“Will you be back?”
“Before then? Noooo.” I drag out the word in honest regret. “I’msosorry. I’d have loved to have you over.”
“Where are you?” she asks again.
“Whoisthat?” Dad repeats, this time in a voice that is too loud, too close, and too gruff.
Margo is silent for a beat. Finally, with dawning horror, she says, “I know that voice, and it isn’t one I want to hear. Where are you?”
I hesitate a minute too long.
“Mallory.”Her words come hard and fast. “Are you seriously at the Bluff? What are youdoingthere?”
“Can’t talk now,” I say, pressing the phone tight to my ear. “Can I call you later?”
“What’s going on?”
“Nothing. Really. Joy loves the beach.”
“Thatbeach? You do know Mom would be turning over in her grave.”
“Actually, no,” I shoot back, furious to be put on the defensive when I am so trying to do the right thing, “I don’t know that, because we never had that particular discussion. It was always you saying it. I have my daughter to think of now. Please don’t pass judgment on me.” I’ve said too much already, but another thought comes and for the life of me I can’t hold it in. “‘Accept what you can’t change by changing what you can’t accept.’”
“What in the hell does that mean?”
“You tell me. You wrote it. This. Week.”
“See? That’s why you shouldn’t be there. You don’t sound like yourself. Go to that place, and you change. He’s alawyer.He knows how to make his case.”
“It isn’t that.”
“Then what is it?”
His age, his mind, the house, the bluff, Anne, Jack, my memory, the truth—it is so many things that I don’t know where to begin, and that’s even apart from the issue of a gun. So I sigh, lower my eyes to the gravel road, and say a quiet, “It’s complicated.”
“You do know this will ruin my weekend.”
If it does,I think,that’s your doing.But saying it will only make things worse. The spoken word is like bleach. Use it with purple socks—as I mistakenly did once with Joy’s—and though the socks may be wearable, they are never the same.
I keep my mouth shut.
“Okay,” Margo concedes, because I hear voices on her end. “Talk later.”
I want to tell her to have fun, but I’d have to apologize if I say more, and I refuse to apologize. I’ve spent alifetimeapologizing. And I’m in the right here.
So I nod, which she can’t see, return the phone to my pocket, and try to put the discussion out of my head. It’s about compartmentalizing. I’m good at that in the city, where anonymity makes for easy diversion. Here, everywhere I look—now at the boulders off the road on the right, where my sisters and I used to sit finishing off our penny candy so that our parents didn’t know how much we’d bought—I see memories.
Dad stumbles. I reach out to steady him, but he catches himself. Has he actually pulled his arm away so that I don’t help?
“Your sister,” he growls.
I consider lying. He can’t have heard that clearly, and the truth will cause him distress. But a lie will cause me distress. “Yes. My sister.”
I prepare for him to attack her as he had so long ago. The words were angry and ugly in those awful days. I thought I’d buried them, but three break through.Traitor. Ingrate. Self-centered imbecile.
Words. Always words. Like knives coming from Jack and arrows from my dad.
But he doesn’t speak, just plods along, breathing heavily now. The road has started to climb, and he is leaning into it, shoulders rounded as they never used to do. The shape of him cries defeat. He seems very much alone.
