Wilde Lake(55)

“Hashtag sorrynotsorry,” Lu jokes. Her father looks utterly mystified. He uses a computer but has drawn a line at all forms of social media. He was horrified to learn that the state’s attorney’s office puts out press releases using the Twitter handle HoCoGov, while Lu was miffed that her office, unlike the library and the cops, didn’t merit a unique Twitter feed.

Intemperate. She remembered her father’s rage when the appeal was announced, his ill-considered words. The mild profanity he used would never inflame people today. Or would it? Even as standards for behavior seem to fall, it also seems easier, quicker, to end a career forever with one verbal transgression. An intemperate moment, a wrong choice of words, can go viral if it is captured on video, or in a screen grab.

Forever. One photograph. Girls still love bad boys. If Lu’s secret life were ever to become known—but, no, it won’t. She has built it that way. Certainly, there are no photographs. She seldom texts Bash and their phone conversations are matter-of-fact arrangements of when they might meet, no where or when stipulated. No records, except for the occasional bruise, scratch, or bite mark. She is careful. She will continue to be careful.

But it would be fascinating if a female public servant had to defend her legal-but-not-exactly mainstream love life. Fascinating as long as it happened to another female public official. Can’t you take that hit for the team, Hillary Rodham Clinton? Step on down, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Now that would be true equality, a female politician coming back after an ignominious sex scandal.

There is the fact that Bash is married. That alone could be enough to torpedo Lu’s career—unless they pretend to be IN LOVE and are therefore given dispensation to break with common decency. Why are people allowed to hurt others in the name of love? Why is love given so much credit, as if it is always a power for good? Does Eloise Schumann love Ryan Schumann, a man she can’t possibly know, a man she never knew, not sexually. Only six states allow conjugal visits and Maryland is not one of them. Even if Maryland were to permit it, an inmate such as Ryan Schumann, sentenced to life in prison for a capital crime, might have a hard time earning the privilege. How had any woman managed to become attracted to him? Lu remembers him as weaselly and small, even to her six-year-old eyes. As a small woman, she is always careful to avoid small men because she doesn’t want anyone to think the man had settled, choosing her for stature alone. Gabe was slender as a reed, but a respectable five foot eleven. Bash is shockingly broad—but, no, Bash doesn’t count because no one has ever seen them together. No one will ever see them together.

Maybe when Penelope and Justin are out of the house, she will go on match.com. For now, this is the best solution she can fashion.

She sips her glass of wine, enjoying the companionable silence, the strains of—ah, it’s Carmen. Old age looks pretty good from here. And she will be all of fifty-five when the twins leave for college, far from old despite the joke she made to AJ. Some women are just getting started at fifty-five. Again, look at Clinton and Ginsburg. In Lu’s third act, whatever that proves to be, she might finally eclipse her brother and her father professionally.

Not that she’s competitive or anything like that.





K-I-S-S-I-N-G


By the time fourth grade rolled around in 1979, I had a best friend. Because he was a boy, my classmates tried to tease us, say he was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend. We didn’t care. Two people can brave the taunts that one person finds intolerable. We left school every afternoon, their silly words bouncing off our backs.

Lu and Randy Sitting in a tree K I S S I N G First comes love then comes marriage / Lu and Randy with a baby carriage.

Yes, my new best friend was the boy I had wanted to kill a year earlier. It happens. For us, it happened this way.

When AJ told our father about the fight on the first day of third grade—a rare betrayal on my brother’s part; I think he was mad about me giving up his real name to Noel—our father drove me to Randy’s house the next day and insisted I apologize.

Randy’s house was like a funhouse mirror version of my own—a distorted, disturbing mirror version. A motherless household, where the boy was the youngest. Chaotic and cramped and messy, with far too many people, whereas my house always felt as if it didn’t really have enough people to justify all its rooms. Randy’s father worked as a night watchman, although I think that was his second job. He was getting ready to go to work when we arrived. He looked surprised, yet not surprised.

The moment my father introduced himself, Mr. Nairn seemed to assume that Randy was in the wrong. Why else would the state’s attorney be in this postage stamp of a living room, trying to be heard above the blasting television that no one thought to turn off?

“Randy,” he screamed. “You get down here right now.” He wore a gray uniform. The living room wall had a hole in the Sheetrock, and there were what seemed like a hundred teenage girls milling about, although there were only three, Randy’s sisters.

Randy came downstairs, cowering like a pup. My father said swiftly, “I think you misunderstood, sir—it was Lu who started the fight, Lu who needs to apologize to Randy.”

I wanted to explain myself, tell the full story, how Randy had provoked the attack. But I also wanted to get out of that strange house, away from its smells and damage and the sensation that a fight might start at any minute, over anything. Staring at a point over Randy’s shoulder, which happened to be the hole in the wall, I mumbled. “I’m-sorry-I-hit-you-it-was-wrong-I-won’t-do-it-again.”