Ronnie never touched his daughter when she was young, really young. He'd never do a thing like that. It wasn't until his wife left him and Cindy had started to develop and looked like her mother, that long raven hair like her mother's that hadn't been cut since the sixties and the same eyes and the same mouth and he thought she was Suzanne when he was drunk enough and he came to her at night and took her into his arms and cried, and loving and needing his wife, he held his daughter and pushed into her and made desperate, tender, little boy needing his momma love to her. Why had Suzanne left them? Didn't she think this would happen? How could she do this to him, to Cindy? leaving her growing daughter alone with a boy-man who couldn't live without her and drank himself into a stupor every night so he didn't recognize what he was doing, that Cindy was his daughter not his wife? How could she have done that to them? But of course she couldn't have known, didn't think, was so desperate herself to escape her slavery, another woman with nowhere to go. Even the slaves of Egypt after 400 years had the hope of the promised land, they had to cross the sea to get there but once there they were free. But for women like Suzanne there was nowhere to go where they would be safe from men who would enslave them with their strong bodies or their little boy eyes, tricking them or beating them, whatever it took and there was nowhere to go but inside, pretend to sleep, not to hear them, not to feel them, abandon your own body and the children of your own body…so Suzanne was thinking when she rode the bus to nowhere Ronnie could find her. So Dancer thought as she watched her do it.
Dancer guessed what was going on from Ronnie's disjointed monologues on the bus. She had wanted to avoid him and usually did but sometimes he caught her and she sat eyes forward, straight and silent until her stop when she excused herself and walked the remaining two blocks to work. She was afraid he'd follow her to the bookstore and one day he did, keeping apace with her and turning into the door as if he'd known all along where she worked. He was talking about his daughter running away and how worried he was and then he stopped and she looked at him for the first time, startled, and saw his eyes riveted on the newspaper headlines: the body of a 14 year old girl had been found in a culvert under I-25 near the bicycle path in southeast Denver and the police said she looked to have been dead for a couple of days.
"Oh my god," Dancer said and looked back at Ronnie but he had gone. She looked up the street and didn't see him. She thought she'd better call the police but when she thought about it she realized she had nothing real to say. She watched people on the bus and often they talked to her and she made up stories about them…this sounded like a story she'd made up. She was afraid of him and went home watchfully. She thought she should look for another job on another bus route or maybe move to a mountain town.