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She stopped speaking. De
“Oh,” she said, “I’m fine. How have you been?”
So De
The first time, he came alone. Abby was disappointed that he didn’t bring Susan, but Red said he was glad. “It makes this visit different from those last ones,” he said. “Like he’s getting squared away with us first. He’s not taking it for granted that he can just pick up where he left off.”
He had a point. De
Susan was doing great, he said. She was attending preschool now. Yes, he could bring her to visit. Carla was fine too, although they were not together anymore. Work? Well, at the moment he was working for a construction firm.
“Construction!” Abby said. “Hear that, Red? He’s working in construction!”
Red merely grunted. He didn’t look as happy about this as he might have.
Notice all that was missing, though, from what De
Then Jea
But still, somehow, it wasn’t enough information. Oh, always there seemed to be something else — something that surely, if they could ferret it out, would at last explain him.
He stayed a day and a half, that time. Then he left, but — here was the important part — they did have his cell phone number. That number they’d dialed was his cell phone number! This changed everything.
They allowed a strategic lapse of several weeks, and then Abby called him (Red hovering in the background) and invited him to bring Susan for Christmas. De
Red and Abby knew all about his maybes.
But he did it. He brought her. Christmas fell on a Tuesday that year, and he brought her down Wednesday and they stayed through Friday. Susan was a self-possessed four-year-old with a mass of brown curls and very large, very brown eyes. The eyes were a bit of a shock. Those were not Whitshank eyes! Nor were her clothes the rough-and-tumble play clothes that the Whitshank children wore. She arrived in a red velvet dress, with white tights and red Mary Janes. Well, perhaps on account of Christmas. But the next morning, when she came down to breakfast, she wore a ruffled white blouse and a red plaid taffeta pinafore very nearly as fancy. Jea
“Do you remember us?” they asked her. “Do you remember coming to visit us when you were just a baby?”
Susan said, slowly, “I think so,” which of course could not be true. But it was nice of her to pretend. She said, “Did you have a different dog?”
“No, this is the same one.”
“I thought you had a yellow dog,” she said, and they traded unhappy glances. Who was it she was thinking of who had a yellow dog, and perhaps one not so slobbery and arthritic as old Clarence?
She was entranced with her cousins. (Aha! They could be the Whitshanks’ bait: fairy child Elise and rowdy little Deb.) She seemed unfamiliar with card games but soon developed a passion for Go Fish. Also, it emerged that she knew how to read. They were surprised that Carla could have reared a precocious child, but maybe that was thanks to De
By the time she left, she’d lost all her reserve. She stood in front of the train station holding De
So De
In 2002, shortly after Jea
It came to light only later that Jea
This was both touching and distressing. Had Jea
Well, but Abby had her job to go to, Jea
As if De
Or, who knows? Maybe he didn’t.
Red told Abby they should just be grateful that De
Abby said, “Oh, yes. Yes, I know that.”
Things fell into more or less of a pattern. De
How shocking, Abby told Red, that they were willing to settle for so little. She said, “Would you have believed it? Sometimes whole days go by when I don’t give him a thought. This is just not natural!”
Red said, “It’s perfectly natural. Like a mother cat when her kittens are grown. You’re showing very good sense.”
“It’s not supposed to work that way with humans,” Abby told him.
At least they could be sure that De