“I know,” Jim Jeffreys said, having nothing more to say on the subject after six years. He watched me drink my wine in silence. “But in a way, Libby, this presents you with a really interesting new phase of your life. I mean, what do you want to be when you grow up?”
I could tell this was supposed to be charming, but it brought a burst of rage up in me. I didn’t want to be anything, that was the fucking point.
“There’s no money left?”
Jim Jeffreys shook his head sadly, and started salting his newly arrived steak, the blood pooling around it like bright Kool-Aid.
“What about new donations—the twenty-fifth anniversary is coming up.” I felt another splash of anger, for him making me say this aloud. Ben started his killing spree around 2 a.m. on January 3, 1985. The time stamp on my family’s massacre, and here I was looking forward to it. Who said things like that? Why couldn’t there have been even $5,000 left?
He shook his head again. “There’s no more, Libby. You’re what, thirty? A woman. People have moved on. They want to help other little girls, not …”
“Not me.”
“I’m afraid not.”
“People have moved on? Really?” I felt a lurch of abandonment, the way I always felt as a kid, when some aunt or cousin was dropping me off at some other aunt or cousin’s house: I’m done, you take her for a while. And the new aunt or cousin would be real nice for about a week, try real hard with bitter little me, and then … in truth it was usually my fault. It really was, that’s not victim-talk. I doused one cousin’s living room with Aqua Net and set fire to it. My aunt Diane, my guardian, my mom’s sister, my beloved, took me in—and sent me away—half a dozen times before she finally closed the door for good. I did very bad things to that woman.
“There is always a new murder, I’m afraid, Libby,” Jim Jeffreys was droning. “People have short attention spans. I mean, think how crazy people’re going about Lisette Stephens.”
Lisette Stephens was a pretty twenty-five-year-old brunette who’d disappeared on the way home from her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. All of Kansas City was invested in finding her—you couldn’t turn on the news without seeing her photo smiling at you. The story had gone national in early February. Nothing at all had happened in the case for a month. Lisette Stephens was dead, and everyone knew that by now, but no one wanted to be the first to leave the party.
“But,” continued Jim Jeffreys, “I think everyone would like to hear you’re doing well.”
“Awesome.”
“What about college?” he chewed off a hunk of meat.
“No.”
“What about we try to set you up in some sort of office job, filing and whatnot?”
“No.” I folded in on myself, ignoring my meal, projecting glumness. That was another of my mom’s words: glum. It meant having the blues in a way that annoyed other people. Having the blues aggressively.
“Well, why don’t you take a week and do some thinking on it?” He was devouring his steak, his fork moving up and down briskly. Jim Jeffreys wanted to leave. Jim Jeffreys was done here.
HE LEFT ME with three pieces of mail and a grin that was supposed to be optimistic. Three pieces, all looking like junk. Jim Jeffreys used to hand me bulging shoe boxes full of mail, most of them letters with checks inside. I’d sign the check over to him, and then the donor would receive a form letter in my blocky handwriting. “Thank you for your donation. It is people like you who let me look forward to a brighter future. Your truly, Libby Day.” It really did say “your” truly, a misspelling that Jim Jeffreys thought people would find poignant.
But the shoe boxes of donations were gone, and I was left with a mere three letters and the rest of the night to kill. I headed back home, several cars blinking their headlights at me until I realized I was driving dark. Kansas City’s skyline glimmered to the east, a modest, mid-rise Monopoly scatter, radio towers spiking here and there. I tried to picture things I could do for money. Things that grown-ups did. I imagined myself in a nurse’s cap, holding a thermometer; then in a snug blue cop’s uniform, escorting a child across the street; then wearing pearls and a floral apron, getting dinner ready for my hubby. That’s how screwed up you are, I thought. Your idea of adulthood still comes from picturebooks. And even as I was thinking it, I saw myself writing ABCs on a chalkboard in front of bright-eyed first graders.
I tried to come up with realistic occupations—something with computers. Data entry, wasn’t that some sort of job? Customer service, maybe? I’d seen a movie once where a woman walked dogs for a living, dressed in overalls and sweater sets and always holding flowers, the dogs slobbery and loving. I didn’t like dogs, though, they scared me. I finally thought, of course, about farming. Our family had been farmers for a century, right down to my mom, until Ben killed her off. Then the farm got sold.