Follow Me (18 page)

Penny candy, a felt pony with glass eyes, and a doll’s pie cupboard made of wood and tin. Hinky-dinky parlez-vous. This is
the way we build a house, build a house, build a house. Funny to think that someday we’ll be all grown up. I’ll tell you about
the man I’m going to marry. He’ll have straight brown hair, gray eyes, he won’t be too short or too tall, he’ll play the banjo,
and he’ll always be stronger than the Sea Hag and her goons. Take that, umph, and that!

And then her cousin Daniel gunned the engine of his motorcycle, and she hung on for dear life.

Run, Sally!

Wretched Sally Werner.

And here she was back where she’d started, at the top of the slope of her life, her feet sliding out from under her.

“You poor girl.” Tru caught her in her arms and held her upright. Sally wanted to call out for her mother. Instead, she said,
“I’m fine,” and left it at that, too stunned to say anything more, even to press the issue and demand to know what they’d
done with her child. Tru’s concern was too much for her. Loden’s judgment was too harsh. The weight of the thick air made
her weak. But she was still strong enough to separate herself from her sister and walk out of the room and out the front door.
She wondered if they were waiting for her to change her mind and come back or at least call to them and say good-bye. But
they must have known that Sally never said good-bye. She just squeezed her arm against her fat purse and left without telling
her family where she was planning to go. And they didn’t try to stop her as she walked out the door. They didn’t come after
her and weren’t going to explain why there was a tricycle resting on the lawn below the porch, with the back end hidden by
the corner of the house so only the front wheel was visible. Sally hadn’t noticed it when she’d entered the house, but she
noticed it as she left, and she knew what it meant: a tricycle meant that there was a young child nearby, a child the Werners
were hiding from Sally.

“Where were you?” Mole asked. He’d moved to the driver’s seat and had started the car as he’d seen Sally returning.

He wanted answers to his questions: Who lived here? And why had they driven all this way if they weren’t going to stay for
dinner? But Sally had nothing to tell him, other than to insist that they had to get out of there now.

Mole put the car in reverse, backed toward the fence, then shifted to drive, rolling the wheels over the muddy ruts. As he
headed out to the road, Sally looked over her shoulder to take one last look and saw a crow perched on the gatepost, maybe
the same crow that had been hopping ahead of her earlier. Its black eyes stared at nothing and it sat there so still that
years later, whenever Sally thought about her last visit home, she’d forget that the crow had been alive and would picture
it as a painted figurine fixed there, nailed in place. It had been there, she’d believe, for as long as she could remember.

Coming from this direction, Sally wasn’t sure whether to go left or right when they reached the second main intersection,
but she pretended to be certain when she told Mole to turn left. Left was wrong, they began to suspect after they’d traveled
along the road for a good twenty minutes without seeing any landmarks she recognized. When they passed a long stretch of meadow
crowned on its rise with a boarded-up, decrepit old mansion, Sally knew they’d gone the wrong way. But Mole didn’t complain;
he just swooped the car around in a U-turn and headed back along the route toward Amity.

Sally closed her eyes for a while, trying to feel what Mole had felt when he’d let the bumping of the car lull him to sleep.
But she couldn’t sleep because Loden and Tru and the rest of her family, along with a little boy whose name she didn’t know,
were crowding her head, waiting for the opportunity to give her nightmares. Because of them, she’d never sleep again.

Mole was quiet, waiting for her to explain. She wanted to tell him something worthy, though she couldn’t bring herself to
tell him the truth. Instead, she hatched a story. She said that though she’d once told him before that her parents were living,
in fact they’d passed away, her mother in ’41, her father in ’46. She was sorry she hadn’t told him the truth, but the truth,
she said, had been too hard to face. She’d wanted to pay a visit to the farm for old times’ sake. Well, the new owners hadn’t
been welcoming — not very welcoming at all!

