Live to Tell (Live to Tell #1)(19)
“You don’t actually expect us to eat that, do you?”
Lauren follows Lucy’s gaze to the spongy brown spots on the overripe avocado.
“No, I don’t expect you to eat that.” She steps on the pedal of the trash can and chucks the whole thing. “Maybe we should go out to dinner. What do you think?”
“Because of a rotten avocado?”
Lauren shrugs. “Just because.”
“Really? We never go out to dinner anymore—I mean, not with you.” As soon as the last words leave her mouth, Lucy looks as though she wishes she could take them back.
Of course the kids eat out whenever they’re with Nick. Nick is the one with the job—and the one who can’t cook.
Lauren, who can cook—and in fact was marinating chicken breasts to go with the salad—suddenly doesn’t feel like it tonight. There’s not a breath of breeze at the open window, and the kitchen must be a hundred degrees. An air-conditioned restaurant—and a meal someone else cooks and cleans up after—couldn’t be more appealing.
“We’ll go down to Mardino’s,” she decides, reaching for Saran wrap to cover the half-made salad. “Can you go help Sadie get her sandals on while I clean this up?”
“Sadie’s still in her bathing suit. She’s watching The Wizard of Oz on TV.”
“What?”
Wait a minute—that’s right. When they got back from the pool, Lauren had told Sadie to go wait for her in the living room and watch television and she’d bring her some dry clothes.
And then I got busy in the kitchen, and I forgot. Terrific.
Lauren’s first instinct is to beat herself up over it—and to tell Lucy to forget about the dinner they can’t really afford when there’s perfectly good chicken in the fridge.
But everyone needs to treat themselves sometimes, right?
Right.
And sitting around in a wet swimsuit has never killed anyone, has it?
Neither—as far as she knows—has a divorce.
“If you’ll clean up the salad scraps,” she tells Lucy, “I’ll go find something for Sadie to wear.”
Her daughter eyes the cutting board, littered with vegetable peels, onionskins, and celery strings. “Okay, but we really should compost this stuff, Mom. We all have to do our part to save the planet, you know?”
Yeah, well, we’ll worry about the planet tomorrow, Lauren wants to tell her. Tonight, let’s just focus on saving ourselves.
She can hear Ryan, still on the phone with Nick, as she leaves the kitchen.
“Yeah, and Mom let me have a couple of guys over to watch the Yankees–Red Sox last night,” he’s saying, “and she made us those brownies I love…yeah, with the chocolate chunks… I know they aren’t, but they’re good… Yeah, well, whatever. I have to go, Dad. Wait, here, talk to Sadie first.”
Maybe, Lauren thinks with a faint smile as she unfastens the doggy gate at the foot of the stairway and heads up to Sadie’s room for her clothes, the tide is turning at last.
Smiling so hard his face hurts, Garvey Quinn wishes the old lady would release her death grip on his hand. But she’s been grasping it for what feels like five or ten minutes, going on and on about her health problems and her family’s health problems and her neighbors’ health problems, and how she suspects there’s a secret toxic waste dump somewhere around here.
Garvey isn’t so sure she’s wrong. This industrial western New York town is maybe an hour’s drive from the notorious Love Canal, and look what happened there.
“Even my cousin’s dog has cancer now,” the woman informs him with more anger than sorrow.
“I’m sorry to hear that, Barbara Ann.”
He sees a glint of pleasure in her weathered face as she registers that he remembers her name. Yes, and he only heard it once, when she first came up to him, introduced herself, grabbed his hand, and refused to let go.
Barbara Ann. Of course he remembers. In the grand scheme of things, remembering names is one of the simplest tasks on his daily agenda. He has all kinds of little tricks for doing so.
Barbara Ann—that’s an easy one.
Ba-ba-ba…ba-ba-bara Ann.
Garvey was a Beach Boys fan back in his college days, when all his friends were listening to so-called alternative music. Image-conscious even way back then. Typical conservative Quinn behavior.
“Nobody’s listening to me!” Barbara Ann rails. “I talked to my doctor and I wrote to the mayor. I even called Eyewitness News. You know what?”
“No, what?”
“I got to talk to an assistant reporter, and she said she’d send someone down to check things out, and do you know what?”
“No, what?” he asks again.
“She never did.”
“Is that right.”
She vigorously nods her scarf-covered, chemo-ravaged head. “Nobody ever does what they say they’re going to do. And that’s the biggest problem with the world these days.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more.”
Garvey studiously keeps his gaze fastened on her lashless eyes beneath a brow-less forehead, fighting the urge to look beyond her toward the closed businesses lining Main Street. Amid plate-glass windows covered with brown paper and “For Lease” signs, all that remains open are an OTB, a rent-to-own center, a tanning salon, and a chicken wing joint.