Free Carry the One by Carol Anshaw Page A

apartment had also—between the parties—been Alice and Carmen and Nick’s home. There was little of the empty nest to it now, though. The girls’ room had been refurbished into Loretta’s office when she got her realtor’s license. Nick’s was now home to a giant ornate wood console television Alice called the Credenza Cordoba, and a low-slung, U-shaped sofa. Loretta referred to the room as the “entertainment center.” Everything else was much the same as it had always been. The whole apartment had its own distinct, static smell.
    Gabe zipped through the crowd in the living room and headed for Nick’s old reflector telescope, which had, over time, washed up against the far wall of windows. Carmen set her cake at the end of the buffet and told Walter, “Nothing on this table is for dogs.” At the center of the buffet was Loretta’s infamous Texas jailhouse chili. Carmen got a cautionary aura of heartburn as she stared it down.
    She checked out the crowd, mostly old friends of her parents, the people who represented adulthood to her when she was a child. Paco and Cindy Beecham. Larry and Giselle Zorn. Phaedra Carlson, who was now widowed and on her own.
    She found her brother sitting by himself against the wall beyond the buffet table, a little too upright on a frayed sofa, holding a can of ginger ale as though it were a grenade on which he had just pulled the pin.
    “Hey,” he said, and shifted over a little to make room for her.
    She was by now used to the thinner, more aquiline nose that emerged from the reconstruction after it had been broken by Casey Redman’s father. It made him look maybe British, like someone who collected butterflies and had read all of Trollope. She also noticed that his hair was meticulously cut, the tips blonder than the rest.
    “Has Olivia been doing something bleachy here?” She pulled at a piece for inspection.
    “Ouch. Come on, you think that doesn’t hurt? What can I say? When you live with a hairdresser, shit happens.” His breath, as usual, was deeply wintergreen. It was like talking to someone in a Norwegian forest. He used tiny squeeze bottles of concentrated freshener he picked up at truck stops. He had used this stuff since the days when he needed to show up for work, but was dead drunk.
    “Where is she anyway?”
    “She’s supposed to be parking, but my guess is she’s just sitting in the car, building enough critical mass to come in here.”
    Carmen was grateful—everyone was—for Olivia’s presence in Nick’s life, for the constraining effect she had on him. She was the one thing he seemed to value more than getting high. Carmen no longer thought of Olivia as a murderer. By now she was stern and focused, a new person who seemed to have been designed in opposition to the stoner who casually got behind the wheel and killed a girl. Plus she had paid, paid a little for each of them. They were all aware of this.
    “Well, sure. I can see that.” And she could. She could picture Olivia in sharp detail, sitting in her car down the block, drumming her fingers on the steering wheel. “So what’s up? How is it being back at school?”
    “It’s weird. You drop out for even just a couple of years and you come back and you’re already the old guy.”
    “But you’re finishing the thesis,” Carmen prompted.
    “Sort of. The thing is, I have way too much stuff. I’ve got to start pruning. Tons of new information is rolling in. By the time you find something and pin it down, something more has been discovered. Not just theoretical stuff, but stuff we can actually see. We have better scopes, and more ways of looking. Radio scopes, of course. Also X-ray scopes. They’re getting ready to send a big reflector scope into space, to get clear views from outside our atmosphere. The bang put a lot into motion and now we have more ways to watch the action.”
    “I love the big bang,” Carmen said.
    “Yeah.” He exhaled wearily. “Everyone loves it. It’s very