Dark Places

twenty minutes after I would have. “I told you, we’re not in touch,” she said.
    Lyle started to say something when I turned to him, poked a finger toward his chest and mouthed, Shut up. He opened his mouth, shut it, looked at the girl onstage, who was now pantomiming fucking the floor, and walked out the door.
    It was too late, though, Krissi was already saying she had to go meet someone. As I was settling up with the bartender she asked me if she could borrow twenty dollars.
    “I’ll buy Colleen some dinner with it,” she lied. Then she quickly changed it to fifty. “I just haven’t cashed my work check yet. I will totally pay you back.” She made an elaborate play out of getting a sheet of paper and a pen for me, told me to write down my address and she’d totally totally mail me the money.
    I mentally put the cash on Lyle’s tab, forked it over to Krissi, her counting it in front of me like I might shortchange her. She opened the big maw of her purse and a child’s sippy cup rolled out onto the floor.
    “Leave it,” she waved at me when I bent to pick it up, and so I left it.
    Then I took the greasy scrap of paper and wrote down my address and my name. Libby Day. My name is Libby Day, you lying whore.

Patty Day
JANUARY 2, 1985
1:50 P.M.
    P atty wondered how many hours she and Diane had spent I rumbling around in cars together: a thousand? two thousand? Maybe if you added it all up, a sum total of two years, put end to end, the way mattress companies always did: You spend a third of your life asleep, why not do it on a ComfortCush? Eight years standing in lines, they say. Six years peeing. Put like that, life was grim. Two years waiting in the doctor’s office, but a total of three hours watching Debby at breakfast laughing until milk started dribbling down her chin. Two weeks eating soppy pancakes her girls made for her, the middle still sour with batter. Only one hour staring in amazement as Ben unconsciously tucked his baseball cap behind his ears in a gesture mirror-perfect to what his grandpa did, his grandpa dead when Ben was just a baby. Six
years
of hauling manure, though, three years of ducking calls from bill collectors. Maybe a month of having sex, maybe a day of having good sex. She’d slept with three men in her life. Her gentle high school boyfriend; Runner, the hotshot who stole her from her gentle high school boyfriend and left her with four (wonderful) children; and a guy she dated for a few months some-wherein the years after Runner left. They’d slept together three times with the kids at home. It always ended awkwardly. Ben, sulky and possessive at age eleven, would park himself in the kitchen so he could glower at them as they left her bedroom in the morning, Patty worrying about the guy’s semen on her, that smell so stark and embarrassing with your children still in their pajamas. It was clearly not going to work from the start, and she’d never gotten the courage up to try again. Libby would graduate from high school in eleven years, so maybe then. She’d be forty-three, which was right when women were supposed to peak sexually. Or something. Maybe it was menopause.
    “We heading to the school?” Diane asked, and Patty pulled out of her three-second trance to remember their horrible errand, their mission: find her son and, what? Hide him away til this blew over? Drive him to the little girl’s house and straighten it all out? In family movies, the mom always caught the son stealing, and she’d march him back over to the drugstore and get him to hand over the candy on a shaky palm, and beg forgiveness. She knew Ben shoplifted some. Before he started locking his door, she’d occasionally find strange, pocket-sized items in his room. A candle, batteries, a plastic packet of toy soldiers. She’d never said anything, which was horrible. Part of her didn’t want to deal with it—drive all the way into town, and talk to some kid who got paid minimum wage and didn’t care anyway. And the other part (even worse) thought, Why the hell not? The boy had so little, why not keep pretending this was something a friend gave him? Let him have this stolen trifle, a pebble-plunk of a wrongdoing in the grand scheme.
    “No, he wouldn’t go to the school. He only works Sundays.”
    “Well, where?”
    They came to a stoplight, swaying on a line like laundry. The road dead-ended onto the pasture of a land-rich family that lived in Colorado. Turn right and they were heading to