Crushed by Laura McNeal Page A

said, but the truth was, she had no idea whether it was a problem or not. She’d never returned an article of clothing in her life. Oggy always did that if something didn’t fit or turned out to be of poor quality. Returning something because you couldn’t afford it seemed a different matter altogether.
    Half a mile away, Wickham Hill came home to find his mother sitting at the kitchen table with a magazine and a cup of tea—in theory a comforting scene, but he saw at once that the tea had gone cold and that she wasn’t reading the magazine. Crumpled tissues lay nearby.
    â€œWhat?” Wickham said. His mother glanced up at him, then tugged her earlobe and looked away. Whenever his mother felt fragile, she would begin the earlobe-tugging. Wickham sat down at the table and, more softly now, said, “What?”
    His mother was not a plain woman, and when she was happy, she seemed beautiful to Wickham, but tonight she’d been crying, and her washed-out face and runny nose and red eyes gave her a hapless aspect. She dabbed at her nose, took a deep breath, and said, “James called.”
    Dr. Yates. His actual but unofficial father.
    Wickham waited.
    His mother opened her mouth, breathed in, breathed out. “He said he’d been getting our bills.” Another deep breath. “He said he’d keep paying them, up to a thousand dollars a month for the next three months. I told him I didn’t care about the money, I just wanted to see him, but it was as if he didn’t hear me. He just said that after three months, the amount he’d pay would go down by one hundred dollars a month.” Another pause and earlobe tug. “He called it a one-year weaning period.”
    Wickham stared at the tablecloth. It was red-and-white gingham, the kind you saw in reassuring depictions of cheerful American kitchens. “What about the house?” he said. “Can we stay in the house?”
    â€œHe said that after nine months, we’d receive a ninety-day notice to vacate.” Pause, earlobe tug. “He was using his business voice. I’ve heard him use it with other people lots of times. But he’d never used it with me.”
    Wickham worked his jaw and with low vehemence said, “And people thought
I
was the bastard.”
    Quietly his mother said, “No. This isn’t him. This is someone else. This is what his horrible wife and that horrible town have turned him into.”
    These words had a softening effect on Wickham, toward his mother if not his father. He never touched his mother, never took her hand or kissed her, and though he wouldn’t now, he wanted to. He wanted to lean forward and kiss her on the cheek before he spoke. Instead, he just used his gentlest voice to say, “No, this is him, Mom, and nobody made him him but him.”
    Upstairs, Wickham took down his father’s boyhood dictionary and skimmed through the “W” section until he found the word he wanted:
    wean . . .
v.t.
1 : To accustom (as a child or other young animal) to loss of mother’s milk. 2 : Hence, to detach the affections of; to reconcile to a severance—as “to wean one from a life of ease.”
    Wickham opened the nearest window and, with a quick sidearm toss, sent the dictionary sailing out into the darkness. He heard a dull
thump-shush
as it hit the ground and skidded onto the driveway.
    Weaning.
    It was just like the bastard to find the one word that fit the circumstance more insultingly than any other in the English language.

Chapter 25
    A Single Droplet
    â€œYou kissed in the backseat of a taxi?”
    Audrey was caught between feeling excited and embarrassed. “A little,” she said.
    It was Saturday morning, and Audrey, C.C., and Lea were sitting in a window booth at Bing’s. Outside, the sky was Indian-summer blue, and for November it was strangely warm—people passed in short sleeves, and newspaper headlines talked of