Goddamned Dern.
“No, I’m sorry. I don’t,” I told her.
She turned to Celeste.
I shifted my arm so it was around her.
Audrey did not miss this, and she winced.
God, this was torture.
It was plain to see her puzzle was broken and dark, re-forming even as she stood there, and it was one of those three-dimensional ones.
Dimension one: before Alice, and how Audrey was now plagued with thoughts, wondering if she should have done what she (allegedly) did to trap Dale by making Alice.
Dimension two: those now hazy, and getting terrifyingly hazier, days of the time with Alice and having everything she thought she wanted, though, even as she denied it, she knew there was a pall over that. A pall she’d lived with. A pall that might now bite her spectacularly in the ass. Last, a pall that had hung over her daughter her whole life.
Dimension three: the now, knowing she birthed a child who ended in a way so unimaginable, it shook a cocky, sharp, strong, intelligent young man to the point he was questioning his ability to control his actions, and in a very real way he feared he might commit murder himself as retribution. But it was Audrey’s actions (in Audrey’s mind, this was not the actual case) that led Alice on a collision course from birth to devastating death at the age of eight at the hands of a madman.
I was no psychologist. I could not tell her those hazy days would come back into focus. She’d never forget the beauty of her girl.
In fact, I could do nothing.
Her puzzle would have to re-form on its own, even she had little control over the process.
“Do you know, sweetie, if your dad told the sheriff not to?” she asked Celeste.
“No. He didn’t,” she announced. “Dad didn’t even know about it until…” I squeezed her, because that “until” was the day of her daughter’s funeral. “Later,” she finished.
Apparently, Bohannan’s Dad Ears were faulty, and Celeste hadn’t been out of hearing distance when we’d had our discussion, or one of the boys or someone at school told her.
Audrey’s gaze wafted—and I mean it—it wafted to mine.
“Don’t you find that strange?”
“I don’t really know much about these types of things,” I said.
“I wish I didn’t,” she told some point over my shoulder.
“Do you want to go somewhere?” I offered, and Celeste put her arm around me and poked me in my side.
What was that about?
I ignored it in the face of Audrey’s disorientation and pain.
“Sit down?” I went on. “Get a coffee. Talk?”
She semi-focused on me. “You were the nice one in that show. So very sweet. And they all said that was the way you are in real life. Like, you were playing yourself.”
I wasn’t.
I didn’t tell her that.
“I guess they were right,” she concluded.
I looked down at Celeste. “Is there a fun coffee shop in town?”
“Yeah. Aromacobana,” she answered.
Excellent coffee shop name.
“No, no.” Pause as we looked at her. “No. You’re in the middle of something.”
“I’m sure we can set these aside and come back for them later.”
“No, really, I have to…get…” a very long pause, “home.”
I asked a pertinent question. “Are you okay to drive?”
She looked surprised at the inference, squared her shoulders and said briskly. “Yes. Of course. Yes. I’m fine. It was nice to meet you and thank you again.”
“Please, don’t mention it.”
“Celeste, honey,” she whispered, her voice husky.
She then turned and scurried away.
I watched her but Celeste didn’t.
She disengaged from me, grabbed the cart and asked, “Ready?”
We went in. I left it while we picked up some things, but I went for it in the chip aisle.
“You were a little distant with her. No shade, just wondering.”
“Will hates her.”
I stopped at the Doritos.
She piled some in.
“That was, like, the first thing he said to me. He ordered a chocolate malt, turned to me and said, ‘I fucking hate Audrey. She’s such a bitch.’ And I know I’m cursing, but that’s what he said. Word for word.”
“The first thing he said?” I asked as she took us down the aisle and stopped at the Ruffles.
She opted for cheddar and sour cream.
I approved of her choice but only in my head.
She was talking.
“I wasn’t surprised. Everyone knows about her.”
“What does everyone know?”
She was now at the Pringles and considering her options.
I wasn’t sure who she was feeding, but my guess was she had a mental list, and if this was what fueled the Bohannans when I wasn’t around, I wasn’t going to stop her.
“That she broke up Mr. and Mrs. Pulaski.” She looked at me. “And by that, I mean the real Mrs. Pulaski.”
“This is known? In high school?”
“Will is popular,” she mumbled, adding more sour cream to the collection, this one with onion, and spicing things up with BBQ.
We rounded the end cap, and she kept talking.
“Anyway, she did it before.”
“Hold up,” I said.
She stopped.
“Before?” I asked.
“Yeah. To some other guy. He was smart enough not to get her pregnant, though. But when he wouldn’t leave his wife for her, she told his wife all about them hooking up. They almost got divorced. But they went to counseling and sorted themselves out. I bet she didn’t see that coming.”
I bet she didn’t.
Celeste continued, “So she set her sights on Mr. Pulaski.”
“I don’t want to talk trash about Mr. Pulaski, and when I say that, I really don’t. The man is in hell, and I have no idea about any of this. But I do think it’s important to note that, in things like this, it always but always takes two to tango.”
“Oh yeah. Will isn’t, like, clearing his dad. But, you know, he’s his dad. And they both, like, totally loved Alice. Like, you know how Dad and Jess and Jace are with me?”
“Yes.”
“That kind of love, except she’s still little.” She let that sit only a moment before, wistful, she said, “Or she was.”
“Does Will say that Audrey isn’t cut up about losing her daughter?”
If he did, he was talking through hurt.
The woman we just saw was destroyed.
“Oh no, she loved her too. Just that, you know, Will hates her. Audrey. Mrs. Pulaski. And, like, you’re new to town and you’re, like, able to go around and meet people and get to know stuff now. So you should know, no one in town likes her either. Not with what she did to that other couple. Not with her breaking up Mr. and Mrs. Pulaski. Not with her being…her.”
Before I could ask what that meant, Celeste started moving down the aisle again.
But she did it still talking.
“It’s actually a weird kind of gross because we all have to pretend to like her when none of us do. I mean, we feel sorry for her, but we don’t like her.”
“That’s a pretty strong collective we.”