Unfortunately, they had learned a month earlier that Estelle had liver cancer.
It had been Dave’s idea to volunteer to adopt the children, and while Miriam had doubts about his motives-she thought Dave was more interested in the bond it would establish with Estelle than the girls themselves-she had been eager to do it. Only twenty-five, she had already miscarried three times. Here were two beautiful girls, ready for them, girls that would not require a drawn-out adoption process. The Turners, as the girls’ guardians-the girls’ only family, as far as anyone knew, a fact that would be verified years later, when Detective Willoughby tried to ascertain if their dead father had any relatives-could assign guardianship to the Bethanys. It had been simple. And, cruel as it may sound, Miriam was relieved when Estelle finally died and Herb drifted away, as they all had known he would. The girls reminded him too much of his lost wife and daughter. Grateful as Miriam was for his decampment, she despised him for it, too. What kind of man wouldn’t want to be part of his granddaughters’ lives? Even now that she knew the whole story, she still couldn’t get past her initial dislike of the Turners, Herb’s uxorious regard for Estelle, his inability to love or care about anyone else. It was likely that Sally had run away because there was no room for her in that beautiful Sudbrook home, filled as it was with Herb’s excessive love for Estelle.
The girls never learned the entire story. They knew they were adopted, of course, although Heather had always refused to believe it, even as Sunny pretended to greater memories than she could possibly have. (“We had a house in Nevada,” she would announce to Heather. “A house with a fence. And a pony!”) But even let’s-be-honest, let-it-all-hang-out Dave could not bear to tell the girls the complete truth-the young runaways, their biological father’s deadly rage, the loss of two lives because Sally could not bear to pick up the phone and ask her parents for help to get away from the husband they had disapproved of from the start. Miriam had been of the opinion that the girls should never be told everything, while Dave thought it would mark their passage into adulthood, at age eighteen or so.
But she had been even more uncomfortable with the gentle fantasy Dave created for the girls in the interim.
“Tell me about my other mommy,” Sunny or Heather would say at bedtime.
“Well, she was beautiful-”
“Do I look like her?”
“Yes, exactly.” They did. Miriam had seen the photos in the Turners’ home. Sally had the same flyaway blond hair, the small-boned frame. “She was beautiful and she married a man and went away to live. But there was an accident-”
“A car accident?”
“Something like that.”
“What was it?”
“Yes, a car accident. They died in a car accident.”
“Were we there?”
“No.” But they had been. That part worried Miriam. The girls had been found in the house, Heather in a crib, Sunny in a playpen. They were in a different room, but what had they seen, what had they heard? What if Sunny remembered something that was more real than Nevada and a house and a pony?
“Where were we?”
“At home with a baby-sitter.”
“What was her name?”
And Dave would keep going, making up details until it was simply the most colossal lie that Miriam had ever heard. “We’ll tell them the truth when they’re eighteen,” he said.
To think that the truth could be assigned an age, as if it were beer or the right to vote. Oh, what busy but inexpert beavers Dave and Miriam had been, slapping together makeshift dams against all their secrets, trying to stem the trickle of a mere creek when an earthquake lay in wait for them. In the end all their lies had been released into the world, only to go unnoticed, because who would take note of such puny things in a postapocalyptic world, when so much debris was lying around? On the day that Estelle and Herb Turner came to them seeking their help, Miriam had thought she was providing a fresh start for two innocents. But in the end it was the girls who gave her the chance to reinvent herself. And when they were gone, she had lost that part of herself as well.
Fuck it , she thought, making an erratic and illegal left turn, I will go to Barton Springs. But she turned back to her original route a block later. The Austin real-estate market was beginning to slow. She couldn’t risk losing a single client.
CHAPTER 26
“You think faster than the cash register,” said Randy, the Swiss Colony manager.
“Excuse me?”
“The new cash register calculates change, does all the thinking for you. But you don’t let it, I can tell. You’re a step ahead, Sylvia.”
“Syl,” she said, pulling at the sleeves of the Swiss Miss outfit they were forced to wear, complete with dirndl and puffy sleeves. The girls all hated the low-cut necklines, which exposed their breasts as they leaned over to fetch cheese and sausage from the cases. In winter they wore turtlenecks beneath their dresses, though now, with April almost here, it was hard to justify the turtlenecks. “It’s Syl, not Sylvia.”
“But you can’t wrap for shit,” he said. “I’ve never seen anyone get more lost in a roll of plastic wrap. And you don’t suggestive-sell. If they buy the summer sausage, you gotta push the mustard. If they want the small gift basket, you gotta suggest a larger one.”
We don’t get commissions , she wanted to say, but she knew it was the wrong thing. She pulled up the right sleeve and the left one slid down, pulled up the left and the right slid down. Fine, let Randy look at her shoulder.
“Don’t you need this job, Sylvia?”
“Syl,” she said. “It’s short for Priscilla, not Sylvia.” She was trying to make the new name her own. She was Priscilla Browne now, twenty-two according to the documents she carried-a birth certificate, a Social Security card, and a state ID card, but no driver’s license.
“You’re kinda spoiled, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?”
“You didn’t have a lot of work experience. You said you weren’t allowed to work in high school, and here you are…what?”-he glanced at the sheet in front of him-“in Fairfax Community College? A daddy’s girl, huh?”
“What?”
“He gave you a nice allowance, you didn’t have to work. Spoiled you.”
“I guess so.” Oh, yes, he definitely spoiled me.
“Well, things are slow now. Been slow since Christmas, you want to know. So I have to thin things out…”
He looked at her expectantly, one of the moments that she dreaded. Since forced out on her own, she had been thrust into this situation again and again, trying to converse in what she thought of as the dialect of “normal.” The words were more or less the same as the language she knew, but she had trouble following the meanings. When someone left a sentence open-ended, expecting her to fill it in, she was afraid her response would be so off the charts that she would be automatically suspect. Right now, for example, she wanted to provide “…and introduce a line of low-calorie foods.” But that clearly wasn’t what Randy meant by thinning things out. He meant-Oh, shit, she was getting fired. Again.
“You’re not a people person,” he said. “You’re bright, but you shouldn’t be in sales.”
“I didn’t know I was in sales,” she said, her eyes brimming.
“You’re a salesgirl,” he said. “That’s the job title. Salesgirl.”
“I could do better…with the selling and the wrapping. I could-” She looked up at Randy through her wet lashes and abandoned the plea. He wasn’t someone she could sway. Her instincts on this were unerring. “Is this effective as of today? Or do I have to work the rest of my scheduled hours?”