Schweitzer was licking his front paws now, in his usual philosophical manner. I wished I were a dog, so content with so little. My loneliness, as tangible as if I had painted the room indigo, felt so heavy that suddenly I knew I had to get out of there or develop existential nausea.
I stood up. “Schweitzer,” I told my only friend in miles and miles, “this is the South, and a person is allowed to drop in on strangers, for God’s sake. I’m going to get acquainted with the neighbors.”
By “neighbors” I meant whoever lived in the shack diagonally across the road from mine, almost far enough away to justify taking the car. Nobody else lived anywhere within sight of either that shack or mine. One thing I liked about this part of Florida was its frontier feeling of spaciousness, small towns spread out enough so that people kept horses in their backyards. Another thing I liked was the tasteless colors. My shack—it really was a three-room wood-frame shack squatting on concrete blocks—was painted fuchsia, or at least that was what I called it, because “pink” didn’t do it justice and I don’t like magenta. Definitely fuchsia, and a good match for the fuzzy mimosa blossoms all around it. The shack I planned to visit was painted peacock blue, almost turquoise. Peeking from the edge of my front window, I could see parts of it and a generic white van parked alongside it. Somebody was home.
Defiant of the heat, I would walk there. Mad dogs and Englishmen, yeah, whatever, five minutes in the sun wouldn’t kill me.
Shoving my keys into the pocket of my shorts and heading for the door, I said, “Schweitzer, be good. Stay out of the trash.”
Schweitzer did not take this philosophically. The moment I stepped outside into the broiling heat, he started barking frantically, almost hysterically, almost as if he knew he would never see me again.
• • •
About an hour’s drive away, across the state line in Alabama, another middle-aged woman, named Amy Bradley, sat on a sofa overdue for replacement, hugging the cat, a hefty brown tabby she and her daughter had rescued and named Meatloaf. There was plenty of room on the sofa for her husband to sit beside her, but he lounged separate and silent in a recliner even more decrepit than the sofa.
Amy sensed the presence of a large elephant in the room, and decided to stop ignoring it. Careful to keep her voice level and quiet, she asked, “Honey, are you still pissed?”
Chad—his actual name was Charles Stuart Bradley, but everybody called him Chad—gave an exaggerated sigh before answering, “I have a right to be pissed.”
“Then, so do I.” She tried to maintain the same neutral tone and did not quite succeed. Yes, she felt as angry as he did, but for a different reason. She was tired of being nice. For the first year after the unbearable had happened, Amy had borne it with all the nobility seemingly expected of women since long before Michelangelo had created the Pietà, feminine exemplar of tragedy faced with saintly calm. It seemed to Amy that the carved-in-marble Mary should have been screaming with grief and rage. Surely crying out loud was the more fitting reaction for a mother so unfairly bereft.
“Tell me again why you’re pissed with me for trying to get our son back,” she said.
Chad did not answer.
Amy hugged Meatloaf so tightly that he stopped purring and tried to squirm away. “I’m angry too,” she said. “I’m angry at God for letting this happen. I’m angry at people who know where their children are. I’m angry at people who can have normal lives and aren’t over their heads in debt. But above all I’m angry at that creep who stole Justin and I want him punished and I—I want our son back! Even if it’s only his body, or his bones!” Her voice wobbled; the cat scratched her arm, drawing blood, and she had to let him go.
Meatloaf complained at her, but otherwise there was silence. Amy grabbed a tissue for her arm and surreptitiously applied it to her eyes as well. Chad still did not look at her. She stared at the side of his head as he lounged in his recliner, distanced from her as had become usual, front and center to the flat-screen TV, watching a nationally rated rodeo taking place in Alabama’s Peanut Capital Arena. Amy ached to go over there and hug him and kiss him. But she couldn’t, because Chad would mistake love for capitulation. She wished their ten-year-old twins, Kyle and Kayla, were there to cuddle with her on the sofa. But as so often happened those days, she had sent them to play at a friend’s house to spare them the tension at home.
After an uncomprehending glance, Chad had silently turned his attention back to the TV. Amy decided silence might be best; she settled back to watch, sort of. She had no interest in bull riding or calf roping. Nor did Chad; Amy knew he would rather have been enjoying almost any other sport, especially NASCAR. But both of them knew that all the Bubbas and Bubbettes within five hundred miles of here, meaning pretty much the entire population of Alabama and upper Florida, would be tuned in—which was why, despite Chad’s opposition, Amy had gone ahead and taken out a second mortgage to pay for the ad they were waiting to see aired.