Little Pretty Things (3 page)

“I’m not sure what happened to the Madeleine Bell I used to know,” I said. I felt raw, and mean. “You know where they’re having it, right? The reunion?”

She started to say something, then thought better of it. She pulled her coat tighter around her. “Let’s just say there’s a lot about me you don’t know, too,” she said.

Fair enough. I turned to leave.

“Juliet, wait.”

She caught up with me at the door to the lobby and laid a soft hand on my arm. I could see Lu at the desk, leaning her chin on her fist and watching the dark parking lot. For a moment, my life split in two and I was the me I could have been and also the me I’d become.

“It could still be,” she said.

“What are you talking about?”

“It could still be the same as being friends. We could—it could be real this time. We could get things right. Chicago’s not that far away, and there’s the reunion. Maybe I will come back for it, even if they’re holding it at the same place—” Her face darkened. “God, what are the odds? But there are some things—I’d like to have a chance to talk to you sometime, really talk. Just think about it, OK?”

Clearly she had no idea how little happened around Midway in a given week. I wouldn’t be able to think about anything else. I slipped out from under her hand and opened the door.

I led Maddy through the lobby, Lu watching, and pointed in the direction of her room. Outside, a lean silver car had parked nose to nose with the vending and ice machines. It could only be hers. As soon as Maddy had swept through the lobby, Lu turned on me.

“What the—”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“All this time I thought I was your fanciest friend.”

Lu lived in a ranch house overstuffed with her husband, three kids, and mother-in-law. She might have the same terrible job I did, but she’d figured out a few things I hadn’t. “You’re pretty fancy,” I said.

Lu’s smile was close-mouthed to hide her crooked teeth. “So why is she here?”

“Business, she said.”

“No, I mean here. At the Mid-Night. Did you see her? She could stay anywhere. She could have stayed at—hotels I don’t even know downtown, the Luxe even.”

I glanced uneasily at Lu. Maddy knew all about the Luxe. But she’d gotten a room here to talk to me. Hadn’t she admitted it? But she could have stopped by with her olive branch and still stayed somewhere else. And what had she actually said, in the end?

A pair of headlights grazed over the lobby. The silver car was leaving. Maybe staying somewhere else was the plan she’d had in mind all along.

Why had she come? The car, the diamond, the soft raincoat. The forty-two-dollar tip on an eight-buck bar tab. The room paid for but not used. Maddy Bell certainly wasn’t a Bargain.

Which could only mean she was desperate.

CHAPTER THREE

Lu pushed the cart into its closet. I locked the lobby doors behind us and dropped the keys into the slot for Billy.

As we walked out to my car, I scanned the parking lot. Maddy hadn’t come back.

“She got a room, didn’t she?” Lu said. “Weird.”

I wondered why she’d bothered. What had she accomplished? Was putting me in my place worth the price of a room at the Mid-Night? But the Mid-Night was a cheap place to stay, and Maddy could clearly afford to throw money around. “One less room to clean tomorrow,” I said, grabbing a brochure that had been tucked under my windshield wiper and throwing it in the backseat.

“At least she didn’t bring a guy back,” Lu said as we got in. “And then you’d have to clean up? After your friend had freaky sex all over one of the rooms?”

“Lu,” I said.

“You don’t think she has freaky sex with
some
body? Did you see that ring?”

“Lu, please.”

We drove the rest of the way to Lu’s place in silence. The Mendoza house was small and plain, on a clean, pleasant street where people invested heavily in flower boxes and kept the paint on their shutters touched up. The house was dark, but Lu’s husband had left the porch light on for her.

“Goodnight,” I said. “See you bright and early.”

She hesitated with her hand on the door. I could already feel how Maddy’s visit had changed how Lu thought of me. Lu and I had worked together for a few years now, and we were friends. Really friends—what Maddy had wanted from me. Lu was older than I was by about ten years, and she had a husband who remembered to leave on the porch light. We didn’t have a lot in common, but we could talk for hours about what we watched on TV or how we were so glad we didn’t live at the Mid-Night the way Billy did. About her three rowdy kids and how coming to work was like a vacation from all their noise. About her parents, back in Mexico, who she missed, or her mother-in-law, who she wished would get her own place. About how she might get her real-estate license someday. About the life she was working toward.

It’s not like I hadn’t ever told her anything about me. I’d told her plenty.

But now we’d both had a look at Maddy Bell and at the world outside our reach. Her real-estate license must have seemed so small, so far away.

“Yeah,” she said, finally opening the door. “See you.”

I stopped for gas, counting out the few bills I had on me beforehand. The numbers on the pump turned fast. Inside, I leaned against the counter and chatted with Dickie Buggit, the attendant. We’d gone to Midway High together. Sometimes I had to remind myself that I’d gone out with Dickie Buggit once—oh my God, why? But then there were a lot of guys in town like Dickie and not a lot of guys not like Dickie. Out of all the guys I’d gone out with, gone home with—hardly any—Dickie was the only one I could still be friends with. And by friends, I meant buy gas from. I counted out my change, considered a lottery ticket.

