I pictured Runner breathing heavily, striding through the house with that shotgun, his grimy Stetson tilted back as he sighted my mother with the 10-gauge. I heard the bellowing in my head that I always heard when I remembered that night, and tried to make it come out of Runner’s mouth.
“Fibers from your home were found in Runner’s cabin, although this has been continually dismissed because he’d been in and out of your home that summer, but it’s still a viable fact. None of the victims’ blood or tissue was found on Ben, although the prosecution made a lot of the fact that Ben’s blood was found in the house.”
“Hell-ooo? Like you aren’t allowed to cut yourself shaving?” the angry crucifixed woman said.
The women laughed on cue, primed.
“Finally, the part that I’m most excited for, Libby, is the opportunity portion. As you know, your father was vouched for by a girlfriend of his at the time, a Ms. Peggy Bannion. Just so you know there’s no shame in righting a wrong, Peggy is currently in the process of recanting that alibi. Even though she could be sentenced up to five years.”
“Well, she won’t be,” cheered Katryn. “We won’t let that happen.”
The others applauded as a spindly woman in elasticized jeans stood up. She wore her hair short, the top part permed and frosted, and her eyes were small and bland as dimes that had been in someone’s pocketbook too long. She looked at me, then away. She fiddled with the oversized blue stone she wore on a chain, which matched a blue stripe on her sweatshirt. I pictured her at home in front of a water-stained mirror, enjoying the slight bit of good fortune of matching her necklace to the sweatshirt.
I stared at my dad’s girlfriend—this special guest of Magda’s— and willed myself not to blink.
“I just want to thank you all for your support these past months,” she began, her voice reedy. “Runner Day used me like he used everyone. I’m sure you know.” It took a few seconds before I realized she was talking to me. I nodded, then wished I hadn’t.
“Share your story with us, will you, Peggy,” Magda said. I could tell Magda watched a lot of Oprah. She had the cadence but not the warmth.
“The truth of the story is this. On the evening of January 2, I cooked dinner for Runner at his cabin. It was chop suey with rice, and of course with Runner, a lot of beer. He drank these beers called Mickey’s Big Mouths, you had to pull the tab off, but the tabs came off at these sharp angles, looked like crab claws and he was always all cut up by them. Do you remember that, Libby? He was always bleeding with those.”
“What happened after dinner?” Lyle interrupted. I waited for him to look over at me for an appreciative smile, but he didn’t.
“We, uh, had relations. Then Runner was out of beer, so he left to get more beer. I think this was about 8 p.m. because I watched The Fall Guy, although I remember it was a repeat and that was discouraging.”
“She watched The Fall Guy,” Magda piped in. “Isn’t that ironic?”
Peggy looked at her blankly.
“Anyway, Runner left and he didn’t come back, and, you know, it’s winter time, so I fell asleep early. I woke up to him coming home, but he didn’t have a clock, so I don’t know what time it was. But it was definitely middle of the night, definitely late, because I kept waking up, and I finally got up to pee and the sun was starting to come up and that couldn’t have been more than a few hours later.”
When this woman was peeing, and looking for toilet paper and probably not finding toilet paper, then wending her way back to bed through the motors and blades and TV intestines that Runner always pretended to be working on, maybe stubbing a toe, feeling sulky, I was crawling through snow toward my blood-soaked house, my family dead. I held it against her.
“Lord help me, the police came by in the morning, asking Runner where he was between 12 and 5 a.m., asking me where he was. The whole time, he was so insistent: I was home early, I was home way before midnight. And I don’t think he was, but I went along with it. I just went along.”
“Well, you’re done with that, girl!” said the brunette with the baby.
“I haven’t even heard from him in a year.”
“Well, that’s more than me,” I said, and regretted it. I wondered if this woman would have kept her secret if Runner had just stayed in touch a bit more. Phoned every three months instead of every eight. “And, like I said,” Peggy continued, “he had these scratches on him, all over his hands, but I can’t be sure that it wasn’t from those beer tabs. I just don’t remember if he scratched himself before he left that night, or if maybe someone scratched him.”