Mr. Mercedes (Unnamed Trilogy #1)(39)

“Then you’ll understand. Ollie was my big sister, eight years older than I was. I loved her, but when she went off to college, I was the happiest girl in America. And when she dropped out three months later and came running back home, I felt like a tired girl who has to pick up a big sack of bricks again after being allowed to put it down for awhile. She wasn’t mean to me, never called me names or pulled my pigtails or teased when I walked home from junior high holding hands with Marky Sullivan, but when she was in the house, we were always at Condition Yellow. Do you know what I mean?”

Hodges isn’t completely sure, but nods anyway.

“Food made her sick to her stomach. She got rashes when she was stressed out about anything—job interviews were the worst, although she finally did get a secretarial job. She had good skills and she was very pretty. Did you know that?”

Hodges makes a noncommittal noise. If he were to reply honestly, he might have said, I can believe it because I see it in you.

“One time she agreed to take me to a concert. It was U2, and I was mad to see them. Ollie liked them, too, but the night of the show she started vomiting. It was so bad that my parents ended up taking her to the ER and I had to stay home watching TV instead of pogoing and screaming for Bono. Ollie swore it was food poisoning, but we all ate the same meal, and no one else got sick. Stress is what it was. Pure stress. And you talk about hypochondria? With my sister, every headache was a brain tumor and every pimple was skin cancer. Once she got pinkeye and spent a week convinced she was going blind. Her periods were horroramas. She took to her bed until they were over.”

“And still kept her job?”

Janey’s reply is as dry as Death Valley. “Ollie’s periods always used to last exactly forty-eight hours and they always came on the weekends. It was amazing.”

“Oh.” Hodges can think of nothing else to say.

Janey spins the letter around a few times on the coffee table with the tip of her finger, then raises those light blue eyes to Hodges. “He uses a phrase in here—something about having nervous tics. Did you notice that?”

“Yes.” Hodges has noticed a great many things about this letter, mostly how it is in many ways a negative image of the one he received.

“My sister had her share, too. You may have noticed some of them.”

Hodges pulls his tie first one way, then the other.

Janey grins. “Yes, that’s one of them. There were many others. Patting light switches to make sure they were off. Unplugging the toaster after breakfast. She always said bread-and-butter before she went out somewhere, because supposedly if you did that, you’d remember anything you’d forgotten. I remember one day she had to drive me to school because I missed the bus. Mom and Dad had already gone to work. We got halfway there, then she became convinced the oven was on. We had to turn around and go back and check it. Nothing else would do. It was off, of course. I didn’t make it to school until second period, and got hit with my first and only detention. I was furious. I was often furious with her, but I loved her, too. Mom, Dad, we all did. Like it was hardwired. But man, was she ever a sack of bricks.”

“Too nervous to go out, but she not only married, she married money.”

“Actually, she married a prematurely balding clerk in the investment company where she worked. Kent Trelawney. A nerd—I use the word affectionately, Kent was absolutely okay—with a love of video games. He started to invest in some of the companies that made them, and those investments paid off. My mother said he had the magic touch and my father said he was dumb lucky, but it was neither of those things. He knew the field, that’s all, and what he didn’t know he made it his business to learn. When they got married near the end of the seventies, they were only wealthy. Then Kent discovered Microsoft.”

She throws her head back and belts out a hearty laugh, startling him.

“Sorry,” she says. “Just thinking about the pure American irony of it. I was pretty, also well adjusted and gregarious. If I’d ever been in a beauty contest—which I call meat-shows for men, if you want to know, and probably you don’t—I would have won Miss Congeniality in a walk. Lots of girlfriends, lots of boyfriends, lots of phone calls, and lots of dates. I was in charge of freshman orientation during my senior year at Catholic High School, and did a great job, if I do say so myself. Soothed a lot of nerves. My sister was just as pretty, but she was the neurotic one. The obsessive-compulsive one. If she’d ever been in a beauty contest, she would have thrown up all over her bathing suit.”

Janey laughs some more. Another tear trickles down her cheek as she does. She wipes it away with the heel of her hand.

“So here’s the irony. Miss Congeniality got stuck with the coke-snorting dingbat and Miss Nervy caught the good guy, the money-making, never-cheat husband. Do you get it?”

“Yeah,” Hodges says. “I do.”

“Olivia Wharton and Kent Trelawney. A courtship with about as much chance of success as a six-months preemie. Kent kept asking her out and she kept saying no. Finally she agreed to have dinner with him—just to make him stop bothering her, she said—and when they got to the restaurant, she froze. Couldn’t get out of the car. Shaking like a leaf. Some guys would have given up right there, but not Kent. He took her to McDonald’s and got Value Meals at the drive-through window. They ate in the parking lot. I guess they did that a lot. She’d go to the movies with him, but always had to sit on the aisle. She said sitting on the inside made her short of breath.”