The Quarry Girls(60)

She took a swig of her tea. It intensified her oversweet smell, like the liquid was pushing the scent out her pores. “When I find the stuff here that matters, and I’m about ready to say none of it does. Not without Maureen.” A wave of muddy grief rolled across her face, but she continued. “I have a friend lives in Des Moines. She said I can stay with her for a while, then who knows? Las Vegas always needs showgirls.”

She chuckled at this. She was the same age as my mom, midthirties. She was still pretty.

“I should get my drum kit out of the garage,” I said.

I’d come to play, but on the walk over, I’d also considered asking her what to do about the photos. I wouldn’t tell her why I’d gone to the basement, just what I’d found. She seemed like the one grown-up I knew who was comfortable with the darker stuff, but she was so strange this morning, sad but solid in a way she hadn’t felt to me in years.

She nodded, but her clear eyes had grown stormy. “You could leave with me, you know. There’s nothing for anyone here. I should have skipped town a while ago, back when your dad started tomcatting around my door after he’d worked his way through the rest of the neighborhood. If your parents couldn’t survive Pantown with their souls intact, none of us can.”

She grabbed my chin, startling me. “I’m sorry about that, about what it did to your mom, me sleeping with your father. Constance was never the same after she found out.”





CHAPTER 35


“I know it wasn’t the only factor, that she had some bad genes from her own mother and got the baby blues after Junie was born, but my sleeping with her husband couldn’t have helped,” she continued, like she hadn’t just leveled my world, like we were talking about our favorite television shows or which restaurant we should choose for lunch and not my dad running around on my mom with Gloria Hansen, with Maureen’s mom.

“No,” I said.

She set down her glass, studying me, her head tilted. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know about me and your father? He brought you with sometimes, for heaven’s sake, when Mr. Hansen was at work. You’d play with Mo.” She gave me a look like maybe I wasn’t as smart as she’d thought, but that crumbled into sympathy. “I’m sorry, honey. I thought you knew. I paid for it, if that helps. Cost me my husband and my best friend. When Maureen found out, it cost me her respect, too.”

Images clacked against each other like billiard balls in my head. Mom and newborn Junie resting in the same bed, Dad asking if I wanted to get out of the house for a bit. I said yes every time. I loved playing with Maureen, was used to going to her house with Mom. Maureen and I would run around outside, take long drinks from the hose when we got hot, or on rainy days squirrel away in her room, the Hansen house emptier then but still full of interesting things. We didn’t pay attention to Dad and Mrs. Hansen other than to hide from them, knowing when they discovered us, the fun was over and I’d have to go home.

“May I use your bathroom?” I asked Mrs. Hansen.

She looked like she wanted to say more, to rewrap that apology and offer it a second time, but instead she said that was fine and turned to pull more cups out of the cupboard.

“Help yourself to anything you see that you want,” she said, her back to me. “I’ll end up leaving most everything. Let the damn city figure out what to do with it.”

I navigated the path to the bathroom, still in a daze. I sat on the closed toilet seat, trying to hold on to a thought, but it was like grabbing fish underwater.

My dad and Mrs. Hansen had an affair.

The medicine cabinet was ajar, the sink stacked with orange prescription bottles. I reached for the nearest. Equanil. The next one said diazepam. Mom had both of those. I’d seen them in her nightstand, and I knew they were both meant to relax her. Happy pills? I supposed. The third bottle was labeled digoxin. I heard Dad’s voice talking about Maureen’s drowning.

Sheriff Nillson believes Maureen stole some of her mother’s heart medicine, her digoxin, to knock herself out so she didn’t fight the water. If it wasn’t the heart medicine, it was some of her downers.

Before I could talk myself out of it, I opened all three bottles and dropped a bunch of tablets from each into my shorts pocket. I didn’t have a plan, just a desperate need to figure out Maureen, or to be like Maureen. Or maybe I wanted to escape everything for a moment, not forever, just long enough to stop feeling so sad, so lost, so sure things were going to get even worse.

And soon.

Help yourself to anything you see that you want, Mrs. Hansen had said.





CHAPTER 36


As soon as I got home, I moved the pills from my pocket to a nearly empty Anacin bottle and tucked it under my mattress. I already regretted taking them. That was apparently what I did now. Stupidly took things I shouldn’t.

After the pills were out of sight, I called Dad to tell him I’d seen Ed. He didn’t like hearing that. He told me to stay away from Ed—as if I needed anyone to tell me that—and then hung up, I assumed to figure out how to make the “running Ed out of town” stick. Maybe he and Sheriff Nillson should have watched some Westerns.

Alone in the kitchen after the phone call, I was smacked by a wave of desperation to talk to Claude. Out of all my friends, he’d stayed steady. Hadn’t started chasing girls, crashing parties, wearing weird clothes. He was simply Howdy Claude, dependable as the sun, steady as cement, and forever trying to get a nickname to stick.