The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [73]
“Here.” She takes his hand and places it on the cat's back. The purring stops.
“Smoky!” Lyra cries, startled as the cat springs past her head and runs from the room.
“He's scared because you are,” Robin chides with a pouty look. “He can tell.”
He never had a pet, it was all he could do taking care of himself, he snaps back. He feels accused. Judged. He takes deep breaths. Can barely look at her for fear of losing it. He should leave, but doesn't. Can't. His scalp shrinks on his skull. The frantic cartoon voices pitch higher, shriller, faster. He can't think straight. Can't stand being turned on like this.
“Not having a mother, I can't imagine it.” Her eyes fill up, blind to his agitation.
“Your mother, she doesn't like me.”
“It's not you,” she says, with a shrug, and leans closer. “It's me. My judgment. Or lack thereof,” she laughs.
“Meaning me, right?”
“No!” She laughs. “Eddie! Why would you say that?” She touches his arm. “Eddie?”
“I can tell, that's all.”
What began as rejection ends the way it must, whenever the quest is meaningful. It is an obsession and he accepts it as such, not a flaw or illness to be defeated with padlocks and pills, but a strength. All he seeks in this jangled universe are connections. While others lose their way, puzzling over randomness, he easily recognizes patterns, linkages, preordained paths only the few, the gifted, ever find. Through perseverance.
Robin thinks their meeting happenstance. Serendipitous, she declares again. Her blonde hair is pulled loosely back. Stray wisps frame her face. Like a teenager with her turned-up nose and legs tucked under her. An athletic teenager. She is running again and works out every morning in her friend's home gym. Her slender fingers sift absently through her daughter's fine, pale hair. Lyra wears silky pink Cinderella pajamas and sits on the floor in front of her mother. The child is beautiful. She was there when he found her mother. On the playground. Easy enough. Everyone in town knows Robin Gendron. He watched from the car a few times, watched her hang from the monkey bars to make the little girl laugh. Even in the bitter cold she wore sandals and a bulky sweater, no coat. She dresses Lyra the same way. Skirts, bare legs, that day, a thin red cotton jacket. They're never cold. And never apart, she tells him. Clay is another matter. Sports or out with friends, her son is seldom here. It bothers her, but she tries to understand. It's his age, rebellion, part of growing up. He won't listen to anyone. Bob's no help. Clay can't stand his father's drinking. In a way, it's almost like not having one, a father he respects, anyway. That's when she wishes he doesn't come back. Bob, she means. He barely speaks to Lyra. Her sweet baby girl.
There is something on television now about 9/11. Black smoke pouring from the Twin Towers. All those poor people killed, it makes her cry. Every time she thinks of it, the husbands who never came home, the babies who'll never know their daddies. Even though she can't afford it, she sent a hundred dollars to the Republican Party. She doesn't like the war in Iraq, but Americans should stick together and support their president through these dangerous times, don't you think? she asks him. Everything ends with asking, caring what he thinks. Really? Don't you? she adds. Yes, he replies. Of course, he agrees, thinks so, if only just to continue watching her hypnotic mouth and the little pink dart of her tongue. George Bush, he's a good man in a crazy world, she insists as if arguing with an unseen presence. He's caught in a situation beyond his control. Some