The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [92]
Marylou flung open the door, gave Suzi a hug, and invited her in, noticing that Suzi looked sloppy for Suzi, in an old T-shirt and sweatpants cut off into shorts and old flip-flops, her hair jammed down under a SeaWorld baseball cap.
“You should’ve just phoned me, honey,” Marylou told her. “I would’ve come and got you.”
“Could you take me to the library?” Suzi asked Marylou. “The big one downtown? It has some books I need.”
Marylou told her sure, wondering why she hadn’t asked her mother to take her, but pleased that she hadn’t. She explained to Suzi that they’d need to wait until her pineapple upside-down cake finished baking. While Suzi flopped down on the sofa in the living room with Buster to wait, Marylou busied herself in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and wiping counters.
She wanted to run over her options in her head once again, but she’d recently had trouble thinking clearly. Maybe it was the torpid subtropical heat here. It was hard to focus.
Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot. Even after that nighttime walk on Nun’s Drive when he asked her to go ahead and kill him. Oh no. She did not feel a bit sorry for him. In fact, after meeting with him and talking with him and observing him, she hated him even more than she had when he’d simply been an abstract bogeyman. It was easier to despise him now that she had particulars to focus on—his spotty, shaking hand waving in her direction like an underwater plant when he was trying to tell her something but couldn’t form the words; his habit of farting like a pack mule when he walked; the way he sat three inches away from the TV screen and stared at the idiotic commercials for Depends diapers as if they were words of wisdom from on high. And him—some smart research doctor who thought he was better than everyone else! A Nazi doctor who treated pregnant women like his own personal guinea pigs! She’d stopped dropping in to see him because his decrepit condition depressed her. She’d decided to leave him be and take care of the rest of his family.
Marylou’d decided that Suzi, the first family member she’d met, was the person she wanted to focus on the most. She would continue to disrupt the lives of the others, but she’d devote most of her trouble-making time to Suzi. But trying to decide how to best use Suzi was just as difficult as pinpointing the best method of ridding the earth of the scum named Wilson Spriggs, the American Nazi. The problem was that she felt no desire at all to harm a hair on Suzi’s head. She liked Suzi. Plain and simple. In fact, she liked her so much that she wished she could adopt her. Who knew why you liked one person more than others? She and Suzi were nothing alike, so it wasn’t that. Marylou was reserved and calculating and expected people to intuit her stellar qualities without her having to do a thing—meanwhile ignoring all her weaknesses—while Suzi was earnest, open and self-confident, and enthusiastic about life. Marylou felt good just being around Suzi. And Suzi needed her, too, since her own mother had checked out long ago. The two of them, she and Suzi, needed each other.
And now, in her cake-smelling kitchen, stacking hot clean melamine plates in her cupboard, Marylou had another hand-slap-to-the-forehead moment. Instead of trying to create trouble for Suzi, maybe she should pour her energy into creating a positive relationship with Suzi. Make Suzi want to come live with her! Suzi needed to spend time with Marylou, lots of time; and gradually she’d become more and more estranged from her own parents; and soon she would turn, by her own choice, into the granddaughter