Liz slid in behind the wheel. She wanted to cry, but that was not news. She had wanted to cry ever since she first pulled into this parking lot. She couldn’t cry in front of Geoff. He associated her crying with his father dying. Still, she thought. It was all wrong. Everything was. She was all hollowed out inside, as if all that was left of her was a great draining pulse of pain and guilt, and she couldn’t figure out which one was true. It was the guilt that held her attention. She felt guilty every day, as if she’d stolen her own life and owed it back to somebody. It seemed to her that she was somehow to blame for what had happened to Maris, or had not happened to her. It didn’t make any sense, but it wouldn’t go away, and as long as it was right here in the front of her mind, she didn’t know if she would be able to move. She tried fixing her hair in the rearview mirror. She got Geoff, staring at her, instead.
“Well,” she said.
“We should start the car,” Geoff said.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “We should start the car.”
She started it, and backed out of her parking space, and headed for Grandview Avenue, but she couldn’t help looking back at the Sycamore. Then she was winding up the hill on Grandview, headed for the center of town, and for a moment it seemed as if Maris was headed right back at her, driving that bright yellow Volkswagen she had said she’d rented, but that she wouldn’t drive. Then the car passed and Liz realized that she recognized the woman driving it, but that that woman was not Maris.
She was halfway out to the Interstate when she pegged the face as Peggy Smith’s.
2
Emma Kenyon Bligh had been restless all day. In fact, she’d been restless since some time the night before, when she’d sat in Chris Inglerod Barr’s living room and listened to Chris and Nancy go on at length about image laundering and strategic campaigns. Image laundering. That was the first time she had ever heard that one, and she had been almost as annoyed with it as she had been with Chris’s tray of perfectly matched china and monogrammed silverware. Real silverware, of course. Chris’s whole life seemed to come out of an issue of Better Homes and Gardens. Years ago, she’d even badgered her mother into getting her real engraved wedding invitations—not just thermoplated ones—from Tiffany’s in New York, and Emma knew for a fact that the Inglerods couldn’t afford it. They’d probably had to put the expense on a credit card and borrow the rest of the money for the wedding, too. Emma had had her own wedding at St. Mary’s Roman Catholic Church right here in town, with a reception at the Holiday Inn out on the Interstate.
This morning, her restlessness had had some use. The store needed a good cleaning. She cleaned it. She took all the objects off each of the shelves, one by one, and dusted them, with a damp cloth if appropriate. Then she dusted and polished the shelf itself. Then she put the objects back. It had taken her two hours to get it all done, and when she was finished she had started in on the rest of the woodwork, the counter, even the windowsills. When that was done, she’d had a customer, and for half an hour she had been able to lose herself in an elaborate discussion of the differences between crocheting and knitting and the relative merits of needlework and brocade. It was only after that that she felt herself begin to fall apart. She didn’t keep a television in the shop, because she thought it looked tacky. She had the radio on to the easy listening station out of Johnstown, but that wasn’t enough to keep the brain of a fruit fly occupied. She had one of Betsy’s books that she’d taken out of the library—Making It Out: A Look Into the Real American Dream—but she’d already tried three times to read it and never managed to make it through more than a page and a half. Betsy still used words so big no normal person could possibly know what they meant. Sometimes, when Emma felt like this, she went through the scrapbooks and picture albums she brought with her every day when she came in to work—pictures of herself as a cheerleader and in Tri-Y; pictures of herself in her formal dresses from every junior and senior prom and junior-senior semiformal from the day she started high school (it paid to go out with older boys); dance bids; prom cards; the certificates she’d received for being voted Cutest Girl and Best Dressed four solid years in a row—but since she’d first heard that Betsy was coming home, she hadn’t been able to get into the spirit of them. Even eating didn’t help. She sat still next to the cash register in the empty store and felt weighed down and bloated, as if she’d eaten lead.
It was almost one o’clock when Emma went out to the porch to get some air. She looked up one end of Grandview Avenue and down the other. She saw Maris Coleman walking slowly across the railroad tracks near Mullaney’s. Maris trudged up past the Opera House. At English Drugs, she stopped, looked at the newspapers in the rack outside, picked one up, and went into the store. She came out barely two minutes later, carrying the newspaper under her arm.