His thumb found a button on the side. The bean opened to reveal a smaller bean dressed like a mariachi musician with a tiny plastic trumpet. Time is running out—what did you forget? “Free tacos,” he said. That’s where Jeanne would be.
The red-haired girl pushed him toward the huge sombrero and turned from him to meet the next new customer. “Bienvenidos, amigo; would you like a hat?”
The building was too bright, too crowded, and everyone wore a sombrero. Where was Jeanne? Young people carried trays of tacos through the room, and mariachi music crashed through the speakers, louder than the band outside. In the old man’s house, there was always music. The steam of so many hungry bodies pushed Lex against the wall, where a smiling young face offered him a tray of tacos, and he took one. He put it in his pocket. Somebody gave him another taco, this one spilling chocolate goo onto his fingers, and he put that in his other pocket.
He saw Jeanne near the counter, with three tacos neatly rayed between the fingers of her left hand while she ate another, in two bites, crunch through the middle of the taco, four chews and it was down, and she poked the rest of the taco into her mouth, sucking her finger clean as she pulled it out. She snatched two more tacos off another tray. Lex leaned against the door and forced himself out of the building, against the crush of customers crowding in. Where was Jeanne’s car? “Adios, amigo,” the red-haired girl shouted as he passed her, and for a moment he was tangled in the mariachi band, guitars everywhere and a trumpet right in front of him.
Then he was through the crowd, out among the cars, next to Jeanne’s car. Theo was in the back with a bag of minidonuts. All alone in the cold and the dark, with donuts she could choke on, choke and suffocate and die. Drowning in sugar.
Lex banged his fists on the car window. Theo smiled through sugar. He wanted a rock, but the parking lot was smooth and black. Mariachi trumpets thronged in his mind. He pressed the button on the toy in his hand, and his own tiny musician played silently. The real band in the parking lot started “La Cucaracha.” The simple melody helped him think, and he laughed at himself. He didn’t need a rock. He had keys to Jeanne’s car, because it was half his car. He opened it and took Theo out of his half.
Chapter Forty-five
LACEY SAT AT HARRY’S KITCHEN TABLE. “A friend of my mother’s,” she said, as the ambulance pulled away from her house. “He had an accident.” Harry stood with his back to her, pouring boiling water into two mugs. Now that she was here, she found it hard to begin this necessary conversation. Why did you sell me your haunted house? wasn’t easy to say, just like that. She had to work into it. She said, “He fell down the stairs.”
Harry’s shoulders pulled up and in, a slow flinch, and he said, “Tea or cocoa?”
“Cocoa.” She was surprised to see him dump an envelope of powder into a mug; she’d thought of Harry as a man who made cocoa with milk, from scratch, whisking sugar and real cocoa powder into the hot milk, whisking continuously so it wouldn’t scald. He poured boiling water over the Nestlé mix just like everyone else. “Thank you,” she said.
He must have caught the tone of disappointment, because he turned toward her with his eyebrows high in his long face. He set the mugs on the table, said, “Hang on a second,” and pulled a jug of cream from the refrigerator. Real cream, in a white ceramic jug. “I’m glad you came to me,” he said.
The cocoa slopped over the edge of Lacey’s mug and scalded her knuckles as the contraction began. It began with a grinding shift in the bones of her pelvis, bones she had not thought could move. Agony yawned and swallowed her whole. She pushed the mug away. It wobbled on its farther edge, took half a turn, balanced, and tipped, spilling cocoa all over Harry’s table. This pain, so much worse than the others, ran out more quickly, a foaming wave, already gone. She rubbed her face.
Harry was all around her, fluttering with a damp washcloth, a dry tissue, paper towels for the table, and a second mug of cocoa for her, while his own cup cooled and the cream separated into a scum of oily bubbles on its surface.
“Honey, what’s wrong?” he said.
So he was going to play innocent to the end. She was tired of him. Her right hand worked the tissue, rolling it hard and tight. “Because it used to be your house and you lived in it and you left it and you lived next door to it and you saw what happened to them, the Craddocks and the Honeywicks and all of them. Where’s that picture?”
She roamed the kitchen, scanning through the family snapshots of children on the beach, children in plaid uniforms, a little girl with a giant white rabbit, a boy next to a bicycle with a big red bow on it. So many pictures. The refrigerator was paved with them, and pictures of every dimension, from wallet-sized school photos to ten-by-fourteen portraits, paneled the kitchen walls. These hundreds, every race and age, many of them posing with violins, must be students and children of students, a teacher’s gallery.