Dark Water - Laura McNeal [9]
“I’m really late,” Robby repeated.
“I think my dress shirts are downstairs,” Hoyt said. “In the laundry room.”
Robby turned and went downstairs, and his dad followed him, but there weren’t any shirts. “I thought your mother said she was going to iron them,” his dad said.
“Never mind,” Robby said. He walked out the front door, and he saw the strange car again. It was just an anonymous silver-green-gray Toyota, but he noticed the name—Avalon—because of our mock global launches of new cars: the Ford Estrogen, the Dodge Hootenany, the Honda Dust Bunny.
“Whose car is that, anyway?” Robby asked his dad. Hanging from the mirror was a red and white graduation tassel. Fallbrook High colors.
“I don’t know,” Hoyt said. “Maybe somebody visiting Pearl or Sharon.”
Some people can lie, and some people can’t. My father was a world-class liar, for instance. We never suspected a thing until the day of the Talbots dress. For some reason, though, Robby felt the off-ness of the conversation and looked hard into the Avalon as he walked past. He saw that the number on the tassel meant she’d graduated two years ago. He saw a sticker on the windshield that permitted the driver to park at Cal State San Marcos. He saw a tennis racket in the backseat. He said, “See ya,” and ran down to the truck with the box of reeds in his hand.
“I decided I would just pretend to leave,” he told me. “I would sneak back to the house and hide in the xylosma hedge and watch who got into that car. That’s when I called you, remember?” he asked.
I broke a cracker in half and shook my head. I walked over to the desk calendar where my mother used to write down what days my father would be home and when my after-school art classes were and where she now wrote down appointments with the attorney, the forensic accountant, and the court-mandated psychiatrist. Sunday, April 15, was blank.
“You were at Major Market,” Robby said. “You said your mother was asking Alfredo whether it was true that grocery stores throw away perfectly good produce.”
Alfredo was the produce manager and he’d been sprucing those vegetable displays my whole life. “That’s right,” I said. I remembered standing far away from my mother behind the floral department, inhaling the scent of crushed carnations and wondering if my mother was going to start scavenging for food in Dumpsters.
“You were in a big hurry to get off the phone,” Robby added. “So I did it.”
“Did what?”
“Parked the truck and walked back to the house.”
Robby was sitting up by this time and looking like the Greek god of unhappiness. He picked up one of my mother’s wooden spindles and played with the fluffy bit of roving she was trying to turn into yarn.
“So you hid in the bushes?” I asked.
“Yeah. I sat in the hedge. For a while, it was like a desert island except the water pump was cycling on and off. Then I heard the front door and some high-heeled shoes.”
“What did she look like?” I asked.
Pretty much anyone who’s ever seen my aunt Agnès has remarked on her looks. The pink lips that Robby has are a direct gift from her, plus she has a stunning figure and sophisticated clothes of a kind you’d never buy around here and skin kept young by I don’t know what kind of Parisian secret creams. What kind of man needs more than that?
Robby said he was too far away to see much, so he didn’t know except that she seemed really young. “They kissed, which made me want to upchuck, and then she drove her Toyota Succubus away.”
“It was a bus? I thought you said it was an Avalon.”
Robby looked annoyed.
“Oh,” I said. “I get it,” though I didn’t. I thought he’d made it up. Eventually, I came across the word in lit class and learned it’s a medieval she-demon who seduces you when you sleep. “So you’ve got no idea who it was?”
“No, none, could hardly see her, like I said.”
“Are you going to tell your mom?”
Robby shrugged. “It’s hard to picture myself doing that. Would you be the one to do that to her?”
I’d never thought of myself as having the power to do anything to Agnès. “Are you going