The Revenge of the Radioactive Lady (28 page)

“You should see my dad.”

“I’ve seen him.”

They both shared a nasty little laugh.

Suzi asked what was wrong with Buff.

“Let’s just say, his fixation on your sister—it’s not the first, and it won’t be the last.”

“How did you know he liked Ava?” For some reason, hearing this, rather than making Suzi angry or repulsed or frightened, gave her hope. “Did he tell you?”

“It’s obvious.”

“Doesn’t your mom care? Does she know?”

Rusty sighed and rolled over onto her back. “She’s the Great Wall of China.”

“Huh?”

“She knows, but she pretends she doesn’t. She blocks it out. Even though he’s been in treatment.”

“Wow,” Suzi said, but she didn’t know exactly what this meant. In treatment for what? Did she want to find out? Not really.

“For sexual addiction,” Rusty added, staring at her ceiling. She sighed again.

“Wow,” Suzi said again, thinking how peculiar it was for a daughter to be talking about her father this way. A minister with sex-u-al addiction. What did this mean? That he couldn’t help himself? Again, in a way that Suzi knew was sick and twisted, this gave her hope. But she didn’t want to know more.

“What were you doing in here?” she asked Rusty.

Rusty rolled over and pulled a book from under the bed. “I bring in one book at a time, and when I’m done, take it out and bring in another. Usually I get them from the library. Otis gave me this one. It’s scintillating.” She held up an old white paperback book called
Atoms to Electricity
.

“How do you know Otis?” Suzi asked, but she was wondering, Would she be able to hear Angel if she woke up?

“Night, night, Suze,” Rusty said, flopping back on the bed. “Enough questions for now.”

* * *

The following Wednesday Suzi stayed late after youth group and watched as Buff cleaned up. All the other kids had left. Buff was supposed to give her and Ava a ride home, but Ava, of course, wouldn’t
lower herself to attend youth group. Buff was rearranging beanbag chairs in the chat room, scooping them up and slinging them into a corner, while Suzi, because of her knee, sat on a folding chair and watched. The muscles in his back and arms rippled under his white T-shirt as he bent over and picked up the multicolored beanbags.

He was scowling. He’d been acting annoyed all evening. When one of the smaller boys, Nick, banged his elbow against a cabinet and doubled over in pain, Buff had told him to get over it. When one of the girls, Jackie, went on and on during check-in about a fight with her friend, he’d said, “That’s lame.”

“Where’s Ava tonight?” he finally asked Suzi, kicking the beanbags into a mound. “Did we do something to scare her away?”

“You did,” Suzi said boldly. “She doesn’t like you.”

Buff hesitated, glancing up at Suzi as if he were going to say something, then changed his mind. He snatched up the last beanbag chair, the one with a hole in it, and heaved it at the wall, and when it hit beans rattled out.

“But I do,” Suzi said, her heart popping away like a string of firecrackers. “I mean,
I
like you.” She hoped Buff understood what she was trying to tell him.

“I like you, too,” Buff said, not meeting her eyes. He put his hands on his hips and surveyed the room.

Suzi knew what kind of like he was referring to. Pals. Buddies. “No, not that kind of like,” she blurted out. “I
like
like you.”

He finally turned, looking her up and down. “What exactly are you saying, honey?”

Why was he making this so hard? “You know.”

He shook his head. “Okay, I know. But
you
don’t know. You’re younger than my daughter.”

“Your daughter hates you.” Because of all her sparring with Ava, Suzi had a knack for saying just the right thing at the right time, or
maybe it was the wrong thing, depending on how you looked at it. But either way, her words usually had the effect she desired.

Buff walked over to the food table, where bowls of tortilla chip crumbs and plates of cookie crumbs waited to be taken to the kitchen. Buff slammed the table into the wall. “Wait for me in my office,” he told Suzi.

