Starter House(107)

“I live there. I want you to come home. Please.”

Lex mirrored Lacey, his arms folded across his body, his shoulders pulled in around his chest. “No. Not allowed. No.”

“He needs you.”

Lacey touched his arm, and he exploded. He flailed and battered, punched her as if he were beating at a cloud of wasps, wild directionless blows around her shoulders and head. With every blow, he cried out, as if some other, heavier hand were striking him. “Leave me alone,” he shouted. He shoved her into the corner, catching her between the fireplace and the bookshelves. He hit her with slanting, diagonal blows, more of rejection than attack. She sank down, clasping her legs against her body to shield the baby.





Chapter Forty-eight

ALTHOUGH THEY COULDN’T serve alcohol on Sundays in Greeneburg until after two, Abernathy’s opened at ten thirty with a brunch buffet of everything greasy, crunchy, and fried. The kitchen was experimenting with twice-fried cheeseburgers—a beer-battered cheeseburger, deep-fried—and anyone who was willing to critique it could have one for free. By late afternoon, Abernathy’s usual crowd would drag itself in, returning like dogs to roll in their own stink. But at 10:45, when Eric arrived, the place was full of families, satiny girls, boys in Sunday suits with clip-on ties, their halos almost visible. They’d just come from church. Not just church, but early service. They’d earned their twice-fried cheeseburgers, their caramel-apple pie.

Eric’s Bluetooth kept slipping off his ear, and Cambrick MacAvoy’s voice faded, but he wasn’t missing much. Cambrick liked to repeat herself when she had the upper hand. “Custodial interference,” she kept saying, as if it were some playground game she was winning and not a family in pain, a confused baby, and poor crazy Lex who had already suffered so many losses. Even Jeanne. He wasn’t representing her interests, it wasn’t his job, but was anybody looking out for her? Nobody would ever care for her as Lex had. Sammie was right. If there was just a way to get them together and talk sense to them . . . “I’ll call the cops on him,” Cambrick said.

Once, in another life, she had been his aunt Marian. On one of his birthdays, when he was very small, she had given him a Thomas the Tank Engine train set.

“I want,” Eric said, and then realized he was standing at the cashier’s desk, with three respectable families lining up behind him and a four-year-old girl in an Alice-in-Wonderland dress kicking his ankles. “I need two boxes to go, please. Three boxes.”

“Six dollars a pound, no crab legs,” the cashier said, handing him a stack of Styrofoam boxes.

“I’m hungry now,” the Alice-child said, and so was Lacey hungry at home. She needed him to feed her, to take care of her and tell her he was sorry; he’d bought the house for her, and if she didn’t want it anymore, they’d sell it. He had to get moving.

“I want to know,” he said to Cambrick MacAvoy, “how long was the baby missing before Jeanne called you?”

Silence from the Bluetooth. Eric wove through the crowd at the buffet, sliding between indecisive children, cutting in front of the slow-moving fat people, who took all-you-can-eat as a command and not an offer. Lacey wanted an onion blossom, roast beef, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a twice-fried cheeseburger. She’d never feared food, unlike the slim expensive girls he had dated before her.

“What do you mean?” Cambrick said.

“Two hours, three hours, not till morning? How long?” Eric felt the taste of truth in his mouth, thrilling and hot, someone else’s blood. “She thought she left the baby in the car overnight, didn’t she? She doesn’t even know for sure if Lex took her. She doesn’t know where that baby is. I’ll see your custodial interference and raise you criminal neglect.”

“I’ll get back to you on that,” and Cambrick hung up on him.

Eric dropped a tongful of ribs into the second to-go box. The boy standing at his elbow said, “I like coleslaw. And beans, the spicy ones.”

Eric caught himself with the spoonful of beans lifted over the steam table, red-brown sauce dripping from the underside of the spoon in a translucent amber ribbon. He hated baked beans. “Where’s your family?” he said. The boy looked familiar.

“I’m waiting for them.”

“They’re meeting you here?” Ridiculous, a stupid thought. Ten-year-olds did not meet their families for brunch. Eric shook his head, as if he could shake his ideas into place. The taste of truth was gone.

“I’m waiting for my mother.”

Some kind of post-divorce child exchange. Parents who couldn’t stand to be in each other’s presence, the shared air turning to poison in their throats—one would leave a child and the other would pick him up. What if the pickup parent happened to be late? If the mother’s car crashed on the way to Abernathy’s, it could be hours before anybody knew the child was missing. An open, friendly child like this, who would talk to strangers so readily. Terrifying, the risks people took with the thing they should most treasure. Whatever you could say about Lex, he’d never leave Theo alone in a car, not for a second. “How long have you been waiting?”