The line was silent. She understood he was waiting her out.
“C’mon,” he said. “We can cheer each other up. You’re ready to go, we’re outta there.”
She leaned against the wall, wedging the receiver between her ear and the plaster. “All right,” she said. “I won’t be ready till the last minute.”
While she spoke she wrote notes to herself on the TO DO pad stuck to the refrigerator:
Coward
Asshole
Liar
“Be over in a hour,” Bruno said. He got off.
Despite the half-makeup job, she thought she’d better shower. Todd was finished and thumping around his room. She took a shower. He’d gotten water everywhere. When she got out, feeling a little better, he was in the kitchen, buttering a bagel. She sat at the kitchen table, her hair still wet, and combed it out. He brought over the two bagel halves and gave her the bottom. Recently he’d started keeping the best part of the food they shared for himself, as if life without his father made him selfish.
He put marmalade on his half. His face was closed off and concentrating, as if he was counting to himself.
She pulled at a knot in her hair. She had a headache. She thought, Is this what it’s going to be like from here on in?
“Do you know where Dad might be now?” he said. His lips were chapped and his wet hair looked like a modified punk haircut.
“You mean what city?” she asked.
“Where he is, what city,” he said. She could hear the weariness in his voice.
“I know as much as you,” she said. “Last I heard, he was heading somewhere in Washington. He never said what city.”
Todd tore off some bagel and chewed while squinting at the kitchen window. It was gray out.
“No guarantee he ever got to Washington,” she said.
A sports merchandising catalogue was on the floor under the window, swollen and frilled from having been rained on. She could see the circled Minnesota Viking helmet from there.
“You thinking of telling him about what happened?” she asked.
He shrugged.
She got up and went into the downstairs bathroom. While she dried her hair and put on makeup, she tried to think of what to say.
When she came out, he was gone.
She put the dishes in the sink. She got dressed.
She heard him in the living room. She stood on one leg, wrestling with the heel of one of her flats, and peeked in.
He sat on the sofa, bending a spoon into odd shapes. He had the TV on. She couldn’t tell what he was watching. It looked like a nature show on rodents. Brown things (beavers? woodchucks?) were rooting around a riverbank.
“You gonna be all right?” she asked. It sounded like she meant, You gonna tell? She felt, suddenly, like an old guard at a tired museum.
“Yeah,” he said. He didn’t look up. He had the spoon in an S shape.
She heard Bruno’s car in the driveway. She said she’d be back soon and headed out the door. It looked like rain. She grabbed a folding umbrella leaning against the wall near the dog’s dish.
The dog was sitting there when she opened the door.
“How long was Sewer Mouth out?” Bruno called, getting out of his car. He’d pulled up on the grass next to the garage instead of parking in the driveway. “All night, I hope?”
“I just let her out,” Joanie said. She moved aside to let the dog through and then shut the door behind her.
He watched her walk toward him. “Kid sick?” he asked.
“He’s got a fever,” she said. She ran a hand through her hair. “What’d you park there for?”
“He looks all right,” Bruno said. He gestured up at Todd’s second-floor window. Todd was looking down at them.
She could feel herself blush. “What’re you supposed to see, fever germs?” she asked. “You ready?”
“You look like you got a fever yourself,” he said.
She came around the back of his car and opened the passenger door.
“Can we take your car?” he asked. “Mine’s fucked up.”
“Why? How?” She hung on the door handle like there was a strong wind.
“How do I know how? It stalled four times comin’ over here. Is there a problem?”
“No problem,” she said. She turned toward the garage. She felt as if she could not sound, or be, less convincing.
She edged past all the junk inside the garage on the driver’s side and opened the door.
Bruno was still outside.
“Well, let’s go,” she said.
“Back it out,” he said. “What am I, gonna squeeze by all that shit?”
She tried to keep her eyes away from the front fender. She got in. All the coffee she’d had came back now, thrumming around inside her. She started the car. It died. She started it again. It died again.
“What is it, going around from car to car? Pop the hood,” Bruno said. He came into the garage and edged down the passenger side, his hands on the car body, leaning away from the wall to protect his suit. Shovels and hoes hung on nails, blades outward.
Please please please, she thought. She twisted the ignition once more. The engine turned over.
Bruno stopped, then opened the passenger door as far as he could and wedged his way in.
“Jesus God,” he said as a general complaint. She murmured in agreement.
She backed down the driveway, a little fast, she thought. She slowed for the main street. Bruno sighed.
“Things are getting worse and worse,” she said. She wasn’t even sure how she’d explain the comment if he asked.
“Tell me,” he agreed.
She was sweating. She rolled down the window. She thought about where she’d park at the church to hide the front end.
“So how you been?” Bruno asked. He put his arm across the seat and spread out. He loosened his collar. “You been okay?”
“I been okay,” Joanie said. She peered ahead like the visibility was bad.
“You talk to the police yet?” he asked.
She took a curve a little wide and overcorrected. “Talk to the police?” she said. “Why would I talk to the police?”
He shrugged and looked back at the road. “Just wondering,” he said.
They passed a sign on the side of a parked panel truck: REMEMBER: BEHIND A ROLLING BALL COMES A RUNNING CHILD. It was illustrated with one of those moment-before-the-disaster tableaux: a kid, a red ball, a nonalert motorist.
“J’ou go home One-ten the night of the confirmation party?” he asked.
She looked over at him. He was looking out the window. “I mighta,” she said. Her underarms were instantly wet. She was sweating at her hairline, too. “I think I did,” she said.
“Yeah, I told the police that,” he said. He was still looking out the window. They headed up onto the Devon bridge, and he was looking upriver toward the I-95 overpass. “They’ll probably come talk to you pretty soon.”
It took her a minute to get hold of herself. She stopped at a light on the other side of the bridge and put her turn signal on. “Thanks a lot,” she said. “Just what I need.”
“Yeah. Really,” he said.
They got going again. She didn’t know whether to ask questions or not.
“Hot in here,” Bruno said.
She reached awkwardly behind her with one hand and cranked the back window down as best she could. Her arm hurt from the angle and the vehemence of her cranking.
They rode along. She couldn’t decide what to say.
“You see anything that night, driving home?” Bruno asked. “A car? Anything?”
She made a show of thinking about it. “No, I didn’t,” she said.
He made a “that’s-too-bad” face.
“Do they think he was robbed, or something?” she blurted. She had no idea if what she was saying was disastrous, but she had to say something. “Did they find anything missing?”