I gave her a one-shouldered shrug. “It’s the one-year anniversary of his death. I should be with my family.”
“We don’t have to go to the beach.” Tina’s voice turned soft. “We can go to his gravesite right now, if you’d prefer. Just you and me.”
I gazed at the closet’s green carpet, the same intense shade as a tennis court, and volleyed back. “You didn’t hear my mother on the phone last night. She knows she was wrong. She just wants us to be together today.”
Tina stepped forward and got in my eyeline. “Is it about being together or showing people you’re together?”
“If I’m being honest,” I answered, “probably a little bit of both.”
“You’re not being honest, though,” Tina protested. “Because if it was just about being together, she would not expect you to show up today and hide who you really are! The same way your father hid who he really was! That’s the coward’s way!” By then, Tina knew the story of how my father died.
My eyes flashed at the word coward. “Fuck you.”
Tina nodded as though I’d gotten the answer to some unasked question right. “That’s good. You’re mad. You should be mad, but not at me. You can be mad at your father and still love him. Hell, you can be mad at your mother and still love her. But they’re the ones you need to get mad at.” Tina’s hands were flying around as she spoke, and I removed the navy shift from its hanger, folding it against my body protectively, not wanting to see it splattered with lotion.
“Fine,” I said, my voice nasty. “I’ll just never talk to my family again, if that’s what you want.”
“That is not what I want, Ruth. I want you to have a relationship with them on your own terms. One that doesn’t only feel good to them but to you too.”
I gaped at her. “You think what we have right now feels good to me?” I began to unbutton the back of the dress. “My whole family is getting ready to attend a celebration on the one-year anniversary of my father’s death, and I am the only one not going. My mother is despondent.”
“She is an adult, and she will be okay!” Tina cried as I stepped into the dress. She lowered her voice, changing tack. “Listen, Ruth. This is not easy. I went through it with my own parents and—”
“And you never speak!” I laughed meanly. “You have no family. I don’t want that. I don’t want to be like you.”
Tina held up her hands as I barged past her, considerately, so as not to get any lotion on the dress. I didn’t say anything more to her after that, but in the driveway, I did listen while she told me that she understood why I had to do this, and she knew it would get easier in time—that all this just took time—that she loved me, and if I changed my mind, I knew where to find her. She got behind the wheel of her rich-lady Cadillac, and I swung my leg over the seat of my rusted old bike, and at the end of the driveway she made a left, toward the water, and I went right.
PAMELA
Miami, 1979
Day 540
The trial started Monday, July 9, 1979, a scorcher of a day in Miami. The walk from the hotel to the rain-stained terra-cotta Justice Building took only five minutes, but that was enough for Tina and me to arrive with matching sweat patches on our lower backs. In the brick-laid Met Square, the jungle of media and spectators slowed us, everyone passing at the pace of treacle through the single entrance door. The Defendant would go on to blast the “bloodthirsty and virulent press” that assaulted his mother on these same stairs, butchering the word virulent so badly that the court reporter recorded it as variant. But it was perhaps the only point on which we agreed. They couldn’t have offered some of us a side door?
Patiently, I shuffled forward with the crowd, trying not to tear the shopping bags I carried in each hand, pastries, fruit, and yogurt in one, thermos of coffee in the other. I was essentially hidden in plain sight among the other young women who had parted their hair down the middle and put on their Sunday best that morning. There was no way to tell which of us was there to ogle the Kennedy of Killers and which to testify against the booger-eating alcoholic who had picked up a heroin habit on the inside.
“This is a case study waiting to be written,” Tina said, eyeing a girl who could not be older than sixteen, hopping bunny-like on the balls of her feet and craning her neck as though she were at a Beatles concert, hoping to catch the eye of Paul.
“If they only knew what we knew,” I said.