Starter House(74)

Chapter Thirty-three

LACEY KEPT COUNTING THE MONEY, and it came out the same every time. “Two thousand dollars,” she said. “It’s not much, considering.”

“Something will come up.” Ella Dane was in the bathroom, emptying the melted water from the ice bags. Lacey could smell the dog, not the usual dark smell of Bibbits, but a sharper odor, with a skunky, sulfuric overtone. The sooner they got the poor animal buried, the better.

Something will come up. For as long as Lacey could remember, that was Ella Dane’s motto, and something usually did come up. They’d live in the car for a few days and then start traveling from one of Ella Dane’s friends to another, sleeping on couches, in sleeping bags, in attic bonus rooms with no air-conditioning, in basements or converted garages. One of these friends would hook Ella Dane up with a friend of a friend who needed a house sitter or had a trailer sitting empty on family land. Once, they lived for three months in a model home in a new subdivision, the builder paying Ella Dane to keep it and the two other models clean and ready to show.

Mostly, Ella Dane earned a few dollars here and there, babysitting, housecleaning, gardening. And she could always work with dogs. She’d advertise dog training in your home, house training a specialty. They always had money, never much, just enough.

Lacey sat at her computer, trying to figure out what baby was born at 571 Forrester Lane in 1971—Greeley Honeywick had been so positive, surely there was a way to find this out—and thinking Eric-type thoughts about Ella Dane. Would she drift from one odd job to another for the rest of her life? Did she have any money saved? What kind of Social Security benefits could a person receive, who had practically no official income over her lifetime? Who was going to take care of Ella Dane when she was old?

Who else, but the daughter who had taken on thirty-eight thousand dollars of student loans (plus another ninety-seven thousand for Eric), in order to qualify for a stable career. Lacey was on the Census Bureau website, trying and failing to get into the records for 1980, when her computer crashed. She slammed the top down and snapped at her mother, “How are we going to pay for this hotel?”

“I’m going down for a facial and a mani-pedi,” Ella Dane announced, “and I made an appointment for you, too.”

“And how are we going to pay for it?”

“That’s the advantage of traveling light. We’ll walk out of here, and they’ll send the bill to Eric. Let’s go downstairs and get all girled up.”

“Really?” Lacey said. “After all that’s happened, that’s all you can think of, really?” She knew she wasn’t being fair. Her fear of Drew, her grief over Bibbits, her terror of the blank, solitary, Eric-less future were all part of the poisonous mix, but everything in her came to a point, aimed at Ella Dane. “Because here we are again,” Lacey said, “stuck in some hotel that we can’t pay for that we’re going to sneak out of”—and where was Eric with his instinctive, bone-deep honesty, Eric who stood in line at the bank and argued with the teller if there was ten dollars too much in the account after he balanced the checkbook, where was he?—“and we’re eating cashew nuts out of the minibar, and then we’re going on the road with barely enough money for gas, and how are we going to eat, how are we going to survive?”

“One thing and then another,” Ella Dane said placidly.

No, no, no. That was the way Lacey organized her school year. It couldn’t be the way Ella Dane organized her life. Lacey was nothing like her mother, no matter what Eric said. Nothing like. “It’s your fault,” Lacey said. “If you hadn’t brought that dog into my house. It was the dog that made Drew so mad. If it wasn’t for you, I’d be home right now, and Eric would be frying me a pork chop and rubbing my feet.”

“Bibbits was a good dog, he was an old soul; he was getting ready to move on but he wasn’t ready yet. I came here for you, Lacey. I came because you needed me.”

“I don’t need you.” Lacey felt breathless, but she hurried recklessly on, because Eric was wrong; she was nothing like Ella Dane. “I never needed you. I always used to wish I could go back and live with Grandpa Merritt like a real person in a real house, so I wouldn’t have to grow up like I did, like a tramp. I never knew from one week to the next where we’d live and I hated it! All I wanted was a real home.” She had a real home with Eric. What if it was over?

“I only ever thought of you.”

“You only ever thought about what you wanted. Why couldn’t you let me stay with Grandpa Merritt? It’s the only real home I ever had.”