Free Little Blue Lies by Chris Lynch Page A

dialogue.
    â€œThe vacation she was on when I came to your house.”
    â€œWhat?” he says, all cartoon surprise. “You was at my house? Jeez, I gotta get a dog.”
    His fans don’t let him down, and the place rocks with enough rumbling laughter that Santo has to pause for the tremor to pass.
    Ronny’s stupid, but he’s winning.
    â€œDid she come home yet, Ronny?” I snap.
    â€œWhat, home? She was never away.” He looks to the flunkies again. “She was there all the time, just didn’t want to see this schmuck.”
    They are falling all over one another. I look at my pal Malcolm, to see him very diplomatically giving me sympathy eyes and a shrug through his own complicit laughter.
    I’m boiling now. I see my face in the mirror like an angry red sunset. “Liar,” I say.
    It’s all going so well for him, he’s not even insulted.
    â€œAll too true, I’m afraid, sonny. She was right down the hall, in her room. But she had a bunch of guys in there and a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door.”
    â€œShut up, Ronny.”
    â€œI think it was a basketball team. They were tall, anyway.”
    â€œThat’s your daughter, you animal.”
    â€œHey, how do you think I feel? I thought you were bad, but it’s just gotten worse and worse. She doesn’t have any quality control at all at this point. You were the beginning of the end, I think.”
    Getting louder didn’t help me, so despite his rollicking crowd support, I decide to go for quieter.
    â€œYou have no shame, Ronny Blue, you know that?”
    â€œWhat? Haven’t you been listening? I got plenty of shame.I’m rotten with shame. I got shame comin’ out the wazoo. I mean, if she did even this guy, how low could she go?”
    It’s all swim now. I don’t need to look out to the ocean for help, because the ocean has come right in here to do the job. It feels like the shop has filled right up to the ceiling, with rich, salty, sting-y seawater and we are all floating in it. I stare, squint, lean in the direction of Malcolm’s cloudy, distant reflection, and can only half-hear him over the din, or through the water, as he says slowly, “No, no, no, no,” his lips mouthing, “No, no, no, no,” and he looks like a damn fish.
    â€œWhere is sheeeeee?” I scream, out of my mind, giving Ronny Blue exactly the gift he’s been snuffling for, giving his fans just the performance they paid for.
    â€œShe’s at work, you idiot,” he snarls.
    I leap out of the chair, out of astonished Santo’s grasp. I tear off the bib, stick some bills into his hand.
    â€œThere he goes, giving to the poor again,” Ronny says.
    I dash for the door, and just as I get there, the big man himself is on his feet, blocking my way. My nose comes just about to Ronny’s lips.
    True venal wickedness has a smell all its own.
    After he has held me, wordlessly, effortlessly, right there for his chosen number of seconds, he sits back down. Malcolm comes up behind me as I open the door, until Ronnyputs out a hand. “We need to talk about tennis,” he says to Malcolm, and like that, I am running on my own.
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    If you closed your eyes while making the journey from my house to Junie’s, or mine to the beach to Junie’s, you would know at every step where you were. The air is different. The beach, of course, is all the things the beach is supposed to be—salt and sand and fried clams and sugar and Coppertone and crabs opened belly-up on the pasted low-tide mudflats. But you could also smell the difference between mine and Junie’s. Drier down my way, greener, pine jostling with honeysuckle and roses. Junie’s you can smell as you cross that invisible line, between here and there, between this and that. There is a moisture there that we don’t seem to have, rich oils, spice, air that is