The Better Liar(33)

Outside, Miss Gloria held Eli draped halfway over her shoulder. He sobbed snot into her T-shirt. I watched them for a while as she did a funny little jiggling walk that made his teakettle screams wobble in pitch, Auto-Tunelike. She had flat, wide feet and square hips; her low center of gravity gave her the air of a sphinx.

    “Oh, Mrs. Flores.” Miss Gloria grinned, holding the still-whistling Eli out to me. “We’re teething this afternoon. Third top tooth!”

I took him and set him against my shoulder, just as she had. He screamed against my cheek, and I imagined my ear fluttering in the breeze from the sound waves like in a Bugs Bunny cartoon.

“Thanks for walking with him,” I said.

“Oh, no problem. He’s been very good about learning his sign language. He signed ‘Up!’ during story time, and he didn’t cry until we made it outside.”

I nodded and smiled. “Well, thank you,” I said. “Have a good night.”

She tilted her head. “Sure, honey,” she said. “You too.”

In the hot-tub car, Eli shrieked as if I were cutting him as I buckled his seatbelt and handed him his gummy key ring. He flung it away, and I replaced it in his lap. He flung it away again, and I abandoned the effort and shut the door, heading for the front seat.

“Hurts, huh?” I said over the noise of his screams and “Cheap Thrills” on the radio.

He sent another wave of sound up toward the driver’s seat.

I hummed along with it tunelessly.

He tried to drown me out.

I pulled onto the main road toward the Sprouts.

“Ahhhhhhhhh,” I said into the din. Slowly, I got louder and louder to match him, until we were both screaming in the car.

He fell asleep in the parking lot of the Sprouts, wheezing a little with exhaustion.

I wish Dave were here, I thought, looking in the rearview mirror. I wish Miss Gloria were here.

For the first time since I’d become a mother, it occurred to me to wish my mother were here. Robin—Mary—had put her into my head, played me that record.

But I didn’t want her with me. Not really.

I thought about what Eli might look like as a grown-up. Babies were so featureless, like tadpoles. I pictured him looking like his older cousin, Maria’s kid, curly-haired, broad-shouldered. Would Eli ever sit in a parking lot with his kid in the backseat, both of them screaming at each other? Would he think about me then? Wish for me to be next to him? Or would he take after his mother, as my mother had taken after hers, and be grateful he’d escaped me?

    Back in the driveway at home, I lifted Eli’s limp form out of the car seat and pressed him into my shoulder, hefting the grocery bag with the other. He stirred but didn’t wake as I made my way up the walkway.

“Mary?” I called as I opened the front door, then thought better of it—Dave could have come home early, been dropped off by someone else…“Robin?”

My voice echoed in the front hallway. I dropped the grocery bag in the kitchen, then spun slowly. All the cabinet doors stood open. “Robin?”

She wasn’t on the patio or in the living room. I went upstairs. The guest room door was open, and her bed was unmade, half her few clothes strewn across the floor.

“Mary?”

Against my shoulder, Eli woke up and began to sob in the empty house.





24


    Mary


It was brighter outside in the afternoon than it had been when I’d crawled onto the porch in the morning, and I shaded my eyes as I made my way through Leslie’s neighborhood. I’d run out of cigarettes around four in the afternoon, and I’d figured that wasn’t too long to be locked out. Besides, I wanted to send a message to Leslie: I wasn’t her pet. She couldn’t just lock me in her house and expect me to be there when she got back.

There was a surprising number of people out, despite the hour and the heat—women, mostly, in sleek gray-and-neon athletic wear, jogging or biking down the wide white sidewalks. Like the women, the houses matched, although each one boasted some unusual feature: timber accents, Spanish tile, lime-green Nikes. It was impossible to look into any of the houses, or any of the women’s eyes; the latter wore shiny mirrored sunglasses, and the sun turned the former’s plate-glass windows into mirrors themselves.

After fifteen minutes or so I came upon the entrance to the neighborhood. The sidewalks turned grubby along the edge of the main road, broken here and there by creosote and yucca. The road was flat and straight, so that I could see a long way in either direction. To the right lay the mountains. To the left was another residential pocket, this one patterned with single-story adobe houses, and beyond that I could see a sign for a Shell station.

    I was gathering sweat underneath my tits and shoulder blades by the time I made it to the station, and the cold air from the refrigerated drinks was a relief. “Two packs of Spirits,” I said to the woman behind the counter.

“Yellows, blues?”

“Blues.”

She blinked slowly and got up to get them. “Thanks,” I said when she handed me my change, and turned to leave.

“Oh—hi,” the woman behind me in line said as she saw my face. Her expression was sheepish, like a student running into her teacher outside of class, except she was at least thirty.