The Better Liar(20)

Leslie and I went survivalistically silent. My mother began to apologize. His expensive camera! But he was bare-ankled, in high spirits. Who cares about the camera, he said, and took her in his arms. He bent her over backward, like a ballroom dancer, kissing her against the magic backdrop. Like all good vacations, it convinced us that these versions of ourselves were truer than the others, that the workaday shell of my mother could at any moment spring open to reveal her more buoyant, romantic insides.

I didn’t remember any of that. Leslie could have made it up and I would have believed her. I don’t think she did; she clung to it for years after, never bothering to change it out for a better story. For her it represented a kind of perfect happiness. I wanted to share her happiness, so I lied: Yes, I remember! When my only memory of the trip was of Leslie gifting me her Honey Bun, which I ate facing the enormous picture window, smearing sugar grease on my father’s beloved briefcase seats, licking my fingers one by one as the Pinto lifted off like a plane. Leslie beside me, my mother in front of her, Daddy in the driver’s seat, cameraless: each of us experiencing exactly as much happiness as we could successfully contain.





14


    Leslie


Even with stops for gas, a new phone for Mary, and brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tarts (traditional on road trips, she told me), the trip home seemed half as long as my drive to Vegas. I kept swallowing nervous spit as we crossed into Albuquerque. “Birthdate,” I said.

“May…twenty-second?” Mary said. “Um, 1992,” she added, more confidently.

“Good,” I said. “What’s your father’s name?”

“Walter Voigt.”

“Warren.” I gripped the steering wheel.

“Warren. That’s right.” She leaned down to unzip her duffel and took out a tube of strawberry Chapstick. “Want some?” she asked as she rubbed it over her lower lip.

I shook my head. “What’s your mother’s maiden name?”

“You didn’t tell me that.” She capped the Chapstick and put it back in the bag.

“It’s Stetson,” I said, feeling sick.

“Like the hats?”

I smiled perfunctorily.

It was the worst time to drive. The sun blinded me in one eye as we entered the foothills. Every so often it gained the perfect angle and turned the dust on the windshield totally opaque.

    “What have you been doing in Vegas?” I asked.

She looked blank. “Waitressing. You know that.”

“No—Robin-you. Dave will ask.”

Mary shrugged. “She could be waitressing too.”

“I guess that’s true.”

Mary turned her head to stare out at the trickle of the Embudo arroyo. “I’m good, you know. I’m not going to freak out.”

“Okay.” I blew out a breath. “I guess we’ll see when we get there.”

She gave me that smile she’d practiced in the mirror, the Robin smile, then turned back to the window.

I turned the radio on. “You Light Up My Life” immediately oppressed the car.

Every time I glanced over to check on Mary, the color of her hair startled me a little—that and the slight pink fleshiness of her arm resting against the divider. She was real, meaty in a way that Robin’s body hadn’t been. With her hair lighter, closer to the color I remembered from childhood, she seemed more like my sister than my sister had.

“What’s that?”

“Lynnewood? Just a park.”

“It looks like it was air-dropped in from Connecticut.”

We went slowly north, following the mountains, the sun sinking over the tops of the adobe roofs.

“You live way out here, huh?” Mary asked.

“Kind of,” I said. “It’s a nice community.”

“I thought you said your husband was a firefighter.”

“Fire safety engineer,” I said. “It’s different.”

“Must be.” She stuck her finger in her mouth and ran her nail along one of her molars.

I turned in to our neighborhood and drove down High Canyon Trail. Mary rolled down her window and lit a cigarette. It was twilight now and cool. The hairs on my arms rose. “Please don’t smoke in the car.”

She looked at me and ashed into the wind. “We’re almost there, right?”

    I didn’t answer. Eventually the silence made her put the cigarette out.



* * *



—

We pulled up to the house a few minutes later, the grit on the driveway crunching beneath the tires. My ears felt stuffed with cotton after eight hours of engine noise. I paused in the driver’s seat as Mary put her shoes back on and glanced up at the house. For a moment we were both staring at it. When we’d first bought it I’d felt exultant every time I looked at it. Mine, ours: the superclean, near-white stucco fa?ade; the arched, shining window over the reclaimed-wood front door; the long, lazy concrete walkway, which wound like a stream from the front door to the driveway, suggesting that the people who lived there had eons of time on their hands.

The porch light flickered on. After a moment, Dave opened the door and came hurrying out. He was in his new jeans, the effect of which was ruined by the combination of his old thin Tweety Bird T-shirt and flap-soled sneakers, and the familiar warmth at seeing him crept into my fingertips. He was still beautiful, the porch light separating the lines of his face into smooth, rounded planes. Just behind that, equally familiar, I felt the flood of nausea as he approached.