“Are you cleaning?” I asked. I was still jittery from the encounter with Ed, fighting the urge to watch the street for his return.
“Not cleaning,” she said, walking toward the kitchen and indicating I should follow. “Moving.”
Despite her slurred words, she was walking a straight line, but that might have been a function of the boxes that still lined the path. The kitchen was even more surprising than the front room had been. The table was clear. I set the paper sack on top of it, a jumble of questions forming. I’d never heard of anyone moving out of Pantown. People stayed in the neighborhood, passed their houses on to their children.
“Where are you moving to?”
She leaned into the fridge and came out with a pitcher of iced tea. “Away from this hellhole, that’s all that matters. I’m taking my bad heart and hitting the road.”
I didn’t know what my face looked like, but it made her laugh tightly, like someone had pushed on her chest. “You’ll understand when you get older,” she said. “Maybe it won’t even take that long. You’ve always been a smart one.”
She removed two glasses from a cupboard stacked crazy with free-with-a-burger McDonald’s tumblers featuring Ronald McDonald and the gang. She filled them with iced tea. I got a glassful of Hamburglar, and she took Grimace.
“When are you leaving?”
She took a swig of her tea. It intensified her oversweet smell, like the liquid was pushing the scent out her pores. “When I find the stuff here that matters, and I’m about ready to say none of it does. Not without Maureen.” A wave of muddy grief rolled across her face, but she continued. “I have a friend lives in Des Moines. She said I can stay with her for a while, then who knows? Las Vegas always needs showgirls.”
She chuckled at this. She was the same age as my mom, midthirties. She was still pretty.
“I should get my drum kit out of the garage,” I said.
I’d come to play, but on the walk over, I’d also considered asking her what to do about the photos. I wouldn’t tell her why I’d gone to the basement, just what I’d found. She seemed like the one grown-up I knew who was comfortable with the darker stuff, but she was so strange this morning, sad but solid in a way she hadn’t felt to me in years.
She nodded, but her clear eyes had grown stormy. “You could leave with me, you know. There’s nothing for anyone here. I should have skipped town a while ago, back when your dad started tomcatting around my door after he’d worked his way through the rest of the neighborhood. If your parents couldn’t survive Pantown with their souls intact, none of us can.”
She grabbed my chin, startling me. “I’m sorry about that, about what it did to your mom, me sleeping with your father. Constance was never the same after she found out.”
CHAPTER 35
“I know it wasn’t the only factor, that she had some bad genes from her own mother and got the baby blues after Junie was born, but my sleeping with her husband couldn’t have helped,” she continued, like she hadn’t just leveled my world, like we were talking about our favorite television shows or which restaurant we should choose for lunch and not my dad running around on my mom with Gloria Hansen, with Maureen’s mom.
“No,” I said.
She set down her glass, studying me, her head tilted. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know about me and your father? He brought you with sometimes, for heaven’s sake, when Mr. Hansen was at work. You’d play with Mo.” She gave me a look like maybe I wasn’t as smart as she’d thought, but that crumbled into sympathy. “I’m sorry, honey. I thought you knew. I paid for it, if that helps. Cost me my husband and my best friend. When Maureen found out, it cost me her respect, too.”
Images clacked against each other like billiard balls in my head. Mom and newborn Junie resting in the same bed, Dad asking if I wanted to get out of the house for a bit. I said yes every time. I loved playing with Maureen, was used to going to her house with Mom. Maureen and I would run around outside, take long drinks from the hose when we got hot, or on rainy days squirrel away in her room, the Hansen house emptier then but still full of interesting things. We didn’t pay attention to Dad and Mrs. Hansen other than to hide from them, knowing when they discovered us, the fun was over and I’d have to go home.
“May I use your bathroom?” I asked Mrs. Hansen.
She looked like she wanted to say more, to rewrap that apology and offer it a second time, but instead she said that was fine and turned to pull more cups out of the cupboard.