Chapter 32

July 1, 1997

GRAMMS WAS WORRIED.She told Luce so again and again. "So worried about you two," she said, zipping herself onto Luce as constantly as Luce would let her. Feeling sorry for us, Luce thought, giving us one last dose of pity before she started to disappear—not that Gramms had said as much, but Luce just didn't see any reason why she'd stick around.

But she wouldn't leave. Chain-smoking out on the deck when Luce locked her out. Twiddling her thumbs on the futon once Luce let her back in. She wouldn't intrude if they didn't want her to, Gramms said at first, and then she said, "Eh, fuck it, you can't get rid of me so quick." She asked what she could do for them. And Roo, gazing up at her with his tiny, sad puppy face, said, "Pizza."

She brought over an extra-large everything, hugged them, though it was hard to get a good grip on Roo while he jumped up and down, up and down, clapping and hollering. He picked up a piece and ate it straight down, tossing the crust back into the box. For the next piece, he ate it ingredient by ingredient, first olives and then the green peppers, sausage, onions, pepperoni, topping after topping, a piece at a time so he could build his own stack of ingredients inside, he said, until there was a thin triangle of pockmarked cheese, and then he chomped that down too.

Luce watched Roo, and she saw that Gramms did too, everyone checking to see if he was falling apart, to see what he needed, because how did you get a little kid through the death of his mother, of his aunt, the impending sea change of leaving everything he knew? That's what Luce was most worried about. She'd get to her own grief later. For now, she let him do whatever he wanted. She did not interrupt him when he sat on the velvet chair in the office, little legs sticking straight out, chatting quietly into the unconnected phone.

"I feel so sick," Roo said, picking up the fourth slice of pizza, impossible that it could even fit in his little body. Luce belched in response, her stomach lurching. The pepperoni was so beautiful, perfect circles of pink, like frisbees floating in a slippery orange sea.

Roo slid his hand into hers when they were done with the pizza, and even though his hand was covered in grease and tomato sauce, she let him. She smiled up at Gramms, wanting to make sure she saw that he was okay, that she could leave, but Gramms was looking right at her this time. The smallest little smile on her mouth, wiping a tear with her knuckle.

"Well, you monsters, what do you want next?" Gramms wanted to know. "Television? Vodka? Pop-Tarts?" Dear god how they wanted Pop-Tarts. Also the juice that was so beautifully bright and came in plastic milk jugs, sweet and perfect. And they would get frozen corn dogs. Hot dogs. Eggos. Lunchables. Pizza every day. "If I were president, I would outlaw brussels sprouts," Roo said. "They're disgusting."

"So nasty," Luce agreed.

When Roo went to the bathroom, Luce, in a rush, asked Gramms if she was sad that Una had moved away. They'd lived in the same place for so long, and didn't Una feel almost like Gramms's surrogate daughter after all that time, and did she think she'd eventually follow Una? Gramms knew the whole story, but everyone else in the Red Grove knew this version: that Una and a handful of others had left on good terms, of their own volition, and that there'd be some good changes coming soon. And that Gloria was gone too, though thank goodness not because of that sketchy man who'd been sniffing around, no, she'd finally landed a role in a theater production, but it was overseas, so she'd be gone, but her family was going to stay.

It had been part of her agreement with Una. Keep the story stitched tight.

"Course I'm sad Una's gone," Gramms said. "She was a good leader, strong and wise. Except when she wasn't. But mostly she was." Luce nodded. Gramms lit a cigarette, and Luce told her about Una's fraud, claiming all those kids as in her care for the money. She thought Gramms would be outraged, but instead she laughed hard, slapping her knee. "That clever, sneaky bitch."

"So you're not mad at me that Una left?" Luce asked. It was a childish thing to ask, but she needed to hear it.

"No, you fool," Gramms said. "I love you little shits." She scraped at a piece of dried cheese on the cardboard, plopped it into her mouth as Roo came back into the room. "I'm not going anywhere, Luce," she said. And Luce would not let herself believe it entirely, but also—this was Gramms. And so she did, a little bit. "What I am is eager to see if you guys like Hawaiian flavor pizza next time. They put pineapple on there with the ham. Pineapple!"

Tangerine, Aya, and Sam showed up at Luce's door that afternoon to check on her, help pack, they said. They didn't know any details, only that Luce's mother was still gone, her aunt had died, and that, for some reason, she and Roo were leaving. They were subdued at first, saying that they were sorry and how much it sucked, blowing bubbles with their gum while staring side-eyed at Luce, who was suddenly more interesting based on her proximity to tragedy and her trajectory into the outside world, though they must have been warned against asking too much. Their eyes traveled around the house like they were searching for clues, but they did not ask about Gloria.

Luce couldn't think about what had happened to her mother. She would not allow herself to imagine the hands of people she had known her whole life being the last thing to touch her mother as she plunged into the earth. As she was pushed? Or as they failed to keep her from falling? She would likely not get to know that part. But what she did know was that the hands of people she'd known and loved had shoveled dirt on top of her mother's body. She could not let herself think about what it meant for so many people to know and then decide to keep this secret. Instead, she sorted through her mother's record collection. Decided which lipstick to keep.

They settled into the living room, this pack of girls, unfurling themselves on the couch, the floor, trailing their limbs over half-packed boxes and falling into normal overlapping conversation soon enough. Aya fiddled with a paper clip, straightening the tight bends and then folding it into a soft arc around her teeth. Pretend braces. The other girls did the same. They talked about nothing, about eternal love, about nipple hair, who had the most or least, about Peter Rosenthal's new Prince Albert piercing, about the star sapphire Tangerine wanted, about how Aya had been hooking up with a newcomer and thought they were falling in love. "That's called lust," Tangerine said, and Aya kicked her, smiling.

Luce knew that she and Roo couldn't stay in the Red Grove. They couldn't be in this place she knew to be false, where this horror had happened. She would rent them an apartment somewhere, with matching plates and mugs. Maybe she would even find a friend of her mother's from before their days in the Red Grove, someone who had known and loved Gem, too, and they would go live with her and her husband and their two children for a while, until Luce turned eighteen. And she would have nice kids who did karate and football, and there would be a spare room with bunk beds all ready for them, no problem at all, and a high school with a biology lab and dissection tools and a greenhouse for growing carnivorous plants.

Outside, roses baked in the midday midsummer sun. "I'm too hot," Sam said, and stripped down to her underwear. "I guess I'm getting used to it here," she said, laughing as she let her legs splay in frayed underwear, hints of dark hair feathering out from her inner thighs. "I've been riding one of the horses on the ranch, Prince Cassian, taking long rides up in the hills, by the freaky red-rimmed trees. He's a beauty, but he's giving me rashes." She was rubbing along the inside of her thigh. Aya stripped down too, to show off her weird butt tan lines, Tangerine told Sam to put lip gloss on the rash to stop the itch, their world rolling forward in familiar orbits, and how strange that was, and how right.

Luce could tell them the truth about the Red Grove, everything that had happened to her mom and the true history she'd learned from the transcribed documents. It would give them the gift of full knowledge.

She could, and she might. She thought about it, taping boxes, listening. The girls splayed and hunched and passed a joint, and maybe she should, she might, she wasn't sure, the girls squeezing Luce's hand when she passed nearby, planting star stickers beside her eyes when they glowed with tears.