by Kristin Bair
Agatha smacks her fingers on the keyboard and types as if her very life depends on it. It probably does.
Agatha Arch:
“It doesn’t matter if this woman’s need is legit or not. No interlopers in Wallingford. She doesn’t belong here.”
But before she can chant “Interloper, Interloper, Interloper,” the Moms choir is lobbing kumbaya grenades at her head. “Duck!” Agatha yells. “Dive, dive!” but it is useless. Within seconds, she is buried under an avalanche of manufactured love for this needy stranger who is most assuredly a dangerous ne’er-do-well of one sort or another.
Aren’t these women on Twitter? Don’t they read newspapers? Aren’t they tuned in to NPR as they drive their littles to soccer practice? There are all kinds of real-life examples of overdoses, break-ins, burglaries, kidnappings, identity thefts, and murders in the world. The list is endless. But yet the Moms … and this:
Sally Snow:
“Really, Agatha? Really? We don’t have room for empathy and kindness in Wallingford?”
Blonde Brenda What’s-Her-Name:
“Ouch.”
phyliss-with-one-l-and-two-esses:
“agatha.”
Agatha Arch:
“Phyllis.”
Kerry Sheridan:
“Agatha, perhaps you should put your energy to cleaning up the shed mess.”
Rachel Runk:
“Or perhaps it’s time to write another book. Aren’t you on a deadline?”
The Moms know Agatha is an author. A good many of them read—and supposedly love—her books, and, on her mouthiest days, she is pretty sure her well-known-ness as the town’s most prominent literary figure is the only thing that keeps Moms group administrator Marty Snow from kicking her out for good.
Meredith Wilson:
“Oh, Agatha, don’t be such a fraidy-cat. I’m sure this woman is harmless.”
Agatha Arch:
“Fraidy-cat, Meredith? Is that all you’ve got? If you’re going to call me names, do it with gusto. Call me an invertebrate, a mollycoddled milksop, a lily liver. For God’s sake, call me a chickenshit. Show some creativity.”
Kelly Prescott:
“Oh, Agatha, go eat a bean.”
Kelly Prescott—a flag-flying member of Poston’s posse—is the master of hitting where it hurts. Various incidents throughout the years have revealed Agatha’s soft underbelly and the fears that follow her this way and that: mice, spiders, the dark, ghosts, drowning, strangers, lightning, driving over bridges, alien invasion, and, of course, beans.
How dare Meredith and Kelly call her out on this. Fear is real. Fear is mighty. Fear is not to be fucked with.
But then …
Melody Whelan:
“Agatha Arch, let’s offer a gentle hand to this lost soul.”
At this, Agatha’s head pops off and shoots around her kitchen like an unleashed helium balloon. While all the Moms irk her from time to time, Melody Whelan catapults her into a frenzied state like no other. If it were up to the Kumbaya Queen, the citizens of Wallingford would throw open the gates, roll out the red carpet, and spoon-feed every lost soul in crisis. It takes everything Agatha has not to race to Melody’s house, storm the front door, and stuff a potato in her yawning gob.
Agatha Arch:
“Bah!”
She doesn’t bother to read the rest of the responses. These women won’t recognize danger until it leaps at them from behind a silver Mercedes.
She clicks out of Facebook, hops into her Mini Cooper (Coop, for short), flicks her Bear Grylls bobblehead, and heads to the intersection of Apple Street and Route 54. She needs to see this young woman for herself. She needs to make sense of this new development. Since the boys will be getting off the bus at Dax’s new home a mile or so away, she is free to do as she likes. A strange and awful truth she may never get used to.
She parks in the grocery store lot and steps out with her binoculars. She lifts them to her eyes and scans the area. Traffic is light and this young woman—this Interloper—is nowhere to be seen, proving she has some smarts. No cars = no money. The swatch of grass in the center of the five-way intersection is empty other than a soda can, so Agatha adds “litterer” and “imbiber of unhealthy drinks” to the list of crimes she is compiling.
