Read Online Valley of Bones by Michael Gruber - Free Book Online Page B

NW Thirteenth and pauses on the curb, in the shadow of the huge redbrick jail. Even in the shade she begins to sweat, and she hopes that she can avoid armpit stains on her suit. Before long, a silver Chrysler sedan pulls up to the curb and she enters it, grateful for the air-conditioning within. Sheryl Waits, her best friend, is wearing a linen suit too, but hers is fuchsia. Under it she wears a white polyester shirt gushing ruffles at the throat. Her lipstick is fuchsia too, and glossy, startling in its effect against her skin, which is the color of a large drip coffee into which one of those little plastic cups of half-and-half has been poured. Sheryl is nearly as tall as Lorna and twenty pounds heavier, but she has absolutelyno body image problem. She thinks she looks terrific. She goes dancing with her husband all the time, and from what Lorna can observe, he thinks she looks terrific too. Lorna often wonders if this difference is basic to their friendship, and she is occasionally subject to shaming thoughts, yet another exploitation of black womanhood, fat white girl gets fat black friend so she doesn’t look bad? But she genuinely loves the woman and feels loved in return. Is that an illusion too? Who can tell nowadays?
    The two have been friends since the first day of classes at Barry College, where they both took their MSW degrees. Except for the years when she went north to do her psych Ph.D. at Cornell, she has had lunch with Sheryl Waits on average once a week and is thoroughly integrated, so to speak, into the Waits family circle. Sheryl is a psychiatric social worker and runs a unit in a community mental health center in Liberty City, an impoverished black district of Miami, where she is considered both a saint and a tough-ass bitch, often by the same people on different days.
    They go to a moderately expensive restaurant in a waterfront hotel, with a nice view of Biscayne Bay. It is rather overpriced, they both agree, but they are worth it. They are scrupulous about taking turns picking up the tab; what they never do is to minutely divide up the bill, arguing about who had what and how much to tip. While they wait for their meal, they exchange news, which given their lives means that 80 percent of the news will be Sheryl’s, always announced with the phrase “dysfunction in the intact black family,” a torrent of amusing folderol about the husband, Leon, a patrol lieutenant in the Miami PD, the most useless husband ever invented, and the three children, defective, insubordinate, no ’count, doomed to failure and the streets. None of this is true. Sheryl is creating a mythos, propitiating the gods to continue what Lorna knows she believes is the most colossal good fortune. In return, Lorna tells some anecdotes about her patient load, including the Dideroff woman and her saints—no names, of course. Sheryl seems particularly interested in this one, but Sheryl is a church lady, a Catholic, strangely enough,and thus pretty much in the same bin, in Lorna’s mind, as Dideroff. The remainder of their conversation is devoted, as it usually is, to Lorna and men.
    “Anybody on the horizon?” Sheryl asks.
    “Not as such.”
    “Ticktock.”
    “Oh, stop! I’m only thirty-four.”
    “Uh-huh. And as far as I know, you ain’t never yet been out with anybody really gave a damn about you. All of them’re these skinny little white-boy intellectuals want you to be they momma, while they play around on you. You need to get your life sorted out, girl.”
    “I’m fine, Sheryl. Being between men is not a felony in this state. And, you know, I’m wondering why every lunch we have ends up with an elaborate critique of my sex life. I mean it’s getting a little old, don’t you think?”
    “I’ll tell you what else is getting old, darlin. You ringing on my phone at two A.M. in the morning, oh, wah, Sheryl, he done it again, boo hoo hoo!”
    “All right, I’ll never call you except during business hours,” snaps