“Yes, ma’am.” That childhood training again. “I surely will remember.”
She tousled his hair as if he were eight years old and she the aunt who showed up once a year with a can of cranberry jelly. “You want to discuss Jeanne Hall’s spousal maintenance and child support, call me. You make an offer, make it worth my time.” She handed him a business card with a dogwood embossed in gold.
“Yes, ma’am,” Eric said stupidly. She rippled away.
Floyd gave him another beer. “Boy, you done good.”
Eric wiped his burning face. “I done what, I mean, I did?”
“Never seen her off her game like that; the Botox must have worked its way in through her skull. Numbs the cerebral cortex something fierce, they tell me. She gave you something, and you gave her nothing.”
“What did she give me?”
“Your guy’s got a past,” Floyd said. “Don’t ask him, he’ll never tell you. They never do. Pure as woolly baa-lambs, every one. Use an intern. Sammie, get on it.”
Sammie looked around the table and shook her head. Her gold hoop earrings swung against her cheeks, and all the lights in the room flashed along the flying curves. “I’ll do it myself,” she said. “I wouldn’t trust these clowns to track a car title.”
“Thanks,” Eric said.
“Don’t thank me. It’s a billable hour. Now go home to your wife.”
Chapter Twelve
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, just after six, Lacey gave up waiting for Eric. She’d slept downstairs since Sunday, and every evening this week, Eric had gone out with his uncle and the rest of Moranis Miszlak, drinking beer and eating the kind of food she hadn’t seen in weeks. Wings, nachos, chili cheese fries.
She hadn’t been out with friends since spring, when she and Eric started spending their evenings online and weekends in Greeneburg looking for a house. She used to go out with her college friends and a group of young teachers. House and baby had sucked her in, and she hadn’t called her friends, or answered their e-mails, or even checked Facebook. Lacey’s life had kaleidoscoped inward, the same images mirrored and mirrored again. Husband, house, baby. House, baby, husband. Baby, husband, house. Phyllis, her best friend and roommate all through college, must have tried to get in touch with her on Facebook. There must be a thousand messages. The thought exhausted her. She’d get around to it.
She and her friends used to go dancing, ending the night at a dive in Five Points for chili cheese fries at three in the morning. She was that girl, four months ago.
Chili cheese fries. Hunger leaped on her with no warning, filled her like helium, making her head float. She had to sit down for a minute. Low blood pressure, Dr. Vlk said—another good reason for staying off the stairs and not driving, not that she could drive anyway; she and Eric had sold her car when they moved, because they wouldn’t need two cars until after the baby came. Worst decision she’d ever made, letting Eric sell her car. Because it meant this: now, when she would sell her soul for chili cheese fries, the car in the driveway belonged to a vegan.
Restaurants delivered. She could have all the chili cheese fries she wanted. She could even have steak. A deep-fried onion blossom, the whole onion cut open and fanned out and battered and fried, with ranch dressing for dip. She used to share an onion blossom with four friends. Now she was hungry enough to eat one by herself. She got up from the bed and headed for the kitchen to look up restaurants in the Yellow Pages.
The doorbell rang. Lacey closed the phone book and listened. Her skin tightened, and she held the phone book over her belly like a shield—if it was Drew again, mister trouble-at-home—why wouldn’t Ella Dane answer the door? The bell rang a second time.
“It’s your house,” Ella Dane called. “Answer the door. Bibbits, come to Mama.”
Lacey walked toward the front door, Bibbits bouncing around her feet. Whatever Ella Dane had been giving him from the brown glass vial, it seemed to be working; he hadn’t coughed for days. “Why won’t you go to your mama, anyway?” Lacey asked him, and he licked her ankles with his slimy pink tongue, telling her as clearly as a dog could that as long as she kept giving him meat, his mama was on her own. She glanced up the stairs as she passed them, and there was Drew, standing at the top, with one hand on the banister.
When he came with popcorn, he’d asked her if he could come back and she had said Yes, later. Now here he was, inside the house. Without warning, she was back in the world of the dream, accepting Drew’s presence, his right to be present, though some far part of her mind wanted to shout go away, get out.