Then she opens the Moms group on her phone, writes, “At Apple54. Interloper nowhere to be seen. Anyone else spot her?” then hops in her car and putters to Hillway Elementary School to catch a glimpse of her boys as they board the bus.
She blasts her horn as she inches past the Moms idling in their Escalades and Teslas on the side road where they are not supposed to wait. Once in the proper parent pickup line, she turns off the car. No idling; it’s a rule. Then she opens the Moms group.
Agatha Arch:
“Car line tennis-whites ladies at Hillway, put down your skim lattes, get off your damn phones, and get in the parent pickup line with the rest of us riffraff. You and your snitty-snotty brats are not special rays of sunshine who get to avoid the chaos.”
Minutes later, when Jason and Dustin exit the side door of the school and get in line for bus 9B, Agatha’s heart goes kapowy. Look at them. She waves to Principal Bandolino, pulls out of line, and follows the bus all the way to what will be the boys’ new stop a few days a week. Dax is waiting by the fire hydrant, smiling and waving, making sure they know to get off the bus right here on the first agreed-upon Friday at the dog walker’s house. How thoughtful of him to hook up with a floozy on the same bus route so the boys’ routine doesn’t have to change all that much and how kind of Agatha to say yes when he’d asked for his first Friday dad day. It wouldn’t be this way every week; they’d agreed to play it by ear until they figured out a schedule. But even this, one day at the new stop, hurt like hell.
Tears drip from Agatha’s eyes as she watches them disembark, backpacks dragging on the ground behind them, Dustin’s baseball cap clipped to his belt loop.
Jason needs a haircut.
Dustin needs longer pants.
She needs them.
She will follow these two to the ends of the earth.
Hands too sweaty to drive, she parks behind a pickup and plucks Bear from the dashboard. “Why, Bear? Why?” she says, cradling him against her cheek. “I’m so afraid I’m going to lose them forever.”
“It’s okay,” Bear whispers in her ear. “Fear sharpens us.”
“Shut up,” she says, then sticks his foot in her mouth and bites down. Hard.
Chapter Seven
“I wanted to kill him,” Agatha says. “Actually kill him. And I could have. I could have driven that cleaver right through his massive balding head.” Her teeth hurt from gritting them together.
“What stopped you?” Shrinky-Dink sounds as impassive as ever. Her stylus squeaks against the screen of her iPad.
Agatha grunts. “The boys. I can’t kill their father.”
“Mm. That’s good news.”
“I suppose, but the urge is still there.” A fireball in her belly.
“I’m not surprised.”
“No?”
“No. It’s quite a natural feeling.”
“I’m afraid I might actually do it.”
“Kill him?”
“Yes.”
“You won’t.”
“You sound so sure.”
“I am. If you could have, you would have, and I’d be visiting you in prison today.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I do. In the past few days, you’ve had a hatchet in your hand and a cleaver within reach. If you were able to kill Dax, you would have. You’re a woman who gets things done.”
Agatha rolls her eyes. “I wish I were a vole instead,” she says. “Listen to this.” She opens her phone, scrolls to Hard Truths, and reads the statement about voles.
Shrinky-Dink sighs. “Yes, I can see why you’d like to be a vole.”
Agatha slides down in her chair.
“Is this in your Hard Truths folder?”
“I’m going to give you another hard truth. You are a human. You are not a vole. Dax is not a vole. Dax did not turn away from temptation. Dax cheated. You are alone.”
Well.
“For fuck’s sake,” Agatha says, “I pay you. Money. Big money. Can’t you be kind? Or at least give me a hard truth in a soft way?”
“You pay me to help you. You pay me to tell the truth. Even if it hurts.”
“Fine,” Agatha says. “Fine.” She pretends to delete the screen shot and waves her phone at Shrinky-Dink. “There. It’s gone. Happy?”
“Delete it for real.”
Agatha smirks.
“Go on. For real this time.”
Agatha does. “Happy now?”
“Satisfied. It’s different than happy.”
