Natalie swings at her, knocking her hard in the jaw. She is no mountain. She wants to tell Lisa she was wrong.
Felicia screams, and Natalie is scratching at Suzette’s face now, her strength ten times greater than what Suzette would have imagined. Suzette pushes back. She feels the burning of her jaw, the burning where this girl’s nails are in her arms. She is trying to restrain Natalie, but she can barely breathe. Suzette is unsteady in these damn wedge sandals, and feels herself fall over, bumping her head on the car. She feels blood. She feels Natalie jumping down on her, not giving up. She raises her elbow and thumps it into Natalie’s mouth. Her other hand grabs Natalie’s dirty hair, and they are face-to-face like two wild wolves. She realizes she’s never been attacked like this in all her years. Felicia is pulling at Natalie weakly, and Natalie bites Suzette’s arm so hard that she screams. She feels like this girl could kill her right here. The irony, everyone would say. She reaches a point where all the pain feels the same, and now Natalie gets to her feet and starts kicking her in the side.
“Stop,” Suzette says. “Stop.”
Suzette hears a car horn, a man’s voice calling out. “Hey!” he yells, and his shadow eclipses them for a second. “Hey, stop or I’ll call the cops!”
When Natalie looks toward him, she freezes. Her wild face drains. Suzette sees some fear, some horror in her eyes, and Suzette, bloody and hurt, face throbbing, head aching, body feeling bruised, turns to see who is coming to her aid. A thin man stands over them. His hair is gone, and his hazel eyes look hollow.
He looks like it’s his last day on earth.
Natalie backs away. Felicia picks up Natalie’s phone that fell out of her pocket. “Let’s go.” They scuttle toward the Shake Superior strip mall.
Suzette has had the wind knocked out of her. She doesn’t know if she should scream or cry or just moan. She squints and recognizes the man. The seamstress’s husband, Greg, who works for Alex Lionel. She and Damon saw him at a fundraiser event the Lionels hosted a year ago. He looked like a young George Clooney then. Such smoothness, charisma. He wore a black suit that night. He was smiling, shaking hands. Thick hair, dark and gray. Eyes that sparkled. Now she is speechless. She hurts so bad, but she forgets every injury when she stares into his eyes.
“Greg?” she whispers.
He smiles halfheartedly. “You okay? Let me call an ambulance… and the cops, too.”
“No,” she says.
“No?”
She shakes her head. “I think I’m okay.” She holds her side where it hurts the most.
He wears Adidas shorts and a workout shirt. His legs and arms are bare, and she sees a bruise above his wrist. Behind him, a Mercedes is running in the parking lot with the driver-side door open. “What the hell was that all about?” His voice sounds quiet.
He holds his hand out to her, but she feels his frailty, and worries she might pull him down with her. She uses her arm, the one the girl didn’t bite, to help herself to her feet. Her side aches where she was kicked. The pain is so bad she can hardly breathe. One of her sandal heels is broken. Her skirt is filthy. She must look like a zombie with the blood on her face.
Greg brushes some pebbles from her arm, and his hands are cold. Suzette wants to weep because he looks so terrible. She wonders if she will soon read about his death, and her heart breaks that on this hot day, he is helping her, and his face and body, so pale, look genuine and calm, as though he is presenting himself to heaven in some way. He holds her elbow and looks at the wound from the bite. “You need a tetanus shot.” He studies her face. “And maybe stitches.”
She tries to catch her breath. Is it her ribs?
Later, she will think about him saving her, about the way his eyes looked so far away, and how good his cold hand felt on her ripped skin. She knows she will think about him and just shake her head because life is like this. “It was my fault,” she says. “I always think I can save everyone.”
“Me, too,” he says, and he helps her along.
19. The Time Machine
Darcy was never the type of widow who would set a place for her late husband at the table, or bake him a small cake on his birthday. She didn’t keep his clothes hanging in the closet or his toothbrush in the holder. But the one thing she finds herself doing every year without fail at the end of summer, the time of year when he first got sick, is getting angry.
As each year went by, she thought the anger would soften a bit the way she had softened in so many ways with age （not complaining to the newspaper office every time the boy missed the porch and made her hunt in the pachysandra; not shooing the stray cat that would sleep under her porch swing; not chiding Tabby, who worked the register at the dry cleaning business, for failing to put the dollar bills in the same direction）， but the general anger this time of year didn’t stop. And she welcomed it.