“But not to forgive and forget, maybe?”
Liza looked out the window. She hoped it would rain soon. She’d always liked the rain, didn’t know why. Maybe it was the country blood in her. Maybe it had something to do with purification. And maybe it was just because she liked the rain.
“You’re right, a stalker tried to rape me when I was thirteen years old.” She took a deep breath. “So three out of three. Congratulations.”
Silence. Just Emmylou.
“D’you want to talk about—”
“No,” she interrupted.
“—something more pleasant?”
They drove.
She started to laugh. He glanced over at her and then he began to laugh too.
“Screwed-up people,” she murmured, and he turned up the music, another woman, singing about could you please stop yourwhining and laugh instead. And Liza began her story. Not much of it, not the whole story, just stuff about her childhood and her parents. A typical white middle-class family facing the future and optimistic about the eighties, and then the shit hits the fan.
“My father lost his job. We had to move to somewhere cheaper, a place where the neighbors didn’t go out to work but got as much in Social Security checks as my father did for breaking his back in all those temporary jobs he took. He told me he had to use all the money they’d been saving to send me to college, because I was bright, you know. Instead we lost everything, while the rich got richer. And no one seems to know just exactly how it happened.”
“Then other people began making cars that weren’t just cheaper than ours, they were better than ours too.”
“Could be. My father says that people like us were once the backbone of this country but now we’re the crap in the middle, not lucky enough to get rich but still too proud to live off welfare. He’s voting for Donald Trump, he says.”
“And you?”
She shrugged. “I suppose I could vote for Trump, but he just makes me puke. I’m not too crazy about Hillary Clinton either, but maybe it is time for a woman to take over.”
Then they were there. He parked outside her house, and to Liza it seemed the journey hadn’t really been all that long.
The police officer leaned forward and looked up at the house. “Looks cozy.”
“I dated this guy from Tennessee who said that back where he comes from it’s what they call ashotgun shack.”
“Oh yeah?”
“A house so small you could stand in the doorway and empty both barrels through the window at the other end.”
“That I would like to see.”
“I’m not inviting you in if that’s what you think.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Okay.”
“So he had no staying power?”
“Who? The Tennessee guy?” She grinned. “I was the one that jumped ship there. He believed in UFOs, and that it was fake news about the world being round. Those two things together were just a little bit too bizarre for me.”
They laughed.
“Some people are just screwed up,” he said, again with that sad smile she suspected was something he deliberately used on women.
“How’d you get the bump on your forehead?” she asked.
He raised his hand as though to hide it, the same way her sister automatically did whenever Liza asked about her most recent bruise or black eye.
