Lies You Wanted to Hear Read Online Free PDF Page B

she had forgotten they were there.
    “They’re extraordinary.”
    “Thank you.” She smiled, knowing I meant her. “They were my grandmother’s.”
    I asked where she worked, where she’d gone to college. Her answers were short. She didn’t want to talk about herself, though she mentioned that she had recently taken two courses at the Cambridge Adult Education Center—pottery and conversational French.
    “I’m trying to find my grande passion .” She pushed her food around with her fork, then muttered under her breath, “Something besides falling in love with assholes.”
    I let that one go, a conversation for another time.
    “So what happened today?” she said.
    “What?”
    “At work? The thing that almost made you late.”
    I told her the story.
    “The man was the girl’s stepfather,” I said. “Turns out he’d been molesting her for years. The girl was like a firecracker with the fuse lit. She seemed angrier at her mother than she was at him. And the mother…it was almost like she thought it was the girl’s fault.”
    “I can see that. The girl blames her mother for letting it happen. A mother is supposed to protect her daughter, not let some pervert rape her. Meanwhile, the mother knows she failed—she’s the one who brought that monster into the house—but she can’t face it, so she turns on the kid.”
    “Huh? You seem to know a lot about this stuff. Are you a therapist or something?”
    “No, no, I would make a really bad therapist.” She laughed. “Just ask mine.”
    The waiter came by and refilled Lucy’s glass. She was drinking much more than I was but didn’t seem to notice me holding back. The last thing I wanted was to get drunk and do something stupid.
    “Enough,” she said. “This food is too good.” She pushed her plate away. “Do you mind if I smoke?”
    “No, not at all.” I didn’t smoke myself. I picked up the candle from the table and held it out for her. She touched my hand as a gesture of thanks and a little jolt of electricity went through me.
    She said, “I read a book about sex abuse a few years ago. Turns out it happens everywhere. Rich people, poor people, black, white. One of those clubs without any restrictions. Like beating the shit out of your wife. Any two-fisted son-of-a-bitch can join.”
    Her face was flushed. She’d only taken a few drags on her cigarette, but she ground it into a crooked stub in the ashtray. Here was that edge Jill had mentioned, her anger so intense I got the feeling she might have been smacked around by some shithead herself.
    She asked me how I’d decided to become a cop. I told her it was something I’d always been interested in. I went to community college near my home in Butler, Pennsylvania, and majored in criminology.
    “I thought about going on for a four-year degree,” I said, “but I felt a little burned out on school. Luckily, I had a high lottery number and didn’t have to worry about the draft. I told my mom I wanted to do a little traveling and she was great about it. I’m an only child. My father died in a mining accident when I was a baby, and my mom raised me herself. We’re real close, but she never tried to smother me. She told me to go see the country. She said she wished she could have done it herself.” Lucy took out another cigarette. “The farthest I’d ever been away from home was a field trip to Washington, D.C. I had an old Rambler with a stick on the floor and headed west. I got a job in Minneapolis loading freight cars. When the weather got chilly, I headed south. The car gave out in Missouri, so I got on a bus and kept on going.”
    “Sounds neat.”
    “Yeah, it was. I worked odd jobs, bummed around for a year and a half. Got to see some interesting places, met some terrific people.”
    Lucy said, “So, in all your travels, what was your favorite place?”
    I didn’t have to think. “Puerto Rico.”
    “Really?” She narrowed her eyes. “Aww, that’s where you fell in