The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [75]
“You are turning into a horrible flirt,” Tally told her just that morning, after listening to Gwen’s end of a phone call. She wasn’t eavesdropping. Tally was in the kitchen, cleaning up from breakfast, and Gwen chose to take the call here rather than run up to her bedroom. She wrapped the extension cord around herself, then uncoiled, all the while talking about her various conquests.
“Like mother, like daughter,” Gwen said.
“I’m not a flirt.”
“You don’t flirt often,” Gwen conceded. “Maybe that’s why you make such an ass out of yourself when you do.”
“Gwendolyn Eleanor Robison.” She is named for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. And a maiden aunt of Clem’s, but Tally prefers to credit only the poet.
“Remember that time with Mickey’s stepdad?”
She doesn’t. She can’t even remember his name. Then she does.
“I wasn’t flirting with him.”
“That’s not how Mickey’s mother saw it.”
“That’s not what happened—”
“Oh, don’t spazz out about it,” Gwen said with a flippant wave. “It’s not important.”
Then why bring it up? Probably because she knows Tally will brood on it for the rest of the day.
Tally must have seen Rick here or there—at the Exxon, sitting in Rita’s car when they dropped Mickey off—but she first spoke to him at the end of Mickey’s eleventh birthday, a Friday-into-Saturday sleepover. Gwen was not a whiny or demanding child, but she had lobbied relentlessly to attend this party for her new friend. Clem didn’t want her to go. He was dubious about Mickey’s home situation. But Clem didn’t have the heart to tell Gwen his true objections, and she easily batted down the straw men he tried to put up—you won’t get enough sleep, you’ll eat junk, what about homework? All Tally could think was that Rita was a stronger woman than she was, having a sleepover for eleven-year-old girls.
Tally wanted to think she was better than her neighbors—and Clem—when it came to such snobbery. Mickey’s house called her bluff. From the moment she crossed the threshold that Saturday afternoon, she was in distress. The smells—onion, bacon, a never-quite-clean diaper pail somewhere. The noise—there was clearly no quiet corner in the house. And the house, although newish, was showing its seams. Then again, so was Clement’s dream house. Whatever the modern world had wrought, it did not include better-built structures. Old houses got scuffed and dirtied, true, but new houses gapped and sagged and peeled. Gwen seemed oblivious to it all. But Tally noticed, and Mickey’s mother, Rita, noticed her noticing.
“We were living up in Wakefield, but there were only two bedrooms,” she said. “After I got pregnant with Joey, we needed three bedrooms, but I didn’t want Mickey to leave the school district. We didn’t have a lot of options.”
“Oh, that’s good. That you were able to maintain that stability for Mickey. She’s a very special little girl.”
Rita squinted at Tally, as if suspecting she was being ridiculed. “We like her. Although I wish she would help more with the baby.”
“I just turned eleven,” Mickey said. “And he weighs, like, ninety pounds.”
“Try twenty,” put in Rick, the baby’s father, although this dark, good-looking man didn’t resemble his son, a white, doughy blob. Most babies were white doughy blobs, in Tally’s opinion. Why did people pretend to find them fascinating? Tally hadn’t even found her own children mesmerizing. She loved them, of course. But it had been hard, being a twenty-one-year-old girl with two children under the age of three. Hard and, well, boring.
“He’s adorable,” she said,