The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [55]
“So, you’re a whore,” I said.
“Now that’s my Helen.”
I smiled at him weakly. “Thank you.”
“My flip-flop artist,” he said. He took a cursory look around. It had been eight years since he’d stood in my kitchen. In a quick moment during a party, we had had a private toast to Sarah, who had graduated high school that day by the skin of her teeth.
I snapped in the filter and turned on the switch.
I did not look at him but at the counter, at the small golden flecks in the old linoleum. I had never been comfortable asking for help.
He walked over to the kitchen desk, where I paid bills and kept my own records, which was separate from the desk in the living room, where I kept my mother’s, and hung his coat off the back of an old Mexican chair. The coffee gurgled into the pot behind me. I thought of how the roof light of our VW Bug had gone on the night we knew it was over. He was dropping the girls and me at home before going to hang out with a group of teachers. I saw his features briefly, sickly, sadly, and then he closed the door. I stood in front of our small house with Sarah in my arms and Emily holding my hand. “Good-bye, Daddy,” she said. And then I said, “Good-bye,” and so did Sarah. Our words like so many useless cans rattling at the back of the car.
We moved over to the glass-topped dining table, and he pulled out a chair.
“What do we do?” I asked.
“That’s all I thought about on the way out,” he said. I realized how tired he must be. In all the years of flying, he had never adjusted to it. Sarah had told me that when she’d asked him to describe his globe-trotting life, he’d responded with one word: “Lonely.”
I did not sit but stayed standing, my arms crossed against my chest. I had four hours before I was due at Westmore at ten o’clock.
“Before I crawled in that window and saw her in the basement, I thought it would be simple. I somehow thought we’d just say that she had died, and you’d been so distraught you’d called me, and though I’d implored you to call an ambulance, you waited for me to come before you did. Now I’m not sure what to do. Having her down in the basement and nude, and you having left her there, makes it stranger.”
On the tip of my tongue I found the name Manny, but I did not say it. Instead I turned and took down two mugs from the hooks underneath the cabinets. I poured the coffee into them as it continued brewing.
“Couldn’t we say,” I said, “that I found her that way? That she fell?”
As I placed his cup in front of him, he looked at me.
“What do you mean?”
I sat down and wrapped both hands around my mug. “I mean, we say what you said, that I was so upset I waited for you to arrive, but that instead of trying to explain how she ended up down there, we just say that that’s how I found her.”
“Nude with a broken nose in the basement?”
“Exactly.”
I sipped my coffee. He reached his hand across the table and touched my forearm.
“You do realize what you’ve done, right?”
Weakly, I nodded my head.
“You really hated her, didn’t you?”
“And loved.”
“You could have taken off, done something else instead.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. Anything but this.”
“She was my mother,” I said.
Jake was silent.
“So what’s wrong with my plan?”
“They’d treat it like a crime,” Jake said. “They’d be much more likely to scrutinize things.”
“So?”
“So,” he said, “they’ll figure it out, Helen. They’ll put it together that you didn’t just find her that way but that you put her there.”
“And then what?”
“There’d be an investigation.”
I drank my coffee and leaned back in my chair.
“Stonemill Farms,” I murmured to myself, saying, as I often did, the name of my own development. It had always sounded like the name of a medieval jail to me.
He was wearing a blue sweater, which he peeled off over his head. Underneath I saw the kind of T-shirt only Jake would wear. Against a beige backdrop and underneath a picture of a stick-figure man lying in a hammock strung between two green trees, there was a short slogan: “Life is good.” If there was a