Loo reached for the bottle and refilled her glass.
Mary Titus did not seem to care that she was drinking with a minor. She ran her palm across the table. A puddle of milk had dried into the wood, and she started picking at it with her nail. “It was stupid of me to come here.” She swung her tiny legs back and forth underneath the table. Her eyes brimmed with tears again. “I’m crying because I miss my husband.”
“I thought you were divorced.”
“From my second husband. I miss my first husband. He was the one I really loved. He died when Marshall was seven.”
Loo kept drinking and listened to Mary talk about this dead husband, how he was washed overboard during a storm near the Banks, and how she couldn’t stop picturing him lost under the waves, about the fish eating his skin in little pieces, about barnacles and mussels attaching themselves to his bones. She said that after it happened, she rolled a blanket and put it in bed next to her, just to feel the warmth, and sometimes she pretended his hand was touching the base of her spine, his voice murmuring at the back of her neck. She said her skin smelled like him when she woke up in the morning. She said she felt like she was losing her mind.
“And then I met Marshall’s stepfather,” said Mary Titus, “but he left me, too. For a whale.” She sighed and wiped her cheeks with the hem of her Indian skirt. Then she leaned her face into the cloth. Loo did not know what to do. No one had ever confided in her like this before. She patted Mary Titus on the head.
For as long as she could remember, Loo had noticed women noticing her father. And when they failed to get his attention, they tried to reach him through her. There was the waitress at the diner outside Kansas City, who took Loo into the bathroom and showed her how to braid her hair. The shopkeeper in New Mexico who helped Loo try on her first bra. The landlord’s wife in Virginia who slipped Loo a box of Tampax and a copy of Our Bodies, Our Selves. A girl without a mother, the women would say. So sad. So sorry. And they would bat their eyes. And they would lean in close. But their attentions would only send Hawley brooding. And not long after, Loo would come home from school and the car would be packed and they’d be moving on to someplace else. Someplace new. And she would have to start all over again.
She handed Mary Titus a napkin to dry her eyes. “You’re not the only person who’s lost someone,” she said. Then she led the widow to the bathroom and opened the door to her mother’s shrine.
The room was still muggy from the shower Hawley had taken before he left, the papers and photographs moist and curled. Mary Titus’s eyes went wide at the cascade of memories taped to the walls—picture after picture of the same crooked smile, followed by the letters, the jars of cream and lipstick, the cans of food, the chewed-on pencils, the hospital bracelet, the cashed checks with Loo’s mother’s signature, the torn-out pages of novels with words underlined and the lock of dark hair pinned by the mirror.
Mary Titus sat on the side of the tub. “Is everything hers?”
“Yes.”
The widow took hold of a receipt that was taped to the wall. Loo knew the list of items like she knew her own name: two bars of French lavender soap, bug spray, AAA batteries, a package of Uniball pens, a roll of breath mints and a birthday card. The birthday card had been for Loo’s first birthday. Her mother had bought it right after Loo was born. She had died before she had a chance to sign it. The card was taped to the wall next to the receipt. A picture of a cupcake with a single candle. Each year, on her birthday, Loo would open it. The inside was always blank.
Mary Titus tore the receipt off the wall. “He’s crazier than I am,” she said with a laugh. “Thank God.”
All that Loo knew of her mother was in this room. She’d grown so used to the objects piled in the corners and the scraps of paper on the walls that most days she barely looked at them. But Mary Titus had brought the photographs and cans of food back to life, their importance and their details into focus. The Polaroid by Niagara Falls had bled between the layers, so that the plastic was rubbery and her mother’s face was stained. There were split ends in the lock of hair by the mirror. The bottle of perfume in the corner was open—it hadn’t been earlier this morning—and Loo realized that her father must have been smelling the perfume, that maybe he even took the small glass stopper and slid it down the length of his chin. And suddenly this world of adults seemed much too complicated, and all she wanted was for Mary Titus to stop laughing.
“Quit it,” said Loo.
The widow looked at her but she didn’t stop, her eyes wet now and her teeth flashing, and before Loo knew it, the taste of rust was crawling up her tongue. The friendship she’d felt a few moments earlier for Mary Titus faded, just like her mother’s writing on the walls, and Loo watched as her own hands went up and shoved the widow hard. Mary Titus fell backward into the tub, her short legs kicking the air, her body twisting and her skull cracking against the faucet. The widow’s eyes fluttered for a moment before she sat up and touched the back of her head. Her fingers came away crimson, the same color as the ancient lipstick on the counter. Mary Titus shifted her legs in the empty tub and leaned all the way back, as if she were taking a bath in her clothes. There was blood in her hair and down her neck. She was still laughing but now it was more like crying.
And then Hawley came home. Loo recognized her father’s boots on the porch, shuffling slowly and steadily the way he did when he’d spent a long day at the market, and she had just enough time to slam and lock the door to the bathroom before he called her name.
“Quiet,” Loo said to the widow.
“Is that him?” Mary Titus giggled.
Loo pressed her hand over the woman’s mouth. If there had been water in the tub she would have drowned her. Hawley moved into the kitchen and she imagined him picking up the bottle, sniffing the top, noticing the two glasses on the table. He called her name again, and this time it was a question.
“I’m in the bathroom,” Loo called.
“Who’s here?” Her father was on the other side of the door; she could hear him shifting his weight. “Have you been drinking?”
She had never lied to Hawley before. But she did now.
“No.”
“What’s going on in there?”
Loo knew then that she had made a mistake letting an outsider into their bathroom. Revealed something no one else should see. Mary Titus was struggling under Loo’s hand. She kicked her tiny heels against the porcelain tub. And just as Loo was about to answer her father, the widow bit the girl hard and freed herself.