“Yes,” Lily said, although she wondered, How? How did you—how could you forgive a person who wantonly took the life of another? People had done it; she had read about them. Even Holocaust survivors had forgiven those who had tortured them. But those monsters hadn’t been their own children. The very idea that this was the awful possibility shaping her future vacuumed her breath from her lungs. She felt she might collapse, burdening her father with her dead weight, and from somewhere she summoned the effort to straighten, to back away. She found tissues in the half bath and brought him one, keeping one for herself.
He used it, wiping his eyes, blowing his nose, his movements somehow suggesting disgust, resentment.
It was only going to get worse, Lily thought, resuming her seat across from him. “I talked to Paul,” she said, and recapping the conversation as quickly as she could, she told her dad that AJ had been spotted at the Lake Hershey airfield.
“Why didn’t Evers call me?” Her dad didn’t wait for Lily’s answer. “The son of a bitch is ten years older than I am and half-blind. He wouldn’t know shit from Shinola.” He pawed through the papers on his desk. “Where the hell is my phone?”
They spent a half hour hunting for it, finally finding it outside in the seat of an Adirondack chair, one of two that sat in a grassy meadow halfway between the house and the barn. Lily didn’t know what led her to look there. The chairs were out of the way, a detour to nowhere. Her dad was vague as to how his cell phone could have ended up there. Maybe he’d stopped there going to or from the barn.
“Why?” Lily asked.
“To watch the grass blow,” her dad answered.
That might have been a reasonable response for someone other than her father.
She was in the kitchen, breaking eggs into a bowl to make an omelet for their dinner, when her dad came to tell her he’d talked to Wylie. In addition to the eggs, she’d found a box of frozen spinach, a can of mushrooms, and a chunk of Gruyère cheese. Not that either she or her dad had an appetite. But there was something soothing about going through the motions of preparing a meal.
“The way Wylie described him, it could have been AJ.” Her dad went to the refrigerator, pulled out a beer, twisted off the cap, and drank deeply.
Lily watched him, shaking her head no when he asked if she wanted one. She turned her attention back to whipping the eggs. It relieved her that he hadn’t seemed to notice that the refrigerator shelves were still fairly empty.
“I figured it had to be years since Evers saw AJ. How can he remember what he looks like?”
“Dad, you know how it is around here. You can’t go a month without running into everyone you know.”
“Yeah. Wylie said he saw AJ and Shea in town a couple of weeks ago, shook AJ’s hand. He knows it was him at the airfield. Like Wylie said, there’s a lot of air traffic goes in and out of there—tourists, nature freaks, the bunch of damn fools that buy land and a few head and think they’re in the cattle business.” He took another swallow of beer.
Lily didn’t reply.
Her dad spoke into the silence. “Five thousand dollars would get you somewhere. Mexico. Canada. And from there, you could go anywhere.” Her dad pitched his empty bottle in the trash and got another. “Wylie wondered if the wedding was off.”
“I hope you told him yes.”
“I did. I guess all the folks who are coming are going to have to be contacted.”
He had only just now thought of it, what calling off the wedding would entail. “Dru and I talked about it earlier,” she said.
Lily and Paul hadn’t discussed the wedding once since this happened. How would they word their regrets? As parents of the groom, we’re sorry to inform you of the cancellation of our son’s wedding due to the fact that not only may he have murdered a bridesmaid, but he might very well be a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. Would that be socially acceptable as an explanation? She could have the notes printed, she thought, on her monogrammed, beveled, and gilt-edged notecards. The jolt of her laughter came unaware, butting against her ribs, finally wedging itself in her throat beneath the fist of her sorrow. Maybe she could add a caveat: If any of you happen to see AJ, please inform the police.
“Lily?”
She glanced at her dad. “Did I ever tell you what Millie Kramer said to me once? She’s married to Harvey Kramer, the bank president who does most of Paul’s financing?”
“I’ve met him a time or two, but not his wife.”
“It was during the first year Paul and I were married. We were out to dinner—some fancy restaurant—with several other couples, and in front of all of them, she said—and she thought it was funny, a cute joke—she said when Paul told her and Harvey he was planning to marry me, their advice was that he should just get a red Corvette.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“A sports car would be cheaper, less maintenance—you know, than a gold digger like me. That’s how they saw me. They still do. They think I married Paul for his money.”
“I never liked Harvey. The guy’s a know-it-all, arrogant as hell.”
“I’ve never fit in with those people, Dad. In all this time, I haven’t made a single friend. They’re so much older, but it isn’t even that. There’s no common ground.” Lily stopped, hating the way she sounded.
“Is this about canceling the wedding?”
She shrugged. “They’ve criticized me behind my back for years. I shouldn’t care at all what they’re thinking of me—saying about me and AJ now.”
“He’s Paul’s son, too.”
“Yes, but if he’s turned out badly, it must be my influence. He couldn’t get into Rice University or SMU or Yale, or wherever it is those people sent their kids.”
“He didn’t have the grades, but he could have gone somewhere else—a community college—”
“He got arrested, Dad, the same way I did, but that’s never been discussed—the fact that we have this terrible thing in common.”
Her dad looked perplexed.
“AJ doesn’t know about Jesse, or that I was jailed once, too, as an accessory to murder the same way he was when he was nineteen. Paul didn’t want him to know; he’s never wanted anyone to know that about me, and yet I’m never allowed to forget it.” Making a fist, Lily pressed it to her mouth.
Her dad came to her, wrapping her into his embrace. The gust of his sigh stirred her hair.
“Maybe it would have helped him if I’d been honest.” She spoke in a hot whisper against his chest. “He would have known when he was arrested that first time that he could talk to me, that I would understand. Maybe, together, we could have kept Paul from forcing him to enlist, and the PTSD—it wouldn’t have happened.”
“Oh, Sissy, don’t go blaming yourself.” Her dad’s voice slipped and broke. She wondered if he was crying again.
Taking a breath, she pushed away from his embrace, wiped her face, and composed herself, for his sake. “We should eat,” she said. She got out the cast-iron frying pan, wiped it with olive oil, and set it over a burner to heat.