Timmie still couldn't look at Murphy. "You don't understand." She was pacing now, using every inch of space in the room. Swinging at the Nerf ball as she walked past.
"Make me understand."
"What, in twenty-five words or less?"
She couldn't look at him. Hell, she couldn't even breathe. She'd known this was coming. She should have prepared. Set aside some of her store of guts to ride it through.
Behind her, Murphy rustled in his chair. "Are you saying you're falling in love with him?"
Well, at least that was worth a laugh. "You've been watching way too much ER, Murphy."
"Then what?"
Again, that terrible feeling of claustrophobia. The weight of inevitability she'd been running from all these years. Timmie walked over to the window, where she could see the tidy columns of yellow mums marching along her clean walk to the street. The last of the leaves were falling, leaving behind spectral trees against a cold sky. The lush, soft town of summer was being stripped of its guise and left with reality.
"I need Alex to be innocent," she said, not knowing how to say what she'd never before admitted. "If he isn't, there isn't anybody for my father."
Timmie didn't see Murphy, but she heard the hesitation in his voice. "There's you."
"You want coffee?" she asked, spinning around and heading straight for the kitchen. "I want coffee. Hell, I want a drink, but I don't drink. So coffee it is."
He followed her right to the edge of the kitchen, and just stood there.
"Leary?"
Timmie refused to look at him. She slammed through cabinets as if she were chasing cockroaches.
And Murphy waited.
Timmie pulled out coffee. She pulled out filters and she pulled out cups. Finally, though, she couldn't pull anything else out, and she couldn't manage to actually put everything together. So she stood there, her hands on the counter, staring at an empty coffee machine and thinking how much she hated what she had to do.
"You have kids, Murphy?" she asked.
"Yep." He sounded a tad confused.
Timmie nodded to herself. Sucked in a slow breath for courage, lifted her head, and stared out the window.
"I wonder if you know how much they hate you."
Silence. She hadn't expected anything else. So she faced him, and she told him.
"I have a feeling that you weren't just a great drunk, Murphy. You were a magnificent drunk. Larger than life, charismatic as hell. Brilliant and funny and beautiful. And when you got home, still a drunk. Still undependable and forgetful and unintentionally cruel. Still smelling like piss and vomit in the morning when your kids crept into bed to find a safe place. Still provoking massive, howling arguments that were more terrifying than storms, and walking back out to drink some more as if none of it mattered."
She wasn't going to cry. Not in front of Murphy. Not in front of anybody. She hadn't done it in years, and she wasn't going to do it now. But, God, faced with Murphy's tight, closed expression, all Timmie could think of was how her chest hurt. "Your kids would do anything," she said, her voice hushed, "anything to belong to you, because that's all kids want. But you never noticed, and so eventually they'll give up and belong to something else."
She blinked fast. Swallowed. Finished.
"Alex only knew my father when he was brilliant and beautiful," she said. "So I know he'll fight for him, no matter what I say."
Murphy was so still Timmie wondered if she'd frozen him into immobility. Or insulted him to death.
But Murphy was made of stronger stuff. Most great drunks were.
"You really hate him?" he asked.
She couldn't help but smile. "Oh, yes. Every bit as much as I adore him. I was the lucky one in the family. I got to see him when he was beautiful, too. So I may be the queen of denial, but I'm also the grand empress of ambivalence."
Timmie didn't know what she expected after that. She didn't expect Murphy to really understand, no matter how smart he was. She certainly didn't expect him to forgive her. So she turned back to her coffee and braced herself for his reaction.
"I'm sorry, Leary," he said.
She closed her eyes. Son of a bitch. How dare he?
"Don't be sorry, Murphy," she said. "Just help me catch the son of a bitch who's doing this so I never have to talk about this shit again as long as I live."
Chapter 19
Timmie made her coffee. Murphy made his own copy of the list and went home. The house got very quiet. Too quiet, with just the hum of the refrigerator and the hall clock for company. Too still with nothing in motion but a second hand. Timmie hummed. She paced the kitchen and consigned a couple of piles of debris to the trash. She took a dozen swings at the Nerf ball and cleaned up the sewing box she'd left out and watched the clock until Meghan was due home, like a prisoner ticking off the days of her sentence.
At exactly 3:10, the door slammed and hard-soled footsteps clattered across the floor. Timmie and Meghan met in the middle like those freight trains in the infamous math problem. And Timmie did it looking much saner than she felt.
"Hiya, punkin, how goes it?"
"Look who I found outside!" Meghan crowed, swinging around in Timmie's arms like a carnival ride.
"Not Renfield again," Timmie begged. "I just put him back upstairs."
Meghan slid out of Timmie's reach. "You let Renfield out?"
Timmie tousled the dark head of hair and thought again how much she wanted her little girl to belong to her. "Funny, that's the very same question I was going to ask you. I don't think I'm the person he always talks into breaking him out of stir."
Meghan straightened with outrage. "I would never let Renfield out. He might get lost or run over or eaten by a cat!"
"I did it," Cindy announced from the hallway. "Disguised him as a tree frog and bribed the guards to look the other way."
Meghan giggled. Timmie wondered if Murphy knew how lucky he was that he'd missed this. "Hi, Cindy. How's it going?"
"You didn't answer my calls," she said, clacking across the hardwood in the new red-leather cowboy boots she sported with her studded denim dress. "I thought something was wrong."
"I just got home myself. Anybody for milk and cookies?"
Meghan pulled quite a face. "Really, Mom. That's so retro."
"Retro?" Timmie echoed. "Where the heck did you learn that?"
"Billy Peebucket."
Timmie turned her little troop for the kitchen. "That's Parbagget, young lady... ooh, Cindy, eau de Betadine. You working today?"
Cindy sniffed her armpits, which made Meghan giggle all over again. "Half a shift. I didn't know I carried it home."
"My mom has the best nose in the West," Meghan boasted.
"How was it?" Timmie asked because she didn't want to talk about boyfriends, which was what Cindy had come to talk about.
"Biker heaven. I think I'm in love."
"Which means, I guess, that you're over your loss."
Cindy's grin was fierce. "You don't want Meghan to hear what I think of that. There's some hot gossip at the hospital, by the way. Word's going around they're trying to hush up some patients getting intentionally stiffed." She snorted unkindly. "Like with the doctors we have they'd need any help."
Timmie opened the refrigerator and pulled out sodas instead of milk and apples instead of cookies. "Who says?" she asked, trying hard to be nonchalant.