A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty (22 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Big

A YEAR AFTER Liza and Mosey came home, I caught sight of Lawrence when I was stocking up at the Sam’s Club in Gulfport. He was pushing a cart piled high with juice boxes and family-size frozen lasagnas. My feet stopped dead, but at the same time I felt my inside self leap forward, sweeping toward him like I was made of wind. Then I saw Sandy. She was ahead of him, letting the boys get sample sherbet at the end of a frozen-food aisle.

She looked tired, and I hated her because the tired didn’t stop her being pretty.

I barreled backward into Liza, practical y giving poor little Mosey whiplash as I jerked the cart out of sight, back into the cereal aisle.

“Big, what the hel ?” Liza said as I shoved the cart past her.

I didn’t even correct her for cussing in front of our preschooler. I trotted halfway down the aisle and started hurling box after box of Honey Nut Cheerios into the cart.

“Wannit,” Mosey said, reaching. Shades of baby Liza asking for the Gulf of Mexico, but then she smiled her sunny Mosey smile and said,

“Please!” while she opened and closed her starfish hands at me. The box had a maze on it that Buzz the Honey Bee had to navigate to get to a picture of a healthy breakfast. I handed her a box and dumped another in the cart.

Liza stayed at the mouth of the aisle, scanning, and then she turned toward me with the ghost of her old up-to-no-good smile growing. I owed the dentist a chunk, but it was worth it to see that smile again. She was close to getting her first-year pin from NA, and she’d bounced a long way back from the hard living she’d done on the road. The glow was returning to her pale gold skin, and her hair was thick and bright as new pennies. She came sauntering down the aisle to join me, hips swaying.

Mosey was absorbed in tracing Buzz’s route with her finger, and Liza leaned in close to me and murmured, “Yum. Two thumbs up. Who is he?” in a conspirator’s tone.

“Did you see the price on this?” I said, too loud, putting two more boxes in.

Liza’s lip quirked, and she whispered, mock pitiful and wheedling, “Talking about boys makes me want the meth less.”

My cheeks were so hot that I knew I must be glowing like cranberry glass. I fixed Liza with my sternest mother gaze and put two more boxes in. “A lot of things make you want the meth less. Borrowing my shoes, holding the remote, not doing the dishes.”

Liza laughed and nodded. “Yup. Is that his wife, and do you real y want al this bee cereal?”

“Yes,” I said, and began wheeling the cart away.

“Yes to wife or yes to bee cereal?”

“Yes to bee!” Mosey said, triumphantly lofting her box, and that, at last, shut Liza up. At least until we got home and Mosey was playing dol s in the den. Then Liza came into the kitchen where I was trying to figure out where to store fourteen boxes of Cheerios and leaned on the counter, ankles crossed.

When she spoke, it was like she was picking up in the middle of an old conversation, but it wasn’t one she’d had with me. “Couple weeks back I did some stuff with Denny Wilkerson.”

I stopped putting things away and wheeled to face her. Denny Wilkerson was over thirty years old, not to mention married. “What do you mean,

‘did some stuff’? How much stuff?”

“Not
all
the stuff,” Liza said. “But a lot of stuff. I needed something, you know? There’s al these things I’m not al owed to have.”

“Yes, and he is one of them,” I said, fierce.

“Exactly. Something I can’t have. But not the worst thing on the list.” She was meeting my eyes dead-on, confessional but not al that sorry. She looked so young, and I wanted to take her by her stil -frail shoulders and shake her until some sense got in. Her honesty was a mother trap, catching me wanting her to be able to talk to me, and yet, Lordy, never wanting to hear about her climbing on Denny Wilkerson looking for something to fil up the hole she had inside of her. I counted ten in my head, reminding myself that I’d helped to make that hole. She’d grown up with no father, no grandparents or cousins or kindly aunties, no community of wacky, warm, closer-than-family friends that people on TV seem to find so easily. No church, and in smal -town Mississippi that had surely limited her social life. Al she’d had was me, too young and dumb to know how to discipline her. I didn’t even know where to look for support. Not that I would have. I’d been too busy proving to my parents I could do it al on my own, so busy I hadn’t even noticed they weren’t watching.

When I thought I could answer in a quiet, calm way, I said, “If you need something, go to a meeting. Cal me, or cal your sponsor.”

