A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty

  “Last chance,” Lawrence said, leaning in close. “Who hired you? Whisper me a name and we’re done here.”

  Morissey was as white as paper napkins now. He said nothing, but he didn’t have to, because I realized then that I knew the answer. I said it for him, to make Lawrence stop. To make me stop liking it.

  “Claire Richardson.”

  I saw surprise, a clear confirmation, cross Morissey’s face. He wiped it away fast, but we’d both seen it. Lawrence had better control over his own features, but one eyebrow twitched and he flashed a glance at me. I’d surprised him, too.

  Lawrence let Morissey go, and Morissey immediately slumped forward, his spine curving, facedown. His breath came out in a soft, gobbling burble. Both his own hands went under the table, into his lap, to cradle himself.

  Lawrence leaned in close to his ear and said, so quiet I had to strain to hear, “I think you’re not hungry. You’re going to get in your car and go.

  Next time I see you around my girl here? You won’t get them back.” Morissey made a gulping noise. “We understand each other?”

  “I understand you fine,” he said, rol ing his forehead back and forth across the cool tabletop.

  Lawrence gave a short nod, satisfied, but my eyes narrowed. I’d been Liza’s mother for a long time; I’d learned there was often a big fat gap between understanding and agreement.

  Lawrence stood up, and I hastily fol owed suit. I moved back to our booth, but Lawrence stayed standing as Morissey clambered painful y to his feet. He dropped a five on his table and turned, stil hunched over, and limped out. Lawrence watched him go, his eyes so cold and hard that it occurred to me he must know the difference between understanding and agreement, too.

  I said, “I don’t want you to get in trouble, but should we let him go? What if he heads to my house? Liza and Mosey are there alone.”

  Lawrence was shaking his head. “The guy is a licensed PI. He’s a digger, not a heavy. If he does stake out your house? Cal me. I’l handle it.”

  “What does that mean, you’l handle it?” I said, not liking the sound of it.

  Lawrence said, “I warned him. He keeps fol owing you, then he gets what he gets. Forget him.”

  He sat back down across from me. Neither one of us spoke, watching out the window as Morissey hobbled across the lot. He got into a tan Saturn and drove away.

  Once he was gone, Lawrence asked, calm, direct, “What kind of trouble are you in, Ginny?” I said nothing. “Okay, let’s start simple. How did you know that Claire had hired him?”

  I wasn’t ready to answer that. I reached for the empty cups on John’s abandoned tray and set one down in front of each of us. My hands were shaking so hard the lid chattered against the pot as I poured us both some tea. I stirred half a packet of sugar into mine while Lawrence watched and waited.

  I took a bracing sip and said, “That was the least Baptist thing I’ve ever seen you do.” I sounded too breathy, even to my own ears, but it made him chuckle.

  “Oh, real y? Maybe not the least.” He quirked an eyebrow at me, and I found myself flushing at the memory of the two of us, twined together on his sunshine-covered bed. I smiled back, a shaky smile, but present. He went on. “I don’t think you’re al that angry with Baptists anyway. You’re plain old mad at God. We Baptists are easier to yel at, though.”

  I puffed air out and said, “Maybe so. He does seem to have it in for me some years. But to be fair, very few of the Baptists that I’ve known have made me feel any kindlier toward God. You’re the exception, and look what you did to that PI. Not exactly Christian.”

  That made Lawrence flash his quick grin. “Nothing unbiblical about a little righteous fury.” Then his face got serious again. “How did you know it was Claire Richardson?”

  “Who’s asking? A cop? Or a guy who loves me?” It came blurting out. We hadn’t talked love. Not for years. It was pretty bold, but I was too wrung out for bul shit.

  “Ginny,” he said, and the way he said my name was almost an answer. His voice was so sweet and low and deep, like a honey drip. And it stayed sweet, even as his words got spiky. “I grabbed another man’s testicles at the damn Panda Garden. It’s pretty clear that I’m al in. It’s me who should be asking. You came to my apartment pretending to be curious about my marriage, then slipped me a bunch of questions about an ongoing police investigation. I’m so tied around your pinkie finger I didn’t spend nearly enough time wondering why you were asking.” His eyes on me were so warm. “It’s me who needs to know, are you here because you love me or are you deep in some bad shit and playing me?”

