted to go back because—

—because she’d loved him. She did. And he had not recognized her. He did not know her and he never would, and her mouth tasted like bitterness itself, the back of her teeth dry with bile, and Bobby’s big hand was on her knee now, the bird and car slowing as he drove up their street. “That’s the same truck, baby. That’s his truck.”

It was. Bobby’s lights were on it, and Susan could see the rust on the rear bumper, the dusty letters and numbers of a Massachusetts license plate. And there was the back of his head and shoulders in the driver’s seat, too. Jesus Christ, her father’s shoulders. Her father’s big hands and his fucking letter. I don’t want to bother you now but I’m coming to see you in a few days just this one time and I hope that’s all right with you.

No! It is not all right. It is not.

“Stop, Bobby. Stop.”

“Baby—”

“I said fucking stop!”

Her husband began to pull over and she had her door open and her leg out before the road stopped moving beneath her foot. Then she was up and out and walking onto grass then back into the street, her father’s small pickup truck in the bright lights of her husband’s car.

“Susan, wait.”

She kept her eyes on the back of her father’s head through the truck cab’s rear window, his big nearly bald head. Her legs and arms were water, her mouth ash, each step she took a wave rolling her into whatever was coming which was her father’s truck door opening and him rising slowly and turning into the light. This old man. This old man in a wrinkled suit and worn work boots, reading glasses hanging from his neck, his eyes close together and his ears sticking out. He was blinking into the glare of Bobby’s headlights like some night animal flushed out of the brush, and it was seeing the soft black guts of her shame itself; her very shame was standing there and calling her name, saying, “Susan? Suzie, is that you?”