“Shut up. Go help.” Milo pointed at the empty plates. “And take those in with you.”
Bastien made a face but did as he was told. I turned to Milo and tried again. “I’m honestly worried about her mental state. She thinks this is a healthy way to grieve Dad. What does that tell you?”
He shrugged and leaned back against the sofa cushions. “I dunno. People all handle shit different, I guess.”
I couldn’t understand why he was acting this way. I took a breath, trying to think up something reasonable to counter his argument. “That is the stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”
Jay and Travis stood talking beside the buffalo while they finished their coffee. Travis smoothed a hand up and down its neck, perilously close to the leather figure’s thigh. “This is real well done,” Travis said, picking up a wooden paddle studded with blunt spikes. “You ever seen one of these before?”
Jay looked like he was going to respond, but Vera shot him a look that promised death. “Nope, don’t think I have.”
I tried again. “It’s not right. She needs to see a therapist, something.”
“What do you expect us to do about it, Jessa?” Milo rubbed a hand across his forehead. “She’s a grown woman. She can do whatever she wants.”
“Well, I’m putting a stop to it,” I said, trying to convince the both of us.
I found Lucinda in the hallway, examining some of our family photos. She touched the edge of a frame, one where the four of us posed in front of a craggy waterfall. Milo and I were both wearing overalls. My mother had on a denim dress with a red bandana tied around her ponytail, my father with a matching one around his neck, his arm looped around her shoulder. It was the most ridiculous picture of our family, and I’d always loved it.
“This is adorable,” Lucinda said. “Look at that bowl haircut. You still have those overalls?”
“Can we talk?” Instead of waiting for an answer, I walked down the hall and out the front door. Bugs zapped in the piss-yellow light from the front porch fixture. A large, fuzzy moth repeatedly battered itself against the dirty glass.
The air was fully saturated, cars already covered in condensation. We stood close to my truck and I remembered the way she’d pushed me against it, how her hands felt on my skin.
“This show cannot happen,” I said, crossing my arms so I wouldn’t try to touch her. “I mean it.”
“That’s not very reasonable.” She leaned into me and rubbed her hands briskly up and down my arms, chafing the skin. “Also it’s pretty ballsy of you to ask for anything after bailing on me this morning.”
“Stop it.” I put another foot of space between us. “That is my mother and there’s something wrong with her. It’s not okay.”
“What do you want me to do? I can’t just tell her no. I’ve invested a lot of time and money.”
I was sure she had, and probably a ton of it. Lucinda didn’t talk about it much, but I knew everything she owned was tied up in her condo and the gallery—a pretty significant chunk of change. What little I’d managed to uncover about her finances had come from rooting around her office while she was preoccupied with my mother’s work. There were always massive piles of mail stacked on the desk, mostly addressed to Lucinda Rex, but also some made out to a Donna Franklin. Her roommate, that word again that could’ve meant anything but likely meant partner. Maybe wife. A person Lucinda was probably sleeping with, sure, but it was also someone else investing in my mother’s work, who’d put money into it. Someone who might be able to see reason when it came to stopping this atrocity, if she had a little distance from it.
And if I got a little more info on their relationship at the same time, even better.
“What can I do?” she repeated. “What do you want from me?”
“Figure something out.” I climbed inside the truck and started the engine. It took three tries to turn over, I was so stressed. When I backed out of the driveway, she was still standing there looking at me, her face glowing unrecognizable in the beams of the headlights.
Driving straight to the bar, I drank until I was so drunk I couldn’t unbutton my pants in the bathroom. There were other women in there with me: a brassy blonde with a tattoo of a dolphin on her shoulder, an older woman who wore a sweatshirt with a Christmas wreath puffy-painted on the front. I wished I could be either of them, that I could trade bodies and go back to whatever their lives were so I could stop staying in mine. Husbands, children. Families that didn’t need so much care. I took a cab home and puked up everything I’d had to drink in my kitchen sink. When I woke the next morning, bleary and sick, I called Bastien and told him I was taking the day off.
I spent my time at home sleeping, dreaming about my mother and Lucinda and Brynn, all mixed up in a strange sexual miasma. Vague, sticky figures cavorting with the animals my father and I had taxidermied: the bear, raccoons with small black paws that grabbed with scratchy fingers. I woke at dusk and stumbled into my living room. A steady stream of ants marched their way down the wall next to my head, following a crooked path into the kitchen. There were dishes piled up in the sink, crusted with food that had long ago fouled. The air was sour and thick with garbage.
It had been only a day since we’d fought, but I couldn’t be alone in that apartment anymore without going crazy. I called Lucinda and asked her to meet me for drinks.
We met up that night. Then we met up the next. I didn’t bring up what had happened at my mother’s house and neither did she, but it sat there between us, another of the unspoken hurts in my life that worked to rot something good from the inside out. It was all cadaver flesh. I refused to step foot in the gallery, unwilling to support it even by acknowledging it. Alone at home, I went online and looked up stuff about Lucinda. About her life before me, outside of what we had. I wasn’t very good at it—my brain didn’t like processing things on a screen; I was used to tactile work—but I knew enough to figure out she was married. Donna Franklin, I learned, was eight years older than Lucinda. Before they’d bought the gallery together, she’d lived in South Carolina and owned a woodworking business, one of the gayest professions I could imagine. There were some pictures of her when I googled further. I stared, wondering if we were a similar gay type. We shared a body shape, for sure, both of us stout with faces more likely to frown than grin. At the bottom of one of the outdated websites, I found contact information. A phone number. I wrote it down on a Post-it and kept it hidden inside an old magazine in my bedroom. There it sat, stuffed between the pages of a 1994 Better Homes and Gardens showcasing water features. Just in case.
My relationship with Lucinda continued, but it wasn’t like before. We didn’t talk. There weren’t moments where sex verged on tenderness. We fucked against walls or on my ratty sofa; sometimes leaned over the coffee table or slammed against the sticky kitchen countertop. I knelt on the rug, pressing my face against her crotch until I thought she’d absorb me into her body.
We never fucked in bed. I kept the door to my room closed and directed us anywhere else. The harder I pushed her away, the more often she called. I touched her like I wanted her to combust, exploding into pieces sharp enough to draw blood. Donna could take care of the intimacy I lacked, I thought. Donna with her short hair, Donna with those wide, strong hands, just like mine, Donna with her soft, dimpled baby face. What did it matter if Lucinda said she needed me? Someone who says she needs love when she’s really just looking for some on the side isn’t talking about romance; she’s talking about the demands of the body. The grunting sexuality of the physical. Well, let Donna keep her sweetness, I thought. Let Donna have her love, whatever the hell that meant. I could focus on the happy little deaths we inflicted on each other. I could have that, if nothing else.