The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady - Elizabeth Stuckey-French [94]
She was happy for Teddy that he’d been able to escape the weight of what had happened and create another life for himself, even if she hadn’t been able to. She’d married Martin, of course, a few years after Teddy left, but, although he was a perfectly nice man, he was no Teddy, and she never could talk to him the way she’d been able to talk to Teddy.
For years she’d kept a notebook full of things she wanted to tell Teddy, things only she and Teddy would appreciate. Small things, mostly. The oak tree in the side yard got struck by lightning and it split the trunk right in half, but I wouldn’t let them cut it down. I took swimming lessons at the Y, and it turns out I’m a natural! Remember Marcia Jenkins, that sweet but homely girl from down the street who was in my junior honors English class? She married a Canadian Inuit! In their newspaper picture the two of them are rubbing noses. Remember how I used to hate prunes? Well, I’ve gotten right fond of them in my old age. And so on.
After she got caught up with planning to murder Wilson, she shut that notebook, Notes to Teddy, for good. Teddy would never understand, or condone, her desire to get even. Living well is the best revenge, he always reminded her. That’s what he’d said when she expressed to him her anger at her own parents, telling him how they’d abandoned her at her grandmother’s house in Little Rock so they could go off gallivanting in Hollywood. Teddy, while not making light of her anger, had encouraged her to forgive them, and after a time she had. But forgive Helen’s death? Never.
Suzi Witherspoon was the first young person she’d met, in all her years of teaching Sunday school and high school, whom she thought she could love the way she’d loved Helen. She had to go carefully with Suzi. Not make any mistakes. It was even possible that if she was able to have a grandparent-grandchild relationship with Suzi, her anger about Helen would dissipate and she could get on with enjoying the rest of her life. Live and let live, as Teddy would’ve said. It could happen, couldn’t it? Maybe it wasn’t too late.
The timer dinged and she removed her pineapple upside-down cake from the oven. She was supposed to take it to a potluck supper her Sunday school class was having that evening. Perhaps she could talk Suzi into coming with her.
* * *
The Leon County Public Library, where Marylou hadn’t been before, was a two-story affair with large plate glass windows, built in the seventies. It was full, on this summer afternoon, of mothers with small children and office workers and scantily clad teenagers and people who appeared to be homeless napping in the air-conditioning.
Marylou had loved going to the Georgian-style, three-story library in downtown Little Rock when she was a child. Her grandmother would drop her off there a couple of afternoons a week, and in her memories of that library it was always summer. She relished the time by herself, the drowsy heat and whirring fans and smell of old book covers, sitting in the same plaid chair in the children’s room and deciding which five books, in the stack of mysteries she’d selected, she really wanted to check out, the same lady librarians working behind the counter, probably they were only in their forties but they looked, to Marylou, to be 140.
In the Leon County Library it was all DVDs and CDs and banks of computers. Suzi rode the elevator upstairs to get her books, and Marylou wandered to the back of the room downstairs where there was a children’s section. She leaned against a long bookshelf and glanced through children’s books—some of the same ones she’d read to Helen—Three Little Horses by Piet Worm,