suspended grief. Five years of filling his head with all the terrible things that might have been done to his eldest daughter.
“Daddy,” Lydia sighed. She wished that he had lived long enough to see Lydia straightened out. She really wished that he’d met Dee. He would’ve loved her dry sense of humor. And maybe knowing Dee, holding his granddaughter in his arms, would’ve kept his poor, broken heart beating a few more years.
Lydia stopped at a red light. There was a McDonald’s on the right. Lydia still needed to go to the bathroom, but she knew if she went inside, she’d order everything on the menu. She stared at the light until it turned. Her foot went to the gas.
Fifteen more minutes passed before she pulled into the Magnolia Hills Memorial Gardens. She’d told Penelope Ward that she was going to a funeral, but she felt more like she was going to a birthday party. Her birthday party. The Lydia who didn’t have to worry about Paul Scott anymore was officially four days old.
She should’ve brought a hat.
The rain picked up as soon as Lydia stepped out of the van. She popped open the back and found an umbrella that would open. The hem of her dress wicked up rainwater. She scanned the cemetery, which was gardenlike and hilly with lots of magnolias, just as advertised. She pulled a sheet of paper out of her purse. Lydia loved the Internet. She could Google Earth the Mothers’ houses, look up how much they’d paid for their idiotic designer outfits, and, more important to today’s task, print out a map leading to Paul Scott’s gravesite.
The walk was longer than she had anticipated, and of course the rain got worse the farther she got from her van. After ten minutes of following what turned out to be a very inaccurate map, Lydia realized she was lost. She took out her phone and Googled the information again. Then she tried to map her location. The flashing blue dot said she needed to go to the north. Lydia turned north. She walked a few feet and the blue dot indicated she needed to go south.
“For fucksakes,” Lydia mumbled, but then her eye caught a headstone two rows over.
SCOTT.
Paul had grown up just outside of Athens, but his father’s people were from Atlanta. His parents were buried alongside Scotts going back several generations. He had once told Lydia that Scotts had even fought on both sides of the Civil War.
So, he came by his duplicity honestly.
Paul’s grave had a tiny marker that looked more like a stake you’d use to label a vegetable garden. Sugar Snap Peas. Cabbage. Sadistic Prick.
Lydia supposed his headstone had been ordered. Something large and garish made of the finest marble and phallic-shaped because being dead didn’t stop you from being a dick.
Last night while Lydia was watching TV with Rick, she had zoned out, picturing herself standing by Paul’s grave. She hadn’t anticipated the rain, so in her mind, the sun was happily shining in the sky and bluebirds sat on her shoulder. Likewise, she had never considered the freshly dug red Georgia clay would be covered by Astroturf. The fake grass was the kind of thing you saw at a putt-putt course or on the balcony of a cheap motel. Paul would’ve hated it, which is why she couldn’t help smiling.
“Okay,” Lydia said, because she hadn’t come here to smile. She took a deep breath and slowly let it go. She pressed her hand to her chest to still her heart. And then she started talking.
“You were wrong,” she told Paul, because he had been a pedantic asshole who thought he was right about everything. “You said I would be dead in a gutter by now. You said I was worthless. You said that no one would believe me because I didn’t matter.”
Lydia looked up at the dark sky. Drops of rain tapped insistently against the umbrella.
“And I believed you for so many years because I thought I’d done something wrong.”
Thought, she repeated silently, because she knew that no one could punish her as viciously as she punished herself.
“I didn’t lie. I didn’t make it up. But I let myself think that you did it because I asked for it. That I’d sent you the wrong signals. That you only attacked me because you thought I wanted it.” Lydia wiped tears from her eyes. She had never in her life wanted anything less than Paul’s advances. “And then I finally