by Laura McNeal
“And that nurse at the hospital that replaced your pills with placebos,” Veronica says. “That was another of his allies.” She takes a deep breath. “And now of course he has the widow.”
Confusion floods Lana. “What widow? What’re you talking about?”
“The widow Mullins. The widow whose house Whit has been painting.”
“What about it?”
Veronica pretends to be bored, but Lana can tell how much she’s enjoying this. “Have you ever noticed how when he comes home, he never has paint on his clothes or on his arms or under his fingernails?”
Lana hasn’t noticed, as a matter of fact, but now that she thinks about it, she doesn’t remember paint on him.
Veronica says, “And have you ever noticed how he doesn’t smell of turpentine?”
Lana wants to object, but she can’t. One of her mother’s boyfriends had been a painter, and he always smelled like paint thinner, even on weekends when he wasn’t painting. But Whit never smelled like anything other than himself, or lime shaving cream, or sometimes smoke and gin.
“The widow Mullins is rich and she’s old,” Veronica says, “but she’s not so old she doesn’t like a little … company.”
“Are you saying …,” Lana says, but she doesn’t even know how to complete the sentence.
“I’m saying that one thing Whit and I have always understood is that allies come in all shapes and sizes.” Her smile is sly and wintry. “It’s how we got into the foster business.”
Lana shakes her head violently. “But Whit likes us.”
“It’s true,” Veronica says. “He does. But without the check from the state each month, he would like you less.” She smiles. “Quite a bit less, actually.”
Lana stands dazed. She feels vulnerable. She wishes she had something to put on over her swimsuit.
“You see?” Veronica says. “You’re surprised. In fact, you’re mortified. That’s because of your child eyes. When you’re a little more mature, you’ll see things differently, and, believe me, you’ll have allies, too, lots of them, probably more than Whit and me combined.”
“I won’t!” Lana says, and even as she says the words, she hears how young her voice sounds.
Veronica seems to hear it, too, because she feels no need to rebut it. She starts again to go upstairs but again stops for another word.
“Oh, and just so you know, that magazine with the cute, stark-naked men in it? I didn’t bring that home. Whit did. He likes me to go through it and decide which one I’d like to … canoodle with”—Veronica actually winks—“if I wasn’t married to him.” She smiles. “It’s surprising how it ratchets up the evening’s high jinks.”
Lana tries to hold herself very still. She feels actually, physically ill.
“Ah,” Veronica says. “You’re appalled. And yet, someday, you won’t be.”
Veronica takes the stairs then up to her room. By the time her door closes, Lana still has not moved. What has come into her mind are the words Veronica’s friend Louise had used to describe Veronica’s going out to find Whit the night of the car wreck: The tender little secrets between a wife and her husband.
Louise had made it seem like these were the kind of secrets Lana couldn’t understand now but one day would, but she was wrong about that, Lana thinks, she was completely wrong. Lana will never understand secrets like these.
Lana takes a beach towel from the back of a kitchen chair and wraps it all the way around herself, feeling the thin cotton fabric tighten over her shoulders, elbows, and wrists. She stands there like that for at least a minute before Tilly’s voice calls her into the backyard.
“Found a marble!” Tilly shouts, and waves the small object in her hand. She’s wearing a pink two-piece that makes her look oddly toddler-like, and her knees are muddy. “It’s a green one,” she says, beaming, “but I’m calling it Pinky!”
“Makes sense to me,” Lana says, but without her usual irony. The truth is, at the moment, calling a green marble Pinky makes as much sense to Lana as anything else in the world.
Part Three
49.
One slight change for the better.
Veronica hasn’t thumped her cane today. Probably she knows Lana will no longer respond and doesn’t want to give Lana the pleasure of proving it, but no matter what the reason, it’s one slight change for the better.
Around three, Veronica comes down and makes herself some toast and soup. (Lana watches her struggle one-handedly with the can opener for a few seconds before opening it for her.) Veronica then sits at the table eating and reading Us magazine without a glance at anyone or anything around her.
