Nell Zink - Mislaid

“Well, I love Karen very much.”

“I know it. There’s never a reason to take a word you say on faith, because you couldn’t tell a lie to save your life.”

“Also, she loves me,” Temple said.

“Maybe so. I don’t know what goes through her pea brain. Except that right now she’s figuring out I screwed her to the wall, and she’s wanting to trust Lee Fleming. And now you think I should trust him, too! But I’m not going back there. You don’t know him. He’s about five hundred times smarter than you are. He can dominate people and make them do things they never thought they would do.”

“But he can’t fuck with you now, because Karen would never speak to him again.”

“You wish. My problem is whether anybody will ever speak to me again.”

“Are you kidding? You’re Mom. And you should have seen his face when he looked at her. It was love.” Temple lowered his voice like a soul crooner on the word “love.” “Not I-love-you love. This was unconditional love, Christian agape, like his top priority in life is how he can fatten her up. If we don’t hurry up, he’s going to buy her a pony.” Almost whispering, he added in an undertone, “I am rushing so hard on pure euphoria, it makes me frightened.”

He leaned down and Meg stood on tiptoe so they could hug. A deep male voice boomed through the alley. “Get your hands off her, boy!”

Temple raised his arms and stepped away from Meg. It was a uniformed cop, sidling down the alley with his hand on his revolver. “Ma’am, are you all right?” he called out.

“I’m fine,” Meg said, stepping between Temple and the cop. “We’re friends.”

“We had a report you were under pursuit,” the cop explained.

“We were having a footrace,” Meg said. “I won, and now he has to buy me lunch. But thank you for your concern.”

“Why don’t you take two steps toward me and turn out your pockets?” the cop suggested to Temple. He obeyed, starting with his jacket. A battered paperback of The Confessions of St. Augustine flopped to the asphalt, and a prerecorded Herbie Hancock cassette landed next to it with a sharp click. “Open it,” the cop said, pushing the cassette case into a puddle with a leather-clad steel toe.

Temple crouched to retrieve the cassette from under the policeman’s boot. “Oh, no! The tape’s all wet!” he said, shaking it. “My sister is going to kill me!”

Out on the sidewalk, a pedestrian paused to watch. Suddenly bored and somehow also disappointed, even disgusted, the cop wished Meg a nice day and returned to the street.

Temple stood poised in front of the Dumpster, mourning the ruined cassette and weighing whether to put the damp, dirty book back in his jacket pocket or in the trash. “I’ve read it an awful lot. I could leave it for someone else,” he concluded, propping it against the wall.

“I’m going to walk you back to the courthouse now,” Meg said.

M eg and Temple arrived at the judge’s office. Karen was clinging to Dee, and Byrdie and Lee were gone, to Meg’s profound relief. But they had left a forwarding address. Trip handed Meg a note torn from Lee’s black book — an invitation to dinner at a restaurant. She stared at it in silence.

Karen took the note and folded it and said they would be there.

It was hard work dissuading Temple from coming along uninvited, but Dee finally extricated him and drove him home. She felt Meg and Karen needed time to talk. Which was true, though they spent most of the afternoon playing pool in Karen’s dorm. At suppertime they were late.

The restaurant was hidden down a back alley, up a narrow staircase, with nothing to mark its presence but an old Pepsi sign. Inside, the high-ceilinged loft space was painted white, there were huge crimson roses in white vases, and the prix fixe was a hundred bucks. Lee and Byrdie were waiting in a private back room with oyster shooters and two bottles of champagne on ice. The atmosphere conveyed was that of a 1960s-themed surprise party.

When Meg was led into their presence and made to sit down, everyone could sense the hurt. Lee felt more hurt than he expected — he was used to feeling angry — and Meg felt so guilty she could have gutted herself with a teaspoon. “I’m so sorry,” she said to Byrdie over and over as Lee opened the champagne.

“It’s okay,” Byrdie said. “You did the best you could. I just wish you would have written to me, or called me or something.”

Meg writhed and covered her face.

“Why are you picking on Mom?” Karen finally asked Byrdie. “We should be celebrating! I feel so happy and lucky. I always had the best mom and the best boyfriend in the whole world, and now I have the best brother and the best father, and maybe even the best grandparents!”

“You were a baby the last time we saw you,” Lee said. “Don’t be one now.”

“Whoa,” Karen said.

“When you’re older, you’ll see there’s more to life than the future,” he added. “Byrdie has pent-up negative emotions. If he can’t let them out, they’ll spoil his dinner. Drink up your champagne and let us talk.”

“What about my pent-up joy and happiness?” Karen protested. “I mean it! You could all just be happy for me. If everybody would stop blaming each other and just think about me for a second, we’d all be fine!”

Lee laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “You’re just like a woman. It’s something your mother never mastered.”

“It’s not fair! I’m the one who got the biggest shock today. Everybody here knew what was going on but me.”

“Knowing just made it worse,” Byrdie said. At that Meg exploded in helpless sobbing.

“Stop torturing us!” Karen said. “You think it was any fun? You think she wanted to go on the lam? We didn’t even have heat or running water! We had possums coming in the house!” She looked at Lee accusingly, and her eyes narrowed to a squint.

“And whose fault was that,” he said. “Possums in the house.”

“Is this what family dinners are like?” Karen wailed to no one in particular.

“You’re asking me?” Byrdie said. “How am I supposed to know?”

“It’s awful! It’s perverted! Mom, help me!” she begged, but Meg was too busy crying. When she touched her mother’s arm, Meg pushed her away, covering her face.

Karen eyed the door, longing to escape. She wanted Temple. But she also wanted the truth, not in manageable portions but now, and not as information but as experience. The situation was unbearably formal and tense and she was alone, but the formality and the tension, and even her being alone: They all might be integral parts of the truth. There was no way to find out but pay attention and wait. She let Lee refill her glass.

He leaned back, folding his arms, and said, “Now listen, Peg, it’s true that most of the time I was ready to shoot you on sight. I wanted Mireille back more than anything in the world. Mickey, darling. I love you. I wanted you back so bad. I paid every spare dime I had to private eyes to look for you. They told me you were dead . Because it never crossed anybody’s mind that your mother would be so fucking afraid of me she’d go underground, refuse to cross state lines, live under an assumed name in a shack, never go to college or get a job, and let you turn into this undereducated, underfed — you know what I mean — physical and intellectual pygmy. Like I was the Manson family!”

Karen stared. She had never imagined a father like this. A large, strong creature with an emotional hold over them all and no gears except overdrive. It went way beyond Anne Sexton, deep into Sylvia Plath territory. Yet her mother’s alliance with this animal had been long and voluntary. She looked at Meg.