Agatha sighs. “Would you really visit me in prison? If I ended up there?”
“Of course.”
“What if I couldn’t pay you from prison?”
“We’d work it out.”
Agatha wonders if anyone else would visit her in prison. Someone would have to bring the boys. Right? She imagines herself in an orange jumper, gray overtaking the brown in her hair, murmuring to the boys through the glass on a phone, with Dax and GDOG standing a few feet away.
Fothermucking Dax. If only she could. “So?” she says.
“So what?”
“So how should I handle this urge to kill my husband?”
“What’s that thing Bear Grylls always says? The one about fear?”
“Fear sharpens us?”
“Yes. Fear sharpens us.” It sounds much mightier coming out of Shrinky-Dink’s mouth. Like a sword.
“What about it?”
“Jot it down on a piece of paper. Hang it on your front door so you read it every time you leave the house.”
Agatha stares at Shrinky-Dink’s cherry red lips. They are startling against her pale skin. It’s a new color for her. Not a good one. “I’m talking about an urge to kill my estranged husband and you’re advising me to hang an inspirational quote on my door?”
“Yes.”
“Seriously? That’s what you’ve got for me today?”
“That’s what I’ve got for you today.”
“Okay, Oprah.”
Shrinky-Dink smiles.
“And that’s it?”
“For now. Time’s up.”
* * *
That evening, Agatha writes FEAR SHARPENS US on a blue sticky note. She pins it to the front door of her house. She pins another on the wall of the back staircase leading up to her office. It can’t hurt.
* * *
Kerry Sheridan—chief complainer of all complainers—grouses to Dax about the unsightly shed debris. “She says it’s just awful, Agatha,” Dax says when he calls. “An atrocity.” He puts on his best Kerry-Sheridan-is-complaining-again voice, as if things, funny things, private jokes between him and his estranged wife, can still exist in the world, the too-bright world in which he’s had sex with another woman in their shed, moved out of their home, and moved into the another woman’s home. “She says wood and tools and bits of this and that are littering the lawn. ‘What will visitors think?’ she says. ‘And when will the storm of shed tourists end?’”
Agatha bites her tongue until it bleeds. Shed tourists. Who ever thought such a thing would exist?
“But seriously, Aggie-girl,” Dax says, his tone shifting into his own. “You need to get it cleaned up.”
As he talks, Agatha’s head swells to the size of a watermelon and starts to split. She looks around wildly, hoping, praying that a member of her imagined zephyr of friends has magically appeared and is at this very minute pouring her the biggest glass of tequila ever poured in the history of tequila pouring.
Aggie-girl?
Aggie-girl?
This man pulls the most horrific act a man can pull and now has the brass balls to use the nickname he’d given her all those years before on the day of the rotting cow? Her head explodes.
Aggie-girl?
As if nothing has changed between them?
Dax continues, oblivious to the explosion of Agatha’s head. “As Kerry says, it is a bit of an atrocity.”
Agatha gathers bits of her head and pushes them back into place before speaking. “Dax, first of all, do not ever call me Aggie-girl again. You have lost every right to that name, to that expression of affection. Do you hear me?”
Dax grunts quietly. “Yes, sorry about that, Agatha. It just came out. Habit.”
“Second, you and Kerry Sheridan need to look up the definition of atrocity. The Rohingya genocide is an atrocity, Dax. The clampdown on free speech in Russia is an atrocity, Dax. The refugee crisis around the world is a fothermucking atrocity, Dax. But the shed debris? The shed debris in this yard? That shit is an annoyance. A first-world problem. A who gives a royal fuck.”
She hangs up.
* * *
Despite Kerry’s complaints, Agatha will not clean up the mess. Nor will she allow it to be cleaned up by the crew that arrives at Dax’s behest.
“I’m happy with it just like this,” she tells them. Happy is the wrong word but the right one is stuck somewhere between her heart and her mouth. “Do not touch it.”