  I didn’t have a good answer, because al those things were true. I loved him, and I was in deep shit, and I had been playing him. I thought of my girls, and I gave him the simplest truth I had. “There’s only two things on this earth I love more than I love you, Lawrence.”

  He breathed in, then out. If anyone could understand my choices, it was this man, who had stayed with Sandy until his kids were grown and gone.

  Who had tried for more than a year to stick it out, even after his youngest was in col ege. “It al comes back to Liza and Mosey somehow, doesn’t it?

  Tel me. Let me help you.”

  I thought about it. Hard. But I’d jumped into a huge heap of felonies, headfirst and eyes wide open. It was wrong to pul him in, too, blind. I shook my head.

  He swal owed and said, stil toothache-sweet, “Dumb-ass. I am tel ing you, I’l break every stupid law I’m sworn to uphold and go to hel on top of it, if that’s what you need. Tel me.”

  I was crying then, because I believed him. I believed him. And that meant I had to settle this myself, so I could start with him clean, in November. I understood then his wanting to wait until his divorce, in a way I hadn’t before. I didn’t want anything wrong or underhanded touching us. We deserved better.

  I said, “If that’s true, then the best thing you can do for me is look away. Don’t think too hard about it. Don’t try to know. Let me fix it, and I’l cal you in November.”

  He had to stop looking, because he was too smart. If he looked close, he would figure it out. No one had yet, because of Mosey. She was the perfect blind. It was like one of those old riddles, like the one where the emergency-room doctor is a woman and that’s how the patient is her son.

  Or how the guy who only takes the elevator when it’s raining is a midget and needs an umbrel a to reach the buttons. The answer was so obvious, but no one could see it: The lost baby in the yard couldn’t be ours, because Mosey made al our babies look accounted for.

  He said, “You don’t even want to tel me why Claire is having you fol owed. Did you…You never had anything going with her husband?”

  “God no,” I said. “Why would you think that?”

  He shook his head. “She’s fol owing you. So she must think it.”

  I felt my eyes narrowing. “What aren’t you tel ing me?”

  He shook his head. “Al right, Ginny. You’re playing your cards close, but I’m going to show you my whole hand. The investigation stal ed because the state coroner didn’t find any trauma on the bones. Nothing to indicate shaken baby or any kind of violence. He said the most likely cause of death was SIDS. Meanwhile it’s footbal season, so Rick is up to his ass in new DUIs. The investigation was back-burnered. Indefinitely. But then the married couple I told you about approached him. They thought the bones in your yard might be their missing infant. They paid for more testing.”

  “No,” I said. Not because I didn’t remember, but because I didn’t want him to say what I was afraid he would say next. He said it anyway.

  “It was the Richardsons.”

  Al at once I was back in the yard, recognizing that little pink dress. Recognizing my lost grandchild. Claire and her husband had never accepted that Melissa had let their baby drown. They must have thought those bones in our yard belonged to their baby, and that gave Claire even more blame to lay on Liza’s doorstep. The world spun out from under me and dropped a
way, exactly as it had that day. My vision pinholed and grayed for a moment, and I had to grab the table.

  “It came back negative,” I said. I sounded so very far away. “It wasn’t Claire’s baby in that yard.” I stated it as fact, because I knew it.

  “Right. The child’s DNA proved it wasn’t Claire’s,” Lawrence agreed. “Here’s the thing: The husband was a match. The child buried in your yard was definitely Coach Richardson’s. It was a hard way for Claire to find out that her husband cheated. Rick told her in the bluntest terms, too, hoping she’d turn on Coach and help Rick find out who the mother was. But that is one cool-blooded lady. She didn’t make a scene. Rick said she went so stil it was like the news had turned her to stone. Then she said, ‘Come,’ at Coach, like he was a dog, and they got up and walked out.” He was stil talking, but it came from so far away. “Rick tried to question Coach, but Claire lawyered up for both of them. So he went back— Ginny? Ginny, what’s wrong?”

