she had every right to be upset. Instead of making her talk it out or driving her to a meeting, he’d put on John Coltrane and fried some chicken. The chicken was good. The company was better. They had started arguing about which was the best Coltrane solo, “Crescent” or “Blue in Green,” and right in the middle of it Dee came out of her room and gave Lydia the greatest gift a teenage daughter can ever give her mother: She had agreed with her.
The cordiality had been short-lived.
Dee was currently slumped in the minivan’s passenger seat in what Lydia thought of as her Phone Posture (automobile). Her sneakers were on the dashboard. Her elbows and forearms were flat to the seat like a kangaroo’s feet. She held her iPhone two inches from her nose. The seatbelt would probably decapitate her if they were in an accident.
“OMG!” Dee would text as they waited for the ambulance. “Decapd in car ax!”
Lydia thought about all those times her own mother had told her to stand up straight, stop slouching, hold the book away from her face, moisturize, wear a bra to bed, always suck in her stomach, and never hitchhike, and she wanted to slap herself for not following every single stupid piece of advice that had ever come out of the woman’s mouth.
Too late for that now.
Rain started to spit onto the windshield. Lydia turned on the wipers. The rubber part of the blades skittered across the glass. Rick had told her last week to come by the station and get the wiper blades changed. He’d said the weather was looking bad, and Lydia had laughed because no one could predict the weather.
Metal scraped glass as the shredded rubber flopped in the wind.
Dee groaned. “Why didn’t you get Rick to change those?”
“He said he was too busy.”
Dee gave her a sideways glance.
Lydia turned up the radio, which is how she used to fix strange car noises before she dated a mechanic. She shifted in the seat, trying to get comfortable. The seatbelt insistently pushed against her gut. The plump rolls of fat reminded her of a popped can of biscuits. This morning, Rick had gently suggested that she might want to go to a meeting. Lydia had agreed this was a good idea, but she’d ended up going to Waffle House instead.
She’d told herself that she wasn’t ready to share what she was feeling because she hadn’t had time to process Paul Scott’s death. And then she reminded herself that one of her more unsung talents was that she was really, really good at denial. Maintaining a three-hundred-dollar-a-day coke habit took a certain level of self-delusion. Then there was the short-sighted conviction that she was never to blame for the consequences of her own actions.
The addict’s credo: It’s always somebody else’s fault.
For a while, Paul Scott had been that fault for Lydia. Her touchstone. Her mantra. “If only Paul hadn’t …” prefixed every excuse.
And then Dee had come along and Lydia had righted her life and she’d met Rick and Paul Scott had gotten shoved into the back of her mind the same way she had pushed back all the awful things that had happened during what she thought of as The Bad Years. Like the many times she’d found herself in county lock-up. Or the time she’d woken up with two skeevy guys in a Motel 8 and convinced herself that trading sex for drugs wasn’t the same as doing it for money.
At the Waffle House this morning, she’d almost ignored Rick’s call on her cell phone.
He had asked, “You feel like using?”
“No,” she’d told him, because by then, the desire had been stifled by a tall stack of waffles. “I feel like I want to dig up Paul’s body and kill him all over again.”
The last time Lydia had seen Paul Scott, she was practically crawling out of her skin from withdrawal. They were in his stupid Miata that he cleaned every weekend with cloth diapers and a toothbrush. It was dark outside, almost midnight. Hall and Oates were playing on the radio. “Private Eyes.” Paul was singing along. His voice was terrible, but then any noise had felt like an ice pick in her ear. He seemed to sense her discomfort. He smiled at Lydia. He leaned over and turned down the radio. And then he put his hand on her knee.
“Mom?”
Lydia looked over at her daughter. She feigned a double-take. “I’m sorry. Are you Dee? I didn’t