last journal, the one Billy had sworn he’d never read. So let Olivia think Katy was off with girlfriends; let her try to believe that. But Billy had heard the shaking in her voice. She wouldn’t have booked a plane if she thought it was all right. And even if Katy had run off with some guy named Randy, it wasn’t like her not to call and tell him where she was. She’d at least text if she didn’t want to talk on the phone. Unless she’d really left him for good.
Billy walked to the living room, saw the photos of Katy spread on the coffee table. The REV lady had said she’d need a photograph if he wanted her to make a flyer. Billy stood there, afraid to go closer to the photographs. He couldn’t believe this was really happening. The REV lady was coming tomorrow. You didn’t get calls from searchers if everything was all right. He’d seen her on the news. Shelby Waters. She helped cops find bodies, although that wasn’t how she’d put it. “No, I don’t go searching for bodies, Mr. Jenkins. I support people who have lost . . .” She went on, but that was all he heard. People who have lost.
He went back to the bathroom for another glass of water. He looked down at the grime caked at the base of the tub. It was his turn to clean the bathroom. He grabbed a piece of toilet paper, scrubbed at a black spot in the caulk where dust and dirt and moisture made that black mildew not even bleach could get out. He spit on the toilet paper, wiped at the spot. The toilet paper fell apart. He tossed it into the toilet, slammed the lid down, sat up. The cops had asked, “Are you sure nothing’s missing? Toothbrush, birth-control pills, perfume?”
He looked around. She’d left her cell phone. But she was always forgetting her cell phone. And all her favorite things were here. The birth-control case. Her Vitabath soap, the stuff she loved and they couldn’t afford so her mom always got it her for Christmas and her birthday. And there were her other things: Amber Shea Butter, bath salts, her makeup and cleansers and lotions overfilling the two drawers, cluttering the shower. It was no wonder he always put off cleaning the bathroom when he had to go to all that trouble to move her things. She could always tell when he hurried and wiped the rag around whatever was on the shelf, said, “Do it right, Billy.” But it wasn’t like she was perfect. Her truck was a garbage can on wheels. He hated to ride in that truck of her daddy’s, but the truck was one good thing he’d left her, so she kept it running, new engine, transmission, but something was always going wrong. She said she’d drive it into the ground, and she drove it hard, filling the floorboards with Coke cans, beer cans, chip bags, candy wrappers, and rocks and leaves and branches she’d found from walking around the lake. She was always filling the truck bed with driftwood and broken chairs and lamps she’d pull from the garbage on the side of the streets. “We all have our sloppy spots,” she liked to say. “We’re all entitled to our sloppy spots, and Daddy’s truck is mine.” He figured it was hers to do what she wanted with.
At least she liked the house clean, and Billy was grateful for that. No matter how messy his mind felt after a day on the job, when he came home to see the prettiness, the brightness, the clean sheets and shelves she’d brought to his house when they’d made it their house, it was all peace. She took one shabby brick house and made it something wonderful just out of scraps of things she’d find, stitch up, repair, and paint. Only one month after she moved in with him, he asked her to marry him, please. She gave one little blink and looked around as if the answer hovered around her head like a little bugging mosquito she needed to catch. She looked at him as if there were a sudden solution to something she had been puzzling over for years.
“Yes,” she said. “Billy Jenkins, I’ll marry you. I’ll even change my name for you if you want.” But later they’d talked about that. She didn’t see why a woman would give up the name she’d been born and raised with when she married some guy and odds were they’d end up divorced, and then she’d be carrying around some name like gum stuck to her shoe.
He just nodded like he agreed and said okay because there was no use arguing. He just kissed her and asked if she’d mind wearing his grandmother’s ring. And she kissed him and said it would be great. Or maybe he said that, or maybe he just thought that. But anyway, she was wearing it. He hoped she was wearing it. Wherever she was.
He looked around the bathroom that she’d wallpapered with sentimental-looking little blue cornflowers on a white pattern, girly but not too girly, a clean little print, so fine and crisp you had to look close to know it was a cornflower. She’d pointed that out—he hadn’t even known what a cornflower was. She’d been so proud of hanging that wallpaper, he hadn’t bothered to point out the places where the design didn’t line up. There’d be a row of half flowers jutting up against white space where the row of other half flowers was supposed to be. But that was all right. It was Katy. She always meant to get things perfect, and that was one of the things he loved about her, but sometimes he thought he loved her more because she didn’t get things perfect. It was the trying to get perfect, a sweetness in the trying, that he really liked.
And there on the racks were what she liked to call her “delicates”—had to be a word her mom had taught her, some proper term for panties and bras. She liked good underwear, was always cruising T. J. Maxx for cheap prices. She liked lace, black, white, green. Nothing too trampy, and little thongs, and her little bras that never matched. Now he sat there looking at her delicates, waiting for her hands, her fingers to take them down, fold them, place them in her drawer the way she liked.
She liked everything just so. She’d studied poetry and philosophy and all kinds of stuff in college. And she always had this simple, smart way of talking about things that he liked to hear but didn’t understand. Like the poem she loved: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” It was a line she liked to say. She couldn’t remember who wrote the poem, or much of the rest of the poem. All she remembered about it was something about laundry.
He couldn’t believe some guy had gotten famous for writing something like that. It was kind of obvious to him that if you liked the world, you liked the things in it, but she said it was all more mysterious, or did she say it was more complicated, than that. He didn’t know, but she liked the line so much she wrote it out in calligraphy letters and framed it. All Billy knew was that the poem was about laundry. Billy didn’t get that either, that some guy could get famous for writing about laundry. But here it was: “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” And there near the bottom corner of the frame was a little drawing she’d done: his shirt and her blouse on a clothesline. She’d said it was their clothes, and the clothes hanging there were a metaphor. He loved it when she talked like that. He loved all the pretty, useless things she made and put all over his house. Their house. But he couldn’t remember what love had to do with laundry.
“Katy,” he whispered, and felt that little rush of anger like when she came home too late from work. But then he felt that knot in his throat. She wasn’t with Frank. So maybe it was this Randy guy. But she would have called by now. She wasn’t that cruel. He thought maybe he should just take her things down, stick them in her drawer like everything was normal. He started to reach, but he couldn’t touch them. Her things would wait for her hands to put them away. “Please don’t touch her things,” he’d said when he’d seen the cop reaching for them. He was glad he’d said “please” because his voice had snapped, and the cop had flinched a little, had given him a look like One more word out of you and I’ll bust you just for getting in my way.
The cop had taken a box of her hair dye from the bathroom trash, studied it carefully, held it at a distance with his latex-gloved hand. “So she dyed her hair before she left,” he said as he dropped the box into an evidence bag. “She was touching it up,” Billy said. And the cop said, “She wasn’t a natural blond, was she?” Billy walked out of the room because he knew there was pot in the coffee can in the freezer, and he knew the cop was just looking for a reason to put cuffs on him, take him in.
He stood and looked in the mirror. He looked like a drunk. Red eyes, crazy hair, the puffed, sagging jowls of a drunk. No wonder the cop was itching for a bust. He looked like
