“But she must have told you something about why she didn’t want to go out with me anymore.”
I forced a smile. “There’s clearly a lot Syd hasn’t shared with me. Not just about her relationship with you.”
Jeff shrugged. “I mean, she likes me as a friend, I guess. Lots of girls like me as a friend. Patty likes me as a friend. But that starts to feel a bit pitiful after a while.”
“You’re a good guy, Jeff,” I said. “It can take a long time for the right person to come along.”
He looked at me and I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he was too polite to argue. “Sure, I guess.” He guzzled down most of the Coke in one gulp.
“I really hope Sydney comes back soon,” Jeff said, his eyes heavy.
I waited a moment, then said, “Jeff, all this mess, someone breaking into this house, it all has something to do with Sydney. She’s in some kind of trouble.”
“Uh-huh.”
“So I’m asking you, I’m asking you as her father, to tell me if there was anything going on that might have made her run off. Maybe something you’ve thought you should tell me but haven’t so far.”
“I just don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, we’re just sort of friends now. Maybe, before, she would have told me.”
If she hadn’t dumped me, he seemed to be saying, maybe I’d be able to help you now.
“If you think of anything…” I said, not bothering to finish.
“I got to take off,” Jeff said. “I just wanted to come by and see how it was going. Can you tell Patty I had to beat it?”
“Sure,” I said.
About a minute after he left, Patty came back down to the kitchen. “Where’s Jeff?” she asked. “He go back to the circus?”
“What?”
“You know. The tranquilized bears they train to ride the little bicycles?”
“That’s mean, Patty,” I said.
“I say it to his face,” she said. “He’s cool with it. He knows I’m kidding.”
“It’s still mean.”
She was all innocent. “He’s a big boy. You should hear the stuff he says about us. About the girls.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Like we’re all a bunch of skanky sluts. But he’s just joking around, too. And he’s wound up kind of tight, too, you know? Like, you say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ around him and he gets all weird, like he’s a goddamn minister or something.”
“Why would he call Syd a skanky slut?”
“Oh, so you’re not surprised he’d call me that.”
I wouldn’t be baited. “Patty, you push the envelope. It’s your thing. I’d never call you a skanky slut, but a girl who walks into a house and the first thing out of her mouth is ‘motherfucker’ shouldn’t be shocked by what people might think.”
She tilted her head to one side. “Go on.”
“But Sydney, so far as I know, didn’t do anything to cultivate that kind of an image.”
“Cultivate,” Patty said. “Yeah.”
“So why would Jeff say that about her?”
Patty actually gave it some thought. “I think, maybe, because she dumped him, Jeff was thinking, okay, if I run her down, then maybe she was never worthy of me in the first place.”
I nodded. “That’s pretty good.”
Patty noticed some canned goods still on the counter and started putting them away in the cupboard. She followed me around the house for the next couple of hours, helping me tidy, asking me where things went, taking bags of garbage to the side of the house and jamming them into the cans. We worked side by side, and although sometimes we were tripping over each other’s feet and bumping shoulders, we got a rhythm going. Patty’d hold a trash bag open, I’d dump stuff into it. I’d get the vacuum out, she’d move a chair out of the way.
She threw herself into it, working up a sweat, a stubborn strand of streaked hair repeatedly falling forward into her eyes. She tried blowing it away, and when that didn’t work, tucked it behind her ear until it came free a few seconds later.
We were standing in the kitchen, having a drink of water.
“That thing you said, about DVD players in vans being a sign of the end of civilization?” I said.
“Yeah?”
“You might be onto something.”
She smiled. An honest, genuine smile. It reminded me a little of Sydney’s. I fought not to let the thought ruin this moment Patty and I were sharing.
She said, seemingly out of nowhere, but maybe not, “My dad was a complete asshole.”
I didn’t ask.
I CALLED LAURA CANTRELL and brought her up to date. No Syd, trashed house. Laura said that was too bad. Once she was done with that outpouring of sympathy, she was about to ask when I was coming back to work. I headed her off at the pass and told her I’d be in for the afternoon sales shift, which began at three.