The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [125]
McKey could end it here. It’s enough that Sean has called, that he wants to see her. To talk, he said in his message. Right, sure, uh-huh. I bet your wife doesn’t understand you. I bet you’ve grown apart. She’s very cold. She never pays you any attention, never has a kind word for you. McKey has heard all those things over the years. Not long ago she heard them from her ex, who came sniffing around her door, and OK, she let him in one night. No one got hurt. No one ever gets hurt if people are quiet and discreet and mind their own business. It’s the talkers of the world who make trouble.
Tally Robison was a gossip, although she didn’t have any awareness of this, proclaimed to be the opposite. When Mickey sat in her kitchen, waiting for Gwen to return from school on the cute little half-bus that kids took to private school—even her bus is better, she remembers thinking—Tally talked on and on, and all her stories were about how wonderful she was and how awful everyone else was. The drab clothes worn by so-and-so, the awful casseroles the other mothers brought to the church potluck. The wonder of her taste, her style, her knowledge, her wit. She would flip through magazines, sighing. It’s criminal to have the taste without the pocketbook. McKey now thinks Tally overrated herself, but she was mesmerized at the time, nodding raptly over her miniature packets of Smarties and Twizzlers. Oh, the pain of being so beautiful, so bright, so stylish. How do you stand being you, Mrs. Robison?
She always thought it came down to the mothers. That’s why Sean chose Gwen. Because he bought into those fables, the special-ness of the Robisons. True, there was that dramatic rescue, the day he saved Gwen from the stream. But it was merely the climax to a story already written. He was going to choose Gwen no matter what. Mickey saw it coming a long way off, well before anyone else knew. Which was good. It gave her time to practice the art of not caring. An art that, three decades later, she has almost perfected. Being with Sean will obliterate everything else somehow.
Won’t it?
There’s the baseball field. There’s the little park. There are the lights of the runway. Why do people need to narrate their lives? What is the point of all this talk, talk, talk? Words don’t make things more real. Quite the opposite, McKey thinks. The more you talk about a thing, the less real it is. That’s what she was trying to get Go-Go to understand before he died. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP.
He finally did.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Tim hangs up the phone, looks at Arlene, and lies to her face with an ease that breaks his heart.
“Work,” he says. “I need to go in to the office.”
She says: “On a Saturday? Poor you,” and rubs his shoulders. This is the payoff for being a relatively honest husband all these years. He can lie to his wife without her suspecting a thing. Interesting how scrupulously honest people and pathological liars end up sharing the same advantages. Those who never lie have so much credit stored up. Those who lie all the time get very good at it. It’s the poor schmucks in the middle, the sometime liars, who suck at it.
He always had Go-Go pegged as one of the poor schmucks in the middle. But if Gwen is right—he shakes his head. She can’t be right.
“I might as well go in now, get it over with,” he says, grabbing the car keys, ignoring his daughters’ wrathful looks.
“Is it the jewelry store murder?” Arlene asks.
“Sure,” he says. He almost wishes she would call him on his shit, ask what could possibly require him to go to the office on a Saturday, short of a cop killing. But she doesn’t pick up on it, only smiles and pats his shoulder again.
Behind the wheel of his car, he tries to concentrate on the roads even as he keeps reviewing the time line. If Gwen is right—if Father Andrew is telling the truth—
If. There is another way of looking at this. The old priest is a liar. And with Go-Go dead, he can spin the story however he wants. But why spin a story at all? What does he have to gain? With Go-Go