“It is. But you have to focus on what you want, not what’s right or principled. You don’t want to tell the kids yet what happened to you, but you don’t want the kids to find out from someone else. How do you best achieve that goal?”
“Maybe Walter wants money, cash to purchase some privilege or item he can’t afford on his own.”
“Maybe. But his friend Miss LaFortuny is well fixed, right? I think Walter would be offended if you offered him money.”
“Walter has no right to be offended by anything I do.”
“Agreed. Walter has no right to anything. And if you’re prepared to weather the consequences of ignoring him, I say go for it. If you’re ready to bring the kids down here and give them the PG-13 version of what happened to you when you were fifteen, I’ll back you up. We can even ask your parents to point us to some experts in the field, get their advice on how to talk about it. We always knew this day was going to come. We just didn’t expect Walter to be the one who forced the issue.”
“No,” Eliza said, nibbling at her biscuit, trying to make it last. “Albie can’t handle it, and Iso won’t be able to keep the secret if we tell just her.”
“Iso’s very good at keeping secrets. Too good, in my experience.”
“Her own,” Eliza said, thinking about her rifled purse. “Not anyone else’s. Besides, she might tell him in order to upset him.”
“Okay, that was one alternative. The other is to do nothing, and see what happens, which basically puts us at the mercy of Walter and the loose cannon that is Miss LaFortuny.”
Eliza grimaced. She disliked the woman and felt guilty about disliking someone ostensibly well intentioned. But there was something creepy about her.
“The final option is to let Walter have some sort of direct contact with you. A call, or a visit. Clearly, a letter didn’t satisfy him.”
The teakettle sang. It had belonged to Eliza’s mother and was an anachronistically silly item, emblematic of the late 1970s, an enamel kettle that was meant to resemble a puffer fish. Inez had decided she hated it soon after buying it. Eliza hated it, too, but she hadn’t been in any position to disdain her mother’s hand-me-downs when she and Peter started living together the final year of school. Now this fish had traveled with them from Wesleyan to Houston to London and back again to its home state of Maryland, earning Eliza’s affection on the basis of its sheer longevity, its staying power. Her kitchen held many of Inez’s castoffs-simple things, with no stories, no distinction-and she loved them all. Her mind cataloged them now, all those little relics of the house back in Roaring Springs-a particular mixing bowl, a bottle opener, a long spoon used to stir Sunshines. She had wept-wept-when a ceramic jar, used for holding kitchen utensils, had been misplaced during the move back to the States. Eventually it was found, unharmed, in a mislabeled box, and she had wept again with joy.
“A call,” she said. “I can handle a call. But it has to be understood that we will talk during school hours, only.”
“And do you think,” Peter asked, “that he’ll be satisfied, then, that you’ll have nothing to worry about?”
She chewed her cookie with unusual care. “Probably not.”
“Eliza-do I know everything about what happened?”
“No,” she told her husband. “But then-I’m not sure I do, either.”
20
“LOOK AT THAT GIRL, the shine on her,” Walter said.
Where were they? They were in Manassas, Virginia, on the outskirts, about as far east as they ever seemed to get. Walter’s path reminded her of the Spirograph she had owned as a little kid. They were traveling in a fixed circle, rotating according to a pattern that made sense to him, making great loops through western Virginia, western Maryland, and easternmost West Virginia. She wondered if he was circling his own hometown, if he was as homesick for his house and parents as she was. But he could go home anytime, couldn’t he? She refused to feel sorry for Walter in his home-sickness. It wasn’t the same as hers at all. He had freedom of movement. If she ever got away from him, she would make sure to-
“Go talk to her,” Walter said.
The girl was at a makeshift stand, filled with homemade jars of something. The sign promised that all proceeds would go to Darlene Fuchs, whoever she was.
“What?”
“Go talk to her. Make friends.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Sure you do.”
But she didn’t, not anymore, and she wouldn’t.
“I’ll do it,” Walter said angrily, downshifting into a lower gear and turning around. Elizabeth had been watching him drive, trying to figure out if she could ever take the truck, but the stick shift was baffling to her. She had sat in the backseat during Vonnie’s driving lessons and thought it looked easy, but both the family cars were automatics. And even Walter sometimes ground the gears on this old truck.
“Excuse me, miss?”
The girl-and Elizabeth could see instantly that she was a girl, not quite her age, although tall and shapely-had more than a shine on her. She was movie-star pretty, with hair worn long and straight, not the most current style, but becoming to her. Her eyes were sea green, a color made more vivid by the pale green oxford shirt she wore, a Ralph Lauren emblazoned with a tiny polo player. Elizabeth thought of that preppie style as played out, but it worked on this girl.
“Yes?” she said. Her voice was southern, although not like Walter’s. Different southern. Classy southern.
“I want to buy some clothes for my sister, but I don’t know this area very well and I just thought someone as well dressed as you might be able to help us out.”
She looked down at her own clothes as if she had forgotten what she was wearing, as if her perfect outfit was a lucky accident. Yet the oxford cloth shirt was paired with plaid Bermudas, which held hints of the same green. The arms of a pink sweater, picking up the other theme in the Bermudas, hugged her neck. She did not look like the sort of girl who sold jams and jellies on the roadside, on a pretty Saturday afternoon. She looked like someone who should be at the football game. A cheerleader. Or if not a cheerleader, someone with a boyfriend, or a gaggle of female friends, laughing in the stands. A long driveway rose behind her, going up and over a hill, no house in sight. A sign affixed to a post read T’N’T FARM. Elizabeth somehow knew it was not a real farm, but someplace very grand, a place that concealed its grandeur behind this silly name, which was just a sneaky way of being pretentious show-offs.
“I’m not sure I bought this around here, but if you go over to the mall-”
“How do we get there?”
“It’s not far. You just go up that way and make a left on-”
“But I’m not from here. Those names mean nothing to me. Is it on your way? Could you ride part of the way with us and show us? I’ll give you five dollars for your trouble.”
She shook her head.
“Five for you and ten for your cause. I bet that’s more money than you’ve raised so far today.”
Don’t, Elizabeth thought. Please don’t. But the girl had grabbed her little tin cash box and was climbing into the cab of the truck, into the space that Elizabeth made by jumping out and holding the door open for her. Elizabeth marveled at the way she left her little jars there, trusting that they would be there when she got back. Trusting that she would be back at all.
“Did you make those jellies yourself?” Elizabeth asked.
“Uh-huh. It’s green pepper jelly, from an old recipe in my mother’s family. My daddy told me that trying to sell green pepper jelly around here was coals to Newcastle, but I thought it was better than a car wash, or a bake sale.”
“Who’s Darlene Fuchs?”
“A girl in my grade, at Middleburg Middle.” So the girl was younger than she was, no more than fourteen. “She has Hodgkin’s lymphoma and her family doesn’t have any insurance.”