There was no one at the bus station to meet her.  Liz’ bus got in at about eight-thirty, and she found herself amid the crowd with her suitcase and no way to get to her father’s house.  If he thought she was going to take a goddamned taxi…  Liz scanned the bustling Detroit Greyhound station, which was a flurry of activity in the early evening, and saw no familiar faces.  Where the hell was Papa?  She was tired, she was hungry, and the more time she spent here the more she was going to want to just ditch the whole plan and go get trashed.  Thinking about seeing Andrew chased the desire back a little bit.  Not much.  What she needed to do was get to her father’s house, where no one would let her drink, even if they all had beers in hand.  Either way she wanted to get out of the bus station.  Too many ordinary people.

With a sigh and clenched teeth, she picked up her suitcase and went outside.  It was cooler than Los Angeles, no surprise there, and it was also raining.  The air in Detroit had a metallic, ozone-ish smell to it that LA lacked, and Liz realized that she had missed it a little.  It was hardly fresh country air, but there was something comforting about it.

The rain she could have lived without, though.  It was a cold October rain, too.  Lovely.  She looked up and down Mack Avenue, singing a tuneless song of irritation to herself and seeing no one who might be looking for her.  The rain plastered her green and black hair to her head, and she ignored it.  For a while she watched the cars come, and willed each set of headlights in turn to be her father with a warm car and maybe a welcoming smile (not that Ted was much good at those, but still).  It didn’t work, though; the cars sped past, one by one.  “So where the hell are you, Theodore?” she asked the rain.  She thought Theo was a better nickname for her dad, but he preferred to be called Ted.  Liz didn’t care for it much.  All of his friends called him Ted.  It made Liz think of Ted Nugent and the two men couldn’t be more different, her disciplined dad and the gonzo rocker-turned-right-wing-mouthpiece.

Hot on the heels of that was a dim gnawing worry, one she’d almost learned to ignore over the years.  If anyone else showed up late, it was no big deal, but when your father was a cop…you never knew if his watch had stopped, or if he had been stopped by something else.  Worrying that something might have happened to him was a feeling she hadn’t missed.

He was twenty minutes late.  Liz was sitting on her suitcase by then, soaked to the skin because she was too stubborn to go back inside, feeling sorry for herself and aware that she was being childish.  When a big blue Ford 4×4 pickup pulled up in front of her, she just looked up at it until Ted reached across and opened the door.  “Hey,” her father said.

“Hey, Papa,” Liz said, accenting the second syllable of “papa” as she always did, looking at the ground as she stood and picked up her suitcase.  She stowed it in the cab behind the seat and then climbed up.  “New truck,” she said, not asking.  He’d bought it since she had moved out to LA to stay near her mother three years ago, anyway.

“Like it?”

“You’re late.”

“Traffic,” Ted said by way of explanation, pulling away from the curb.  “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Liz said with a shrug that half contradicted it.  Ted didn’t reply.  Liz recognized the silence, and knew it would persist for the rest of the drive, so she reached over and turned on the radio, to fill up the silence before it could become uncomfortable.  She flipped instinctively to WHMH, which was the only Detroit radio station she liked.

On the radio, a female DJ was cheerfully razzing a caller.  “What to you mean, you want to hear ‘some Green Day?’  What song do you want to hear?”

“Uh, I dunno.  Anything, I guess.”

“You’ll have to be more specific than that, sweets.  C’mon.  Name a song.  Just one.  Just for me.  Make me want to play it.  Make me afraid not to play it.”

“Uh…play some Green Day, or, um, you’ll regret it?” the guy on the phone tried.

“You suck!” the DJ laughed.  “I’m not playing anything for you until you’ve finished your assertiveness training.”  She hung up on the caller.  Liz laughed softly, which made Ted look at her, but he didn’t say anything. 

The DJ was taking another caller.  “97 HMH with Sigue-Sigue and Vim, what do you want to hear?”

“Oh, hi.  Can I request a song?” another tentative male voice asked.

“Not the right foot to get off on with me, cutes.  I want decisiveness tonight.  I’m feeling like I need a real man.  Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want,” she said, a hint of dominatrix in her voice.

“Oh.  Sorry.  Well, I wanted to request ‘Fell on Black Days,’ by Soundgarden?”

“Hey, Vim, he knows what he wants!  Now we’re closer to being friends.”  Sigue-Sigue’s partner laughed but didn’t contribute to the caller’s humilation.  “Okay, what’s your name?”

“Joel.”