Suzi stepped out of the chat room and stood a moment in the great hall, and she felt like cartwheeling across the cavernous room, dancing and whirling. She would have done it except for her lame knee. Ha-ha-ha, she was thinking, for some reason. Na, na, na. So there. She had no idea to whom these thoughts were addressed.

It seemed too good to be true, the morning that Suzi came knocking at her door. Marylou was wary about answering, because nobody ever rang the bell except Jehovah’s Witnesses and the person who was harassing her, the coward who’d always run away by the time Marylou could step outside to look around.

Suzi had an eerie look on her face. She’d hobbled all the way over to Marylou’s house on her bad knee, but the look on her face didn’t seem to Marylou to indicate that she was in pain. On the contrary, it seemed like suppressed pleasure, the way Helen used to look when she came home from school, bursting with a story to tell her mother about some kid’s bad behavior.

Marylou flung open the door, gave Suzi a hug, and invited her in, noticing that Suzi looked sloppy for Suzi, in an old T-shirt and sweatpants cut off into shorts and old flip-flops, her hair jammed down under a SeaWorld baseball cap.

“You should’ve just phoned me, honey,” Marylou told her. “I would’ve come and got you.”

“Could you take me to the library?” Suzi asked Marylou. “The big one downtown? It has some books I need.”

Marylou told her sure, wondering why she hadn’t asked her mother to take her, but pleased that she hadn’t. She explained to Suzi that
they’d need to wait until her pineapple upside-down cake finished baking. While Suzi flopped down on the sofa in the living room with Buster to wait, Marylou busied herself in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher and wiping counters.

She wanted to run over her options in her head once again, but she’d recently had trouble thinking clearly. Maybe it was the torpid subtropical heat here. It was hard to focus.

Okay. She’d tabled her initial plan to murder Wilson, because there wouldn’t be any satisfaction in murdering him if he didn’t know, or understand, why he was being murdered, but it wasn’t that she felt any sympathy for the wretched old coot. Even after that nighttime walk on Nun’s Drive when he asked her to go ahead and kill him. Oh no. She did not feel a bit sorry for him. In fact, after meeting with him and talking with him and observing him, she hated him even more than she had when he’d simply been an abstract bogeyman. It was easier to despise him now that she had particulars to focus on—his spotty, shaking hand waving in her direction like an underwater plant when he was trying to tell her something but couldn’t form the words; his habit of farting like a pack mule when he walked; the way he sat three inches away from the TV screen and stared at the idiotic commercials for Depends diapers as if they were words of wisdom from on high. And him—some smart research doctor who thought he was better than everyone else! A Nazi doctor who treated pregnant women like his own personal guinea pigs! She’d stopped dropping in to see him because his decrepit condition depressed her. She’d decided to leave him be and take care of the rest of his family.

Marylou’d decided that Suzi, the first family member she’d met, was the person she wanted to focus on the most. She would continue to disrupt the lives of the others, but she’d devote most of her trouble-making time to Suzi. But trying to decide how to best use Suzi was just as difficult as pinpointing the best method of ridding the earth of
the scum named Wilson Spriggs, the American Nazi. The problem was that she felt no desire at all to harm a hair on Suzi’s head. She liked Suzi. Plain and simple. In fact, she liked her so much that she wished she could adopt her. Who knew why you liked one person more than others? She and Suzi were nothing alike, so it wasn’t that. Marylou was reserved and calculating and expected people to intuit her stellar qualities without her having to do a thing—meanwhile ignoring all her weaknesses—while Suzi was earnest, open and self-confident, and enthusiastic about life. Marylou felt good just being around Suzi. And Suzi needed her, too, since her own mother had checked out long ago. The two of them, she and Suzi, needed each other.

