He set a place for her on the L of his kitchen counter so they wouldn’t be side by side. He wanted to look at her when they talked. “China Fun,” he announced as he unpacked the bag. “I always over-order, so eat up.”
She didn’t say much at first because she put everything into her eating. Holly Flanders was lean but had the eye circles and complexion of someone who wasn’t a slave to the food pyramid. When she finished her plate, he dished over some more pork fried rice. She held up a palm and said, “That’s OK.”
“Take it all,” said Rook. “There are kids starving in Beverly Hills, you know. Of course, that’s by choice.”
When she’d finished the rest of it, he asked, “What did you want to talk to me about? By the way, that’s one of my great qualities as a reporter. Asking the inobvious question.”
“Riiight.” She chuckled politely and nodded. “ ’K, well, I felt like I could do this because you were nice to me when I got busted the other day. And could relate to the no-parent thing.”
“Right,” he said and then waited, wondering where this was going.
“I know you’re going to write this article about my mother, right? And . . .” Holly paused, and he saw light shimmer off the pools forming in her eyes. “. . . And I know everybody is probably telling you how bad she was. And I’m here to tell you, damn, she was all that.” Rook drew the mental image of Holly standing over her mother’s bed while she slept, holding a handgun on her, a millimeter of finger movement from blowing her away. “But I came to tell you, since you’re going to write her story, don’t make her all about being a monster.”
Holly’s lips quaked, taking on lives of their own, and a tear streamed down each cheek. Rook handed her his napkin and she dabbed her cheeks and blew her nose. “I have a lot of anger at her. Maybe more now that she’s gone, because I can’t work any of this shit out with her now. That’s part of why I didn’t kill her; we weren’t done, you know?”
Rook didn’t know, so he just nodded and listened.
She sipped her beer and, when she had settled enough to continue, said, “All of the bad things about her were true. But in the middle of it is one thing. About eight years ago my mother made contact with me. She had some way of tracking me to my foster home and got permission from my family to take me to dinner. We went to this Jackson Hole burger place I liked in my neighborhood, and it was bizarre. She has the waitress take a picture of us like it was my birthday party or something. She doesn’t eat, just sits there telling me all this stuff about how tough it was when she found out she was pregnant, and that she thought she would keep me at first, so she didn’t have an abortion and then she changed her mind the first month because it wasn’t going to work in her life—‘it’ she said, like I was an ‘it.’
“Anyway she goes through this whole blah-blah about why she did it and then she says she had been thinking long and hard about it and feeling so bad—agony, I remember that was what she said she felt, like she was always in agony—and asked what I thought, if maybe we could talk about getting together.”
“You mean, like . . .”
“Well, yuh. Like she thought she could just show up and change her mind about abandoning me and I would just get in the frickin’ Acura with her and live happily ever after.”
Rook let a healthy silence pass before he asked, “What did you say to her?”
“I threw my ice water in her face and walked out.” Part of Holly Flanders showed proud defiance. Rook imagined she had told that story before to friends or barflies over the years and reveled in her heroic act of maternal repudiation, poetic in its balancing of scales. But he also saw in her the other part of Holly Flanders, the part that had brought her to his doorstep to wait in the dark, the woman who felt the weight of emotions that nest uncomfortably in any soul with a conscience that has to bear the unhealable wound of banishing another person. With ice water, no less.