Instead she lifted her chin and swallowed and said to everyone: “My children are very religious, you know. Every night, they say their prayers before bed. Every night.”
An image came to her: Frankie and Cindy kneeling by their beds in the safe glow of the nightlight, their soft voices rising and falling, stumbling over the familiar words. And then an image of Frankie alone, kneeling on a bare floor, eyes squeezed shut in terror, his voice a whispered plea. Begging. Bargaining. I’ll be good. Please God. Please. Please. I won’t talk back to Mommy no more. Please.
Ruth blinked. And then took a long dry suck on the cigarette, and her lips set perfectly, and she moved onto the next guest.
They had to wait ten more days before the cops would release Cindy’s body. Ten more days before they could hold the funeral.
For Ruth it was ten days of waiting for her baby to come back to her. Waiting for news of Frankie. Ten days of Devlin’s questions.
They blurred together, those days. Each one was stifling. Each was a listless shimmer over slow-moving streets, full of brown and yellow dust, the kind that gets into your eyes and throat and thickens your thoughts.
One morning she woke on the living room floor: her mouth dry, her head pounding. There was a warmth against her back and for a moment she let herself lean against the weight and the softness of the small body beside her. She let herself imagine: even as the tears leaked from her swollen eyelids, she let herself hope.
And then the dog yawned and stretched and grunted beside her and Ruth could no longer pretend, so she gave herself up entirely to weeping. She pressed her fists against her sore eyes and sobbed, hunched into a tight ball against the pain. She heard a gentle snuffling near her face and felt Minnie’s wet, curious nose and her rough tongue licking the salt from her skin. She heard her worried whine and reached blindly for the dog’s reassuring bulk, and pulled Minnie against her. She buried her face in the warm, familiar smell of her, rubbed her skin against the soft fur. Minnie whined again and she held her tighter and tried to give and take what comfort she could.
One afternoon she started to make coffee, realized the Folgers can was empty. She checked the pantry and saw there was nothing in there except a jar of pickles and half a box of stale graham crackers. The sight of them reminded her that she hadn’t eaten that day. She couldn’t remember eating the day before. She couldn’t imagine wanting to eat again—but some sense of what was right, what was normal, made her slide her feet into her shoes, made her pick up her purse and keys.
As though it were that easy to leave one world behind and enter another, she stepped outside and closed the door behind her.
Dust clung to her sticky skin and lost itself in her strawlike hair and in the creases of her cotton dress. Her white cuffs were stained the color of old blood. Behind her sunglasses, dust scratched her swollen eyes, bringing her close to tears.
She walked, forgetting where she was going, why she had come out. One foot in front of the other, ignoring other feet, voices, flashes of light, car horns.
And all the while, the rhythm of her feet trod out the rhythm of endless stories, endless possibilities, each one a vivid picture of what might have happened to Frankie.
She looked up, realized she was outside the store and remembered that she needed coffee. She took a wire basket, went inside, recoiled from the strip lighting.
Her feet took her along the aisles and she put things in her basket: a blue box, a can with a green label, a white carton.
She kept walking, kept picking things up and putting them in the basket, because this was what people did.
She kept going. She trod away the pictures of Frankie’s tearstained face, his terrified voice. And she waited for each new one to rise to the surface.
She reached the checkout and saw the girl’s mouth form words that she couldn’t hear, and she nodded and reached for a bag. Then she saw what she had put in the basket. Animal crackers. Chocolate milk. Cindy’s favorite cereal.
And her hand stopped and her breath stopped and all sound stopped.
She was dimly aware of someone’s arm around her, and a chair and the too-loud tick of a clock. Of voices and a phone ringing in the distance, and then of Frank arriving: the familiar smell of him, the hot seat of his car, the quiet of the apartment. He brought her a glass of water and she stared at it and then at him.
“I wanted coffee,” she said. “I’m out of coffee.”
Finally, Cindy was given back to them. And then it was nine in the morning on another sweltering July day and they were in the chapel of St. Theresa’s. Small, intimate, and ninety-three degrees inside. Ruth stood near the coffin: protective, eyes downcast under the veil, Frank so close she could feel the heat coming off him, hear each ragged breath he took before raising his face to a new mourner. He thanked them so that she didn’t have to, so that she could keep her head bent, could stay still and perfect. Black dress, white skin, red lips.