The Better Liar(19)

“That’s adorable.”

“Yeah.”

“What happened to your mom?”

The smile disappeared. “She died,” Leslie said. “When I was twelve.”

    “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“When did your dad die?”

“A few months ago. It wasn’t a surprise. He had thyroid cancer. He couldn’t do much for the last seven years or so.”

I itched at my scalp. Leslie watched me do it. She had pale eyes, as unsaturated as the rest of her coloring, so that against the vanilla tiles she could have been part of the motel décor.

After a while she said, “I think that was part of why Robin ran away. She didn’t want to deal with it.”

I stayed quiet, squatting next to her.

“Daddy and I, we didn’t know where she was for the first few years. We kept thinking she’d come back…Then we thought we’d never see her again. When she was nineteen she called and asked for money to go to business school in Florida. Daddy was thrilled. He sent her the money right away. Then we didn’t hear from her for a couple months, so I called the school and asked them to check on her. They said she’d never been enrolled. After a while a creditor in Louisiana got in touch with us about some debt she’d run up. She called from New Orleans a few times after that, asking for money, which he gave to her, of course. Then saying she was thinking about getting married and wanted his blessing. She was planning to bring the guy home to meet us. But she never showed up. When I got married she left a message for me with Daddy’s home nurse. It didn’t make any sense. The nurse said she sounded drunk. Then we didn’t hear anything from her anymore.”

I picked through my hair, moving locks aside so I could make sure I hadn’t missed a spot. “You don’t sound mad at her.”

Leslie was silent, hands braced on her knees. Finally she said, “She’s dead. It’s useless to be mad at her now.” She looked over at me. “I should let you rinse that out.”



* * *



—

It took almost ten minutes before the water was clear of dye, and even after the second round of chemicals it still felt like sticks. Leslie peered around the door just as I started finger-combing the ends in the mirror.

    Her expression went all funny when she saw me.

“What do you think?” I said. “It’s kind of yellowy, but maybe that’ll go away when it’s dry.”

She blinked. “Mary, you…It really looks like her.”

“Robin,” I said. “You should call me Robin.”

“You’re right,” she said, but she didn’t correct herself, just hung there in the half-open doorway. “We should…practice, I guess.”

“Go ahead,” I said, making eye contact with her in the mirror. “I don’t want to slip up later.”

Leslie’s face was pale. “You mean start right now?”

“Hi, Leslie,” I replied, imitating her flat New Mexican accent. “It’s me, Robin.”

She flinched.

“Good?” I asked her, turning around to look at her in person, but she was already disappearing behind the door again.

“Yeah, good,” she said, muffled. “I’m going to pack up. I’ll be ready to go in a minute.”

I turned back to my reflection in the mirror and practiced smiling. Then I stopped. It felt strange to be smiling alone.





13


    Robin


We were obsessed with the car, a ’78 Pinto, painted what I called in my head Nineteen-Seventies Orange, straight off the muddy color palette of the decade, so that only a few years into my parents’ marriage it started to look dusty next to the ’80s models on the road, whose yellows and reds had been calibrated for television commercials instead of magazine ads. The interiors were cognac leather, same as my father’s briefcase. It was his commuter car; I imagined him speeding off to work, cradled in his Pinto like an important file.

Mostly we loved the back windshield, which stretched from roof to license plate in a single sheet of reinforced glass as big as a picture window. Had we ever been rear-ended we would have been ribboned, which never occurred to us as we stood backward on the seat to look out at the billboards and gas stations disappearing in our wake. They shrank almost faster than I could fix my eye on them, the way things did when you tried to remember them on purpose.

Before the Grand Canyon we had ridden in the Pinto only a few times each—four times for me, six for Leslie, an injustice—and never on the highway. At sixty miles per hour I thought I might grow wings. That was the year I was four and Leslie was eight; whatever I was, she was double it. I regretted my babyishness bitterly, feeling that I was letting her down. Had I been even two years older I could have been everything to her, as she was everything to me; but as it stood I knew I was too shallow a receptacle for her secret thoughts. It was torture to be aware of these separate chambers of her personality yet too short to access them.

    Later, Leslie would say, Do you remember our vacation? and I’d pretend I did, nod along as she told her favorite story from it: Daddy in the Hawaiian shirt and rolled-up khakis, beltless, deck-shoed, as if the edge of the canyon were a prow; his bare ankles were as white as the skin under a cast. Next to him my mother, just after she’d cut her hair, wearing her old shirtdress with the wooden buttons. Let me have your camera, Warren, she said to my father. I want to take a picture of this—motioning at the sunset, whose striations echoed the layers of sediment. He handed it over and she stood on the bars of the lookout point for half an hour getting tan, pointing the camera this way and that, while Leslie and I complained. At last the light faded and she agreed it was time for dinner and held the camera out to Daddy, who didn’t grasp it quickly enough; it cracked to the ground and skittered under the safety fence, slipping over the edge of the canyon with an anticlimactic chhup!