The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [25]
The poor woman had lugged that big useless book three blocks in the heat. She was so thin and pale and dry, and not a smear of sweat anywhere on her—it was like she was trying to mock Caroline, who was red-faced and sweaty and not yet back—mentally, that is—from her morning run. She and Vic used to run together, but now, because he went in to work so early, he got up to run at five a.m. Caroline ran slower when she ran by herself, but she tried to stay in decent shape, which meant something different at age forty-eight than it did at age twenty-eight.
She didn’t know what to make of this insistent old lady. Caroline didn’t trust her, but what could she do but invite her in?
“Well, for a few minutes,” Nance said in her breathy voice, stepping quickly into the house.
Oh, but this was an opportunity, Caroline realized. Vic was at work, Ava supposedly studying in her room, Otis at Sunny Side High School, and Suzi at Miccosukee Middle School. Her father was in the den, and she would get to witness the meeting between Nance and her father. It would be a big moment. Either it would be a reunion between her parents, or else a first meeting of two strangers. She’d surely be able to tell which one it was when she saw it happening.
She suggested that Nance set the Elvis book on the dining room table so Ava could look at it later. Then she explained that she’d just finished reading the New York Times to Wilson, who liked to be kept abreast of the news, and that the two of them were now working on the crossword puzzle—they did it on Mondays and Tuesdays but after that, forget it, it was too hard.
“I’d love to help, but I’m not too good at crosswords,” Nance said in the dim hallway.
“Neither are we,” Caroline said, wondering if poor crossword solving skill was genetic.
The previous evening, after Nance had left their house, Caroline called her best friend, Billie, and told her what she suspected. It was when Nance mentioned having lived in Memphis when her father had and having been a patient at the clinic where he worked that Caroline began to feel that there was something else going on with Nance, a hidden agenda. Then when Nance talked about the daughter she hadn’t gotten to see grow up, the suspicion began to form in Caroline’s mind. She knew that her mother had met her father at that clinic—that her mother, Mary, had been a patient there. And the daughter she hadn’t known? Might that be Caroline? And then there were the identical birthmarks—the same place on Mary in the wedding photo and on so-called Nancy Archer.
She knew better than to tell Vic what she suspected—he’d tell her she was imagining things and accuse her of letting Billie egg her on. It was true—Billie did egg her on, but that’s what any good friend would do.
“My God!” Billie said to Caroline on the phone that night. “She could be your mother. But why has she come now? What does she want? Why the secrecy?”
“Exactly,” Caroline said, feeling slightly sick and dizzy. She was sitting in her own living room, usually her favorite place in the world. Who had picked out that pink floor lamp? Who were the innocent-faced children in those watercolor portraits?
“Maybe she’s afraid you hate her,” Billie suggested. “If it is her, she’s got a reason to be afraid. Abandoning you like that.”
“I don’t hate her,” Caroline said but knew she’d spoken too quickly. Her feelings about her mother changed periodically—had gone through various permutations