by A. E. Kaplan
“It’s different. But it’s also the same. It’s…what’s the word? When you know somebody like that?”
“Intimate?”
“Yeah. It’s intimate. And I think stuff like that generally makes people pretty uncomfortable. Even the word is kind of…blech. You know? Ah. I have the word for what you are. You’re an emotional nudist.”
I chewed on that image for a while, and it brought to mind my fingers tracing Willow’s naked spine while her cheek pressed against my collarbone and her hands curled against my bare chest. There’d been a raw honesty to that moment.
That was what I wanted: the rawness. The perfect distillation of self, with no lies, no clutter. The beautiful clarity of knowing and being known.
Ed cleared his throat and pulled a piece of paper out of his pocket. “I actually came by your house to give you this,” he said.
I took it from him and unfolded it. “It’s my personal statement,” he said. “For UC Davis. For the viticulture program.”
I smoothed the paper against my chest. “I thought this wasn’t due until October or something.”
“It’s not. I just started writing it last month, and then I rewrote it a couple of times, and I sort of can’t seem to stop rewriting it, and I think maybe I need a second set of eyes on it.”
“How many times is a couple of times?”
“Um. Like eight or nine.”
“Oh. That’s a lot of times, Ed.”
“Yeah. Just. Just tell me what you think. It’s not like…” He looked over at the trees on the other side of the street. “It’s not like I can ask my parents or whatever.”
I opened Mrs. DeLuca’s book and put Ed’s essay inside so it wouldn’t get lost or torn up on the way home. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ll read it today. I bet it’s great, Ed.”
“Yeah, well. I still have to work up to asking my parents to let me go visit the campus. They still want me to go to Brown with Ian and study something that’s…uh…not winemaking.”
“You’ll convince them,” I said. “You have the gift.”
He laughed. “No, my brother has the gift. I have the awkward Secret Santa present that nobody wants. I am my parents’ equivalent of an electric nose-hair trimmer.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some people could really use a good nose-hair trimmer.”
“You, for one,” he said, shoving me so that I stumbled on the gravel. I just hugged the notebook, with fragments of Mrs. DeLuca’s life and Ed’s life, against my chest and wondered if Ed would let me keep a copy of his essay once I was done reading it.
I was mowing Mrs. Steuben’s lawn the next day when I noticed Virginia Werm crossing the street toward me.
It was already crazy hot, even at ten in the morning, and there was a cloud of gnats surrounding me like a bubble of buzzing-insect annoyance (there were also some mosquitoes in the bubble, unfortunately). I was stuck to my shirt, my eyes burned with lack of sleep, and I was acutely, horribly aware of all this because Virginia Werm is the only one of the widows of Lake Heorot who unabashedly hates my guts.
I don’t take it personally since, near as I can figure, she hates everyone more or less equally.
Mrs. Werm was usually seen in a denim shirtdress, orthopedic nurse’s shoes, and a tight bun. Her ubiquitous black eye patch was a souvenir from a run-in with a faulty Martha Stewart Dutch oven some years prior; from what I’d been told, the enamel coating had exploded, resulting in the loss of her left eye and an enormous settlement that funded her retirement as well as her current house. She’d managed to use every fifty-year-old ethnic slur she could think of on me the one and only time I’d offered to mow her lawn, and apart from her occasionally screaming at me to keep five feet from her property line, that was the extent of our relationship.
I stopped pushing the mower when it became clear that she was, in fact, coming to talk to me. I would be lying if I said it didn’t occur to me to flee. I was pretty sure she ran slower than Shultz’s pigs, but I couldn’t be positive she wasn’t armed. The NRA sticker on the back of her Range Rover (also funded courtesy of Martha Stewart) lingered at the back of my mind.
“You,” she said, pointing an accusing finger at me.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “Me.”
“Don’t give me that horse crap, you little punk.” She made a fist and jerked a thumb back in the direction of my house. “How the hell long are you going to let that rigmarole go on?”
“Um,” I said. “To which particular rigmarole are you referring?”
“Lord, you are an idiot.” She shook her head. “This malarkey with those damn kids at Minnie Taylor’s!”
“Oh,” I said. “The Rothgars.”
She scowled. “What are they, Norwegian or something? What do I care what their name is? Look, that damnable racket wakes me up nearly every night, and there’s a line of cars down this street till three in the morning! Why hasn’t your father put a stop to this?” She poked me in the chest with a bony finger.
“Um,” I said. “My dad’s away on business this week.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Does no one watch their spawn around here? In my day, we actually had to mind our children, not leave them to be raised by video games and the damned Internet.”
I sighed. “Mrs. Werm, I’d like nothing more than for those parties to stop. Lord knows I’ve tried.”
“I called the police, you know. Six times. The idiots said there was nothing going on. Called me senile.”
“They’ve got a police scanner,” I said. “Everyone hides when the cops are on their way over, so they never get caught.”
She harrumphed. “Where are the parents?”
“The dad is…I’m not sure where the dad is. The mom is away for work. She’s on the news.”
