fit and hit Patty, who had hit back. When she divorced him she took back her old name, Patty Paul being more than she could stomach for another day. She was trying to get her daughter’s name changed to Hendricks too. But that had turned her former allies, Brian’s family, against her. Some time ago, Annie had written Patty a letter but had never had a reply.
In the phone book, in small, unflinching bold print, she found “Hendricks, Patty and Elizabeth.” That was Patty.
Annie did not call. During the half-hour that she had been back in the house, no one had tried to call her. She copied down the address, a street she didn’t recognize. Out of his glove compartment she fished her father’s map of the city. It lay beneath a glossy, oversized envelope. She laid her cell phone on top of the envelope, still turned on, and closed the glove compartment. Its ring might or might not be audible above the motor noise.
The address was a walk-up second-story apartment in an area of town out beyond the cheapest student housing. She had almost reached the top of the exposed stairs when the door opened and Patty appeared with her daughter in her arms. Patty was still small. Her shoulders were bony, she looked haggard around the eyes and mouth, her teeth were yellowed. She’d chopped at her dull blond hair, which had once had a silky wave she’d practiced drawing over her face, and it had grown out unevenly. Elizabeth was big; the baby was going to dwarf her mother. She was squinched up in the sun, already beginning to cry.
Patty said, “Legs.”
It was her nickname for her friend, and she said it as if Annie was one of ten people she might expect to see climbing her stairs, not high on the list but no surprise either.
Patty’s nickname was “the Pistol,” which her father had given her when he was still around. “She’s hot as a pistol, that girl.” Annie couldn’t stand it, but Patty didn’t seem to mind.
Annie called her by her name. She was hoping to be invited inside, where Patty with her irreverence and her zealous partisanship would talk Annie out of her funk. It wasn’t going to happen.
“You got a car, right?”
Annie nodded. “My dad’s.”
“Come on, then. Brian will be looking for mine.”
There was no baby seat, of course, in her father’s car. They tried to strap Elizabeth in the back, and she let out a ripping wail. So she rode up front with her mother, a pacifier in her mouth. Annie heard the baby’s breathy suck, and then, before she had a chance to start the motor, she heard the muffled admonishing ring of the cell phone in the glove compartment. With the motor on and idling, the ring was like a subterranean vibration.
“Leave it,” she told Patty, who was curious. Maybe Patty thought Brian had her number wherever she went.
“Where to?” Annie asked her. “You mind telling me what’s going on?”
Patty motioned them forward, then, once Annie had started picking up speed, she squared around in her seat, the baby for the moment deadweight in her arms.
“Brian claims I’m denying him visitation rights. He claims he has a right to see his daughter even if he can’t take her out alone. He was going to take me back to court. Now he says he’s going to take the law into his own hands. I know Brian,” she added with a bitter, wise flattening to her tone. “Brian doesn’t give a shit. He doesn’t give a shit about Lizzie. It’s his family’s making him do it. Brian would grab her and hand her over to them.”
“That’d be kidnapping.”
“Since they talked me into having the kid, they think it’s theirs. They think that gives them some kind of rights.” She pressed her mouth shut.
“‘Proprietary’ rights. If that’s what they’re claiming they’re full of shit, legally and—”
“‘Proprietary,’” Patty repeated, letting the word slide professionally off the tongue. She looked down at her baby and said it again. “‘Proprietary.’” She removed the pacifier from Lizzie’s mouth and said, “Now, let’s hear you say it.”
The baby took a couple of questioning gulps of air, whimpered once, then screamed.
Patty plugged her mouth and said, “Stop for some orange juice. That’s what she likes. That’s what she needs.”
Annie pulled into the first convenience store she came to. When she returned with the orange juice, Patty informed her, “Your mother called. She said to stop playing hide ’n’ seek. She said, ‘You sound like Patty Hendricks,’ and I said I was. She asked me how I was and where I was living. I think she wanted to sell me a house. She asked about the baby, and I said Lizzie’d be all right once she had her OJ. She asked if it was safe to assume that since she was talking to me on her daughter’s cell phone that her daughter was back in town, and I told her it was safe. That’s when she said to stop playing hide ’n’ seek.”
“I wish you hadn’t answered,” Annie said.
“I always liked your mom.” Patty was pouring the orange juice into a plastic cup she’d taken from a bag containing Pampers and other baby accessories. The baby was drinking from the lip of the cup, not from a nipple. She had to be coaxed to it, but once she’d started she drank the half-cup Patty had poured her and demanded more. Lizzie had strawberry-blond hair. It was Brian’s hair color, except Brian’s hair just looked rusty. She had Brian’s suspicious cold blue eyes, too, and a tight little dimple. Anything of Patty there? Patty had small, perfectly shaped ears, with lobes she’d never had pierced. Crazy, she’d never had her ears pieced. Both she and Annie had gotten tattoos, Annie’s a small, bruise-colored rose on her right hip, Patty a “he loves me, he loves me not” daisy on her left. But she’d never had her ears pierced. From the looks of it, that was all she and her daughter had in common, the perfectly shaped, unpierced ears.
Annie didn’t need this. Patty didn’t either. Annie wanted to say, Turn the kid over to them for Christ’s sake.
Instead she said, “Mom’s all right. I’m just not ready to deal with her now.”
Patty said, “Wanna take a trip?”
The baby let her weight settle in Patty’s arms and then went to sleep. When Patty stretched her out in the back seat she didn’t wake up.
“A road trip. Whaddaya say?”
“Is Brian really after you?”
“He says he’s on the way. He says when I least expect it.”
“If you’re scared you should go to the police.”
“Do I look scared?”
“You looked pissed.”
“Let’s let him chase us for a while. Why not?”
“We could take a ride,” Annie said.
“Legs, if all I wanted was a ‘ride’ I’d find somebody else to take me.”
“You didn’t find me.”
“No, but I’ll tell you what. I thought about you these days. Maybe I was thinking about your sister, getting blown up like that. You’re like, I can’t take any more of this shit, and it’s
