After Her by Joyce Maynard

Author:Joyce Maynard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty

Patty and I were riding our bikes on an unfamiliar route a distance from where we normally went when we saw it: our father’s car, parked on the side of the road. Not the unmarked Chevy he used for police work, but the Alfa. As always, my heart lifted at the sight.

It was daylight, the middle of the afternoon. The apartment complex across the street looked different from the one he’d taken us to a few years earlier, to visit Margaret Ann, but it occurred to me that she must live here now. I pictured the glass case holding the dolls in it, the mauve love seat with the needlepoint cushions, the lemon tree, and the music box. I could still hear the Dusty Springfield album that had been playing that day we went there, that our father put on a lot in the car, with the song about the windmills, and the one Patty loved: Just a little lovin’ . . . early in the morning . . .

This apartment complex had a pool too, though it looked a lot shabbier than the other had been, if memory served. This was the kind of place a person lived on the way down from someplace better, more than on the way up.

“Let’s go see if we can find him,” Patty said. As critical as she could be of our father, Patty got as excited as I did anytime the prospect came up of seeing him.

“We could pretend we’re Girl Scouts, taking cookie orders, and knock on doors,” I said. “Or just wait till he comes out.”

Hiding was something we were good at. We did it all the time—outside Helen’s, for Ding Dong Ditch, and for Drive-In Movie. Now it seemed dangerous. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what we’d find out.

“He’s probably working on a case,” Patty said. “We wouldn’t interrupt him. We’d just say hi.”

“Remember that woman who served us the tea in the china cups, and the Kool-Aid?” I pointed out. “With the dolls?”

“Margaret Ann,” she whispered. She still remembered the name, though neither of us had spoken it in a long time.

I remembered sitting with my sister on Margaret Ann’s flowered love seat watching cartoons, sipping from our bendy straws, the smoky-voiced woman singer on the stereo, and the look on Margaret Ann’s face when she and our father emerged from that other room. As much time as I spent thinking about Teddy these days, I myself had not experienced that kind of yearning by this point, and it would be years before I did. But I recognized it in my father and Margaret Ann.

“We should go home,” I told Patty. “Maybe after he’s finished visiting over here, he’ll stop by to see us.”

But we both knew this wasn’t going to happen, and we were right.

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