There is the fact that Bash is married. That alone could be enough to torpedo Lu’s career—unless they pretend to be IN LOVE and are therefore given dispensation to break with common decency. Why are people allowed to hurt others in the name of love? Why is love given so much credit, as if it is always a power for good? Does Eloise Schumann love Ryan Schumann, a man she can’t possibly know, a man she never knew, not sexually. Only six states allow conjugal visits and Maryland is not one of them. Even if Maryland were to permit it, an inmate such as Ryan Schumann, sentenced to life in prison for a capital crime, might have a hard time earning the privilege. How had any woman managed to become attracted to him? Lu remembers him as weaselly and small, even to her six-year-old eyes. As a small woman, she is always careful to avoid small men because she doesn’t want anyone to think the man had settled, choosing her for stature alone. Gabe was slender as a reed, but a respectable five foot eleven. Bash is shockingly broad—but, no, Bash doesn’t count because no one has ever seen them together. No one will ever see them together.
Maybe when Penelope and Justin are out of the house, she will go on match.com. For now, this is the best solution she can fashion.
She sips her glass of wine, enjoying the companionable silence, the strains of—ah, it’s Carmen. Old age looks pretty good from here. And she will be all of fifty-five when the twins leave for college, far from old despite the joke she made to AJ. Some women are just getting started at fifty-five. Again, look at Clinton and Ginsburg. In Lu’s third act, whatever that proves to be, she might finally eclipse her brother and her father professionally.
Not that she’s competitive or anything like that.
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
By the time fourth grade rolled around in 1979, I had a best friend. Because he was a boy, my classmates tried to tease us, say he was my boyfriend, I was his girlfriend. We didn’t care. Two people can brave the taunts that one person finds intolerable. We left school every afternoon, their silly words bouncing off our backs.
Lu and Randy Sitting in a tree K I S S I N G First comes love then comes marriage / Lu and Randy with a baby carriage.
Yes, my new best friend was the boy I had wanted to kill a year earlier. It happens. For us, it happened this way.
When AJ told our father about the fight on the first day of third grade—a rare betrayal on my brother’s part; I think he was mad about me giving up his real name to Noel—our father drove me to Randy’s house the next day and insisted I apologize.
Randy’s house was like a funhouse mirror version of my own—a distorted, disturbing mirror version. A motherless household, where the boy was the youngest. Chaotic and cramped and messy, with far too many people, whereas my house always felt as if it didn’t really have enough people to justify all its rooms. Randy’s father worked as a night watchman, although I think that was his second job. He was getting ready to go to work when we arrived. He looked surprised, yet not surprised.
The moment my father introduced himself, Mr. Nairn seemed to assume that Randy was in the wrong. Why else would the state’s attorney be in this postage stamp of a living room, trying to be heard above the blasting television that no one thought to turn off?
“Randy,” he screamed. “You get down here right now.” He wore a gray uniform. The living room wall had a hole in the Sheetrock, and there were what seemed like a hundred teenage girls milling about, although there were only three, Randy’s sisters.
Randy came downstairs, cowering like a pup. My father said swiftly, “I think you misunderstood, sir—it was Lu who started the fight, Lu who needs to apologize to Randy.”
I wanted to explain myself, tell the full story, how Randy had provoked the attack. But I also wanted to get out of that strange house, away from its smells and damage and the sensation that a fight might start at any minute, over anything. Staring at a point over Randy’s shoulder, which happened to be the hole in the wall, I mumbled. “I’m-sorry-I-hit-you-it-was-wrong-I-won’t-do-it-again.”
My father had told me I had to shake Randy’s hand, so I stuck out my hand, feeling ridiculous. Randy looked around as if he thought an enormous joke was being played on him, but he took my hand in his smaller, sweatier one, giving it the fastest shake ever.
Still, I doubted he was finished with me. He knew my middle name. I assumed he would use the information to seal my fate, move me from the category of someone who was merely friendless to being a true goat, the butt of every classroom joke, a walking punch line. It might not seem much, my odd middle name, but I could not bear to have it dragged out into the open and mocked. It had been my mother’s gift to me and, as much as I disliked it, my distaste for it was private.
I went to school the next day, resigned to the beginning of the end. Inside my desk, I found an eraser shaped like a giraffe and a pack of Now and Laters, lime ones. Lime Now and Laters were my favorite. I was not likely to put an unopened pack in my desk and forget about it. I looked around, wondering if there was a new kid who had gotten confused, tried to take my desk. I was careful not to let the candy be seen; it was contraband and would be seized. But the eraser—I held it up, examined it. I caught Randy looking at me, but his eyes scooted away. I was still thinking about my middle name.
During recess, it was my habit to take a book and sit by myself. The book was usually something chosen to impress, even though I knew by then that nothing I did could impress my classmates. On that particular day, I was reading Jason and the Golden Fleece. A simplified version of the myth, but a real book, with chapters.