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“I didn’t ask what you wanted to be called. I asked what your name is.”
“It’s Lucy, all right? And I hate it.”
“Nothing wrong with Lucy.” He consulted the directions he’d gotten from the receptionist at the lab and made his way back to the highway. “Exactly how old are you?”
“Eighteen.”
He shot her his street fighter look.
“Okay, sixteen.”
“You’re fourteen, and you talk like you’re thirty.”
“If you know, why’d you ask? And I lived with Sandy. What did you expect?”
He felt a pang of sympathy at the husky note in her voice. “Yeah, well, I’m sorry about that. Your mother was . . .” Sandy had been fun, sexy, smart without having any sense, and completely irresponsible. “She was unique,” he finished lamely.
Lucy snorted. “She was a drunk.”
In the back the baby started to whimper.
“She has to eat soon, and we’ve run out of stuff.”
Great. This was just what he needed. “What’s she eating now?”
“Formula and crap in jars.”
“We’ll stop for something after we’re done at the lab.” The sounds coming from the back were growing increasingly unhappy. “What’s her name?”
Another pause. “Butt.”
“You’re a real comedian, aren’t you?”
“I’m not the one who named her.”
He glanced back at the blond-haired, rosy-cheek baby with gumdrop eyes and an angel-wing mouth, then looked over at Lucy. “You expect me to believe Sandy named that baby Butt?”
“I don’t care what you believe.” She pulled her feet from the dash. “I’m not letting some jerkoff stick a needle in me, so you can forget about that blood crap right now.”
“You’ll do what I tell you.”
“Bullshit.”
“Here are the facts, smart mouth. Your mother put my name on both your birth certificates, so we need to straighten that out, and the only way we can do it is with three blood tests.” He started to explain that Child Services would be taking care of them until her grandmother showed up, but didn’t have the heart. The lawyer could do it.
They drove the rest of the way to the lab in silence, except for the Demon Baby, who’d started to scream again. He pulled up in front of a two-story medical building and looked over at Lucy. She was staring rigidly at the doors as if she were looking at the gates of hell.
“I’ll give you twenty bucks to take the test,” he said quickly.
She shook her head. “No needles. I hate needles. Even thinking about them makes me sick.”
He was just beginning to contemplate how he could carry two screaming children into the lab when he had his first piece of luck all day.
Lucy got out of the Winnebago before she threw up.
4
NEALY WAS GLORIOUSLY invisible. She tilted back her head and laughed, then flipped up the radio to join in with Billy Joel on the chorus of “Uptown Girl.” The new day was exquisite. Puffs of blue clouds floated in a Georgia O’Keeffe sky, and her stomach rumbled with hunger, despite the scrambled eggs and toast she’d wolfed down for breakfast in a small restaurant not far from the motel where she’d spent the night. The greasy eggs, soggy toast, and murky coffee had been the most blissful meal she’d eaten in months. Every bite of food had slid easily down her throat, and not a single person had spared her a second glance.
