My keys dangled from the ignition, turning in time to a Billy Joel song on the radio. I switched stations.
“Fine, let’s go,” I said.
I drove another few blocks. Magda’s neighborhood was as cheap as mine, but nicer. Every house had been built shabby, but the owners still found enough pride to slap on a coat of paint now and then, hang a flag, plant some flowers. The houses reminded me of hopeful homely girls on a Friday night, hopping bars in spangly tops, packs of them where you assumed at least one might be pretty, but none were, and never would be. And here was Magda’s house, the ugliest girl with the most accessories, frantically piled on. The front yard was spiked with lawn ornaments: gnomes bouncing on wire legs, flamingos on springs, and ducks with plastic wings that circled when the wind blew. A forgotten cardboard Christmas reindeer sat soggy in the front garden, which was mostly mud, baby-fuzz patches of grass poking through intermittently. I turned off the car, and we both stared into the yard, with its jittering denizens.
Lyle turned to me, fingers outstretched like a coach giving advice on a difficult play: “So, don’t worry. I guess the only thing to remember is to be careful how you talk about Ben. These people can get pretty riled when it comes to him.”
“What’s pretty riled?”
“Like, do you go to church at all?”
“When I was a kid.”
“So it would be kind of like someone coming into your church and saying they hate God.”
IT DID FEEL like a church. Or maybe a wake. Lots of coffee, dozens of people murmuring in dark wool clothes, regretful smiles. The air was blue with cigarette smoke, and I thought how rarely I saw that anymore, after growing up in Diane’s foggy trailer. I took a deep breath of it.
We’d knocked several times on the open door, and when no one heard, we just walked in. Lyle and I stood there, American Gothic style, for a good five seconds as the conversation trailed off and people started staring. An older woman with Brillo-wire hair in barrettes blinked at me with the force of someone giving a secret code, a smile frozen large on her face. A brunette in her early twenties, startlingly pretty, looked up from dishing peaches into a baby’s mouth and she too offered an expectant smile. One glaring old broad with a snowman’s build tightened her lips and fingered the crucifix on her neck, but everyone else in the room was clearly following orders: Be nice.
They were all women, more than a dozen, and they were all white. Most looked care-worn, but a handful had the bright, full-hour-in-front-of-the-mirror look of the upper class. That’s how you pick ’em, not by the clothes or the cars, but by the extra touches: an antique brooch (rich women always have antique brooches) or lip-liner that was blended just the right amount. Probably drove in from Mission Hills, feeling magnanimous about setting foot north of the river.
Not a single man there, it was what Diane would call a hen party (and then make that disapproving sinus sound). I wondered how they’d all found Ben, stuck in prison as he was, and what attraction he had for them. Did they sit in their tousled beds at night with their gelatined husbands snoring next to them and daydream about a life with Ben once they freed him? Or did they think of him as a poor kid in need of their altruism, a cause to be nurtured between tennis matches?
Out of the kitchen stomped Magda, six foot tall, her frizzy hair almost as wide. I wouldn’t have been able to place her from the Kill Club meeting, where everyone’s face was smeared from my memory, a Polaroid yanked out too early. Magda wore a denim jumper dress over a turtleneck, and an incongruous amount of jewelry: dangly gold earrings, a thick gold chain, and rings on almost every finger but her wedding finger. All those rings unsettled me, like barnacles growing where they shouldn’t be. I shook Magda’s outstretched hand anyway. Warm and dry. She made a sound like mmmaaahhhh! and pulled me in for a hug, her big breasts parting and closing on me like a wave. I stiffened, then pulled away, but Magda held on to my hands.
“Bygones be bygones. Welcome to my home,” she said.
“Welcome,” called the women behind her, too close to unison.
“You are welcome here,” Magda reasserted.
Well, obviously, since I’d been invited, I wanted to say.
“This, everyone, is Libby Day, Ben’s youngest sister.”
“Ben’s only sister,” I added.
The women nodded solemnly.
“And that’s part of the reason we’re here today,” Magda addressed the room. “To help bring some peace to that situation. And help. Bring. Ben. Home!”
I glanced at Lyle, who wrinkled his nose minutely. Beyond the living room, a boy of about fifteen, chubby in a less authoritative way than his mother, came down the carpeted stairs. He’d put on khakis and a button-down for the occasion, and he looked out into the room without making any eye contact, one thumb fiddling with the top of his belt.