Girls Like Us(19)

“That’s Detective Davis,” I tell Grace. “Have you met him?”

“Briefly, this morning.”

She stands, the mood broken. Her lips form a tight smile. “Hello again, Detective. Thank you for returning my bracelet.”

“Of course. Sorry to interrupt.”

“You’re not. Is there anything I can do for you?”

“No, ma’am. I was just coming to get Agent Flynn.” He taps his watch. I glance down and realize it’s almost two o’clock. Howard will be dropping by any minute, if he isn’t there already.

“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Bishop,” I say, hopping up. I extend my hand and she grasps it, giving it a firm shake. “You’ve been very helpful.”

“Anything I can do. Remember what I said. Call me if you have any questions. I’m happy to help with the investigation in any way I can.”

“I will. Thank you.”

As I follow Lee down the Bishops’ driveway, I can feel Grace watching us from the porch.





6.



Howard Kidd is waiting for me on the front steps of the house.

He holds a briefcase in one hand. The afternoon sunlight glints off the top of his head. The tip of his nose is red from the cold, and he hunches inside his Barbour coat, the collar flipped up to keep him warm. He looks worried, like a kid whose mother has forgotten to pick him up at a birthday party. I wonder how long I’ve kept him waiting. When he sees us pull into the driveway, he gives us a big, relieved wave.

“There are moments,” Lee says as he pulls the car to a stop, “when I’m grateful I never practiced law.”

I snort. “Oh, poor Howie. I’m sure there are some highlights of his job.”

“His job is about death and taxes. And watching families fight over money.”

“Well, the good news here is that there isn’t any.”

“Money? Or family?”

“Either.” I open the car door and hop out onto the gravel. “Talk later?”

“Sure. I’ll call you. Thanks for your help this morning, Nell.”

“No problem.” I watch Lee pull into reverse and back out onto Dune Road. I wonder if I did, in fact, help with anything. It’s possible I just complicated the case further. I may not hear from Lee Davis again. The thought deflates me a little.

I turn to Howard and feign a smile. I’m not in the mood to talk to him—to anyone, really—but I’ve put this off long enough. “Come on inside. Can I get you some coffee? Hot tea?”

“Tea would be nice. Thanks.”

“Got cold all of a sudden, huh?”

“Yeah. Fall sneaks up on you out here.”

“Sure does.”

I put my key into the rusted lock and jiggle it, fighting with the door until it opens. Howard follows me into the house. I’m suddenly acutely aware of how dusty it is, how in need of repair. Dad was always spartan in his tastes, but he was compulsively neat, too. He could fix anything and did. It wasn’t always pretty, but the house was functional and organized. At least, that’s how I remember it.

My mother, more of a free spirit, was content to live with clutter. She would break out paints and brushes and unspool a giant roll of paper across the living room floor. She would play music and we would paint, neither of us caring if we dripped on the wood, on our hands, on our clothes. She cooked that way, too: lots of bowls and mess, flour on the floor, the kitchen alive with the scent of baking bread in the oven and the tang of chilaquiles on the stove. She would hum while she worked, she would taste things straight from the pot, spoon to mouth. I would sit at her feet spinning leaves in a salad bowl or sorting spices by color on the rack.

They fought often about the mess. My father liked to come home to a clean, quiet house. My mother argued that she was not running a military base, she was trying to raise a child. She wanted me to color and spill, to cook and make forts out of blankets and couch cushions without worrying about what it did to the furniture. At night, when they thought I was sleeping, I would creep out of my bed and sit at the top of the stairs and listen to them argue. I felt horribly guilty. I was my mother’s co-conspirator, after all. I knew that she often napped with me when she could’ve been doing the laundry, because I slept better when curled up in her arms, and that she let me stay longer at the beach or park instead of rushing home to make dinner, just to make me happy. These were our secrets. She’d never tell. My father’s ire was reserved for her and her alone. Sometimes after they fought, he would bang out of the house and I would hear the buzz of his motorcycle fade in the night air. Other times, they would open a bottle of wine, turn on music, and dance, her head resting gently against his chest. I told myself that this was love. It was as messy and imperfect as the house my mother kept. It was an uneasy marriage, but a passionate one. It wasn’t until I was in high school that I realized marriages weren’t all this way. I couldn’t picture Tom Street’s parents fighting the way mine did. I couldn’t imagine them dancing barefoot, either. They were always polite to each other, more like business partners than lovers. I wasn’t sure which kind of marriage was worse.

After my mother died, the paints disappeared. So did the baking supplies. My toys were collected from the living room floor and put in baskets in my room. It was clear to me that this was where they were meant to stay. There wasn’t music in our house anymore. My mother’s clothes vanished from her closet. My memories of her began to fade, at an alarmingly fast rate. I searched the house for traces of her—in the medicine cabinet, in the crawl space below the kitchen—but found nothing. She would come back to me only in snatches: I would smell her perfume on a woman at a party or catch a whiff of empanadas baking at a restaurant and I’d think of her. I’d see a woman in a bright red bathing suit at the beach and feel a physical pang, as though my mother was a phantom limb. My father never spoke of her and I never dared ask. Our house was stripped clean of her existence, except for the urn with her ashes in the closet. The house took on my father’s character: practical, organized, precise. My mother simply evaporated, as though she’d never lived there at all.