Silence.
I turned. She had picked up one of Penny’s aluminum softball bats. She had the handle in one hand and the barrel in the other. She appeared to be studying the logo. Then she looked at me, her face glum but her eyes charged with something I had never seen in her before. Her irises were black. She fixed me with a look of pure fear and fury. and I understood what I was to her. I was a monster standing in the mouth of her cave. If I hadn’t turned to look just then — would she or wouldn’t she? A cold shiver blossomed across the middle of my back because I didn’t know the answer.
Then, motion to my left.
“Mom?”
Penny’s face was uncomprehending as she looked at her mother. As uncomprehending as mine must have been.
“Are you guys—”
Mel looked at her as if Penny were a stranger. Then the rage passed and the pale gray returned to Melinda’s eyes. She dropped the bat back into the box like it was scalding hot. “We’re okay, honey. Just ugly adult stuff that you don’t need to hear. Go back in.”
Penny’s doubt was mollified just enough that she could glance at me, then back at her mother, and pretend she hadn’t seen something that would stay with her forever. She looked down and absently petted Moe. “I can’t find the... the tubes we had for the posters.”
“Under your bed.”
A pause. Another look at me, then at her mother.
“It’s okay, honey,” said Melinda. “Go back inside.”
But Penny looked at me before she spoke. Her voice was soft, so girlish, but it was built of conviction and forethought. “I’m going to say something, whether you guys say I can or not. I liked us all here together. You both drank too much because you were totally sad but you were getting over it. You guys were trying. Everything was going to be all right. Things started going pretty good. Then this thing happened and it all got worse. I knew you didn’t do what they said you did, Terry. But I wish you would have told me that yourself. And I wish you two would, like, get your shit together, because it’s definitely not. And if it’s not, you’re just going to ruin everything again for everybody around you, no matter where you go.”
Then she looked again at her mother before coming over to me and throwing her arms around my neck. I smelled the hot sweet tears on her.
“ ’Bye, Terry.”
“I’ll miss you, Pen.”
“Then call.”
She looked behind at her mother again as she walked back to the house. Moe tucked himself up close to her and followed her away. Then she was gone and I had the thought that it would be many years until I saw her again.
“Proud of yourself?” Mel hissed. “That’s what I never wanted to happen, and it did anyway. You came here and you took her heart and you left. You fell in love with your TV cunt and you did exactly what I knew you’d do when we started out. I loathe you for what you did, Terry, but I loathe me even more for knowing it would happen from the very goddamned beginning.”
“I had higher hopes than that.”
“High as a kite, I’m sure. Like you were.”
“Then why did you even let it get started?”
She was silent, and some of the ferocious anger rose again in her eyes. I’d never really known, until that moment, how much of Melinda’s considerable willpower was tapped to keep a lid on the furies in her blood.
“For me. To make me happy. To make me feel good again, like I was something of value. I’m too goddamned old to need a man to make me feel valuable. I know that But it doesn’t do any good to know you shouldn’t feel a way you feel. You pushed my buttons, Terry, you hung my moon for a while, and there wasn’t a lot I could talk myself out of. And you know something? I did it for you, too. I did it for your secrets and your son and your sadness and all the crazy, crazy shit you were going through when I first got to know you. You needed what I had. Hell, you needed everything. And it made me feel like an angel to give it.”
I looked at her. The flesh of her face was red and sagging and she looked, in spite of her anger, defeated.
“You put me back together, Melinda.”
“But I liked you better in pieces, because you were mine then. And I’ll tell you, if I wasn’t going to keep you, no snot-nosed newscaster was going to get the man I fixed up, either. That’s a hateful thing to say, and what I did was a hateful thing to do. But I’ll stand by them, because that’s the way I felt. So I acted accordingly. By the time of your birthday I was ready to move. You deserved to have your cute little world busted up some, for what you did to me. That’s the thing about men, Terry — you take things and really don’t think of the consequences. You take and you take and you take, and you don’t think about what it’s costing. And when the bill comes due, you try to walk away. Nobody walks away from Melinda Vickers. I do the walking, when it’s time. So get out, and do what you want with what you know. I’m giving you something valuable here, Terry. I’m giving you the luxury of being thrown out. Take it Feel wronged. You can remember me any way you want, but don’t suck up to my kid anymore. You don’t qualify as a part of her life. You’re just history we’re going to forget.”
I looked at her a long while.
“Well?” she asked.
“I’m sorry for what I did.”
“I’m not, for what I did. I wish you could have sizzled on the grill a little longer.”
“You lay it on pretty thick, Mel.”
“Life with you was a bag of shit, Terry. What’s it matter how I spread it?”
I nodded and walked away.
Thirty-Five
“Am I poisonous?”
“As in harmful, or as in fatal?”
“Poison is poison, Donna.”
“You’re serious, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Let me consider that a moment while you swerve to avoid the mule.”
We were thirty clicks south of the border, between Tijuana and Ensenada, Donna with five days of vacation ahead and I still on leave. Donna, per usual, was shooting video, having never been to Mexico before. We were in her convertible and the top was down, so that made it easy. She had a polka dot scarf over her head. The morning was late and warm and the coastal fog was breaking up to reveal green hills and a hard blue Pacific. The dark highway flowed by under us, divided by a center railing of black and white posts that blurred if you tried to watch them up close. The road is good and wide and encourages velocity. I moved toward the center line on the sweeping downhill curve. The mule’s ears flapped in the slipstream of the car. The roads down here are better than they used to be, but shoulders are not a Mexican concern.
I was driving fast and hadn’t said much, until then. I was anxious over what we’d do with five days together, because we’d never had more than twelve hours straight. Donna’s presence put me in a state of agitation so intense I couldn’t imagine five days with her being anything but good. But I have been misled by passion before, or, maybe, passion has been misled by me. More to the point, Melinda’s verdict was echoing loud in a soul made hollow by Johnny’s death. But I had not asked Donna to Mexico to lose myself in her, as I had tried to do in Melinda — to my shame, I know. What I wanted to do was find myself. And hopefully, to be able to stand the man I discovered.