“I’m not laughing at you, sweetheart. You surprised me is all. I didn’t expect you to say that.” She didn’t make a sound. She was gonna make me answer her. “You know we can’t get married.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think Liam would like that.”

She shrugged, ’cause it was a stupid reason. Liam had kicked her out.

“I’m a good wife,” she said.

“I know you’d be a good wife. I like your cooking and you clean the house and you know how to keep the books. I mean, if it was just about that, or about me wanting to be with you, sure, but you’re too young to get married.”

Staying out at the farmhouse with Wavy and Donal, it was something near to playing house, except Wavy didn’t play at things.

“Here’s the thing: in a couple weeks you start school, right? Leave the house by seven, when Val’s still asleep. After school, you can go to my house or down to the shop. Stay there ’til it’s time to close. Then we can have dinner, you can do your homework, watch TV, and I’ll take you up to the farmhouse before bed.”

Wavy didn’t answer. No nod, no shrug, nothing.

“Hey,” I said. “Hey.”

For the first time ever, I reached over and touched her hair without waiting for some kind of invitation. Even that didn’t get me a reaction. She didn’t lean into me and she didn’t push me away. There had to be something to make my offer stick and sitting there looking at the back door of my house, I thought of it. I started the truck and headed to the hardware store. Got there just before it closed. I came around to Wavy’s side and almost spilled her on the pavement because of the way she was leaning up against the door.

“Come on, we gotta get something,” I said.

She came after me, dragging the heels of her new boots. While I went looking for a clerk, she stood in the store’s main aisle, staring through a display of car wax.

When I came back, she was still doing that. I had the feeling again like I’d come up on a wild animal. Only instead of a fawn, she was like a fox kit I saw once, hit by the side of the road. On its feet, but dying.

The key in my palm was hot off the grinder, smelled like graphite.

“This is for you. So you can go to my place any time you want, whether I’m there or not. Only other person got a key to my house is Old Man Cutcheon, but that’s so, you know, if something ever happened to me. “

I held the key out to Wavy, but she just looked at it. If she wouldn’t take it, I figured that would mean she was done with me. I wasn’t ready to reach that point, so I kept talking.

“I bought that house three years ago. Mr. Cutcheon co-signed for me on the loan. If I can do a few more deals like with the Barracuda, and with the extra money coming from Liam, I figure it’ll be paid off in two years. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s my house. Where I don’t gotta put up with nobody’s bullshit. That’s why I’m giving you this. So it can be your house, too. So you can have a place to go. Even if you can’t live with me, that other bedroom’s for you. I’m gonna clean it out, so it’ll be your place.”

Finally she reached for the key, squeezed it tight in her fist, and then dropped it down in her boot.

Leaving the hardware store, I asked her where she wanted to go.

“Home,” she said. I wished that wasn’t the farmhouse, but it was.

When we got there, a strange car was parked in the drive. A ’72 Buick wagon. The nurse. I turned off the engine, but before I could open my door, Wavy pulled the keys out of my hand and stuck them back in the ignition.

“You don’t want me to come in?” I said.

She shook her head.

“I know you’re mad, but will you at least give me a kiss?” I said.

She opened the door, got out, and walked up the porch steps without looking back. Sitting there, trying to decide what to do, I saw her answer. She’d written LIAR in the dust on the Willys dashboard.

I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach. Not like she’d kicked me, but like life had. Kicked her, too, while it was at it.

PART THREE

1

PATTY

September 1982

There had been several home nursing assignments where Patty felt she was a member of the family, but the Quinns was the first assignment that made her feel like a patient in the asylum. When she got to the house, the only person there besides the patient was Casey, the day nurse.

“Nobody’s been here. When the ambulance and I got here with Mrs. Quinn, the back door was unlocked,” Casey said. She was one of those perky, up-and-at-’em people who harangued injured patients out of bed and into their physical therapy.

The house was cleaner than Patty had expected. The outside hadn’t been painted in years, but the floors had been mopped and the bathroom smelled of bleach. There were fresh sheets on the bed and clean dishes in the cupboard.

She knew there were children—a little boy who had been injured in the wreck and an older girl—but there was no sign of them. Mrs. Quinn’s bedroom was in the front, off the parlor. The other bedroom was off the dining room. There was a full-sized bed in there. No toys or children’s clothes, just some crayon marks on the wall behind the bed.

After she gave Mrs. Quinn her next dose of pain medication, Patty ventured up the narrow attic stairs. There, she found a bed with a handmade quilt on it. Only the glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling suggested it was a child’s room.