  I shook my head at him. Then I was up and moving so fast I didn’t even feel myself go. I was out of the booth and running. I bolted directly into John with a huge tray of Chinese food. I staggered back, and I heard the same sound outside of me that I was hearing inside, everything cracking and shattering and fal ing into pieces. Lawrence had his arms around me as I stood in a sea of broken glass and spil ed food, the General’s chicken looking like the bloody chunks of something dead and in pieces, and my stomach heaved, and I fought and twisted in Lawrence’s arms.

  John said, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” over and over, and I was saying it, too: “Oh, no!”

  “Ginny!” Lawrence yel ed, loud, like he was cal ing me back into my body. “Where are you going?”

  I had to bite my lips to keep from saying the answer, because the answer was very simple. I was going to shoot Coach Richardson in his face until he was dead. Because Liza was fourteen when she fetched up pregnant, and she’d told me the daddy was some kid she met at the carny. I tried to break out of his arms again, because I had to go find myself a gun and shoot a man, and only Lawrence bul ing me down into the booth and wedging himself in beside me and putting his hands on me made me be stil . He waited until he felt my legs stop straining to rise again, until my fists stopped shoving at him. He waited until I was limp, and then he stood up, the backs of his legs against the edge of the booth seat to block me in.

  I heard his voice talking, making soothing noises, and I heard him opening his wal et and passing money or a credit card to John, but I sat there dumb as a cow. I stared at our ruined food, splashed like roadkil on the navy carpet. I’d been so stupid. That’s why Melissa had ditched Liza. Not because pregnancy spoiled the parties. Liza had stolen her father. I thought I might throw up. Liza had a woman’s body then, but she’d only been fourteen. I had to go shoot him. I should go shoot him. There should be no law against shooting a grown man who goes after your little girl. I tried to get up to go shoot him, but Lawrence pushed in beside me again, trapping me in the booth. John was gone.

  “Ginny,” Lawrence said, his voice low and urgent. “Promise me. If I ran your DNA against that child’s, tel me it wouldn’t match.”

  I stared at him, and I felt myself gathering together. So many things were making sense now, but I could hardly process it. Liza had claimed that Coach was Mosey’s father; that’s how Liza had blackmailed Claire into paying Mosey’s tuition, by threatening to expose her husband. Claire may not have whol y believed it, or else she wouldn’t have let her husband stay on at the school. Denial was powerful, but she must have been worried enough that it was true to fork over the money. Maybe she’d told herself she was paying to keep her good name clear of gossip, not because she believed it.

  That’s why Claire had poisoned Liza, in part to stop the blackmail, but mostly so she wouldn’t have to ponder if her husband was truly keeping such a filthy secret.

  Then, when the bones were found, Claire believed they were her own child’s bones, that the ocean hadn’t taken her baby. That Liza had. Now Claire knew that her husband truly had fathered Liza’s baby, and that the baby had died. There was no way to stay in denial. And that meant she had to be asking herself who on earth our Mosey was.

  It wasn’t possible to pul myself together, but I had to, for my girls, so I did. Possible or not, I packed everything I was feeling away in that deep-down box where I’d kept sex for so long, then piled everything I owned on top of it. I met Lawrence’s worried gaze, and I breathed in and out.

  “Ginny. Talk to me,” he said.

  It was too many felonies. I believed him when he said he’d break the law for me, but I loved him too much to ask it of him. I took a deep breath and made myself be stil inside. Once I was calm, I gathered some truths up into words. Truth, and only truth. This was Lawrence, with a cop’s good nose for liars. I made sure everything I planned to say was gospel, and then I spoke.

  “That is not my baby in the yard, Lawrence. I never, never had anything going with that woman’s husband. I’d sooner lie down with a snake. My only child is Liza. Liza has only ever had one child. Mosey is my granddaughter.”

  I watched relief start in his shoulders and rise up to his eyes and spil down into al his limbs.

  “Okay, then. But then why would…?” He trailed away, thinking again. I had to nip that in the bud.

  I said, stil scrupulously truthful, “Claire blames my family, mostly Liza, for everything that happened with Melissa and the baby, down at the beach.

