Free A Ticket to Ride by Paula McLain Page B

on the floor. And then the next night, she’d want the same. It occurred to Raymond that the eight-year-old who wanted ghost stories wasn’t much changed from the toddler who poked her bottle so she couldn’t drink from it.
     
    Raymond woke to the boat’s manic rocking and the tail end of a half-dream about being pitched from a wheelbarrow. His feet were numb from sleeping in a vee, and he had a crick in his neck. From the cabin, he could smell eggs frying; didn’t Suzette know how to cook anything else? He dressed and maneuvered his way out of the bunk, complaining about his night in the torture chamber. Suzette wasn’t complaining, though she looked even more tired than she had been the night before.
    After eating and washing up, they went for a walk along Oxnard’s small and slightly run-down boardwalk. There was a saltwater taffy place and a gift shop and a shop where pink and gray and striped fish lay packed on ice, their eyes glazed and rubbery and unreal. The sun was finally out, making everything, aside from the stiff fish, look cleaner and more hopeful than it actually was. When a little boy in bib overalls ran up with a paper cup full of hermit crabs, wanting to sell them for a nickel apiece, Suzette gave him a quarter for the lot and peered in at them. Half were dead already; the other half were trying to climb over each other slowly, as if drugged or lost. She walked over to where a clot of seagulls congregated around a tar-stained pylon, and poured the cup out. “Here’s breakfast on me,” she said.
    At the end of the boardwalk, they stopped at an ice cream parlor and watched through a squeaky-clean picture window as a pretty girl in a pink apron and skirt poured thin batter into a contraption that was like a giant waffle press.
    “I work here,” Suzette said. “That’s Marie. She’s Tuesday, Thursday, Friday. I’m Mondays, Wednesdays, and weekends.”
    Inside, the air smelled like bubble gum. Everything was glass or chrome and cold-looking. Suzette introduced Raymond to the girl behind the counter, who was also quite pretty, and to her boss, Stanley, who stood to one side in a long white apron smeared with chocolate. He offered Raymond a cone on the house, like some goodwill ambassador of ice cream, but it was too early to eat dessert. Is he sleeping with her? Raymond wondered as he thanked Stanley and declined.
    Out on the wharf again, Suzette was too chipper about her job, how nice everyone was, how they each got to take home a pint of free ice cream a week.
    “You gotta get out of here, Suzy.”
    “What? Why? It’s a good job,” she said. The wind picked up the tips of her hair and blew them across her eyes in a screen. “You’re always getting down on me. I can take care of myself, you know. It’s a good job,” she repeated. “What’s wrong with it?”
    “Nothing, it’s fine. Great. But what are you doing down here?”
    “Working. Taking care of myself.”
    “Why here? You don’t know anyone.”
    “John,” she said. “And Marie and the other girls, and Stanley. I know lots of people. And why do you care, anyway? Where do you think I should be instead?” Her face was becoming blotchy, pink islands blooming along her cheekbones and just under her eyebrows.
    “Let’s drop it,” Raymond said. “It’s fine. I just want you to be happy.”
    They had run out of boardwalk. To the left, there was a horseshoe of damp sand, and off in the distance, a water-treatment plant that looked like an enormous white kettledrum groaned every few minutes. It was an ugly place, which you could forget only if you faced the ocean and refused to turn your head.
    “I’ve had a letter from Benny,” she said after some time had passed.
    There it was, then. Raymond had been waiting for her to bring up the phone call and whatever it was that had shaken her up so, but didn’t want to force the issue until Suzette was ready. Benny had always been a loaded subject, a radioactive ex-boy-friend