was a girl in a baseball cap and shorts, and it wasn’t until he got a lot closer that he realized it was Suzy and pulled the truck up alongside her. She jumped as though she hadn’t heard him approaching, then saw who it was and put her hand on the door to climb in. There was a moment, then, as they looked at each other and went from seeing nothing but the roiling inside themselves to catching on and realizing that something was not right with the other. A different sort of concern crossed each of their faces. Quickly, and at once, they said, “What’s the matter?” then both laughed for a pained half second, which was all they had in them.
“Get in,” Roddy said.
Suzy inhaled deeply. “I have to . . .”
“Just get in. You have lunch?”
She shook her head no. She got in.
“Mia’s with the girls?”
She nodded.
“Squee too.” Roddy pulled the truck out onto Sand Beach Road and headed north. They rode without speaking, each sorting their own thoughts all the way to the Luncheonette on Old Post Office Road. Suzy leaned to check her face in the rearview mirror but bumped the bill of her baseball cap on the way. She tore off the hat as if she’d just discovered the ugly thing to be the root of all that was wrong, and she shoved it behind the seat of the truck.
Sixteen
A LONG TIME HELPLESS IN THE NEST
This is a typical predator’s foot, better for gripping than for walking.
—“Function Forms the Foot,” Life Nature Library’s The Birds
LANCE WAS NOT A GOOD FATHER. He knew that. It didn’t take a genius. He could see himself, sometimes—the way you catch a glimpse of something from the corner of your eye—as the kind of father Lorna wanted him to be: a father out of a pancake syrup commercial, or from those sepia stories old people told about their back-in-the-day Norman Rockwell childhoods. Lance occasionally caught a moment’s understanding of fatherhood, but then it would slip from him and he’d be back to being Lance Squire, whose fatherly instinct was a sentimental hiccup.
Sometimes he wanted to kill the kid. The desire was almost physical, and Lance had to hold himself back some days from beating the living shit out of Squee just for looking like Lorna, reminding him of Lorna, being a pain in the ass, always in the way, always causing trouble, always making other people think Lance was some kind of villain Squee needed to run away from. Lance never knew what Squee was going to go and do, what stunt he might pull. The boy, in Lance’s opinion, was damn spoiled. Lorna doted on him, did everything for him; Lance was surprised the kid could wipe his own ass. And that made him angry at Lorna: What had she thought she was doing? Had she thought about what would happen if she acted like the kid’s servant and let him grow up thinking the world was his? Lance—in rare moments—tried to show his son what the world was really like, how you had to fight for the things that were due you and beat out the people who’d inevitably try to take away what you’d won for yourself.
The coffee urn in the Lodge kitchen was empty, Jock was nowhere to be found, and it was Tito’s favorite thing in the world to pretend he didn’t speak enough English to understand what Lance wanted when he pointed at the urn, made the international symbol of drinking from a teacup, and shouted, “Coffee! Is there any coffee? Make. The. Coffee.” Tito just smiled, shook his head, waved a hand by his ears to indicate either incomprehension or deafness, and continued to chop his garlic, swaying slightly, as though the music inside his head was so lovely he couldn’t bear to tear himself away.
Lance slammed through the swinging doors into the dining room toward the bar to pour himself a Coke from the fountain. At a table near the windows a group of the Irish girls were gathered, some sitting, some presiding, spreading peanut butter and jelly on napkin-white bread they pulled from a bright plastic sleeve. Brigid was there, looking spacey and sullen and, Lance thought, sexy as shit. And there amid the twittering, officious, bored, giggling, hyperactive girls were Squee and Mia, seated at the table, getting fussed over and catered to as though they were some Egyptian king and queen, child rulers of a great dynasty.