right out of her. Bud held his hands at his sides with a force of will as he managed to reroute his violence to his mouth instead of his fists. “Are you not able,” he bellowed, “to do a single goddamn day’s work without your griping and bitching that everything’s so goddamn unfair?! A woman is dead here . . .”
Nancy, from the kitchen, in a voice that almost topped Bud’s in pitch and command, said dramatically into the telephone (but so loudly that it was impossible to think of the phone as anything but a stage prop), “Look, I’m just going to have to call you back later!” Whereupon she slammed down the receiver, stalked past Bud and Suzy, and climbed the stairs to her bedroom, one hand firmly gripping the banister, the other held across her eyes as though the migraine brewing therein might just kill her this time, as if that’s what her family had been after all along.
They waited for her door to close before they resumed. Then they turned back on each other like cats in a tangle.
“Do you think”—Suzy’s fury was slow and leveled—“do you think I don’t work?” His oblivion was unfathomable to her. He imagined teaching to be a cushy sort of a pastime—like taking tickets at the movie theater, or babysitting a few afternoons a week—something that spoiled, lazy, loudmouthed girls like his daughter did so they didn’t have to work real jobs. Like what? Like running a hotel that was only open two months a year? By the time Suzy spoke again, she was shrieking. “I work twelve-hour days, five days a week. On the weekends I grade papers, I plan lessons, I advise three different extracurricular activities, I sell Oreos at intermission of the goddamn school play! Teachers get three months in the summer because we work so fucking hard the other nine months of the year, and I didn’t come here during my vacation to scrub toilets for six bucks an hour!” Suzy’s face was boiling red, and she was gesticulating wildly with her arms. “Did you ever have any intention of looking for someone to replace Lorna, or did you just figure it’d be easier if I did it this season and you’d deal with it in the fall when you had some more time on your hands?”
They stood, faced off, as she waited for an answer and he waited for the wrath to continue as it always did. He’d learned that sometimes the only way was to ride it through, let her tire herself out, the way you’d contend with a child’s tantrum.
They stood, glaring at each other, Suzy’s breath heaving now, the only other sound the chink and buzz of the window-unit air conditioner. It whirred and clicked and spun, and then it double-clicked, spat a hiss, and wound itself down for a brief thermostatic hiatus. In the silence that followed, Bud finally said, “Are you finished?”
Suzy said nothing. There was nothing to say. She spun around, threw open the front door, and walked out.
RODDY HAD STOPPED AT the Squires’ cottage around eight-thirty that morning, but there were no signs of waking life inside. At ten he knocked again. No answer. He tried the outer door, which was unlocked, but the screen was latched from the inside. Roddy could see in, through to Lance’s bedroom, where Lance lay sprawled across the bed, fully clothed, dead asleep. Further inside, the door to Squee’s room was also open, the boy a lump under a sheet, a blond mop of hair poking out at the top. Roddy stood for a moment, frozen, to make sure he could see Squee’s body rising and falling with his breath.
When Roddy came by again at noon, Lance was standing at the kitchen sink, ashing his cigarette into the drain. Squee was at the table, a bowl of cereal before him, though he was clearly not eating. He held the spoon in the milk as if he were about to eat but couldn’t remember the next step. His eyes were blank. He looked small, and anemic, and gray, and it made Roddy very afraid. But before he could say anything or even make a move toward the boy, Lance was laying into Roddy as if it were high school all over again.
“Ro-od-LESS!” Lance cheered. When they were kids, if Roddy so much as spoke to a girl, the ribbing from Lance and Chas and Jimmy Waters and all of them was relentless. It