Abby looked at Susan, who nodded to confirm it.
“I don’t think he recognized me,” she said. “But I’m positive it was him.”
For half a second, Abby thought she might get away with saying, “So what? It’s not like I care.” But in the next half of that second, she felt herself slipping down to sit on the kitchen floor, and she heard her own voice whisper, “Shit.”
Almost before she knew it, they were all down on the floor with her, sprawled out on the linoleum, or sitting cross-legged, passing around glasses, with the pitcher of iced margaritas in the middle of their circle.
Even the birds joined them, taking up perches on the friends.
“Why?” Abby asked them. “He didn’t even come back for his own mother’s funeral, so why would he come back now?”
They all shrugged and looked helpless.
“Guilty conscience,” Cerule suggested tartly.
“Better late than never,” Randie sneered.
“I don’t want to see him!” Abby wailed at them.
“Hell, nobody wants to see him,” Randie said. “Fuck him and the horse he rode out on.”
“I want to see him,” Cerule admitted, but then added hastily, “but only from a distance. I just want to know what he looks like after all these years. I hope he’s blotchy, bald, and a hundred pounds overweight.” She looked over at Susan. “Is he, Susan? Is he fat and blotchy and ugly?”
The funeral director looked down at her drink. “Well. Not exactly.”
“Well, shoot,” Cerule said. “It’s not bad enough that he’s back, but he has to still be gorgeous, too?”
“ ’Fraid so,” Susan said, with a sigh.
“Why should I care?” Abby said, her voice rising on the last word. “It’s been years!”
“You don’t care,” Randie said stoutly. “You’re just surprised, that’s all.”
Abby gave her a weak smile. “Nice try.”
Suddenly Ellen got to her feet and made an announcement. “I think this calls for a large pizza with everything on it.”
“But what about dinner with the family?” Abby asked her.
“This is family, too,” Ellen informed her. “And this is a family emergency if I ever saw one. Emergencies call for pizza.”
Cerule joined her in standing up. “And chocolate ice cream.”
“Gross,” said Randie, also getting up, “but delicious.”
“Can’t we just stay here and drink?” Abby whined, but they wouldn’t let her sit still. Having emptied one pitcher of margaritas between them, they cleaned up her kitchen, secured the birds in the big cage, and then piled into Ellen’s car, because she’d taken only a couple of sips of the alcohol.
At a sedate pace befitting the mayor of Small Plains, they drove into town for supper.
To the west, towering white cumulus clouds were building higher and higher in the muggy air of the early evening. Behind the white clouds, there were other clouds that were turning to gray tinged with black. Even as the friends traveled down the highway, the atmosphere around them seemed to thicken, to get hotter and stickier, as if it were August instead of May.
But the friends weren’t paying any attention to the weather.
As they drew closer to town, Abby realized what they were all trying to hide from one another and especially from her. Every one of them, including herself, was sneaking peeks at the cars and people they passed on the streets, looking for him. She wanted to say, “Stop it!” She wanted to roll down a window and scream, “Go back the hell where you came from!” She wanted to whisper, Why did you leave me?
When they drove by the cemetery Cerule suddenly said, “Hey, Susan, is the Virgin only supposed to cure people? Do you think she ever gives people bad luck?”
From the front seat, Susan said, “I don’t know. Why ask me?”
Cerule raised a sardonic eyebrow. “ ’Cause, next time you’re at the cemetery? See if you can get the Virgin to give Mitch Newquist the plague.”
Chapter Nineteen
“You ever seen the jails in Douglas or Johnson County, Sheriff?”
“I have,” Rex answered Deputy Marvel, who walked in front of him down a short row of traditional cells with bars. The air was so heavy that the ancient central air conditioning was laboring like some kind of mechanical behemoth, noisy and distracting. Rex said, “Are you telling me you’re jealous?”
“Man, they’re like state-of-the-art, sir.”
“Not like this, you’re saying?”
They stopped in front of a particular cell, where an inmate in an orange jumpsuit sat on a single bed attached to a wall, looking out at them. Rex detected curiosity, but no fear in the eyes, a fact that suggested to him that his deputies were not abusing their positions. Or, at least this deputy didn’t do that, and he, himself, had no reputation for it. He wondered how much tougher he would have to act if he reigned over a more populated, more violent kind of county. It was something he was probably never going to have to find out. In the meantime, he and his few deputies and their few “guests,” would continue to co-exist in their dim, confined, separated world.
“At the Douglas County Jail,” Marvel said, conversationally including the inmate by making eye contact with him as well as with Rex, “this kind of section looks like a hospital emergency room, instead of a jail, you know? The central command post looks like a nurses’ station, every inmate’s got a private room with a door with a window in it, and it’s all clean enough to eat off the floor.”
They all looked instinctively at the ancient cement floor of the cell, with a drain in the center of it.
“We could use more taxpayers,” Marvel observed.
“Yeah, but then we’d get more crime,” Rex countered.
“And a worse class of criminals,” the man in the cell contributed, with a grin that revealed a lifetime of inadequate dental care.
“I wouldn’t say that,” the deputy joked, opening the cell door.
He stood aside, wiping his sweating forehead with the back of one arm.
Rex stepped inside, allowing Marvel to lock it behind him and then hand him the keys.
“Did Abby Reynolds convince you?” the deputy asked him.
“Of what?” Rex said.
“To reopen that-”
“No!” Rex thundered, before the man could say anything more.
Marvel raised his eyebrows, exchanged a glance with the prisoner, and said, “Okey-dokey.”
He walked off, whistling, down the long corridor.
“Nothing scarier than a cranky lawman,” said the man in the cell.
“Best not to annoy us then,” Rex snapped, before taking a breath to calm himself.
Careful to keep his own shirt and trousers clean, he picked a spot to stand that was close to, but not touching, the dampish cement wall opposite the jailed man. On hot humid evenings like this, the place smelled like a cellar.
Rex would have been tempted to think of the inmate’s presence here, at this time, as a remarkable coincidence, if it were not for the fact that the man had been a fairly frequent “guest” over the years.
“I’m gonna stop drinking,” the man announced, seemingly out of the blue.
“Worth considering,” Rex agreed, poker-faced. “When did you start?”
“Drinking?” The man raised his face toward the ceiling and squinted at the lightbulb in it. “I dunno. I was maybe ten, could have been younger.”
“How long is it since you’ve had a driver’s license, Marty?” Rex inquired.
“Oh, God, three years, going on four. At this rate, I’ll never get it back.”
“That’s certainly possible.”
“How the hell’s a man supposed to make a living when he can’t even drive a truck, and the nearest employment is miles away?”