“Do you still want to?” she said. “Things won’t be like we thought.”
He nodded but could not speak.
“So return this ring. Get me a little topaz, and use the money for tuition.”
He put the ring on her hand, sold the BMW his parents had bought for his sixteenth birthday, and applied for student loans. While applying, he learned his parents had stolen his identity to open several lines of credit, so Lacey took out extra loans to cover his tuition. She finished her degree in three years and started teaching fourth grade, also after-school tutoring and summer school. A dozen divorces a month passed over Floyd Miszlak’s desk, but he didn’t know everything. He saw only the failures. Nobody came to the lawyer on their twentieth anniversary to file a legal declaration that they were happy and faithful.
Eric picked up the phone to call Sammie Vandermeijn, Moranis Miszlak’s office manager. “I need you to order flowers for my wife,” he said.
“What do you think this is, 1963?” she demanded.
“What?” Eric said, completely thrown.
“I don’t work for you. I don’t order flowers, and you can make your own damn coffee. You got something for me to do, it better be a billable hour with a client’s name on it. Your wife doesn’t want flowers.”
“I want to do something nice for her. She’s having a hard time.”
“She asked for it, marrying a Miszlak.” His door opened, and Sammie entered, phone in hand. She leaned against the door frame, her gray skirt pulled tight across her hips. He didn’t take it personally. Sammie flirted by instinct. Everybody knew she was sleeping with Floyd. “You know what’s nice?” she said. “Sapphires.”
“What about food?”
“Miszlak. The little birds in the trees have a name for you. Cheap, cheap, cheap.”
She swayed out of the doorway, and he watched her walk down the hall. He could watch Sammie enter and leave rooms all day long. Sapphires: that showed how shallow she was. The way to Lacey’s heart was through onion rings.
Chapter Eight
ELLA DANE HAD BEEN E-MAILING her clients. She had taken to the Internet with astonishing ease and had become an online pet psychic. Mostly she tried to persuade people their dogs wanted to be vegan. She told them dogs felt compassion for all living things and truly preferred hydrolyzed soy protein to beef, and in return, the owners deposited twenty dollars a month into her PayPal account. Surprisingly, she had over fifty clients. Lacey couldn’t understand it.
Somehow, Ella Dane had supported herself and Lacey ever since the day they left Grandpa Merritt’s house forever, a day just as hot and sticky as this, though it had been September. Lacey was six, a first grader, when her teacher held her back at the end of school to say, “You’re not riding the bus today, your mom’s picking you up.”
Ella Dane arrived at school not in Grandpa Merritt’s extended-cab Ford pickup but in a blue car Lacey didn’t recognize, a sickly hatchback lunging against its wheels. She had to get in the driver’s door and slide over Ella Dane, because the passenger door was punched in, and it was terribly hot. “Can’t you turn the air on?” she said.
“There’s no air.” Ella Dane lowered her window. The passenger’s side had no window, only a sheet of thick plastic duct-taped to the crumpled frame.
The hatchback was full of black garbage bags. One of them was open, and Timmy the bear peered out of it. Lacey grabbed him and said, “Why’s my stuff in garbage bags?”
“I packed our things, we’re leaving.”
That was all Ella Dane would say, then or later. That morning, Lacey had kissed Grandpa Merritt good-bye and gotten onto the school bus with her Barbie backpack and sparkly sneakers. That night, she and her mother slept in the car on a strange street. A week later, they moved into a motel in a new town halfway to the coast, and Lacey found a palmetto bug in her book bag. It ran across her hand. Each individual thorned foot clutched her at a particular point. She couldn’t get the feeling off her skin.
Grandpa Merritt had lived in an old neighborhood in Columbia. The magnolia was twice as tall as the house, and in September when the furry cones fell, little Lacey picked out the ruby-red seeds. Grandpa Merritt suspended a hula hoop from the ceiling and hung gauze curtains from it, so she could have a princess bed. After that day, she never saw that house or that room again. By the time she was old enough to visit Grandpa Merritt on her own, he had suffered three strokes and was trapped in the nursing home bed. He clutched her with his dry claw and mouthed words she couldn’t understand. The hair on his arms was a wiry white fleece. Long ago, he used to swing her up over his head and catch her, swing her and catch her again.