Locust Lane(60)
Clicking the blue oval made her feel like one of those hot Maoist chicks from the seventies, plunging a detonator and sending some capitalist pig’s limo into orbit. And yet, despite the thrill, posting the thread was a big gamble. Whatever her precautions, it could still blow up in her face in ways she didn’t anticipate. It was also a pretty shitty thing to do. But she had to do something, especially after her blunder yesterday morning in Hannah’s room, when she’d failed to preserve Jack’s incriminating texts. It had been a golden opportunity to help Michel bring his son home. But she’d fucked up, leaving Christopher behind bars and her lover in hell.
Last night, her other prize bit of information—the Lexi cover-up—had also looked like it was going to prove useless. Michel had called just before ten to report that Cantor had been unable to confirm that the Parrishes had paid off the Lirianos. There was nothing in the public record, naturally enough, and the lawyer’s call to Gloria Liriano, the mother, had elicited only a terse denial. As for Lexi, she was currently a freshman at Bucknell, and Gloria would appreciate it if Cantor left her in peace. He’d called her anyway. She hadn’t picked up. If there was an NDA, it was a good one.
After hearing this, Alice got pissed off. The thought of Christopher sitting in a jail cell was horribly wrong. Her rage deepened as she pictured Oliver driving around in his Merc like it was a chariot of the gods, paying people off, intimidating them. Oliver, whom she’d always thought a beacon of integrity. God only knew what he’d discussed with Geoff at five in the morning. She pictured Jack bullying her stepdaughter while Eden Perry lay dead in the Bondurant house. She couldn’t believe they were doing this and nobody was stopping them.
She should have seen this coming. If nothing else, the confrontation she had with Jack in December should have alerted her. It was during their Christmas break; she’d come home from the gym to find Hannah and Jack prowling the kitchen.
“Come on,” she said, in Cool Mom mode. “Let me buy you lunch.”
She took them to a Greek place. Jack did all the talking, describing his AP Psych project, an admittedly clever variant of the Stanford Prison Experiment set in Home Ec. Evidently, amid the failed soufflés, the worst aspects of human nature were confirmed. When the server arrived, he ordered for both of them. Spanakopita for Hannah, a gyro for himself.
“Since when do you eat feta?” Alice asked. “Or spinach?”
Hannah shot her a panicky look and gave her head the slightest of shakes. When lunch arrived, she put a forkful in her mouth and attempted, without much success, to chew it. What the hell, Alice thought.
“Why did you order her that?” she asked Jack. “I don’t get it.”
“She can never make up her mind,” Jack said.
Alice was flabbergasted. If a man had ever ordered unwanted food for her, she’d have made him eat it. Off the floor.
“Women are a lot less decisive than men,” Jack continued, authoritatively. “They need us to make decisions. It’s an established fact.”
Alice knew she should let it go. There was no reason to fight with her daughter’s boyfriend. Except for the fact that he was being an asshole.
“Meanwhile, Hannah’s lunch gets tossed. Not exactly a win for the male of the species.”
“I’m just saying there are proven differences between the sexes.”
“I agree. And men have no clue what they are.”
“So men never make decisions for you?”
“Only when I tell them what they are.”
“Not even Mr. Holt?”
The question was delivered with a knowing smirk. Alice was tempted to impale him with one of the little plastic spears holding his gyro together. Meanwhile, Hannah was making barely audible sounds of alarm beneath the congealing food still resident in her mouth.
“Meaning what?” Alice asked.
“No, it’s just, he works like twenty hours a day and makes all this money and is totally stressed, and here you are at lunch after the gym, so it’s not like it’s this big equal partnership.”
It was such an astonishingly shitty thing to say that Alice found herself waiting for him to announce he was just kidding. But he didn’t. Because he wasn’t.
“Relationships are negotiations, Jack. Don’t judge them unless you’re at the table when the deal is done.”
If he caught the reference to his own entanglement with Lexi, he wasn’t letting on. Instead, he took a big, shrugging chomp of his meat-stuffed sandwich. It occurred to Alice this could go one of two ways. She could either wipe the sticky floor with him, or she could let it go.
“Here, have some of my salad,” she said to Hannah, choosing the latter course. “The portions here are too big anyway.”
And why had she let it go? Because she knew the damage a knock-down brawl would inflict on Hannah. Because she’d believed an entitled cocksure pseudo-intellectual preppy boy was better than no boy at all. But she’d been wrong. The anger, the will to control—it was right there, as plain as the pustule of sauce perched indifferently on the corner of his lip. The kid was bad news. Bad news, and she’d let it go.
So it was on her. She needed to help Christopher before he was beyond help. She had to put the focus where it truly belonged. On Jack. If the Parrishes were going to throw Christopher under the bus, then she’d run an Amtrak over them.