She was surprised by how easy it was to make up this new lie, so she kept right on lying, spinning one deception out of the
web of another. She said that the new owners — the Haggertys, she named them on a whim — had been church friends with her
parents, but they’d moved away. They came back to Tauntonville on holidays, and when they visited they always brought Sally
a box of ribbon candy, yet now that they owned the farm, they pretended not to know her. They must have coveted the property
all through the years her parents were alive, she said. Her father was still warm in his grave when the Haggertys bought the
farm for next to nothing, with the help of a no-good lawyer. Sally had been too young to fight them in court. She’d grown
up since then. She’d thought about finding a lawyer of her own and trying to win the farm back. Really, though, she didn’t
want to live on a dreary old farm in the middle of nowhere. That wasn’t what she’d been born for.

The story roused Mole; he kept shaking his head and interrupting to tell Sally that she sure had been dealt a bad hand, and
it was hard to tell a crook from a friend these days, and she shouldn’t sit back and let others take advantage of her. No,
she should claim what was rightfully hers.

Having taken a sharp turn into a gas station lot, he sealed his last statement with an emphatic cluck of his tongue and shut
off the engine. While he was out chatting with the attendant, waiting for the tank to fill, Sally came up with a good reason
to explain why the farm was worthless.

“The thing is, they started using some newfangled fertilizer, something Mr. Haggerty bought on discount, and it turns out
they’ve gone and poisoned all their land,” she said as Mole drove from the gas station. “The Haggertys won’t have a harvest
next year or ever again. Serves them right, huh?”

“I guess.”

She’d thought he shared her indignation and was surprised by his noncommittal response. She wanted to ask him to say more.
But he was too busy watching the road, searching the land as though there were something he expected to find.

“Looking for something?” she asked after a moment.

“Mmm” was all he said.

To their left, a wall of tall pines was black in the twilight; to their right, the empty fields were a gray blur. The occasional
farmhouse seemed insubstantial, like a cardboard cutout. Front yards were cluttered with tires and hubcaps and the shells
of burned-out cars — the kind of junk that would survive the people who lived there.

“Aha!” Mole said when he finally spotted the sign he’d been looking for. He was already turning into the lot as he announced,
“Let’s have dinner.”

“Dinner,” Sally echoed lamely. She didn’t say,
I’m feeling miserable, and all you can think about is dinner?
She did exclaim with unnecessary anger when, stepping from the car, she stubbed the toe of her shoe against broken pavement.
“Damn you!” she seethed, as if she blamed Mole for her stumble, though he was already ahead and holding open the door to the
tavern.

Sitting across from him in a booth and watching him lick beer foam from his top lip with the tip of his tongue, she felt convinced
that he was to blame for everything. It was his fault that she’d had to lie about her visit home. It was his fault that he
didn’t know the truth about her. If he’d been the kind of person who could read between the lines, he would have realized
that Sally wasn’t upset because she’d lost her parents and the farm. She was upset because all this time she’d been mistakenly
thinking that she would see her child again.

It was Mole’s fault for getting so worked up over the thought of barbecue ribs the attendant back at the gas station had called
the best in the free world.

“I forgot to have lunch,” he explained to the waitress, a girl who looked at least a couple of years younger than Sally, plump
and rosy, with a great mound of bleached hair pulled back in a braid.

“I’ll have the kitchen speed it up, honey.”

“She called you honey,” Sally said after the girl had disappeared through the swinging doors. Mole smiled, as though to indicate
that he considered himself deserving. But he wasn’t deserving. He was just ignorant.

It was his fault for not sensing that Sally was about to burst into tears. It was his fault that they were sitting in this
dive with creaking benches and lime green walls and a revolving dessert case holding only one-third of a cream pie. It was
his fault that when Sally tried to lift her glass, the bottom of it stuck to the Formica, the glass tipped, and some beer
splattered.

Damn you
.

She was using her napkin to wipe away the spill when the waitress came over and swirled her rag over the table, a handy action
that Sally should have known was logical but in her unsettled state took on a vexing meaning, as if the girl were demonstrating
for Mole’s benefit how competent she was.