  She has had it in for us for years. As for my yard, there was no fence back then. It was al woods behind my house. Liza and every wild child in Immita were back there al the time, having sex and smoking dope and worse. Lawrence, think about the time line. If Claire did poison Liza, she did it before those bones were ever found.”

  “That’s true,” Lawrence said. “So then why poison her? Why hire Morissey to fol ow you?”

  I said, “I think Liza had something on Claire. I think she was blackmailing Claire to pay Mosey’s tuition to Calvary. Maybe Claire is trying to find out how much I know?” I had to fight to keep my face stil , because al at once I understood Liza’s insistence that Mosey go to private school. She’d never send Mosey to the school where Coach taught. Either because Coach thought Mosey was his or because Liza knew that young girls weren’t safe around him, or both. “I think any number of women have had ample opportunity to get pregnant by Claire Richardson’s husband. I don’t care about that. I only care about what Claire tried to do to Liza. Please, please, can you get someone to test this cup?”

  He measured that, then reached out and picked up the ziplock bag and put the cup in his jacket pocket. “If that’s what you need, you can have it. I have a guy at the lab who owes me. Owes me huge. I’l get it done fast. But if you need more, cal me. November be damned.”

  “Just the cup,” I said. Then I sat looking at him, like I was trying to memorize his laugh lines and the exact pattern of brown and gold in his deep-set eyes. Because I wouldn’t see him again until we were free. Both of us.

  He looked back in that same kind of memorizing way, and then he said, real quiet, one word: “November.”

  I said it back because it was easier to say that word than it was to try and say good-bye.

  As we left, John and the young hostess were standing by the greeting station in front of the fish pond, whispering and watching us with big, interested eyes.

  Lawrence lifted a hand and said, “Sorry about that,” as we passed.

  He walked me straight to my car, but before I could get in, his arms came around me. I tipped my face up, and he put his mouth on mine. It was more comfort than anything, and I leaned in, soaking in the smel of him. I stil wanted to go shoot Coach in the face, but I was so damn wrung-out tired. Truth be told, I wished I had the energy to go higher, and shoot God in the face as wel .

  As if he’d read my mind, Lawrence said, “There are good things coming, Ginny. I promise. I promise you, there’s a balance.”

  I wanted to believe him, but there
’d never been a trouble year like this one before. It almost made me hope I would die before I saw sixty and God came at me again. Every fifteen years I won a cosmic lotto for an Old Testament–style shit storm. Never the good stuff.

  What I thought then, strangely enough, was something like a prayer. A whiny child’s self-pitying, miserable prayer, but a prayer al the same, though God and I, we had not been on speaking terms for years. It was a “why me?,” but it was more than that. In some deep, wordless piece of me, I found myself asking God if I would ever win one of the good things, if I would ever beat the odds the other way and stumble into huge, undeserved, and unexpected joy.

  I had no expectations of any kind of answer. I wasn’t even sure the God I was so angry with was there. But at that moment Lawrence buried his face into my hair, like he was breathing me, like I was oxygen and he needed me to live. I tilted my face up again, and he kissed me again, and I wanted nothing more than to lie down with him then. To let him touch me and make everything else go away, if only for a little piece of time.

  He pul ed back to smile at me, and I realized I ought not to be feeling this low-down coil of building heat. The dates had gotten away from me, but today I should be curled up in my ugly sweatpants drinking tea, smack in the middle of my clockwork period. I stared up at Lawrence, not even seeing him, doing math in my head.

  I was three days late.

  I thought, Well, at my age I should start being late. But I never had been before. It would be too much even for God, even this year, to throw me headlong into early menopause the same month I had sex for the first time in, literal y, years. I started laughing then.

  “I’m forty-five years old,” I said to Lawrence. I fel back a step and leaned on the car. I was laughing so hard now I could barely choke the words out.

  He looked puzzled, smiled and shrugged. “I’m forty-six.”

  “Once!” I choked out, howling now, with tears streaming down my cheeks. My insides hurt with it, I laughed so hard. “Once!”

  “What?” he said. It was catching. He was chuckling now, too, helplessly, with no idea why, and that made me laugh harder.