The last secret_ a novel - Mary McGarry Morris [74]
“Scattered!” she announces. “That's what my mother called me. All over the place. Because I told her about last night. Valerie.”
Valerie is the old crone she met in the supermarket. They were in the same checkout line, chatting easily, the way people do with Robin. “That looks good,” Robin remarked of the old woman's Lean Cuisine Oriental chicken and rice, moving along the black mat. The old woman said Robin should try it sometime. It was delicious and going to be her dinner that night. Naturally, Robin insisted she come home with her instead, for spaghetti and meatballs. Eddie arrived at the tail end of dinner, annoyed to find someone else there, invited, instead of him. Robin's eyes were red. She had already had three good cries, hearing about Valerie's husband's long and painful ordeal with cancer, then the funeral nobody came to, not even his own four children who weren't hers, though she'd helped raise the last one, a girl with a club foot. Granted, he'd been a hard man to live with, demanding. “But for no one to come. To not even care how I'm doing,” Valerie said, shaking her head. “I'm not over it yet.”
“Well, we care,” Robin said, putting her arm over the stout woman's blocky shoulders. “We care very much, Valerie.”
And as much as he didn't want to, he found himself offered up to drive Valerie home. Everything about her repulsed him. The yellow tennis balls jammed onto the legs of her walker, the way her teeth clicked, the food stains on her pink nylon shirt, the unwashed sourness of her clothes. He enjoyed her glassy-eyed fear in the mirror when he wouldn't answer her. Why should he talk, she was lucky to be getting a ride home. In her rush to get out of his car, her grocery bag spilled open. Cans rolled along the slushy sidewalk in front of her building in the elderly housing project. She was still picking them up as he drove away. I'm sorry, he'll say if it comes up. Wish I'd known. She's lucky he didn't shove her stinking carcass out of his car, which bothers him that he's still driving it, that is. Shouldn't be so careless. He's had it too long. Mostly, he keeps it in a secluded spot behind the Monserrat, the seedy motel off the highway. Again last night the morose manager put a note under his door telling him to park out front. The back lot is for deliveries. He knows he should get another car, one that can't be traced, but he likes the heated seats and Bose speakers, now even the Céline Dion CD. One more hassle in a life of hassles. Eddie's getting tired of hassles.
They are watching SpongeBob SquarePants. When it's over Lyra has to go to bed, Robin says on her way into the kitchen.
“You mind your mother now,” he warns quietly, but the child ignores him. She and her mother share a private universe. Even her brother is excluded. Clay plays varsity basketball and tonight's an away game in Abbeyton. He wanted his mother to go, but she said it was too late for Lyra, who is still up. The boy isn't home much, but when he is he's sullen and rude. Yesterday Robin made him apologize when he muttered, “Yeah, right,” after Eddie talked about playing pro basketball in Greece years ago. Like his grandmother, the boy is a distraction. But a minor one as long as Eddie has plenty of money and the company of a beautiful woman.
With the barrage of popping comes the smell of hot buttery popcorn. He hasn't felt this content in years. From here he watches her moving around the kitchen. She removes the steaming bag from the microwave. She empties it into a large red and white striped bowl, then carries it into the family room. She sits back down and pats the other cushion for Lyra to climb onto so they can share the popcorn. Lyra giggles every time a squid hiccups. Robin laughs too and nuzzles the top of the child's head. Robin knows all the characters' names. As the credits roll mother and daughter sing the theme song.