She shot me an impatient look, like I’d completely missed the point. “I’m tel ing you that whatever you did with Mr. Sam’s Club, it happened. You could talk to me. I’d get it. I’m the last person who would judge you.”

Al at once I could feel a headache coming on. “Are you trying to have girl talk? About Denny and—Liza. No. That man in the Sam’s Club, it was not like that.”

“So you’re saying that wasn’t Mrs. Sam’s Club and her cubs?” she scoffed.

“It’s too much to get into, but trust me, it was not the same thing as you canoodling with Denny Wilkerson.”

She bounced away from the counter and planted her feet, her jaw set. “It never is, if you do it. Stop treating me like I’m some kid having sandbox adultery, while you have a complicated, grown-up kind I wouldn’t understand,” she said, and while her words were hideously convicting, her voice was pouty as any thwarted child’s.

“I’l stop treating you like a kid when you grow up, Little,” I said, gentle as I could.

Her lip curled. “God. Do you ever get a day off from al this Big shit? This constant mommism? Do you ever get to be a human?”

“No, sweetheart. No, and you don’t get to either. Not anymore. You want Mosey running around ‘doing stuff’ with guys your age in a few years, daddy hunting? I’m tel ing you, Liza, if it takes a vil age, we are screwed, because we don’t have one. We have us. We have to do better for her than I did for you.” Liza started stomping away, and I cal ed after her, “That means staying out of Denny Wilkerson’s truck, Little.”

She paused long enough to say, “No worries. I have plans to run around the house with a stick in my mouth al day, so I won’t have time for screwing any father figures.” Then she was gone.

We had to eat that stupid cereal for a month, but good kept growing out of that bad day; back then, Liza had taken my words to heart. I don’t know what-al trouble she got up to with the fel ows. Plenty, I’m sure. But she kept it down low and away from Mosey. Now the memory of that day was paying off again. It made me understand I had to take her with me to see Lawrence.

I planned to go on Saturday. Most of Lawrence’s Sundays were eaten up by church things, and on Monday, at the latest, I’d have to cal Rick Warfield back and schedule a time when he could come by and question Liza. He’d left another message, stil sounding friendly and patient, but if I didn’t cal him back soon, he’d start to wonder if I wasn’t avoiding him on purpose. Which of course I was. I had to talk to Lawrence before Rick came, had to know what Rick was thinking. The only problem was, Mosey had invited her friend Raymond Knotwood over on Saturday.

Mosey wasn’t al owed to have boys over without either me or Liza home, but I’d decided to bend the rule. Just for this one day, and for this particular boy. Sure, Raymond had grown up a lot in the last year—the top of his head almost reached Mosey’s eyebal s now—but he was stil pale and gangly and about as seductive as a teenage Spock. The Leonard Nimoy one, not the new hot Spock they’d sexed up for the movie reboot.

I knew I’d made the right cal when I looked at myself in the mirror that morning. I hadn’t dressed myself so careful in a decade, and I felt a breathless press on my chest, like I was heading toward Christmas or kissing or both. My eyes were overbright. I said to the pink-cheeked woman in the mirror, “You are an idiot.” I was going there to use him, not to get myself good and used. I’d been tel ing myself I was bringing Liza because an afternoon in the pool with Sandy had lit up al the darkened corners of her brain, and so it fol owed that a morning with my ex-man himself ought to flash even brighter. That was true. However, it was also true that today I needed a chaperone more than Mosey did.

I poked my head in the den where Mosey was watching
Mythbusters
.

“Mosey? You and Raymond stay in the den or the kitchen, you hear me? He is not al owed to hang back in your room.”

Mosey rol ed her eyes like that was the stupidest thing any stupid person on the planet had ever said out loud. Her gaze slid right over me, ful of snit, and she didn’t even notice I’d put on mascara and blown out my hair to supposedly go to the grocery. I got out the door with Liza while the getting was good.

Liza was moving faster in that walker. She inched her way to the car, internal y bright and interested. As soon as she was buckled in, I popped open my old flip phone. I’d waited to the last second, but I had to cal now. I didn’t want to find myself living the sequel to
A Nightmare on Sandy
Street
. I imagined what it would be like to show up at his place and find it empty. Or worse, what if he wasn’t alone? I pictured a sleepy, hot thirty-something in underpants and one of his T-shirts peeking through the door to tel me he was in the shower, asking did I want her to pass on a message.

