Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding

for this mini high school reunion. I’m the one who dragged her down here, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy.” She leaned forward to shake his hand, her breasts all but spilling into the air between them.
    “Yes, I seem to recall that it’s pretty hard to get Kate to do anything she doesn’t want to do.” Robert’s smile grew wicked. He’d spent six months in high school trying to seduce me, then dropped me like the proverbial hot potato when it became apparent I was a lost cause.
    “We should get going,” Jo Lynn stated, then leaned toward Robert, conspiratorially. “Our mom is terrorizing the tenants of the old folks home she lives in. We have a meeting.”
    “Interesting family,” Robert Crowe said, as Jo Lynn led me away.
    “So, did you sleep with him?” she asked on the way to the Palm Beach Lakes Retirement Home.
    “No, of course not.”
    “But you wanted to,” she persisted.
    “I was seventeen; I didn’t know what I wanted.”
    “You wanted to sleep with him, but you were such a goody-goody that you didn’t, and you’ve always regretted it.”
    “For God’s sake, Jo Lynn, I haven’t thought about the man in years.”
    When I refused to discuss him further, Jo Lynn launched into a recap of the day’s proceedings. Angela Riegert was a disaster as a witness, she pronounced; her testimony had been more helpful to the defense than to the prosecution. It didn’t matter that she’d placed the defendant beside the victim shortly before the girl’s disappearance; all the jury would remember was that Angela Riegert was a beer-guzzling, marijuana-smoking, half-blind half-wit.
    Marcia Layton was similarly gutted, then tossed aside, as were the rest of the day’s witnesses, all of whom put Colin Friendly squarely in the vicinity of the murdered girls at the time they went missing. “Inconclusive,” Jo Lynn pronounced stubbornly. “Eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable.”
    There was no point in arguing. Jo Lynn had always believed exactly what she wanted to believe. She saw what she wanted to see. When she looked at Colin Friendly, she saw a lonely little boy with a sad smile, and she believed him to be innocent, as much a victim as each of the women he stood accused of murdering. Possibly more.
    It had been the same way with Andrew and Daniel and Peter. Andrew, whom she married at eighteen, broke firstone arm, then the other; Daniel, whom she married six years later, stole her money and cracked her ribs; Peter, whom she married just after her thirty-second birthday and divorced just prior to her thirty-third, threw her down a flight of stairs on their wedding night. Still, in the end, it was Andrew, Daniel, and Peter who did the walking. I tried to get her into therapy, but she would have none of it. “It’s Mom’s fault,” she’d joke. (“Kidding on the square,” our mother would say, shoulders slumping forward, accepting responsibility.)
    “Would you slow down a bit,” Jo Lynn whined as we reached the front door of the retirement home.
    “Why’d you have to wear such high heels?” I asked, transferring my frustration from her to her fuchsia pumps.
    “You don’t like my shoes?”
    The lobby was large and cheery, all white paint and green trees and chairs covered in bold floral prints. At least a dozen senior citizens sat in a row of white wicker rocking chairs, staring out the large front window, as if at a drive-in movie. Thinning hair, liver spots, stooped backs, and sunken faces, an old man fumbling with his fly, an old woman adjusting her teeth—I looked at them and saw the future. It scared me half to death.
    Our mother was waiting for us outside Mrs. Winchell’s office. “Where have you been? It’s not like you to be late.” She looked from me to Jo Lynn.
    “Don’t give me that look,” Jo Lynn said immediately, her defenses, like fists, already raised.
    “I was just thinking how nice it is to see you,” our mother said.
    Jo Lynn made a sound halfway between a