More Twisted

cloth, marking it with tailor’s chalk, findingthe scissors, cutting carefully. She focused on her task but the distraction wasn’t enough to take her mind off the impending visit—and memories from years ago.
    The shoplifting incident, for instance. When the girl was twelve.
    Liz recalled the phone ringing, answering it. The head of security at a nearby department store was reporting—to Liz’s and Jim’s shock—that Beth Anne had been caught with nearly a thousand dollars’ worth of jewelry hidden in a paper bag.
    The parents had pleaded with the manager not to press charges. They’d said there must’ve been some mistake.
    “Well,” the security chief said skeptically, “we found her with five watches. A necklace too. Wrapped up in this grocery bag. I mean, that don’t sound like any mistake to me.”
    Finally after much reassurance that this was a fluke and promises she’d never come into the store again, the manager agreed to keep the police out of the matter.
    Outside the store, once the family was alone, Liz turned to Beth Anne furiously, “Why on earth did you do that?”
    “Why not?” was the girl’s singsong response, a snide smile on her face.
    “It was stupid.”
    “Like, I care.”
    “Beth Anne . . . why’re you acting this way?”
    “What way?” the girl’d asked in mock confusion.
    Her mother had tried to engage her in a dialog—the way the talk shows and psychologists said you should do with your kids—but Beth Anne remained bored and distracted.Liz had delivered a vague, and obviously futile, warning and had given up.
    Thinking now: You put a certain amount of effort into stitching a jacket or dress and you get the garment you expect. There’s no mystery. But you put a thousand times more effort into raising your child and the result is the opposite of what you hope and dream for. This seemed so unfair.
    Liz’s keen gray eyes examined the wool jacket, making sure the pocket lay flat and was pinned correctly into position. She paused, looking up, out the window toward the black spikes of the pine but what she was seeing were more hard memories of Beth Anne. What a mouth on that girl! Beth Anne would look her mother or father in the eye and say, “There is no goddamn way you’re going to make me go with you.” Or, “Do you have any fucking clue at all?”
    Maybe they should’ve been stricter in their upbringing. In Liz’s family you got whipped for cursing or talking back to adults or for not doing what your parents asked you to do. She and Jim had never spanked Beth Anne; maybe they should’ve swatted her once or twice.
    One time, somebody had called in sick at the family business—a warehouse Jim had inherited—and he needed Beth Anne to help out. She’d snapped at him, “I’d rather be dead than go back inside that shithole with you.”
    Her father had backed down sheepishly but Liz stormed up to her daughter. “Don’t talk to your father that way.”
    “Oh?” the girl asked in a sarcastic voice. “How should I talk to him? Like some obedient little daughter who does everything he wants? Maybe that’s what he wanted butit’s not who he got.” She’d grabbed her purse, heading for the door.
    “Where are you going?”
    “To see some friends.”
    “You are not. Get back here this minute!”
    Her reply was a slamming door. Jim started after her but in an instant she was gone, crunching through two-month-old gray Michigan snow.
    And those “friends”?
    Trish and Eric and Sean . . . kids from families with totally different values from Liz’s and Jim’s. They tried to forbid her from seeing them. But that, of course, had no effect.
    “Don’t tell me who I can hang out with,” Beth Anne had said furiously. The girl was eighteen then and as tall as her mother. As she walked forward with a glower, Liz retreated uneasily. The girl continued, “And what do you know about them anyway?”
    “They don’t like your father and me—that’s all I need to know. What’s wrong with Todd and Joan’s kids? Or Brad’s? Your father and I’ve known them for years.”
    “What’s wrong with them?” the girl muttered sarcastically. “Try, they’re losers.” This time grabbing both her purse and the cigarettes she’d started smoking, she made another dramatic exit.
    With her right foot Liz pressed the pedal of the Singer and the motor gave its distinctive grind, then broke into clatta clatta clatta as the needle sped up and down, vanishing into the