I’d put Lawrence’s number in my phone when I’d looked up his new address on the bank’s computer yesterday at work. It rang four times before he picked up. I could tel he’d been sleeping by the way he answered, his voice a cracky, deep rumble in his chest. The sound of him made my stomach drop as if gravity had suddenly decided to stop working.

“Are you by yourself?” I asked. It came out a little too husky for my liking.

I heard him breathe in sharp, and it sounded like he’d sat up in the bed. When he spoke next, he sounded like he’d gone from zero to wide awake in less than a second. “Ginny?”

“I said, are you home by yourself?”

“Yes. What—”

I interrupted him. “Wel . Stay put. I’l be there in twenty minutes.”

I flipped my phone closed before he could answer. It had been so long. Almost twelve years since we had so much as exchanged hel os, and yet my hands were shaking. I’d dated a few men after him, but no one that could get him out of my head enough for me to take them serious. If hearing his voice hit me this hard, then bringing Liza was an act of pure genius.

As I got in my car and backed out of our driveway, Raymond Knotwood’s dowdy black wagon was pul ing up to the curb. I lifted my hand in a wave, and he gave me that egg-sucking dog smile of his.

“I’m pretty sure that kid is evil,” I said to Liza.

She muttered something that sounded a lot like “gladiola” back.

“What?” I said. Whatever it was, it was responsive, and yet another new word. I asked again, more eagerly, “What did you say?”

She waved her good hand at the road, impatient to be going. So was I, truth be told, and so I took gladiola as a good sign and drove.

Lawrence’s new apartment was on our side of Moss Point instead of the Pascagoula side, so it didn’t take long to get there. He was living in a large complex, very depressing, I thought, a host of rectangular buildings painted the same split-pea-soup color, with fake shutters glued beside the windows. Lawrence lived near the back, on the first floor right near the Dumpsters.

His door opened while we were coming up the walk, like he’d been watching for me, and he must have gotten off the phone and jumped straight in the shower—his hair was wet and slicked back off his face. His hairline had moved an inch or so higher than where it used to sit. His eyes had gone creasier around the corners, too, but the lines around his mouth looked the same, as if he hadn’t been smiling very much. He was a little thicker in the middle, but his shoulders had that broad, easy set I remembered.

I was wondering what he thought about the miles I’d put on me. I’d dug out my old chocolate-and-gold wrap dress from the back of my closet.

He’d always liked me in it, and I’d been pleased at how wel it stil fit me.

“Hey, Ginny,” he said, stepping out to meet us.

“Hey, yourself,” I said.

“You must be Liza,” he said, and he said it right to her, looking into her half-lovely face. He rested his hand over hers on the walker for a moment, not at al awkward, like it was a regular way to do a handshake. He’d always been smooth, but this was too smooth, unless he already knew about the stroke. Moss Point and Immita were different worlds. It wasn’t like he and I ran in any of the same circles. If he knew, then he’d been keeping up with me from afar, on purpose.

Liza was eating him up with her eyes, and she leaned in toward him and said, “Yes.” Not her old noise that meant yes, but a slurry-
s
’d version of the real, actual word. Yes and a word like gladiola; every little step forward like this felt to me like the pointy tip of a miracle.

“Come on in,” he said, and swung his door wide for us.

His front room was big, but it had only a stripe of a kitchen, open to his living room with a breakfast bar running in between. There was a little TV

on the bar, tuned to CNN with the volume on low. The back wal had two doors, one open to show a half bath and the other closed. The wal s were plain white, and he hadn’t hung anything on them. There were only a few pieces of furniture: a couch, a coffee table, a bookshelf, the bar stools. It al looked like the cheap stuff they have for dorm rooms in the IKEA catalog. I didn’t recognize a single thing from his old house except some of the books lining his pinewood shelves. He liked the same kind of reads I did, ful of lawyers and cops and private detectives.

“You want coffee? I’m having coffee.” He walked away past us and picked his mug up off the counter. It was plain and white, probably from IKEA, too.

“You didn’t take anything from the…your…” I petered out, uncertain how to say it. The room was so ful of elephants I didn’t even know a single word I could say that wouldn’t jostle us into one of them. Final y I said, “Sandy’s house.”