It was Mole’s fault that Sally was left out and her suffering went undetected. It was his fault that if she didn’t start sobbing
soon, she’d start screaming. And it was his fault that he managed to remain oblivious to it all and could think of nothing
else to do besides picking up a painted plywood game board from the table beside him. Sliding the board between them, he said,
“Checkers?”

Oh, she was ready to transform her fury into action. She was ready to grab Mole by the collar and shake him until the fog
cleared and he saw her for who she really was. But now that he knew his empty belly would soon be filled, he looked so pleased
with himself that she couldn’t help but envy him. He leaned back against the cushion of the bench, less in a swaggering way
than in a manner that suggested guidance, offering his own example to Sally, proving that she, too, could be happy — at least
as happy as Mole.

She moved a red piece. He moved a black piece. They continued playing, barely glancing up when the waitress delivered their
food and then both hurriedly pulling their racks apart so they could each hold a rib in one hand while moving a checker piece
with the other.

Mole was concentrating intently. Sally sensed that he was building up an offense along the right side of the board. She moved
stealthily in from the left and after a couple of turns made a multiple jump, capturing two black pieces before he knew what
had hit him.

“Just you wait,” he said in warning.

He jumped her. She jumped him. They played and they drank, they ate and they played. The longer she concentrated on the game
of checkers, the less Sally thought about her visit home. The less she remembered, the more she could savor the delicious
immersion in the here and now, playing as if the sheer, teasing fun of the game were all that mattered.

She signaled to the waitress and ordered a second pitcher of beer. They continued to play slowly, intently. There was nothing
else going on in the world, no cause to worry about affairs they couldn’t control. The game absorbed them, and beyond the
board was a blur of lights and sounds and memories. It didn’t matter who won or lost, only that they kept playing. And so
they took their time, moving a piece only after a long pause spent pondering the options.

Eventually she’d gained three kings to his one. She was expecting to win at the end and wanted to delay the inevitable, so
she made a simple move to stall. In response, Mole brought his own king back toward her offense, clacking the stack along
a zigzag, claiming two of Sally’s kings and a single piece with a triple jump!

She sputtered in disbelief. He offered to take back the move, but she insisted that it was fair and square. She didn’t mind
losing, she said. She didn’t say that she wished the game would go on forever, though she wondered if he could guess what
she was thinking as he stared at her over the rim of his glass.

His affection for her was like the beer — there was too much of it, and the more there was, the more she wanted, but the quantity
made her head spin. She decided that she’d better set the story straight and match things to their names before it was too
late. Mole might be wondering about the Haggertys, for instance. She should explain. But first she had to determine their
connection to the disappearance of her baby. They’d taken him away, hadn’t they, giving Sally justification to despise them?
But they were in a made-up story. What, then, had they done with her baby? What baby? She felt as though years had passed
since she’d last spoken with her brother and sister in the living room of her parents’ house, and she couldn’t remember all
the details of the exchange. Had they even been speaking the same language? The conclusion she’d reached at the time seemed
stupid and inexact to her now. She wished she’d stayed long enough to give herself something clear to understand in the aftermath.

Confusion made her thirsty. She took another sip of beer. Mole drank from his glass, his motion matching hers like a mirror
reflection. She drank again just to see him do the same and then refilled her glass and his.

The beer was tasting better with every sip. It was also weakening her resolve and loosening her tongue. It had been so easy
to tell him a lie about herself. Why wouldn’t it be just as easy to tell him the truth?

“You want to know something?” she asked.

“That can’t be right,” he said.

She didn’t understand his response and wondered if she should apologize peremptorily. But then she followed his gaze, turning
to look over his shoulder at the wall clock, which had on its face the picture of a Jeep splashing through mud. The motto
read “traction through action,” and the second
h
was covered by the point of the hour hand.

“Aw geez,” he said with a moan. “I told Phil I’d be back by six. He’s gonna kill me. He’s gonna squash me like I’m a worm.”
He thumped his fist on the table to demonstrate. “A goddamn worm. Hey, miss, can I have the check? Excuse me, hey, miss!”