My Absolute Darling: The Sunday Times bestseller. Gabriel Tallent

he does.”

      “He was the most imaginative person I ever met. Goddess, he could read! And talk! Can’t he?”

      “Yes.” Turtle smiles.

      “He’s a good guy,” Caroline says, “but when he’s angry, he sure can hit hard, can’t he?”

      Turtle runs her tongue along her teeth. She says, “What?” She thinks, you bitch, you whore. It is the kind of trick people play with kids, they try and get you to answer a lot of questions and then they ask you a question about your family. Turtle’s seen it before. Women are always cunts in the end. No matter how they start up. Always some axe to grind.

      Caroline sits cross-legged on her stool and watches Turtle with serene attentiveness, and Turtle thinks, you bitch. You fucking whore. I knew it would come and it came.

      “Well,” Caroline says, seeing her error, backpedaling, “he used to have a temper on him.”

      Turtle stands there.

      “I remember, when we were just kids—just—well, goddess, he had a temper. That’s all I’m saying, just that sometimes he had a temper on him. So, how is he these days?” Caroline asks.

      “I’ve got to go.” Turtle turns.

      “Wait,” Caroline says.

      Turtle strips all emotion out of her face but not quite out of her posture, and she thinks, look at me. She thinks, look at me. You know that I take this seriously. Look at me. If you ever try and take him away, you will see.

      “Did I say something wrong?”

      “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

      “Julia, sweetheart, I’m just wondering how things are at home. I can’t tell you how often I’ve thought of you over these years. How many times I thought I saw you at Corners of the Mouth, or waiting in front of the post office, or walking through Heider Field. And could never be sure, because, of course, I didn’t know you. And now that you’re here—well, of course it’s you. You look just like your mom.”

      Turtle says, “My daddy would never.”

      “I know, sweetheart, I’m just curious,” Caroline says. “You know, I was so close to your mother, I’m allowed to worry a little bit. You and I, we’d know each other if she was still alive, and you and Brett would’ve grown up like brother and sister, but instead, I don’t know you at all. I can’t help thinking that it’s a weird turn of fate, you know, that she left us and you grew up not even knowing me. And good goddess, girl, you need some women in your life!”

      Turtle stares at Caroline, thinking, I have never known a woman I liked, and I will grow up to be nothing like you or like Anna; I will grow up to be forthright and hard and dangerous, not a subtle, smiling, trick-playing cunt like you.

      “Oh,” Caroline says, “sweetheart. Let me drive you home. I’d like to talk to Marty. It’s been ages.”

      “I don’t know,” Turtle says.

      “Oh, honey, I can’t let you walk all those miles back home. I just can’t. If you’d rather, I’ll call your father and he can come pick you up, but it’s an hour out of his way, and I’d much rather just take you home myself.”

      Turtle thinks, I will be in the car with this woman, and her thinking her things about Martin. But she wants to see how Caroline talks to him. She wants to be there, she half wants to know what Caroline thinks, and half she doesn’t.

       Eight

      IT IS NEAR SUNDOWN WHEN THEY REACH THE TURNOFF FOR Turtle’s house. Caroline drives hard up the washboard gravel, just about six hundred yards, the Explorer lurching in and out of ruts. She keeps saying, “Look at this, Julia, goddess, if you knew how this place used to look.” The boys have their hands and faces pressed to the glass and look out at the fields with fascination. The driveway runs up the northern edge of the hill, and on their left it’s all shore pines standing above Slaughterhouse Gulch, which cuts west below them. Above them, they can just see the house at the crest of the hill, all of the windows dark. On their right the fields run until they meet the orchard, beyond which, and hidden from them, are the raspberry fields and Grandpa’s trailer. A stream cuts its way through the grass, visible only as a seam of thimbleberry and hazelnut. Turtle thinks, we will see how this goes, but he will not be hard on me until they are gone.

      Caroline slows down, looking at pampas grass beside the road, and says, “Daniel used to be more proud of that meadow than anything, I think. I don’t know how many hours he spent tending this meadow, and you know, it used to be just all timothy—as far as you could see, just timothy. But he’s let it get away from him, hasn’t he?”