Two of the men look bewildered, eyes darting between the eyesore and the gleaming white Colonial behind it. The third leans against the We Haul It All truck with his arms folded across his chest.
One of the two bewildered men takes a step toward the debris. They have orders from Dax. Also a sizable check.
Agatha takes a step toward him. “Do not touch it,” she warns, wondering if “All” includes sorrow, heartbreak, misery, anger, and fear. How much would it cost to haul that away? One hundred dollars? Two hundred dollars? A chest of gold doubloons? A miracle?
The leaning man grunts at his coworker and shakes his head. The other man backs away. Agatha offers the leaning man the blueberry muffin she’d planned to give to her shrink.
“Gracias,” he says, taking it. “Lo siento.” He says it with such feeling, such understanding, at least she imagines he does, that Agatha almost cracks in two. Crack, crack, crack, right down the middle. How in the world is a human supposed to stay whole for an entire lifetime? How is she supposed to survive all the emotions life dishes out?
Agatha sits down cross-legged in front of the remains of the shed, places a hand on each side of her ribcage, and squeezes, trying to hold everything in. “Gentlemen, if you touch this, if you dare to touch one stick of wood, one nail, one screw, one measly splinter, I swear to god I will erupt! I am a volcano right now! I am a volcano on the verge. On the verge of spewing lava and ash and rock from here to Antarctica.” She pauses and Googles erupting volcanoes on her phone. Ah, the glory of technology. “At this very moment, I am Mount Sinabung in northern Sumatra,” she says. “Do not fuck with Mount Sinabung.” As the men stare at her, three looky-loos in an Audi yell, “Whoop! Whoop!” out their car window. Agatha closes her eyes and sticks out her tongue. Seconds later, a photo of this moment is posted in the Moms group. The We Haul It All truck is in the background. Kerry Sheridan’s fuzzy red head is peeking out from behind the rhododendrons.
The number of cars in the procession burgeons as the post gathers likes and laughs, and Agatha thinks about all of the things Kerry has complained to Dax about over the years: the eight-foot-tall blow-up Santa (gaudy), Fleetwood Mac playing too loud (“the squawking of Stevie Nicks”), too many bikes in the driveway (road hazard), too many s’more parties (unhealthy), not enough potted mums around the mailbox in the fall (never enough in New England). Just as she remembers the time Kerry complained that Dax whistled too early in the morning, the cupcake van turns the corner and parks in front of Kerry’s house. The cupcake-tess tweets “Parked from 11–12 today at the remains of the shed on Sutton Circle.”
WTF?
Agatha tweets back, “Bring me a double chocolate.”
The cupcake-tess tweets back a smiley f
ace and a cupcake emoji.
It’s something.
But then a Mom shares that OMG, Gem Lily’s black lab is still missing—still—and Agatha hears the Moms machine screech into action like the old hand-cranked meat grinder in her grandmother’s kitchen. Like most, she suspects the ancient beast has wandered off to die alone, with some dignity, but unlike most, she believes he should be allowed to do so. The poor wretch has to be at least a thousand years old, maybe more. Except for a small tuft of gray fur on his belly, he’s bald as a baby, and his eyes are cloudy and moist. A single thread of drool hangs perpetually from his toothless mouth, and his legs are bent backward at the knee as if he is trying to move in reverse toward his days as a spry pup. A lovely thought, but futile, of course, since there’s only one way into and out of this world. Despite his challenges, this hideous creature is loyal, and he’s been holding on for Gem Lily, his ancient equal in the human world, for years.
The distraction from the shed feels good as the procession begins to peel away, but then HP Poston announces that the town-wide search for Balderdash will begin at the library and will be led by his devoted walker, Willow Bean.
Willow Bean.
Willow Bean.
The name echoes in Agatha’s brain and she tips backward into the remains of the shed. Her legs poke up into the air with the handles of the rake, push broom, and hoe. A shard of terra cotta pot jabs into her hip. The back of her head clanks against a shovelhead. She moans. Willow Bean, of course, Willow Bean, the dog walker, the dog walker.