The Better Liar(77)

    I sipped from the bottle and handed it back to her. “Do you think they were in love, though?”

She leaned from side to side, bending her elbows, like a full-body weighing of the scales. “I used to think so. Now…Maybe it was because of us. He thought he should have kids. He was so much older than her. And she’d never been in a relationship with anybody else. When I was a little girl I thought that was so romantic. Like they’d been waiting years and years for each other.”

“Let’s go down to the water,” I said. “Let’s put our feet in, at least.”

Leslie looked over her shoulder and picked up the bottle. “All right.”

I stood up, my head a little lighter than it had been, and took off my heels. Leslie slipped her shoes off too, and the deck creaked under our bare feet as we left it to sit on the concrete next to the pool steps. “This is going to make my dress get those, like, little pills,” I said. “I can feel it already. It’s like I’m sitting on Velcro.”

“Just on your rear end,” Leslie said, craning her neck to look at it. “You can shave those off, you know. With a razor.”

“I’d rather throw this dress away than have to shave its ass.”

Her cheeks bulged as she tried to swallow her wine while she laughed.

I stuck my feet in the pool and had to bite my own arm to keep from shrieking. “Oh, fuck, that’s cold,” I whispered, sliding backward and ruining my dress for good.

“It’s May,” Leslie said. “What did you expect?”

“It’s the desert! It was hot yesterday.”

She stretched her own legs out, skimming the water with the soles of her feet. “It’s not that bad. You’re a wimp.”

I crossed my legs and put the wine bottle in my lap, watching her profile. “Tell me more stuff about your mom.”

“Why do you care?”

    “Because you don’t like to talk about her. Feels like a secret.”

Leslie shook her head and hunched her shoulders. “There’s no secret. She was my mom. She was tiny, like five two. She got a perm when I was ten or so. She liked music and cooking. She taught me how to make apricot pie and coq au vin. She could swim. I remember she smoked Gauloises because it was cool when she was a kid in the seventies, to be the kind of girl who smoked French cigarettes. She wouldn’t let me wear any eye shadow and I hated that. She was gone a lot, though, and I wore it whenever she was gone because Daddy couldn’t tell that I had it on. And then she died. And so I don’t like talking about her. It makes me uncomfortable.”

“Why was she gone a lot?”

Leslie took the bottle from my lap and tipped it back again. At last she said, “I guess it doesn’t matter to tell you. Daddy didn’t want me to tell people, but he’s dead now.” She pulled her feet out of the water and crossed her legs, matching me. “She was in and out of hospitals. She was sad—depressed.”

“How come?”

The wine bottle was empty; Leslie rested her head drunkenly on her own shoulder. “You know, I thought it was just me blaming myself for the longest time? Because kids always blame themselves? But I— After hearing Albert today, I really do think—it was me. I think it was because she didn’t want me.”

“What do you mean?”

Leslie sighed. “She got pregnant so fast, and he wanted the baby, and so they got married, but…” She shrugged. “I always felt like she didn’t really like me. Like we were so distant from each other. And maybe it was true. Maybe she just…didn’t want me.” She shook her hands out. “Is that good? Is that enough? No more secrets?”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s good. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome,” she said, and took my hand, holding it in both of hers. “I hope you have a good life,” she said, slurring a little. “I hope you make it as—as an actress. You’re a good actress.”

“You’re drunk,” I said.

“Am I?” She shook her head. As if prompted by her movement, a square of yellow light fell over both of us. We started, scrambling to our feet, the wine bottle rolling off Leslie’s lap into the shallow end of the pool. “Fuck,” she whispered. We both watched as it hit the bottom of the pool with a hard, sharp sound. Somehow, it didn’t break. Leslie exhaled and turned around to look at the house. “Somebody’s home,” she said.

    I could see a figure in a white T-shirt moving around in the upstairs bedroom. “I don’t think they saw us,” I whispered back. “Let’s go.”

She pointed at the pool. “We have to get that.”

The wine bottle stared up at us from under the waves. “You first,” I said.

Leslie’s face was pink. “They’ll see me if I get in.”

I retrieved our shoes from under the bistro table. “Let’s go,” I said.

She followed me, and took her shoes from me blankly when I handed them to her. Above us, in the house, another person joined the first in the bathroom. “But they’ll see it,” she hissed. “In the morning. They’ll know we were here.”

The two people in the house shuffled out of the bathroom, and the light shut off again. The pool lost its yellow square. I looked at Leslie, and she looked back, and then I watched her burst into silent laughter. She took my hand and we ducked through the gate together in the dark.