When she’s finished, she leaves her dishes on the table and says she’s not to be disturbed, she’s taking a nap. “Dr. Gooch says I need a one-to-two-hour nap every afternoon.”
After she’s beyond earshot, Lana says in a low voice to Tilly, “Dr. Gooch is probably practicing without a license.”
Once it’s quiet upstairs, Lana goes to the house phone and dials Hallie’s number. She gets a secretary who says, “I think Miss Simpson’s in a meeting. Let me check.”
Lana knows what Miss Simpson’s in a meeting means. It means Hallie’s trying to get some work done or is taking a break or is just in a really bad mood, but whatever the reason, she doesn’t want to be disturbed and, since she’s Hallie, she isn’t going to be.
Which makes it all the more amazing when Hallie comes on the line and says, “Hello, Lana. How are things?”
“Something bad’s happening here, Hallie. I think the state’s going to close this place down or something.” She starts to tell her about Inspector Stilller, but Hallie gently interrupts.
“I heard about it this morning. There has been a serious complaint.”
“Was it the woman across the street? Mrs. Harbaugh?”
“It was a family member.”
Lana is confused. “What do you mean, family member?”
“Someone from one of the clients’ families. Someone from the immediate family.”
The answer comes to Lana with startling certainty. “Was it Garth’s mom? A Mrs. Stoneman? Was it her?”
Hallie says she has already said too much.
So it was her. It was Garth’s mom. Lana can hardly believe it.
“Now what?” Lana says. “What will happen to us?”
Hallie explains that the department will quickly come to some disposition with regard to the complaint and investigation. “They could close the place, they could order another inspector out, or they could do nothing.”
“What do you think they’ll do?”
A second or two passes before Hallie speaks. “I don’t know, Lana. But I’m pretty sure they’ll do something.”
“Could they put us all someplace together?”
Over the telephone line, with more than five hundred miles between her and Hallie, Lana can almost feel the kindness of Hallie’s soft laugh. “Oh, sweet Lana,” she says. “You are such a dreamer.”
“But could they?” Lana says.
“This is the state, Lana. We’re already standing room only. There’s no way we’re going to find five seats together in one row.” She is quiet a moment, and then she says, “A couple of months ago you wanted me to transfer you away from these kids. Now you want the whole bunch of you to stay together? What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Lana says. This is the absolute truth. She doesn’t know what happened. All she knows is that something has.
“Is there another element here, Lana? Someone you’re attached to?”
“Maybe.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.” This is the truth, too. It’s Whit, of course, but it’s not just Whit. Tilly and Garth and the other Snicks need her, and the Inside Whit needs her, and this has changed everything for Lana, the fact of people needing her. “Look, Hallie, could you try to get another inspection, tell them that the first inspector came at a bad time and kind of had a chip on her shoulder?”
<
br /> Hallie takes a deep enough sigh that it’s audible over the phone lines. “I’ll try, Lana. But no promises.”
“And if there’s another inspector coming, could you give us a little heads-up?”
“I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” Hallie says, but Lana knows that she did hear it and that she’ll give the heads-up if there’s some discreet way she can do it.
Fifteen minutes later, Mrs. Arnot stops by to take the Snicks to the library, but Tilly says Lana needs her, you bet, so Tilly stays. Lana tries to talk Tilly into taking a nap so Lana can nap herself, and Tilly does lie down on the carpet, but she can’t stop talking and squirming, so they decide finally to take snacks to Tilly’s rock place, a big bunch of boulders under a pine tree at the outskirts of the town cemetery.
Lana stretches out on the big rock in the shade and is nearly drowsing when Tilly says, “Is everything going to be okay?”
Lana blinks open her eyes. “Why do you ask that, Tilly?”
Tilly shakes her head without speaking. On a platter-sized, flat-topped rock, she’s making a loose, rounded pyramid of smaller rocks.
Lana looks at her and says, “If you could have one wish, Tilly, what would it be?”
“For everything to be okay,” Tilly says without even thinking about it.