“Okay, Joel, this is the hard part; make me want to play your song.  I’m in a really crappy mood today, my boa constrictor is sick, and all I want to do is help somebody out.  So why do you want to hear Soundgarden this evening, Joel?  Appeal to my softer side.  Shut up, Vim, I have a soft side.”

“I know,” Vim said.  He had a faint British accent, and his cultured-sounding voice made for an interesting contrast to Sigue-Sigue’s suburban drawl.  “Usually you’re sitting on it.”

“Ignore him, Joel, he’s just jealous of you.  Tell me why you need to hear your song.”

“Oh, man.  Well, I kind of had a fight with my girlfriend, and I was just sitting here feeling like sh–”

“Crap!” Sigue-Sigue interrupted.  “You were feeling like crap!  You can’t say sh–” she was interrupted by a harsh censor-bleep– “on the radio.”

“Oh, sorry.  Yeah, I was feeling like crap and it’s a pretty cool song when you’re feeling like crap, you know?”

“Would it make you feel better to hear Soundgarden, Joel?” she purred.

“I don’t know.  I guess, yeah.”

“Then I’ll do it.  I’ll do it, sweetie.  You gotta promise me one thing, though, just promise Sigue-Sigue one thing.”

“Um, okay, what?”

“You gotta sing along.  I don’t care who can hear you, you have to sing as loud as you can, okay?  And I’ll sing here, too.  We’ll have a little metaphysical duet, it’ll have power, you’ll see.”  Sigue-Sigue laughed.  “Do we have a deal?”

“Uh, I have to sing on the radio?”

“Naw, of course not. Just sing in your car. Fake the words you don’t know. It’ll make you feel better, I promise.”

“Um, okay, cool.”

“All right!  Here’s a little Soundgarden, for Joel who had a fight with his girlfriend…”

Liz grinned again.  As far as she could tell, her father wasn’t paying any attention to the radio at all.  He didn’t speak all the way to the house.  Liz was used to this; he wasn’t angry, just taciturn.  Her father tended to get lost in his thoughts a lot–even with his prodigal daughter in the car–and it didn’t occur to him that they ought to talk.

Ted lived in a lower-middle class suburb of Detroit, close to Ford’s Michigan Truck Plant, where the F-150 he was driving had been built.

“Stay here a couple of days,” he said as they pulled into the driveway.  There were two other cars there, one of them presumably that of Ted’s second wife Margo.  The other was a muscle car under a tarp.  Its twin was in the garage, Liz knew.

She nodded in reply.

“I found an apartment in Ypsi for you.  You can go and check it out, see what you think.”  The tone in Ted’s voice hinted that it had better be okay, because there wasn’t another option.

She didn’t particularly want to live in Ypsilanti, but at least it was a half hour’s drive from Ted’s house.  He wouldn’t be able to crowd her too much.  “Furniture?” she asked as she slid out of the truck.

“We might have some stuff in the basement.  And Frank McIntyre is going to let you work receiving at the fish store, starting Monday.”  He closed the truck’s door, and the sound seemed to punctuate the end of the discussion about Liz’ apartment.

She wanted to argue with the phrase, ‘let you work,’ which irritated the shit out of her, but it wasn’t in her to bitch right now.  She felt tired, overwhelmed, and she’d been wearing the same clothes for three days.

“Tomorrow we can call about that car I told you about,” Ted said as he opened the front door for her.  Ted lived with his new wife Margo in a small ranch house that was similar to, but not the same as, the one Liz had grown up in.  It was a blue-collar suburb, one of several that had been commissioned by the great Henry Ford himself to house his factory workers.  These days much of Garden City still served basically the same function.

Margo came out of the kitchen to greet Liz.  Liz hadn’t seen her stepmother in three years, and had never been inclined to shed any tears about it.  Maybe it was because the difference in their ages was less than ten years, or maybe it was because Margo was shorter than she was.  But then, most women were shorter than Liz.  Margo was too damn young, that was the problem.

Margo had blond hair the texture of cornsilk, sparse freckles, a light mall tan, and vacuous blue eyes.  Thanks to her Swedish Barbie appearance, Liz had been surprised to discover that there really was something going on in her head.  Of course, it was usually self-serving and petty, but there you were.  “Elizabeth,” Margo said, hands outstretched to take each of hers and squeeze.  “It’s so good to see you.”

“Nice to see you, too,” she murmured, submitting to a brief hug.  Hugs were not a part of Margo’s MO.  Liz guessed that there’d been an argument or two about letting her stay here.  Point for Ted.  “I’m so wiped out,” she said, “I just want to take a bath and fall into bed, if that’s okay.”

