The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [115]
Doris kept talking, asking her things, and Suzi answered as best she could, but one thing she could never tell was that she was relieved to be there with Doris not just because she could unburden herself but because, at last, she was the one who needed help and support, she was the one in need of attention, she was the one with the problem, and most important, now she had her mother’s undivided attention. She felt guilty about this, and a little angry. Did you have to get yourself sexually abused (as Doris called it) to get some attention in her house?
* * *
The shit hit the fan again with Ava’s revelation. After Ava told their mother about Mr. Boy and the nude photographs their mother blew another gasket. She went down in the basement and told their father, who was monitoring Hurricane Grayson on his computer. He came up and called the police and reported Mr. Boy, whose real name was Mr. Boyle. Both her parents were furious at Nance and blamed the nude photo thing on her. They invited the poor woman over without telling her why.
It was early evening when her parents, Suzi and Ava, Nance, and her grandfather sat down in the living room. Nance, for some reason, had insisted that Granddad be there. The two of them sat next to each other on the couch, Suzi next to Nance, with her bum leg propped up on the coffee table, and her parents sat in armchairs. Ava sat on the ottoman in her baggy pajama shorts and huge sleep T-shirt, even though it was only seven o’clock. Her face was dotted with three big blobs of white acne medicine, even though she had no acne now and had never had any. You could point this out to Ava until you were blue in the face and it never sunk in.
Otis was wandering around the neighborhood with his Geiger counter, thank God. This whole thing would embarrass him; and he wouldn’t understand it, having never had a girlfriend, or even had a crush on a girl, in his entire life.
Nance, looking sporty in a navy-and-white-striped dress, admitted that she’d taken Ava to the photographer’s, and said she’d only done it to help Ava, because Ava really wanted to go on America’s Next Top Model.
“As if!” Suzi barked out.
“I never really cared about the Next Top Model.” Ava, ignoring Suzi, addressed Nance. “It was mostly your idea. You paid for it.”
Nance looked down at her white veiny hands, and they all waited to hear what she was going to say. She didn’t say anything.
“Regardless,” said her father. He had stubble on his cheeks and the hair on his crown stuck up in wisps. How long had it been since he’d taken a shower? He was obsessed with the hurricane—staying up all night to check on it like it was some bad kid he was keeping tabs on. He had to know exactly where it was, where it was going, how big a troublemaker it was. All day yesterday Grayson had churned across the Florida peninsula, he told his family, moving very slowly, gaining strength over land—very unusual—causing massive flooding. The flooding was so bad that President Bush had declared the entire state of Florida a Federal Disaster Area.
This morning he’d informed them that Grayson had swept through Melbourne, breaking a record for the amount of rainfall accumulated, and back out into the Atlantic again. Where would it go now? Who cared, as long as it didn’t come here. But it might come here. It might! It was a screwy storm, zigging and zagging all over the place as if it were toying with the entire state.
Right now it was sunny and clear here in oblivious Tallahassee. The air-conditioning in the house had shut off for a while, and the birds in the hedge by the living room windows could be heard twittering idiotically through the closed windows; and there were morons out walking their dogs and jogging as though there weren’t a huge storm nearby. Hide! Hide!