Suddenly Moira was all for me staying put. She had sat up straight, holding her blouse in front of her like a sheaf of lecture notes, things she would tell her mother while I was sitting at the table eating leftover pizza and raising my beer bottle in a salute to Mrs Jennings for raising such an independent-minded daughter.
With her soundless laugh Moira jumped out of bed and disappeared into the bathroom. She reappeared a moment later. "Take a shower with me," she said in that parental tone.
For me, two showers in one day was unprecedented. But I was game. While undressing and tossing my clothes on the bed I pictured the two mothers in the lobby, seated across from each other gripping their coffee cups, bleary-eyed from the long drive and grouching about the filthy barbarian who had ridden off with Moira full of evil intentions.
Once in the shower, however, the two mothers went down the drain, their coffee cups rattling in the pipes, as I stood at Moira's sleek backside lathering her hair with cheap shampoo and poking her spine where it curved down to the soapy groove of her buttocks.
When I had pushed her head under the full force of the spray to rinse her hair free of foam she looked up at me with smiling white teeth and crystal blue eyes shining with that rarest form of happiness: joy in the midst of a troublesome situation. I can still see her face, how her hair streamed over her nose and cheeks, her smile puckering and then smoothing out, wanting to be kissed but too happy to keep her lips pursed. So I kissed her smile, mouth on mouth; kissing a water nymph that yearned to be human.
When we got out, fighting over a dry towel, the bathroom and much of the bedroom were as foggy as an early fall morning in San Francisco. Then every memory I had of the Bay Area collapsed into a black hole when one of the two mothers, I supposed Moira's, knocked insistently on the door.
I surrendered the towel. Moira wrapped it around herself as she went haughtily to the door and hooked the chain. She opened it the few inches allowed and said, "I just got out of the shower. You're early. I'm not dressed. Wait a bit."
"Well it's not like I've never seen you dress," a woman remarked in a sarcastic voice. "If that man in there with you can watch, why not your own mother?"
"Just wait a bit." Moira shut the door. "They're here in Josie's mom's car," she told me.
I said, zipping up my jeans, "You don't want both of them in here. One's enough."
She was tapping her cell phone and didn't hear a word I said. She rapped the dresser top with a set of knuckles. "Thanks a lot, Joe," she hissed. "Tell your mom that she can just stay in the car, and you too."
While putting on my black t-shirt and denim vest with the Roadent colors on the back, I watched Moira make faces at the ceiling. I could hear Josie's voice until Moira cut him off. "I know and I don't care! I'd do it all over again, ten times over again, 'cause she deserves it! I wish it coulda been her I drowned! And you can tell her that. Goodbye!"
Her mother's voice: "You can just open this door now or I'll never speak to you again. You know what your father thinks of this."
Moira, arms crossed, said to me in a whisper as angry as hornets, "I hate her!" My response was, "Look, tell her you'll see her at Papa Murphy's at noon. Stall her. You need time to get yourself collected."
"No I want to get this over with." She started getting dressed. I sat down and put on my socks and boots. Mrs Jennings was talking to Josie's mom. She larded her language with invective toward her 'ungrateful' daughter, for whom she had gladly made many sacrifices.
Moira stood by the door barefoot and wet-headed, her expression a cross between tranquility and fatalism. "Are you going to say anything to her?" she asked me.
I reached for my tobacco pouch. "I'll inquire if she likes cold pizza."
"Well, she hates you without ever having met you."
"I know," I clearly remember saying. "I've dealt with that before."
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