The Lies that Bind by Judith Van Gieson Page A

not?”
    â€œHe’s all right. The Kid doesn’t care what he looks like.”
    â€œDon’t bet on it. The older Michael got, the more he looked like Emiliano, and that was a problem for Whit. Here, I want to show you something.” She took a small box out of her purse and opened it. Inside was a silver heart-shaped locket on a bed of cotton. The locket was engraved on the back with the initials VF. Cindy opened it and showed me the picture inside, a handsome young couple smiling like newlyweds for the camera, a fair-haired boy, a dark-haired girl. “Michael and Justine,” she said.
    â€œPeople still wear lockets?” I asked. “It seems kind of old-fashioned.”
    â€œThis one had been in Justine’s family for ages. Mina Alarid gave it to me at the funeral Sunday. She said Justine would want me to have it.”
    â€œWhat does VF stand for?”
    â€œVerónica Falcón. It was Justine’s grandmother’s name.”
    I examined the picture. I still thought Michael looked a lot more like Cindy than Emilio, and I said so.
    â€œ Really?” she asked, surprised. “Michael and Whit never got along very well, and it got worse as Michael got older. That’s why he came here to live with Mother. I had Michael for such a short time, Neil, and I loved him so much. He was a wonderful kid. I wish you could have known him. You would have loved him too. Losing him was like cutting my heart out with a pair of pinking shears and flushing it down the john. Sometimes I’ve almost wished I’d had an abortion. I wouldn’t have had Michael, but I wouldn’t have lost him either. You know I would have had an abortion, but Mother found out I was pregnant and wouldn’t let me. Besides, I didn’t have the nerve.”
    â€œIt takes courage to raise a child too,” I said. And to have an illegitimate child back then took a lot.
    â€œBut an abortion? They performed them on the kitchen table with a paring knife and no anesthesia. Remember?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œEmilio enlisted and went to Vietnam when Mother wouldn’t let us get married. You knew that, didn’t you?”
    â€œYes.” That’s what the sixties were like. The women had illegal abortions, and the men fought an illegal war. Both of them confronted their darkest fears, found out exactly what they were capable of, and nobody was ever the same again.
    The phone on the kitchen counter rang. Cindy stared as if it were a coiled snake and let it go on ringing. It takes a lot of patience or a lot of denial to sit beside a ringing phone. I don’t have that much of either. I was close to picking it up myself, when Cindy sighed and reached for the receiver. “Hello,” she said in a tentative voice and then: “This is Mrs. Reid.”
    She kept a message pad beside the phone, and she drew birds in flight on it while she listened. “You’ll get it next week,” she said. She hung up and went back to our talk. “I’ve envied you sometimes, Neil.”
    â€œWhy?” Because I wasn’t married? Because I was a lawyer? Because I had a lover who was younger and darker and fixed cars for a living?
    â€œBecause you’ve had so many men. I’ve only had two, Emiliano and Whit.”
    She’d hit the high end and the low, maybe what was in between was filler. “It only takes one good one,” I said.
    â€œGuys always liked you. Why, do you think?”
    Because even back then I had the husky voice of a woman who smoked? “They didn’t like me that much.”
    â€œYeah, they did. Come on, what was it?”
    â€œTits.”
    â€œ That’s it?”
    â€œBasically. Do you ever wonder what it will be like to walk into a bar or anywhere else and not have every guy in the place staring at them? It’s like going through life holding an armful of squirming puppies. I kind of look forward to being a gray, sagging