Mom nodded. "Yes, Joe."
"The only way I can do this is if it's like the war. I come home and I forget it.”
“Yes."
He crossed over and put his hands on her shoulders and shook her. "You get it?" he said through his teeth.
Mom's careful French twist came down from its pins. "Yes, Joe."
With every exclamation, he shook her again. "And I'm going to buy us a house, and we're going to live and be happy. That's what's going to happen!"
He dropped Mom's shoulders and she fell back on the couch. I was pressed against the corner.
Joe shook his head, his eyes closed. Then he turned and walked out. The door slammed behind him.
Mom's face was tight and scared. Her hair was half pinned up, half falling down. "Accessory to murder," she said. "That's what they'll charge me with. That's the least it will be."
She held her head in her hands and rocked. "Do you know what this means? A trial. Disgrace and ruin and prison. And worse for Joe. They'll hang him. What did I do?" She started to cry in jerks, her breath coming sharp and painful. "What did I do?"
I didn't move. I sat and waited until she was almost quiet.
She crawled over to me on the couch. She put her hands on my cheeks.
"You and me," she whispered.
I couldn't answer her.
"Stick like glue. Stick like glue, Evie!"
I couldn't finish it. I couldn't give her that. I couldn't go back to the place where we'd been.
It rained that night, all night, a soft pattering rain. There was no wind, so we kept the windows open. It must have cleared after midnight because a breeze came through, bringing the smell of the ocean, strong and tangy. I had the bed to myself. Grandma Glad had made a big show of getting her own room, to make a point that nobody cared about. So the three of us slept in the same room, or didn't sleep, our breaths mixing all together, in and out.
It was that night.
The match snapped, then sizzled, and I woke up fast. I heard my mother inhale as she took a long pull on a cigarette. Her lips stuck on the filter, so I knew she was still wearing lipstick. She'd been up all night.
She lay on the bed next to me. I felt her fingers on my hair and I kept sleep-breathing. I risked a look under my eyelashes.
She was in her pink nightgown, ankles crossed, head flung back against the pillows. Arm in the air, elbow bent, cigarette glowing in her fingers. Tanned legs glistening in the darkness. Blond hair tumbling past her shoulders.
I breathed in smoke and My Sin perfume. It was her smell. It filled the air.
I didn't move, but I could tell she knew I was awake. I kept on pretending to be asleep. She pretended not to know.
I breathed in and out, perfume and smoke, perfume and smoke, and we lay like that for a long time, until I heard the seagulls crying, sadder than a funeral, and I knew it was almost morning.
I tipped over the empty bottle of soda and anchored it in the sand.
I'd gone over it all in my head, and I still didn't know. I remembered all the things I'd seen. It was all there in my head, the things that happened, the things we said. I should stay away from you, pussycat.
Me? I'm just a softy.
I wish a lot of things, and one of them is, I wish you were back in that house, with your battle-axe Grandma Glad.
The rest of us, we have to figure out how to break the rules.
Where does she go, Evie?
I like to blow horns. Nice and loud, so everyone can hear.
Let me put it this way: I think he'd be a hell of a lot happier if I disappeared.
Tom told me I should look them up in New York. Now that I've got old times to talk about with them.
You're not the type of guy to hold a grudge, are you?
What did I do?
If I could add up the clues, would I know the truth? Would I know if Joe had planned to kill Peter? Did everything that added up for Joe—jealousy and fear and spite — make him think, yeah, this was his only answer? Or maybe he hadn't planned it. Maybe out on that pounding ocean he found his answer. Maybe Mom was "downstairs" and didn't see it. Maybe she did. Maybe she was so mad at Peter for double-timing her with me that she helped.
No. If I knew one thing, I knew that Mom didn't do it. She put her hands over her ears during thunderstorms.
The ashtray had flown through the air and shattered. Her face had been so blank.
How could I know what she was capable of? I'd seen what regular ordinary men could do. I'd seen newsreels of what they found after the war.
But I'd never thought about it before. The magazines and movies told me different, that the war was over and we were all okey-dokey, drinking Cokes and smoking Camels and saving up for the new Chevrolet.
Joe was part of that. He came back from the war and hit the ground running. I'd admired that, how the very next day he started making calls. I didn't know then what he was doing, how late at night he'd talk to Gladys, both of them with glasses of whiskey, talking low. And we were all so full of happiness because he was home that nobody thought twice.
"Let them have their time," Mom had said. "There's plenty of Joe to go around now."
He'd wanted success so badly that he'd stolen and he'd lied. How bad did he want to keep it?
If I lined up the reasons for Joe to be guilty, I could see them clear as morning. But if he was telling the truth, it just meant he looked guilty, not that he was. Sure, he'd asked Wally about the hurricane hole. But Joe was the type of guy who was interested in whatever he didn't know. He was always asking the mailman about what were the most comfortable shoes, or the milkman about how he got up so early.
Would Mom stay with him if she knew he was a murderer? She didn't seem scared of him. She seemed scared of him going away.
Could it really happen like this? That a girl like you can make me feel...
Make you feel what?
Make me feel.
What did I owe you, Peter?
Truth and justice? If judges would judge, if lawyers wouldn't trick, if reporters would tell what really happened instead of what sold papers.
Fat chance.
Truth, justice ... I always thought they were absolutes, like God. And Mom. And apple pie.
But you could make apple pie from Ritz crackers. You could make cakes without sugar. We learned how to fake things, during the war.
What did loyalty mean? Loyalty to the family, to the church, to the neighborhood, to the Brooklyn Dodgers. Why did loyalty stop there? Why didn't it keep on going? It didn't seem to take a spin around the whole world, that was for sure.
I wished I could get one clean breath from this humid air. I wanted the snap of autumn, blue sky clear and deep, the familiar cracks of the sidewalks, my feet jumping so surely over them, never missing. I wanted to go home so badly.
I touched the place on my temple that her lips always found, ever since I was a baby. Did everything funnel down to that one delicate place, the place where love was?
Chapter 33
Mom had bought four new dresses, all of them dark colors. I picked out a navy dress she hadn't worn yet, with a narrow belt and a little matching jacket. I took out white and navy high-heeled spectator pumps from a brand-new box. I slipped them on. They hurt.
I brushed my hair with hard strokes and drew it back off my forehead. I twisted it and put in the pins like an expert. I rolled up the tube of Fatal Apple lipstick and painted my mouth.