Nine Perfect Strangers - Liane Moriarty Page 0,111
end of the world?
And the car. She’d been the one who scratched the car. That didn’t seem to matter much either now. It was like those smoothies had sucked all the air out of their arguments, and now they were all wrinkled and deflated and kind of embarrassing. Like they’d both been making a whole lot of fuss about nothing.
There was something else they’d talked about too. Something he thought might have been more significant. He’d remember it in a moment.
Jessica pulled out her shirt and sniffed her cleavage. “I stink. I’m going to try and have a sponge bath at the bathroom sink.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I need to wash my face,” said Jessica. She ran a hand over her cheek.
“Okay,” said Ben. He glanced at her. “Not a single person in this room will care if you’re not wearing makeup.”
“There will be a single person who cares,” said Jessica as she got to her feet. “Me. I care.” But she didn’t seem angry.
He watched her walk toward the bathroom.
Are we fixed? Do we have the right tools now?
He wanted a Bacon ’N Egg McMuffin. He wanted to be at work with the guys listening to FM radio, making cars beautiful again. He was going back to work when they got home. He didn’t care if they didn’t need the money; he needed the work.
How much longer would they be left down here? He had to see sky. Even when he was working, he never spent a full day without going outside to eat his lunch.
He remembered a TV show he’d seen about a guy in jail who might have been wrongfully convicted and how he told his mother that he hadn’t seen the moon in seven years. Ben experienced a full-body chill when he heard that. That poor, poor schmuck.
“Hey. Mind if I sit here?”
It was Zoe, the girl who was here with her parents.
She sat down next to him.
When he’d seen her over the last few days he’d wondered why someone of her age, who was obviously fit and sporty, would choose to come to a place like this. Now he knew.
“I’m sorry about your brother,” he said.
She glanced at him. “Thank you.” She pulled on her ponytail. “I’m sorry about your sister.”
“How do you know about my sister?” asked Ben.
“Your wife mentioned it—when we heard about what was in the smoothies yesterday. She said she was an addict.”
“Right,” said Ben. “I forgot that.”
“It must be hard,” said Zoe. She flexed her toes.
“It’s hard for Jessica,” said Ben. “It’s like she has to keep hearing the same old story. She never knew Lucy before the drugs, so to her, she’s just a messed-up junkie.”
“You never really get anyone else’s family,” said Zoe. “I broke up with my boyfriend because he wanted to go to Bali this week, and I said I couldn’t go anywhere, I had to be with my parents for the anniversary of my brother’s death. He was like, ‘So are you going to have to spend that week in January with your parents for the rest of your whole life?’ And I said … ‘Uh, yeah.’”
“He sounds like kind of a jerk,” said Ben.
“It’s hard to pick the jerks,” said Zoe.
“I bet your brother would have picked him for a jerk,” said Ben, because it wasn’t hard for a guy to pick the jerks, but then he wanted to kick himself. Was that an insensitive thing to say on the anniversary? And maybe her brother wasn’t the type to be on the lookout for his sister.
But Zoe smiled. “Probably.”
“What was your brother like?” asked Ben.
“He liked science fiction and conspiracy theories and politics and music that no one had ever heard of,” said Zoe. “He was never boring. We disagreed on basically everything there is to disagree on.” For a horrible moment he thought she might cry, but she didn’t.
She said, “What was your sister like? Before the drugs? Or beneath the drugs?”
“Beneath the drugs,” repeated Ben. He thought about it: Lucy beneath the drugs. “She used to be the funniest person I knew. Sometimes she still is. She’s still a person. People treat addicts like they’re not real people anymore but she’s still … she’s still a person.”
Zoe nodded, just once, almost businesslike, as if she heard what he said and she got it.
“My dad just wanted to cut her off,” said Ben. “Have nothing more to do with her. Pretend like … she never existed. He said it was a matter of self-preservation.”