The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [12]
“Here’s my phone number,” Nance said, suddenly reaching into her pants pocket and pulling out a little white card. She’d already had the card prepared—she’d written the number in ink. Suzi took the card.
“Ask your mother if it would be all right,” she said.
“If we go to Italy?” Suzi felt a little confused, dazed from the Italian sunlight in the courtyard.
“Let’s start with me coming by for a visit!” Nance said. “First things first. I’d love to talk about Memphis with your granddad.”
Granddad again. Suzi put the card into the pocket of her soccer shorts. She’d throw it away when she got home.
“I had a daughter,” Nance said in a low voice, looking off somewhere down the street, as if she could see her daughter standing in somebody’s front yard.
“What’s her name?” Suzi said, because she didn’t know what else to say, pretending that the daughter was alive, when she could tell by how Nance had said it that she wasn’t.
“Helen,” Nance said. “She died when she was eight years old. You remind me of her. She was a beautiful girl.”
“I’m sorry,” Suzi said. She wanted to ask what had happened—how would an eight-year-old girl up and die—but it wasn’t polite, and did she really want to know, so that she could obsess about it night and day? Maybe a sexual predator got her.
“Her hair wasn’t curly like yours,” Nance said. “Hers was blond. Straight and blond.” Nance reached out her wrinkled hand as if she were going to touch Suzi’s hair, but then she dropped it down by her side again.
“At least you have your son,” Suzi said, proud that she’d remembered Nance’s doctor son, but as soon as she said it, she knew it was a stupid thing to say.
Nance smiled at her, even though it was a mournful little smile. “I do have my son,” Nance said. “That’s right. But I miss my daughter every day.”
Suzi thought about how she could embellish the story when she told Mykaila. She sees her dead daughter, Helen, walking the streets of Canterbury Hills! She thinks I’m Helen reincarnated!
But really, Suzi felt bad for Nance who seemed to be a nice but melancholy woman who wanted to take Suzi to Tuscany. Suzi didn’t throw the card away after all, but she didn’t take it out of her soccer shorts pocket, and these were the lucky shorts she never washed. She left the card there in the pocket like a talisman to remind her that a strange old woman found her interesting enough to invite to Tuscany.
* * *
Fast-forward a few days.
During dinner one night, Suzi gave in to her dark impulses and started tormenting Ava, just a little light torment, even though she knew she shouldn’t, and even though she knew she was doing it because she was tired and pissed at herself for letting Elana, the girl who bragged about her thong underwear, get one past her at soccer practice and her middle finger on her right hand felt sprained, and her knee hurt but she couldn’t complain because her father would overreact, and she’d gotten an isolated lunch at school for answering some twerp’s questions during study time, and, okay, she just needed a little fun.
Suzi made her eyes big and wide, leaned forward, and said, mimicking Ava’s deep voice, “I love Elvis even though he wore thong underwear.”
Ava did not overreact, the word her parents use for Ava’s wild, physical outbursts. She turned red but kept eating her well-salted chicken Alfredo. She reminded Suzi of a long-necked goose.
Otis lay down his fork and grinned in anticipation of a rollicking good sister fight. He came to the table with greasy hair and dirty fingernails, but Mom and Dad had stopped caring.
“Would you look at that tree,” said Granddad, who still had half his dinner left. He sat next to Suzi, looking out the window and eating so slowly he made her feel like a greedy pig. He was talking about the live oak right beside the deck, a tree with long curving branches as thick as most tree’s trunks. Every time he sat down to eat, it was like he’d never seen that tree before. “Isn