And now, in her cake-smelling kitchen, stacking hot clean melamine plates in her cupboard, Marylou had another hand-slap-to-the-forehead moment. Instead of trying to create trouble for Suzi, maybe she should pour her energy into creating a
positive
relationship with Suzi. Make Suzi want to come live with her! Suzi needed to spend time with Marylou, lots of time; and gradually she’d become more and more estranged from her own parents; and soon she would turn, by her own choice, into the granddaughter Marylou had never had. The daughter she’d never had. The daughter Helen would’ve been if she’d been allowed by the American Nazi to grow up like her friends had. Healthy. Smart. Kind. Loving. Responsible. Sweet. Funny. The truth was, Marylou loved Suzi. How could this be? But there it was. The feelings she had for Suzi both delighted and terrified her, but she couldn’t ignore them.

It had already been harder than she’d expected to drive any real wedge between Suzi and those hapless goats she called parents. The church thing, she’d thought, would do it, but she’d underestimated the mother’s ability to avoid looking a gift horse in the mouth. What a strange expression that was. Was she, Marylou, the gift horse? She imagined herself with a horse head and Caroline peering into her mouth. One chomp would do it.

And she’d also underestimated the father’s determination to focus
on anything but his job and that nasty, slatternly coworker of his. Gee-gee.

She’d hoped that Suzi would embrace fundamentalist Christianity and become a zealot, but she was wrong there, too. She’d underestimated Suzi’s ability to fold religion smoothly into her already well-rounded life like eggs into a batter.

It had also been hard to derail Suzi because she, Marylou, had so much to do! She was living in a new city; and living, period, took work. When she’d first moved to Tallahassee—ah, those halcyon days!—she had only her hatred of Wilson Spriggs to focus on. She knew nobody, had no place to go except the grocery store; and, on her first few visits to Publix, she’d looked around and decided that every old man she saw pushing a cart must be Wilson Spriggs. She was in the town where he lived, and it seemed like everyone she saw must be connected to him in some way, like they were all in some unfolding drama starring the Radioactive Lady and the American Nazi.

But now the people and places she saw in Tallahassee had taken up their proper roles again. They were simply themselves, and she was forced to acknowledge them. She had to chat with the checkout girls at Publix and the woman at the hair salon (recommended by Paula Coffey) who cut her hair, and her coworkers at Florida Testing and Assessment who liked to discuss
American Idol
and
CSI
while eating their bag lunches. She had to find new doctors. Keep up with her prescriptions. Locate a reliable lawn service and discuss the state of her yard with the workers. (She actually hated yard work, and she’d put all the fake flowers around as a joke—she’d found them on sale one day at Walmart—but it was like the emperor’s new clothes. Everybody acted like they were real, so Marylou didn’t bother to explain.)

But mostly what took up her time was church. Even though it wasn’t a Baptist Church, and it was the kind of church she’d always turned her nose up at, she found she actually enjoyed going. It was her own fault, allowing Buff and Paula to pull her into their lair, but not
having many other obligations she could use as excuses, it was hard to say no. So she was now going not just Sundays and Wednesday nights, but she’d joined a women’s Bible study group, which met for breakfast on Thursday mornings, and a prayer group, which met for lunch on Fridays. And her Sunday school class, the Wouldbegoods, was always doing community projects. They’d talked her into helping with the food pantry and the clothing drive, and it all took time! Marylou was busier now than she’d been in Memphis. “Busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest,” Teddy used to say.

Six months after Helen died, Teddy’d left Memphis and gone away, up to Wisconsin, where his sister lived, just for a visit, he’d said, but then he kept extending his stay. Finally he told her he’d gotten a job with the City of Madison Parks and Recreation Department and eventually asked her for a divorce. A few years later he remarried and had three boys who were now grown. She knew this because for years they’d exchanged cards at Christmas and the occasional letter, until one letter from Teddy, coming right after what would’ve been Helen’s twenty-first birthday, informed her that he just couldn’t write to her anymore, and asked her not to write to him. It was too depressing, he said, to be reminded of her and Helen, because the two of them went together in his mind, and always would, and Marylou understood. She and Helen did go together, but in her mind, Teddy went with them, and she was incapable of putting it all behind her, even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t.