“Well, they’ll have to prove it,” the lawyer, the investigator in me tells her. At the same time I am reminded that Chandonne almost did something to me. He didn’t actually do it, no matter his intention, and his eventual legal defense will make a big issue of this fact.
“They can do whatever they want,” Lucy replies, as hurt and outrage swell. “They can fire me. Or bring me back in and park my butt at a desk in some little windowless room somewhere in South Dakota or Alaska. Or bury me in some chicken-shit department like audio-visual.”
“Kay, you haven’t had coffee yet.” Anna attempts to dispel the mounting tension.
“So maybe that’s my problem. Maybe that’s why nothing’s making any sense this morning.” I head to the drip machine near the sink. “Anybody else?”
There are no other takers. I pour a cup as Lucy leans into deep stretches, and it is always amazing to watch her move, liquid and supple, her muscles calling attention to themselves without deliberation or fanfare. Having started life pudgy and slow, she has spent years engineering herself into a machine that will respond the way she demands, very much like the helicopters she flies. Maybe it is her Brazilian blood that adds the dark fire to her beauty, but Lucy is electrifying. People fix their eyes on her wherever she goes, and her reaction is a shrug, at most.
“I don’t know how you can go out and run in weather like this,” Anna says to her.
“I like pain.” Lucy snaps on her butt pack, a pistol inside it.
“We need to talk more about this, figure out what you’re going to do.” Caffeine defibrillates my slow heart and jolts me back into a clear head.
“After I run, I’m going to work out in the gym,” Lucy tells us. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
“Pain and more pain,” Anna muses.
All I can think of when I look at my niece is how extraordinary she is and how much unfairness life has dealt her. She never knew her biological father, and then Benton came along and was the father she never had, and she lost him, too. Her mother is a self-centered woman who is too competitive with Lucy to love her, if my sister, Dorothy, is capable of loving anyone, and I really don’t believe she is. Lucy is possibly the most intelligent, intricate person I know. It has not earned her many fans. She has always been irrepressible and as I watch her spring out of the kitchen like an Olympic runner, armed and dangerous, I am reminded of when she began the first grade at age four and a half and flunked conduct.
“How do you flunk conduct?” I asked Dorothy when she called me in a rage to complain about the horrible hardship of being Lucy’s mother.
“She talks all the time and interrupts the other students and is always raising her hand to answer questions!” Dorothy blurted over the phone. “Do you know what her teacher wrote on her report card? Here! Let me read it to you! Lucy does not work and play well with others. She is a show-off and a know-it-all and is constantly taking things apart, such as the pencil sharpener and doorknobs”
Lucy is gay. That is probably most unfair of all because she can’t outgrow it or get over it. Homosexuality is unfair because it creates unfairness. For that reason, it broke my heart when I found out this part of my niece’s life. I desperately don’t want her to suffer. I also force myself to admit that I have managed to ignore the obvious up until now. ATF isn’t going to be generous or forgiving, and Lucy has probably known this for a while. Administration in D.C. won’t look at all she has accomplished, but will focus on her through the distorting lens of prejudice and jealousy.
“It’ll be a witch hunt,” I say after Lucy has left the house.
Anna cracks eggs into a bowl.
“They want her gone, Anna.”
She drops shells into the sink and opens the refrigerator, pulling out a carton of milk, glancing at the expiration date. “There are those who think she is a hero,” she says.