Love Invents Us - Amy Bloom [63]
They drove in silence, wet-faced, two shrinking loose piles in the corners of the front seat, Huddie steering with two shaking fingers, Elizabeth’s head on her chest. She shut the car door carefully. Surely, at the edge of the curb, at the corner, at the blurred traffic light, at the crumbling stucco arch over the entrance to Max’s building, surely at some stopping point one of them would see that it could go another way, that it must, but Elizabeth finds her key and Huddie speeds through the changing yellow light.
He worked longer hours and claimed insomnia. He fixed up his fathers house and built a sandbox for Larry. He ate all day long, stashing macadamia nuts in the glove compartment, dried figs in his pocket, a box of shortbread beneath his desk. Elizabeth fell back on old habits, her own and Max’s, to get through a time so bad it made her long for elementary school. She made her way, at a numbing, workaday pace, through Max’s stockpile of hard liquor. Max had anticipated a long, slow, tedious dying, and he had not expected to stop drinking until he was at death’s very door. There was a bedroom closet full of Scotch and cheap white wine and three bottles of bourbon, which Elizabeth was able to drink if she mixed it with coffee. She shoplifted cans of crabmeat and lobster bisque and paid for bread and bananas and paper plates. Every day she stole something useful, a box of paper clips, a dustpan, a six-pack of sponges, so she could put Max’s things in order. Margaret called to read her the obituary, which mentioned Greta and the two boys and his long teaching career. It did not mention Elizabeth or Benjamin, and she was not invited to the funeral. No one called her about it, which seemed small of them, but she had no wish to go.
She packed and cleaned and hung outside the windows to wash them. At night she flipped through Max’s journals with less interest than she expected and drank until her eyes closed. When she touched her face, it felt like oil over dust.
When Dan finally called, all Elizabeth had to do was shower and put on the set of clean clothes she’d left folded on top of Max’s dresser for the last eight days. The sheets were washed and dried and put away, the drawers were empty, she’d never been there. She took Louisa’s paste diamond earrings and cherry hat and left the stock certificates and passbooks in a daisy shape on Max’s desk.
“What did my father tell you about me? Did he tell you what a strange boy I was? What a strange boy I am?”
“No. He loved you very much, he was very proud of you.”
“He didn’t know fuck-all about me.”
“I didn’t say he understood you or your photographs. I said he loved you and he was proud of you. He supported you all those years, in every way, and he gave you everything he could. He paid for college, he gave you money to go to Mexico. Did he have to understand too? I used to let you stay up until midnight, remember? I’m the person who sat with you when you had those nightmares, when you were little, remember? I don’t think you have to swear at me.”
“You sat up with Benjie. You put Marc and me to bed early. Marc thought you were a bitch. He did a whole comic strip about you. ‘Betty Bitch.’ I loved you so much then. I never even fucking saw you again. You left me, you left him, and that was it. When you lay down on the bed next to me—my nightmares weren’t that bad, by the way, I just wanted you beside me—I used to look down your shirt. You finally started wearing a bra, I see. I wasn’t so little. I just didn’t hit puberty until I was fifteen. You were gone by then. Did you babysit us just so you and my father could be together?”
“That’s actually a very funny question. No. Max thought I was crazy. I wanted to be just the babysitter, a normal girl. So I wouldn’t let him touch me, kiss me good night, nothing. Not so much as a squeeze on the knee. More happened on my other babysitting jobs.”
“But he could fuck you all the other times, go down on you all night long while my mother was in Europe, visiting what was left of her