The door chimed.

“Aw, hell,” Dickie said under his breath. He reached for the phone, running his finger down a list of numbers taped to the wall.

A woman bundled in two sweaters, a scarf, and house slippers stood blinking in the bright light of the station. Teeny, as everyone called her, walked the streets of Midway as the town ghost—alive, but barely there. For a short, slight wisp of a woman, tiny indeed, she had a large presence, showing up in unlikely places, uninvited and unwanted, mumbling some phrase or another to herself on repeat. She came out to the Mid-Night a lot, but there wasn’t much to steal there.

Dickie talked in low tones into the phone. I went to an end-cap to take a look at the audio-book selection: westerns and thrillers marked down, and a few get-rich schemes at full price. I watched Teeny shopping the aisles. She liked color. A handful of gumballs went into her cardigan pocket. She considered and put back a pack of gummy bears.

By the time she made the round trip through the store, her sweater pocket bulged with a stash of bright, round candies.

Dickie hung up and leaned over the counter. “Come on, Teeny,” he said. “If you’re going to steal, at least be sneaky about it.”

She didn’t seem to hear him.

“How much are those?” I said. “The candies.”

“Five cents apiece, for crying out loud,” Dickie said. “Cheapest thing in the store.”

The cheapest thing could still be too much. “You called the cops on her?”

“Nah, that place she lives,” he said. “She gets loose, they come pick her up. She’s going to get hit on the street one of these days.”

He made her sound like someone’s loose mongrel dog. I glared at him. “Let me pay for some of those.” I turned out my pockets, letting whatever change I had fall on the counter.

Dickie shrugged, rang me up.

Teeny was making for the door. I followed her out into the parking lot, looking around for the car or van coming for her. “Hey, Teeny,” I said. “Let’s wait for your ride, OK?”

She ignored me, shuffling past my car, the pumps, and toward the street.

“Teeny, stop—stay here a second.” I came alongside her and reached for her arm. It was thin in the bulky sweater, but she was strong. She ripped her arm away from me. The overfilled pocket swung around, and the candies arced out, pinging against the asphalt around us and rolling in a million directions.

“Sorry, sorry,” I said, running to grab a few before she darted for them and Dickie’s prediction came true. When I came back, Teeny was kneeling in the lot, gathering the candies to her. She mumbled something under her breath. “I said I was sorry.”

I walked the lot, collecting the candies, and brought them back to her, getting mad. What was wrong with her? Why couldn’t she snap out of—whatever this was? Why wasn’t anyone caring for her, keeping her safe?

The last handful of gumballs returned to the pile, I stood up and watched the street, fuming at myself for getting involved. “I’m going,” I said. “It’s late.”

“The girls,” Teeny said.

“What?”

“The girls.”

She looked up at me, her eyes wide and concerned. She could have been a hundred years old, or twenty-five, I couldn’t tell. She was younger, though, than I’d ever guessed, if I’d ever given any thought to her at all.

“The girls who? Which girls?”

“The girls, the girls.” The words were sing-song, but they made sense to her.

“OK, great,” I said. “I hope they get rides home, too.”

My old car didn’t want to start, but at last it did, and I was treated to the gas needle’s short trip from empty to not-quite-empty. I drove off with a last glance in the rear-view at Teeny seated in the lot, alone. Some of the candies had been transferred to her mouth. One cheek was distended, full, like a child’s.

Where I lived, the porch light was dark.

Which is not to say I couldn’t find my way. The whole street was well lit. That was the kind of street it was: houses old but kept up, the grass green and neatly edged. No matter what time I came home, somebody on the block was probably noticing, flicking their curtain back to catch the details. The neighborhood was nicer than Lu’s, maybe, the yards a little bigger. But at my house, we’d long ago given up on flower boxes.

My mom was fine, I’d told Maddy.

The first lie I’d told her.

I let myself in the front door, careful to be quiet. My mom slept badly, which meant she could be trying to sleep at any time of the day or night.

She had the time. She didn’t work. She didn’t cook or clean much. She didn’t have friends or make crafts or read. I’d moved back home after my dad’s death to get my mom through the cycle of grief. But we hadn’t cycled. I was still living in the room I had in high school. The same wall color, the same furniture. I still had trophies from some of my big races on the dresser. My mom still slept in the bed my dad had left that last morning. His clothes were still in the drawers and closet. We were . . . still.

“Juliet, is that you?” my mom called from the kitchen.

Who else could it be? I’d gotten one shoe off, and carried it around the corner. A low-watt light over the stove barely lit the room. She sat at the table in her robe.

What I’d learned from my dad’s death was that the Townsends were made of flimsy stuff. One weak heart, one weak mind, and, for baby bear, a weak will.

“Hey, Mom. Thought you’d be in bed.”

“I was getting a glass of water.”

There was no glass in front of her. I dropped my shoe, kicked off its match, and went to the cupboard. When I set the glass of water in front of her, she reached for it idly, as though it had been there the whole time.