The Fates Will Find Their Way Read Online Free PDF Page A

for, though it hadn’t been Danny who raped her. He and Sarah had gone out a few times. They’d done a few things. He liked her and, for all we knew, she liked him. But when he found out about the rape, he changed. He felt responsible for the things men were capable of. We tried to understand, but at most we simply felt bad for both of them.
    At some point, Danny had the wherewithal to ask Sissy about Phoenix. The city came back to him, making a path through the haze of cigarette smoke and the rush of alcohol. “Did you ever consider looking in Arizona?”
    Sissy laughed. She was still sexy as a high schooler, but she’d turned unfriendly, brittle. “You’re serious? You’re seriously asking me this question right now?”
    “Don’t you have a grandmother out there or something?”
    “My god,” she said. There was spit in her laugh. “You all thought of everything, didn’t you?” She finished a final drop of tequila and wiped her mouth. Her hair was more orange than he remembered. “No,” she said. “No grandmother in Phoenix. Like I said, no family anywhere.”
    They had sex in the back of Danny Hatchet’s Nissan. It had belonged to his dad. It smelled like an ashtray. There was a banana peel on the back floorboard. There were lottery tickets and glass coffee mugs with dried-out grinds at the bottom. There was a spoon with something like Coffee-mate congealed at its tip. Sissy didn’t question this. She didn’t question any of it. She simply crawled in after him and lifted up her skirt.
    When it was done, Danny dropped her off at her car, a large luxury SUV, parked at the rear entrance to the mall. There were two car seats in the back. Danny didn’t ask about that.
    When Sissy was safely outside the Nissan, she ducked her head down and looked at Danny. She was putting on a pair of white leather gloves. “Tell your friends,” she said before she closed the door. “Tell them all. They’ll want to know.”
    We didn’t see Sissy again until Mr. Lindell’s funeral and then not again until Minka Dinnerman’s funeral, which would prove to be the last time any of us but Danny would ever see her, but that was years—almost a decade—in the future.
    Shortly after Danny’s alleged run-in with Sissy, a for-sale sign went up on the lawn of the three-story Tudor. A moving van came. Danny called first; he was always calling these days. He needed money still, though he never exactly asked and we never exactly offered. “Stop by sometime soon,” we said. “Well, no, not right now,” we were forced to add. “The kids are home and the baby’s a mess. The holidays and all. Yes, yes. Soon. Can’t wait.” To keep us on the phone, he told us about Sissy. “In the parking lot?” we said. “In the backseat of your dad’s Nissan?” We closed our eyes. We pictured the exact parking spot where her SUV must have waited. We didn’t believe him, and yet.
    Our mothers called next. Mr. Lindell was finally leaving, they said. He was off to live with his daughter somewhere out West.
    “Out West?” we asked. “Are you sure?”
    “Out West,” they said. “And why not? Some place with altitude where his knees won’t hurt. You might think about something like that for us, you know.”
    “We know, we know,” we said, our first and second daughters and sons crying in the background. “By the way,” we said, trying to sound unconcerned, uninterested, “do you know anything about a baby, maybe two? Did Sissy get married? Are there twins?”
    “Oh, enough,” they said, upset that we hadn’t offered them Denver, Lake Tahoe, or at the very least Truckee. “Hush up about the Lindells already.”
    And we did hush up. At least, we tried very hard. We hung up the phones. We attended our own crying babies. We soothed our wives. But at night, at night we lay awake, the shades drawn, our eyes wide open, the breath of our families a constant hum beside us. We lay awake and wondered all over again about Nora and her