Beyond the cemetery, along the flat horizon, a dark truck moves east to west, right to left, so far away Lana can’t hear it. It could be anybody’s truck. It could be Whit’s truck. Lana eases her eyes closed. She wants to talk to Whit, she wants to talk to him in the worst way, but she doesn’t want to think about him and what Veronica called his allies. It’s quiet except for the slight rattle of cottonwood leaves in the breeze and the dim click of rocks as Tilly builds her little pyramid, but then that stops, and Lana feels Tilly moving close, and after a moment or two, Tilly touches one of her stubby fingers softly to Lana’s eyelids and then smooths it slowly over the contours of Lana’s cheeks and forehead, chin, and nose.
“Pretty face,” Tilly says, and Lana clicks open her eyes and looks up at Tilly.
“Yours too. You have a pretty face, too,” she says, and she means it, which is why, she supposes, Tilly seems to believe it.
Whit hasn’t gotten home yet when Lana and Tilly return to the house, but some men are inside hauling a plasma TV upstairs. It looks really heavy. The men stagger, grunt, and stop every few feet, and these are beefy men. Veronica stands above them wearing house slippers and a short robe. “I don’t know how you lift that big old thing,” she says in a cooing voice.
It makes Lana want to puke, but Tilly is fascinated and wanders upstairs. A few minutes later, Veronica drops the cooing and yells, “Come get Tilly, Lana! She’s in the way!”
Lana doesn’t have to get Tilly. Tilly leaves on her own when she hears this.
It’s almost dusk. The sun slants through the window, and when it catches the motes of dust floating in the air, it reminds Lana of the minutes in the garage before she closed her eyes and let Whit kiss her. Those minutes felt like seconds, but today’s minutes feel like hours. Whenever Lana looks at the clock, she wonders if it has stopped and needs a new battery, but it doesn’t. When she goes over and puts her ear close to it, she can hear its dull rhythmic clicking.
She and Tilly play two rounds of Candy Land, then Lana browns meat for spaghetti, and Carlito, Alfred, and Garth return and the beefy TV guys leave and supper’s over and most of the Snicks are watching a show and Lana and Tilly are standing at the kitchen sink rinsing dishes when Whit’s truck finally turns up the driveway and pulls into the garage. Lana hears him whistling “Some Enchanted Evening” as he crosses the yard.
“Well, there are two fetching individuals,” he says to Lana and Tilly when he comes in, a remark that pleases Tilly more than Lana.
“I just put the spaghetti in the refrigerator,” Lana says.
He slides behind her and, careful that Tilly can’t see, gives the nape of Lana’s neck a quick grazing kiss. When she shrugs him off, he says, “Tilly, did you put Lana in the refrigerator by mistake?”
Tilly laughs at the thought but says she did not, no, sir.
Whit starts eating the spaghetti straight from the pot while leaning against the refrigerator. Lana supposes he’ll finish it all, then put the pot on the counter to be washed. By her.
His little ally.
Who sees with the eyes of a child.
She wipes her hands on a towel and turns around. “How’d the painting go today?” she says.
“Not bad,” he says, chewing. “Better than yesterday anyhow.”
Lana nods. “And yet there’s no paint on you.”
Whit chuckles and keeps eating. “I’m a clean individual. It’s a personal trademark of mine. You know what I always say? Nothing shouts no prospects louder than a painted-up painter.”
“But how do you do that? Paint without getting paint on you?”
Whit tips the pot to get the last of the spaghetti. “Well, for starters, I wear coveralls and a separate pair of paint boots, all of which I can remove at the end of the painting day.”
He must see her looking at his hands because he says, “Then I clean up my hands real good.”
“But you don’t smell like turpentine.”
Whit makes a snorting laugh. “Turpentine? Nobody uses turpentine. They don’t even use paint thinner. Everything’s latex now, water-based, cleans up with water.” He winks. “And water, you may have noticed, is odor-free.”
He drops the fork into the pot and, slipping by Lana, goes to the sink and washes the pot himself, which is just one more strange aspect of this conversation. The explanation he’s given her about coveralls and latex paint was convincing, and now he’s washing his own pot and fork, and drying them, too, carefully, with a tea towel until the aluminum shines. As he sets the pot into its proper place in the cupboard, he says, “So how was it today with Ronnie?”
