Pretty Girls by Karin Slaughter Page B

her cheek. There was a small rash of scraped skin where her face had grazed the brick wall in the alley. Everyone assumed the injury had happened during the robbery, not before.
    Ginny said, “When you were a little girl, I used to give you Scotch and sugar for your cough. Do you remember that?”
    “Yes, I do.”
    She smiled at Claire with genuine affection, which was something Claire could not quite get used to. Last year, the old woman had been diagnosed with something called pleasant dementia, which meant that she had forgotten all the perceived slights and neurotic obsessions that had made her such a nasty bitch for the first eight decades of her life. The transformation had made everyone wary. They were constantly waiting for the old Ginny to rise up phoenix-like and burn them all anew.
    Helen told Claire, “That was nice that your tennis team showed up.”
    “It was.” Claire had been shocked that they’d made an appearance. The last time she’d seen them, she was being shoved into the back of a police car.
    “They were dressed so impeccably,” Ginny said. “You have such lovely friends.”
    “Thank you,” Claire said, though she wasn’t sure whether they had attended Paul’s funeral because they were still her friends or because they couldn’t pass up a juicy social event. Their behavior at the cemetery had offered no clues as to which was the truth. They had kissed Claire’s cheek and hugged her and told her how sorry they were, and then they had all wandered off while Claire was greeting other mourners. She couldn’t hear them, but she knew what they were doing: picking apart what everyone was wearing, gossiping about who was sleeping with whom and who had found out and how much the divorce would cost.
    Claire had found herself having an almost out-of-body experience where she floated like a ghost over their heads and heard them whispering, “I heard Paul was drinking. Why were they in that alley? What did they think would happen in that part of town?” Someone, invariably, would make the old joke, “What do you call a woman in a black tennis dress? A Dunwoody widow.”
    Claire had been friends with these types of mean girls all of her life. She was pretty enough to be the leader, but she’d never been able to engender the type of fearless loyalty it took to marshal a pack of she-wolves. Instead, she was the quiet girl who laughed at all the jokes, straggled behind them at the mall, sat on the hump in the backseat of the car, and never, ever—ever—let them know that she was secretly fucking their boyfriends.
    Ginny asked, “Which one were you charged with assaulting?”
    Claire shook her head to clear it. “She wasn’t there. And it wasn’t assault, it was disorderly conduct. That’s an important legal distinction.”
    Ginny smiled pleasantly. “Well, I’m sure she’ll send a card. Everyone loved Paul.”
    Claire exchanged a look with her mother.
    Ginny had hated Paul. And she had hated Claire with Paul even more. Ginny had been a young widow when she raised Claire’s father on a paltry income from a secretarial job. She wore her struggles like a badge of honor. Claire’s designer clothes and jewelry and the big houses and the pricey cars and the luxury vacations had come as a personal affront to a woman who had survived the Great Depression, a world war, the death of a husband, the loss of two children, and countless other hardships.
    Claire could vividly recall the time she’d worn red Louboutins to visit her grandmother.
    “Red shoes are for toddlers and whores,” Ginny had quipped.
    Later, when Claire had told Paul about the exchange, he’d joked, “Is it creepy that I’m fine with either?”
    Claire put her empty glass back in the console. She stared out the window. She felt so out of time and place that she momentarily didn’t recognize the scenery. And then she realized that they were almost home.
    Home.
    The word didn’t seem to fit anymore. What was home without