Mrs. Billingsley sits up on one elbow, takes a long swallow from her drink, the ice clattering back and forth like bracelets on an arm. “I wasn’t born rich, Rachel. But I wasn’t born poor either. I was somewhere in the middle. Like where you are. In that place where you don’t know how good you got it.” Mrs. Billingsley swings her legs over the side of the bed like she might stand, then she wavers and lies back down, gingerly, as if she’s on a raft in water. “I was thirteen when I met Mr. Billingsley. I worked at the golf house on the ninth hole of the club we couldn’t afford to join, and I served sandwiches to the men. Those were good days. Quiet ones. I worked with another girl. Her name was Beverly. We just listened to the whack of golf clubs. The hum of golf carts. We made lists of what we wanted in life. Cars and rings. Things, Rachel. Then we handed the men sandwiches. We didn’t even have to make them. We just had to keep them cold. When I saw Mr. Billingsley, I told myself to do whatever it took to get him to marry me. So, I did whatever it took.”
Rachel’s hands are stained from the candy. She clasps them together as if in prayer and then unclasps them. Over and over she does this as Mrs. Billingsley talks.
“Oh, Rachel. I just did what it took. And look where it got me.” Mrs. Billingsley reaches her arm down as if to put her glass on the floor, but the floor escapes her by a few inches, so she lets the drink hang in her swollen hand. “You’ll meet him,” she says. “He’s old and angry and handsome and funny and everyone loves him, so I probably should, too. It’s too late and too hard for it to be any other way anyway. Oh, God,” Mrs. Billingsley sighs. “I’m so glad you’re here, Rachel. You’re such a delight. Can you teach my girls something normal? Something useful? Can you show them how to fry an egg? Can you show them how to fold a towel? Can you show them something, anything, they can use in life?”
Rachel thinks of the sisters, across from her at the table, waiting, watching, wanting. Their eyes are as pale as concrete, but whenever she brings the fork to her mouth, their pupils dilate with joy, like black ink dropped into water.
“Yes,” Rachel says. “I can do that.”
Outside, the ocean fades and crashes, fades and crashes. Finally, it occurs to Rachel that it sounds like applause.
DADDY-O
DADDY-O, THE OPTIMIST, always came to town in his fringed vest and yellow van for the months that ended in b-e-r.
“I’m like a summer oyster,” he’d say. “Can’t nobody keep me down.”
He’d show up behind the chain-link fence of W. G. Harding Middle School, a snagged autumn leaf clinging hopeful until Mabel looked his way, then he’d smile wide, teeth as white as bathroom tile against his Pensacola brown, and offer his daughter a little something for her time: a leather necklace greasy with patchouli, a temporary tattoo of a mermaid, a stolen red lipstick that insinuated Mabel was old enough to do what Janet Yuri did to Jimmy Overlay in the wide, shady mouth of the drainage pipe.
“Well, aren’t you a bloomin’ daisy?” he’d say. “Looks like I shoulda brung a stick instead. To keep the boys away.”
And every fall, Mabel would play deaf to this and offer up a silent prayer of thanks that a palm reader in a low-cut blouse had seen divorce between Daddy-o’s thumb and forefinger when Mabel was only nine.
When Mabel moved seven miles over to Harrison High, she hoped Daddy-o would miss a beat. But on her first Monday of tenth grade at 3:30 sharp, she found him leaning against a bike rack with a dry hibiscus and a smile cracked white with remnants of Florida zinc.
“Guess who’s coming to dinner?”
Mabel stared. Last time Daddy-o’d been in town, alongside a banded stack of his Can Do! pamphlets, she’d found a bowie knife in his glove compartment. She’d also found an old photograph of her mother graffitied with a felt-tip mustache. She hadn’t been sure the duo was connected, but it did give her reason enough not to sit across from him in a restaurant.
“I already ate,” Mabel finally said.
“Well, hot dog,” Daddy-o beamed. “Let’s go for dessert.”
At the Dairy Queen, Mabel refused a soft serve cone. She knew letting Daddy-o treat her to something would make her feel beholden. She might even break down and confess that she sometimes imagined local meteorologist Brent Westerly as her new dad, the sort of man who would eat T-bones and make her mother forget how much she liked drinking. A man who would pay his taxes and own a set of encyclopedias and have his pilot’s license. Mabel watched her father pay for a cone of his own by digging into a beaded satchel and producing a proud palmful of dimes.
“Milk does a body good,” her father insisted. “You’re missing out, Maybe Baby.”
Mabel went to stand at the old jukebox where she watched the shaky metal arm reach out for 45s the same way her mother reached out for her after one too many wine coolers.
“Is he still so inexcusably happy? Is everything still so peachy-goddamn-keen for him?” her mother would slur. “Jesus. You’d never know he’d had the accident. You could bury the bastard in manure and he’d shovel his way out, grinning that crap-eating grin of his, looking for a unicorn.”
“Bite?” Daddy-o asked, offering his cone.
“I don’t think so.” Mabel wrinkled her nose, then quoted her mother. “Not from a man who can’t tell the difference between baby shit and butterscotch.”
Daddy-o let loose with an amused hoot. “Now that …,” he began.
“Oh, shut up.” Mabel slumped down in the booth and watched her father’s reflection in the stainless napkin dispenser. “Just shut up.”
She waited for his face to fall, for Daddy-o’s optimism to give way to defeat. But “Can Do!” was all he said, and he pulled an imaginary zipper across his mouth in the shape of a permanent smile.
During his annual backward migration from the Florida Panhandle to the Ohio Valley, Daddy-o’s first choice in accommodations was the Happy Thicket Motor Lodge. He liked its brown canvas bedspreads, its tiny lobby that sold smoked almonds, its kitschy ice buckets painted to resemble little wood stumps. But he especially liked the motel’s massive neon sign that rose fifty feet high from a cluster of tall white pines and blinked good tidings for all. It featured a glowing, spotted fawn that jumped a smiling log in three robotic flashes and a red, beaming Happy that made him just that.
“I tell you what’d be a laugh and a half, Maybe. Is if the owners of this here place had sense enough to screw a red bulb into Bambi there’s nose come Yuletide.” He squirted cheese from a can onto a Triscuit. “What all would that set them back? Ninety-nine cents and ten minutes on a cherry-picker?”
Mabel noticed her father’s hand had assumed a quiver in the past eight months—a sporadic jerking not unlike the buzzing yellow NO beside the sign’s serene green VACANCY—and for a moment she felt compelled to entertain him. To tell him about biology class and how, last year, Peter Sawgrass had put the tiny snout of a dissected fetal pig inside his left nostril. Or how junior Dawn Beretti had lost the tip of her tongue at a slumber party when dared to lick peanut butter from a mousetrap. Or how, just today, she’d seen a bunch of pills in the girls’ locker room toilet giving off strands of purple dye like Easter egg tablets.
“What do you think is more dramatic?” Janet Yuri had whispered to Mabel in English class. “Killing yourself or killing someone else?”
Mabel had shrugged, not out of ambivalence, but out of dumb wonder Janet would ask her opinion. She’d never worked a boy’s button fly or known the bitter taste of sixteen aspirins on her tongue. She didn’t staple her skirt hem three inches higher on the school bus or hide marijuana joints in her knee socks.