I understand.”
Di lowered and raised her tea bag. Lowered, raised. Harriet tried to decide whether she hated her. Did she resent her? Was she insulted by her? “I’d hate to resort to Les’s level,” said Di, looking truly repulsed. “But I’m willing to pay you whatever it takes.”
Harriet, in the director’s chair, cradled her tea in her hands. The liquid through the cup was hot, threatening to scald the bandaged finger she’d already burned. “Money?” she said stupidly.
“I won’t press any charges,” Di promised. Lowered, raised, plodding as a backhoe. “I’ll forget she was ever here.”
Harriet could not bring herself to feel sorry for Les, who had been duped out of his own bribe. But now this woman, too, thought she could buy her way into anything? What a match! Harriet put down her mug, rattling it against the table. “Do you think I’m holding the girl for ransom? Do you think I have her bound and gagged in the basement? Christ, I wish money could fix this.” Yes, she hated her, she resented her, she was insulted by her, but she hated herself, too. “I let the kids stay here, and I probably shouldn’t have, and I’m sorry. And I let them leave, and I even gave them a little money. Yes, I have a little money, too! But when I look back at these months, and I try to identify what I could have done differently, to keep my son from backing me into this corner, I honestly don’t know what it is.” She reached for her cigarettes and stabbed one in her mouth. “Do you think I don’t want to know where my son is? Ever since your daughter rode that goddamn train into town, he has vanished. Do you know that? He might reappear every now and then, he might leave me his cats to look after”—she shoved the tiger-striped one off the arm of her chair—“but he’s gone. He’s gone, too.”
On the top shelf of the homemade bookcase, white built-ins that stretched up to the ceiling, a wooden owl perched. It was a crudely carved statue, and Di had never liked it. Les had an identical one in his apartment in New York. The pair of birds must have divorced, too, and now Harriet and Les each kept one.
“How is Jude?” asked Di, attempting to recover some civility. She hadn’t expected Harriet to be angry, angry at her. And she certainly hadn’t expected to feel so shut down by Harriet’s anger, to feel her own anger drain before it had the chance to surface. She hadn’t expected tea. She’d expected pot, maybe. Over the years, she’d imagined getting stoned with Les’s ex-wife, bonding, trading demeaning stories about Les’s lack of ambition, the size of his anatomy, etc. But he was the last person she cared to talk about now. Les was an idiot. What else was there to say?
“I’m not sure,” Harriet answered.
“I really like Jude,” Di said pathetically. “He’s a good kid.” A series of expressions flickered across Harriet’s face: surprise, possessiveness, pride.
“I like Eliza.”
“She’s a good kid, too.”
“She is.”
“How is she?” asked Di.
In a photo album in her apartment in New York, nine pictures chronicled Di’s single pregnancy. In each picture, taken by Daniel, she held up an assortment of fingers: one for one month, two for two months. In the seven-month photo, she was posed in an arabesque, her leotard stretched tight over her expanding belly.
“I think she’s scared,” Harriet said.
“Of what?” Di demanded, her voice trembling. “Is she scared of me?”
Harriet put out her cigarette and lit another one, and when she offered the pack to Di, she was surprised that she accepted. “This may not be any of my business. But when you live in a house with four teenagers, you start to make observations.” She had not expected to offer Di any counsel. “You probably know that we”—she waved her cigarette vaguely—“adopted Jude.” That was when the problems began, Harriet thought. Not a few months ago, but on Jude’s ninth birthday, the day her husband told their son he was adopted. She’d been so angry at Les, but she knew they shouldn’t have waited so long to tell him. Even then, when Jude was a small child, she’d been so scared he wouldn’t forgive her, that he’d love her less. And now look what had happened! It was keeping the secret from him that had turned him away from her. “She was just sixteen,” said Harriet, “the girl who