I Was Here(39)

             “We found some of your things,” Joe says. “And some things of Meg’s you might like.”

             “Another time,” I say. “I have to be up early for work.”

             Is this how it is with lies? The first one comes hard, the second one easier, until they slip off your tongue easier than truths—maybe because they are easier than truths.

             I let myself out. But before the door shuts behind me, Scottie is there, leashing Samson.

             “Walkies?” he says to me.

             “I gotta hurry,” I reply.

             “That’s okay. Samson likes to run, dontcha, boy?”

             I take off at a fast clip, and Scottie easily keeps up with me because he’s ten and he has legs up to his elbows. Samson bounds along, sniffing for things to pee on.

             When we’re at the end of the block, he asks me why I went back to Tacoma.

             “I told you. I wanted to make sure I didn’t leave anything there.”

             I don’t know if it’s harder to lie to kids or if they just have better bullshit detectors, but in either case, he gives me this cynical look that hurts my heart. “Why’d you really go?” he asks.

             “Scottie, can we not do this?”

             “Just tell me why you went. You found something, didn’t you?”

             Scottie is tall and rangy and has Sue’s blond hair, though it’s starting to darken. I know he thinks all his innocence has been destroyed, but he’s only ten years old. It hasn’t. And if it has, he has time to get it back. But not if I tell him. How she posed as a buyer from a cleaning company to order what should’ve been a heavy-duty upholstery detergent. How she went through all this extra trouble, because that was the Meg way, but also because she apparently was so hell-bent on dying, she needed the chemical with the smallest margin of error. How meticulously she plotted it, in that Meg fashion, like this were another concert she was trying to score a backstage pass to. First we’ll try the publicists and if that doesn’t work, we can try the radio station, and failing that, we can always ask some of our band contacts to put in a word for us, she’d say. Her plans worked. They always worked.

             Meg may not have sent Scottie the suicide letter, but she did send him an I love you farewell note. I think she wanted to leave him with that. If I tell Scottie what I found, I’ll wreck that, maybe wreck him, too. And we’ve already lost one Garcia this year. I shake my head. “Nothing to find, Scottie, except for lint on the carpet.”

             And then I leave him there. On the corner. In the dark.





15

             After I decided I wouldn’t be going to UW but would be staying at home and attending the local community college, Tricia demanded I get a job. The Dairy Queen was hiring, so I asked for an application. I handed it in to the manager, who turned out to be Tammy Henthoff.

             “You’re friends with that Garcia girl?” she asked, squinting at my application.

             “Meg? Yeah. She’s my best friend,” I said. “She’s in college in Tacoma now, on a full scholarship,” I added. I was so proud of her.

             “Uh-huh.” Tammy was not impressed. Or maybe she was just defensive. Since she’d run off with Matt Parner, people around here hadn’t been all that nice to her. She’d lost her job at the car dealership where her husband had worked, and I’d heard that Matt’s soon-to-be-ex-wife, Melissa, and all her friends had taken to driving by the DQ and shouting nasty things. Not that Tammy didn’t deserve it. But Matt still had his job at the Jiffy Lube and no one drove by there yelling whore.