“Daddy, Daddy,” and the sound of Aunt Shirley’s quieter voice. Finally, Uncle Mel came into the living room. “There you are, Bethie!” he said, and opened his arms for a hug. He wore a white lab coat, with his name stitched in blue on one side. His hair was cut short and combed neatly. His face was clean-shaven, and both his glasses and his bald spot gleamed, but when he kissed her, his breath was still foul. She wondered how his patients endured it, how Aunt Shirley did.
“Hi, Uncle Mel.”
“Ready to head home?”
“Sure.”
Bethie gathered her pocketbook, her schoolbooks, the box of sheets and towels Aunt Shirley had given her. When she climbed into Uncle Mel’s boat of a Cadillac, she piled everything on her lap, but when Uncle Mel said, “Let’s put those things in the trunk,” she didn’t know how to refuse. She felt naked, even though she’d worn her least-sheer cotton blouse over her most heavily padded bra, with a sweater on top, even though it was June, and warm outside.
Bethie was worried that her uncle would want to talk, but all he did was whistle along to the radio while he drove through the late-afternoon sunshine, bobbing his head and bouncing the palms of his hand against the steering wheel in time to the songs. “I’ll never let’cha go, why, because I love you,” he sang, when Frankie Avalon came on. My father used to sing like that, Bethie thought, and her heart gave a great, miserable twist. At a red light, Bethie felt Uncle Mel looking at her. She crossed her arms over her chest, turned her head toward the window, and clenched her jaw hard. When they turned onto Alhambra Street, Bethie’s right hand was on the door’s handle almost before Uncle Mel had put the car in Park, and her left hand was grabbing for the house key she wore on a ribbon around her neck. “Thank you, Uncle Mel,” she was saying when Uncle Mel reached across her, pulling the door shut.
“Hold on, now! You don’t want to run off before I’ve paid you!”
Oh, God, Bethie thought. Her stomach twisted. Her mother had sold the Old Car and taken her father’s car as her own, and it wasn’t in the driveway, because Sarah had gone for a job interview at Hudson’s, and Jo was still probably at tennis practice, or at her friend Lynnette’s. Her uncle pulled his wallet out of his back pocket and handed Bethie a ten-dollar bill that was still warm from his body. She wanted to pinch it between her fingertips. She wanted to drop it on the floor of the car. She wanted to leap out onto the driveway and run for the front door. Instead, she made herself fold up the bill, slip it into her pocket, and say, “Thank you.”
“Bethie,” said her uncle. “Poor little Bethie.” Once, at a picnic, Bethie had spilled lemonade on her arm. She’d mopped up the mess with a paper napkin and had forgotten all about it until Laura had pointed at her, squealing, and Bethie had looked and seen the tiny black ants seething over the sticky spot, so many of them, packed so densely that her skin looked black, and she’d screamed and screamed and rubbed her arm against the grass, scraping the ants into mush. “How are the three of you holding up?”
“Fine,” Bethie said, in a small voice. “We’re doing fine.”
“Oh, you don’t have to be brave with me. I’ll bet you miss your daddy, don’t you? Poor Bethie. Poor little thing.” His voice was thickening. He stretched out his arm. Bethie cringed, leaning away from him, trying to disappear into her car door, but Uncle Mel wrapped his arm around her shoulders and pulled her across the bench seat, until the side of her body was smashed right up against his. “Poor Bethie.” He pressed his cheek against the top of her head and held her even more tightly. From the outside, it might have looked like an uncle comforting his niece. That wasn’t how it felt. Not with his cheek pressed against her scalp and her cheek squished against his chest, and his horrible stinky breath filling the car with its smell. His hand meandered along the side of her breast, and the point of his chin dug into the top of her head. “Poor little Bethie. I’m so sorry. You must miss your daddy so much. But don’t worry. I’m here for you.”
“I have