The McDonald’s in Lake Forest was like no McDonald’s anywhere else. No golden arches. No tacky plastic. A marble fireplace. Nice furniture. Classical music on the sound system. It was as if they had gone to dinner in a strange world parallel to the one in which they lived, not that the one in which they lived hadn’t gotten strange enough lately.
Throughout dinner, Twyla was Twyla, at least to the casual eye and ear. Mother didn’t seem to notice anything wrong with her older daughter, but Jolie was aware of subtle differences between this girl and the sister with whom she’d grown up. This Twyla wasn’t as witty, wasn’t as lighthearted, wasn’t as present.
A few times during dinner, Jolie nearly blurted out, Mother, can’t you tell she’s gone blurry at the edges, she’s on drugs, she injects herself? We need to have an intervention right now.
But she didn’t do it, and she didn’t know why she didn’t do it until they ordered dessert, when she realized that she owed Twyla a frank one-on-one before going to their mother. They’d been as close as muffins in a basket until Twyla went off to college, and even after that, when they saw each other, it was as if no time passed since their last get-together. Until now. Maybe Twyla could explain herself. Fat chance. There were no good reasons for addiction, only justifications. That’s what Daddy said. Still, she owed Twyla some consideration before blowing the whistle on her.
It wasn’t a good night for family drama and the sleeplessness that would follow a confrontation. They needed to rise early in the morning. Mother and Daddy had talked on their disposable phones. He wanted them to drive to Indianapolis, which would take maybe three and a half hours if they got out ahead of the Chicago morning rush. Mother was supposed to call Daddy when they were in Indianapolis, as soon as they transitioned from I-65 to I-465. By then he would know where they should go for someone to meet them. Not Daddy. Someone Daddy trusted. It was all über-mysterious, but then what wasn’t these days? Maybe it was better to postpone confronting Twyla until the whole family could be together again.
While Twyla waited for their dessert, Mother wondered if the restrooms were as different from other McDonald’s restrooms as everything else was different, and Jolie wondered, too, so they went to have a look. Jolie hoped there would be something in the women’s room to lighten her mood—such as an open sterling-silver box worth ten thousand dollars in which paper towels were stacked, bearing Ronald McDonald’s initials—but it wasn’t radically different from other McDonald’s restrooms, at least not in any way that elicited a laugh.
After they ate dessert, Mother was paying the check when Jolie suddenly realized that the drugs she’d seen in her sister’s suitcase might not be drugs. Well, they were certainly drugs, but they might be prescription drugs and entirely legitimate. Twyla might have a serious health problem that required her to self-inject an exotic medication that had to be kept chilled in a dry-ice case. Jolie’s heart sank, it really did, like a stone in her breast, at the thought that Twyla might be terminal or, if not terminal, stricken with some terrible ailment that would profoundly affect her life.
Because they needed their sleep, there would be no confrontation tonight, but Jolie could perhaps probe subtly, ask a few innocuous questions, and see how Twyla reacted. If she didn’t do at least that much, if she didn’t get some sense of whether her sister’s condition was serious or not, she wouldn’t sleep anyway.