Await Your Reply Read Free Page B

you?” George Orson said.
    “How about me, what?” Lucy said. She lifted her head.
    “What would you be if you weren’t Lucy?” George Orson said.
    Which was a good question.
    She hadn’t answered him, though she found herself thinking about it, imagining—for example—that she would like to be the type of girl who had the name of a famous city.
Vienna
, she thought, that would be pretty. Or
London
, which would be wry and vaguely mysterious, in a tomboyish way.
Alexandria:
proud and regal.
    “Lucy,” on the other hand, was the name of a mousy girl. A comical name. People thought of the television actress, with her slapstick ineptitude, or the bossy girl in the
Peanuts
comic strip. They thought of the horrible old country song that her father used to sing: “You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille.”
    She would be glad to be rid of her name, if she could think of a good replacement.
    Anastasia
, she thought.
Eleanor?
    But she didn’t say anything because a part of her thought that such names might sound a little vulgar and schoolgirl-ish. Names that a low-class girl from Pompey, Ohio, would think were elegant.
    One of the nice things about George Orson was that he didn’t know much about her past.
    They didn’t talk, for example, about Lucy’s mother and father, the car wreck the summer before her senior year, an old man running a stoplight while the two of them were on their way to the Home Depot to buy some tomato plants that were on sale. Killed, both of them, though her mother had lingered for a day in a coma.
    The fact that people at school had known about it had always felt like an invasion of privacy. A secretary had given Lucy condolences, and Lucy had nodded, graciously she thought, though actually she found it kind of repulsive that this stranger should know her business.
How dare you
, Lucy thought later.
    But George Orson had never said a word of condolence, though she guessed that probably he knew. He knew the basics, anyway.
    He knew, for example, that she lived with her sister, Patricia, though Lucy was relieved that he had never actually seen her sister. Patricia, herself only twenty-two, not very bright, Patricia who worked at the Circle K Convenient Mart most nights and with whom, since the funeral, Lucy had less and less contact.
    Patricia was one of those girls that people had been making fun of for almost all the years of her life. She had a thick, spittley lisp, easily imitated and cartoonish, a bungler’s speech impediment. She wasn’t fat exactly, but lumpy in the wrong places, already middle-aged-looking in junior high, with an unfortunately broad, hen-like figure.
    Once, in grade school, they were walking to school together and some boys chased them, throwing pebbles.
    Patricia, Patrasha,
Has a great big ass-a!
    the boys sang.
    And that had been the last time that Lucy had walked with Patricia. After that, they had begun to go their separate ways once they left for school, and Patricia had never said anything; she had just accepted the fact that even her sister wouldn’t want to walk with her.
    After their parents died, Patricia had become Lucy’s guardian—perhaps officially still was? Though now Lucy was almost nineteen. Not that it mattered in any case, because Patricia had no idea where she was.
    She did feel a pang about that.
    She had the image of Patricia and her pet rats—the rats’ cages stacked in the eaves, and her sister coming home late from her job at the Circle K, kneeling there in that red and blue vest with the name tag that said PATARCIA , talking to the rats in that crooning voice, the one rat, Mr. Niffler, with an enormous tumor coming out of its stomach that it was dragging around and her sister had paid to have the veterinarian remove it and then it
grew back
, the tumor, and still Patricia persisted. Showering the dying creature with love, buying it plastic toys, talking baby talk, making another appointment at the vet.
    Lucy was glad that she had