When Lana doesn’t immediately answer, Tilly says, “Her got a big giant TV!”
Whit turns from Tilly to Lana. “Yeah?”
Lana nods, and Whit’s face breaks into a beaming smile.
“I told you that Gooch guy was a genius for gaming those insurance boys,” he says, and before Lana can say anything else or even mention Inspector Stiller’s visit, he hurries upstairs.
Lana hopes Whit will suggest everybody come up to watch a movie on the enormous TV, but he doesn’t. He closes the door to their bedroom and doesn’t come back out for the rest of the night.
50.
That night Lana falls asleep listening to Chet’s podcast—Chet spends a lot of time reminding the Sodbusters about the Oddball Olympics event scheduled the next day on Highway 20. Lana sleeps a deep dreamless sleep, and when she gets downstairs the next morning, Garth is sitting by the front door, Tilly is eating Trix, and Carlito and Alfred are still sleeping. Whit’s already gone. His half-filled coffee cup stands on the kitchen counter, and Lana can see that his truck’s not in the garage. She looks around for a note, but there isn’t one. From upstairs the shrieks and applause of some kind of audience-participation show carry down from Veronica’s plasma TV.
Lana doesn’t know how many more breakfasts there will be together, so she makes pancakes and spreads baked apples over them, a dish that everybody likes and is Garth’s personal favorite. She calls them together at the kitchen table and while she’s pouring milk in glasses, she has an idea. She sits and has everybody be quiet and close their eyes.
“Thank you for this food,” she says, “and thank you for this day, and thank you for the company of Alfred and Garth and Carlito and Tilly.” She stops. She doesn’t know what to say or do next. She’s had her eyes closed, but now she opens them and looks up. All of the others are just staring at her.
To everybody’s relief, Tilly says, “A-men! Let’s eat!” and they all dig in.
Garth didn’t eat yesterday, but today he eats fast, as if somebody’s going to take it from him. “More?” Lana says when he’s done, and he nods,
yes.
After breakfast, Lana cleans up the kitchen, gets Tilly to sweep the porch, and sends Alfred up to make beds in case another inspector comes. “And flush the toilet, okay?” she shouts, just in case. She calls Mrs. Arnot then to make sure she’s coming for the boys and Tilly this time.
When Mrs. Arnot says she’ll be there in two shakes of a lamb’s tail, Lana goes upstairs to talk to Veronica, but as she approaches, she falls quiet. The door is cracked open, and she can see Veronica standing in front of the mirror. She isn’t wearing anything flirty, so she isn’t getting ready for Dr. Gooch. She’s just wearing slacks and a cotton top, a good, normal-seeming look for her, the kind of outfit she used to put on just before Whit came home. Veronica stares at the mirror and turns one way, then the other, and starts to cross her arms, but she no longer has two arms to cross. The awkwardness of it, and of her pinned-up sleeve, collapses something in her face, breaks it down, tears everything away, and what’s left, Lana can see, is fear, pure, childlike, naked fear.
Then Veronica’s eyes flick toward Lana, and the coldness snaps back.
“What’re you looking at?” she says.
“Nothing. I just came to …”
“Came to what?”
Lana takes a deep breath. “Came to tell you that breakfast’s done, the house is picked up, Mrs. Arnot’s coming for the Snicks, and I have to run an errand, so you’re in charge.”
“Oh, no, you’re not,” Veronica says, but Lana’s already on the stairs and heading down. “Where’re you going?” Veronica calls, but her voice isn’t all anger now—there’s an imploring element, too. “When will you be back?”
For the first time since coming to the Winterses’ house, Lana feels almost sorry for Veronica.
“As soon as I can,” she calls back.
Lana has braided her hair and threads the braid now through a green DeKalb cap with a flying corncob on the front, one of Whit’s vast collection of caps. There is a bicycle in the garage, an old Schwinn with ten gears, of which, it turns out, only four actually work, but those are enough. Lana pedals six or seven blocks and then turns east onto Highway 20, toward the rest stop where Chet has scheduled his Oddball Olympics event, tractor-styling or something like that.