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Aunt Beth tumbled into the front passenger seat of the Mercedes while Lucy and her siblings filled the back, and Melvin, Mama’s stout business manager, took the wheel from an attendant. Before they were even strapped into their seat belts, Mel hit the gas and tore away from the curb, rounding the corner. Lucy climbed onto her knees and peered through the back windshield to spy a throng of people still gathered on the wide, front steps of the courthouse.
“Get down,” Aunt Beth admonished. “Lucy, buckle up! Mel, did you even think about a booster seat?”
“Other things on my mind.” Lucy, as she was pushing the seat belt buckle together, saw Mel reach across the space between the two front seats to pat Aunt Beth’s hands. “It was worth it, really. You’ll see. Once Autumn Heat premieres.”
Marilyn rolled her eyes and gazed out the window while Clark glowered and stared straight ahead at the back of Aunt Beth’s head.
“But to take a child into a courtroom, one who . . .” Aunt Beth was shaking her head and reaching into her purse for a bejeweled cigarette case. She withdrew one of her long slim “ciggies.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Mel said as he slowed for a stoplight.
“It’s been a rough day.” She pressed a button to lower her window, lit up quickly, blew smoke out the window, then, after another two puffs, stubbed out her barely smoked cigarette in the ashtray and rolled the window up again.
“Better?” he asked.
“No.” She, too, looked out the side window at the wide streets packed with all kinds of cars, trucks, vans, and buses. “That courtroom was no place for a child.”
“Come on, honey. She’ll never remember this,” he said, fiddling with the radio, while Marilyn muttered, “Move over,” to Lucy. “I can hardly breathe.”
Lucy ignored her older sister, just like she ignored Clark, whose leg was shaking, as it always did when he was nervous.
“She takes in more than you know,” Aunt Beth argued under her breath. “She’s always creeping around and watching. She hears and sees everything. It’s . . . it’s disturbing.” She gave a mock shudder. “Creepy. Ever since . . . you know. She’s been . . . odd . . .” Aunt Beth lowered her voice. “She never cried. I told you that, right?”
They were talking about her. Lucy knew it. And she’d cried plenty. They just never saw it. She would never let them see it.
“It’s over,” Mel said with a satisfied smile growing beneath his mustache as he patted Aunt Beth on her knee, his ring—gold, with a yellow stone that cut into his fat finger—catching the sunlight streaming through the bug-spattered windshield.
“You don’t know that.” She shifted away.
“Sure I do,” he argued but returned his hand to the steering wheel.
The summer sun beat down mercilessly, heat shimmering in weird-looking waves in the distance.
Lucy had to squint.
Aunt Beth slid a pair of her Jackie O sunglasses onto her nose.
As Mel fiddled with a knob that controlled the air-conditioning, Aunt Beth snapped on the radio and punched through the stations until she found something she liked—a song Mama had sung, about a mockingbird and a diamond ring.
It made Lucy sad.
But it seemed to cheer up Aunt Beth. Calmer, she said to Mel, “All I can say is that the movie better do well.”
“A sexy thriller starring Tina Champagne, released after the scandalous tragedy that cut short her career and nearly took her life? It would only be better if we could get her to come out for it, you know, wave to her fans. Give them something to juice them up.”
“Ugh. She’ll never. Not unless you can find a miracle worker of a plastic surgeon and couple it with a Nobel Prize-winning psychiatrist.”
Mel smiled wide beneath his brush of a mustache. Lucy caught his image in the rearview mirror. “It doesn’t really matter. We just got ourselves a ton of publicity, the kind you can’t buy.” He winked at Lucy in the mirror, as if the two of them were in on some private joke, and she just stared at him, not sure why, but knowing that she hated him.
She hated him a lot.
Cascade Mountains, Oregon
Now
“I want to talk to Daddy,” Renee asserted after a long night in the cold, drafty cabin. The adventure, if that’s what you would call it, had worn off, dying like the embers of the fire in the predawn hours. Lucy was second-guessing herself as she cuddled close to Renee, who had crawled out of her child-sized sleeping bag sometime after midnight to slip into Lucy’s, snuggling close. Lucy kissed the top of her daughter’s head. It had been reckless to drive up here, almost crazy. If she wanted to hide, she could have done it in any city away from San Francisco, right? And maybe she should have driven south, to a warmer climate.
Like LA? her mind nagged.
