Lydia Read Online Free Page B

age, girls had long since stopped sleeping with their boss.”
    Shannon said, “When you were my age, you were a grandmother.”
    Lydia reached for the key. “It’s nice to see you haven’t completely lost your spunk. I was afraid you’d gone meek on me.”

3
    Lydia had been spunk personified on the plane. Nothing like spending a few thousand dollars on clothes to give a woman back her confidence. And she did relish flying first-class, up there ahead of the rabble. It may have cost an extra five hundred, but by God, her wine came with a cloth napkin. An executive with his cutting-edge ThinkPad tried to strike up a conversation, and she cut him dead. She was in control.
    Then came the steps and the walk across the tarmac. She held up like a champ through all that. She was home. The county should have sent a brass band. Then she saw Shannon, and Lydia’s illusory bubble burst. In one breath, she became the ex-con limping back to the cave after doing her time. In her breasts, from which Lydia thought all emotions spring, she knew she was a cliché. It was Shannon’s earrings that did it. Hank had made them. She didn’t want to think about Hank, not today. Hank brought on the ache of loss—lost people, lost years. The entire last ten years had been a write-off. She was free and home, and he wasn’t. She felt like Dorothy, waking up in her own bed in her own room in Kansas, surrounded by Auntie Em and Uncle Henry, only to discover Toto had been hit by a truck.
    And Shannon—Shannon looked like cold soup. Girls should wash their face after they cry. Hard times should improve your posture, not wreck it. Lydia had been set to establish her authority, but one look at Shannon and she took the girl in her arms.
    Lydia said, “You look nice.” She would never have said that if it were true.
    At the house, twenty or thirty locals milled around the yard, their attention split between meat and beer. They didn’t rush the car and welcome her back into the bosom of the community. A couple old codgers who looked vaguely familiar cut their eyes her way, but they were checking out the antique BMW more than her. Except for Pud and his cousin Rowdy, she didn’t see anyone whose name she knew. Pud grinned and waved, making signs like he would come over and hug her, but he was stuck at the barbecue pit. Lydia waved back and waited for Shannon to carry her bags into the house.
    Later, after Shannon finished the obligatory fussing with the bags and pointing out where things were, as if Lydia were the guest instead of the owner of the house, Lydia sat in her room and wept. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cried. Not in all the years on the run, not during the arrest or the trial or the nights in prison. She didn’t cry when her father died. Maybe a pet death way back in childhood. The week after she stopped smoking there’d been a tire commercial that made her dewy-eyed, but Lydia blamed that on nicotine withdrawal. And the night Nixon was elected the second time, she almost cried but got drunk instead. But now, when it was over, she was bawling like a baby. That was the shits of it all—it was over. Lydia looked into her future and saw one long playing out the string. She would be going through the motions from here on out. She’d lost her turn.
    After a while—a short while, considering it was her first cry in forty-five years—Lydia dug in her purse for her emergency panties and blotted the tears off her cheeks. She stood and walked to the mirror and looked at herself, thinking what every middle-aged person thinks when they look in the mirror— Where did it all go?
    She sneaked from her bedroom to the bathroom, but Shannon was locked in and wouldn’t come out, so Lydia had to wash her face in the kitchen sink. She was thorough. Scrubbed clean, she doubled back to the bedroom and reapplied her makeup, careful not to overdo it like an old lady. Then she went back to the mirror. Now, she didn’t think, Where did it