“You’re not hungry?  We’ve got some meatloaf and potatoes left over from dinner.”

“Thanks,” Liz said with a smile.  “I’ll grab some after I clean up.  Don’t worry about me, I’ll just come out and grab it.”

Big mistake; the kitchen was Margo’s undisputed, unchallenged territory, and had been ever since she learned that Ted’s first wife ran a restaurant.  Unfortunately, Midori was a better cook.  “I’ll warm up a plate for you,” was the response.  “It’s no problem!  It’ll be on the counter when you’re ready.”

It was stupid to argue, so Liz didn’t.  It wasn’t even her house.  Avoiding the fight also got Liz into the bathtub a lot sooner.  She ran a near-scalding bubble bath, immersing herself to the neck, and lay in a near-comatose state for an unknown amount of time.  It wasn’t quite floating, but it felt good nonetheless, made everything seem a little farther away and put a hundred little stressful things on hold.

When she grew tired of soaking with her eyes half-closed, Liz wet a washcloth and began to scrub.  She soaked the rag, wrung it out, then wrapped it around her fist to create a tight, rough surface.  She applied this to her legs first, scrubbing without soap, taking the top layer of skin off in little gray curls like eraser shavings.  When she lowered her reddened legs into the water, it burned deliciously.  Liz remembered her mother giving her scrub-baths as a child, and a faint smile touched her lips as she washed mindlessly, meditatively, working her way up her body from legs to belly, sides, chest, arms, and finally her neck.  She felt like she was shedding more than just the dead skin that she rinsed out of the washcloth after finishing each section of her abused body.  Los Angeles was scrubbed away, and all the stupid things she’d done were scrubbed away, and that horrible bus was scrubbed away (and Denise with it).  Soon she was submerged again, fresh and pink.  Liz ducked her head underwater and scrubbed her face as well, leaving it as raw and new as the rest of her.  The last thing she did with the bath water was to wash her hair quickly, using the showerhead to rinse.  Now she could be someone else.  She told herself she felt like someone else, but she still wanted a drink.

When she got out, she found an oversized shirt to sleep in and put her hair up in a towel.  The bath had taken about an hour.

Margo had gone to bed, but Ted was still up, watching ESPN on the big-screen television that dominated one wall of the living room.  “Liz,” he said when she entered the room with her plate of leftovers.  She sat on the couch so she could see him in his La-Z-Boy.

“Don’t you have to get up early?” she asked.

Her father nodded.  He handed her a breathalyzer without a word.

Liz had to work to keep the scowl off of her face as she blew, equally wordless.  He didn’t have to goddamn test her now, she hadn’t even been in town for half a day.  The fact that she’d thought seriously (and more than once) about grabbing a fifth of whiskey while she was on the bus didn’t help.  She hadn’t done it, but she felt as though she’d been caught anyway.

Ted was satisfied with the negative result, anyway.  “Good,” he said, tossing the cellophane in the trash.

“I don’t like asking for help,” Liz said, looking at the floor.  Her left hand trembled.  She grabbed it with the right, and squeezed it hard.  A knuckle popped.

“It ain’t going to be easy.”  Her father didn’t look at her, either.  They’d never communicated well.  Ted was a man’s man, and had never known what exactly to make of the child who was, in the great scheme of things, supposed to be a first-born son but had turned out female.  He’d tried, of course; Liz could remember many an awkward moment during her childhood when Papa had attempted to make sense of tea parties and hopscotch.  And just about the time he started to get the hang of it (her mother had confided once that he had even read a Sweet Valley High book or two, as research), Liz had turned tomboy on him.  Even the newly sensitive Ted didn’t have the slightest idea how to give fatherly advice to a girl who was more likely to beat up the boys than to run home crying after being teased.  Liz had never known if he’d been proud or disappointed in her, or maybe a little bit of both.  Then, when she was sixteen, the divorce had happened, and since then she got nothing from him, except the cool, appraising look he was giving the television now, although it was clearly meant for her.  “Frank’s going to work you hard,” Ted said.  “You’re going to be too tired to think about drinking.”

“Good,” Liz said.  “I need the exercise.”

“How’s your mother?” Ted asked.  He didn’t sound particularly interested, and never did.

“Same as always.  The restaurant is doing well.”  She felt somewhat abashed, because she didn’t know.  Something in Ted’s tone suggested that she ought to know more about what her mother was up to.  “She hired a chef from Milan.”

“The number for the apartment complex is on the table,” he said before she was finished.  “Ask to talk to Annie, when you call.”