“On the news,” she mocked. “While her kids are running a drug den, or having orgies, more likely.”
“Um,” I said. “I wouldn’t know about that.”
She folded her arms. “This entire neighborhood is filled with mindless, spineless old biddies. I tell you, if I was in charge…Well, I’m not, am I?” She poked me again. “You have to fix this.”
I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered because she thought I could somehow fix this, or be offended that she thought I was expendable enough to try. I shrugged helplessly. “I’ve tried everything! Everything! I broke up his parties three times! I made his house stink like pigs! He just keeps it up, and I can’t try anything else, because he trashed my room, and embarrassed my friends, and almost got me shot!”
She scowled at me so hard her eyebrow actually crept down over the edge of her patch. “Try. Harder.”
“I can’t do anything else! He’ll burn my goddamn house down next!” I glanced down at her. “Sorry.”
There was a long pause while she tapped on her eye patch. Then she said, “You’re going about this all wrong.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“You’ve been going after the house. You need to go after the guests. Don’t make the house uninviting. Hit ’em where it hurts.”
“How can I do that? I don’t want to get arrested.”
“You’ll think of something,” she said. She pulled a pistol out of some invisible pocket in her dress, pulled the hammer back, looked me in the eye, and uncocked it. “Won’t you?”
After I finished Mrs. Steuben’s lawn, I had to do some weeding at Mrs. Lee’s, where there was a swarm of cranky neighbors on the front porch, clutching paperback copies of The Secret Life of Bees and glaring at the Rothgars’ house from across my lawn.
“Afternoon, ladies,” I called from the bottom of the steps as I pulled on my gardening gloves. “Is it book-club day already?”
They looked at me darkly. Mrs. Lee set her book down and put her hands on her hips. “Maureen here’s talking about moving,” she said. “She came outside in her bathrobe this morning and found a bunch of drunk kids passed out on her porch.”
Maureen Smithfield’s mouth was a pru
ne. “Those kids are wrecking the neighborhood,” she said.
There was a murmur of consensus from the rest of the book club.
“I’m sorry to hear that, ma’am,” I said.
Mrs. Lee heaved a great sigh and turned her back to me. “There’s bamboo growing in my begonias around the back.”
“I’ll take care of it.”
“Of course you will, Tommy. Of course you will.”
I weeded for the better part of an hour. She hadn’t been kidding about the bamboo; it had taken over in a big way.
I hadn’t given much thought to how the parties were affecting the rest of the neighborhood. And it finally dawned on me that this problem was not going to go away when Ellen came home. It would happen, again and again, every time Ellen Rothgar was called out on a story and had to leave town.
Mrs. Smithfield might be the first to pull up her roots and leave for quieter pastures, but she likely wouldn’t be the last.
These people were my friends. They’d served me tea and shown me pictures of faraway grandchildren; they’d brought me cookies, taught me to drive, overpaid me for weeding their flower beds because they wanted to help the neighbor kid build up his college fund. They’d been there to pick me up and drive me to doctor’s appointments and make me dinner when there was no one else around to do it, because my parents were either too dead or too distracted to take care of me.
They deserved to be repaid with more than a shrug of my shoulders. They deserved more than I’d given Marianne DeLuca.
I began to wonder if I’d made a mistake in giving up so soon.
I set down my bottle of Roundup, pulled off my gloves, and had a drink of water. The Rothgars’ place was like a nest of yellow jackets, and we’d been kicking at it and getting stung, over and over, when what we really needed to do was smoke them out and go after them with a can of Raid.
I turned the idea over in my mind a few times. The word raid was particularly appealing.
I threw the gloves and weed killer in my bag and went to get my mower. I was done playing with Wolf. He’d hurt too many people I cared about, and he was going to keep hurting them unless we got rid of him for good.
I headed home, stashed my gear in the garage, and tore off my shirt as I came in the door.
“Good news!” called Ed, and I spun around, trying to cover my sweaty chest.
Ed was sharing a bottle of rosé with Zip and raised a glass to toast me. “I took your laptop to Kieran Graham, and he fixed it.”
“How did you get my laptop?”
“I gave it to him,” Zip said. “You’re welcome.”
“Um, thanks. You mean, fixed it like it’s working now, or fixed it like he got my stuff off the hard drive?”
“Both,” Ed said. “He replaced the motherboard, and the hard drive was salvageable. You owe him a hundred and thirty, by the way.”
“And,” Zip said, beaming, “we fixed your window.”
“It was off the track,” Ed explained. “We just had to wedge it back in.”
“Well, thanks for that, too.” I wiped my face on my shirt. “I think I’m going to take a shower now.”
“Excellent,” Zip said. “Because otherwise we’re going to have to mop the floor over there.”
I let the cold water run over my face for a good five minutes before I let myself think about my computer. If Kieran Graham had saved my data, I could make new copies of all my books. It meant I still had digital copies of all my interviews, of all those voices I’d recorded over the years. I thought of what Zip had said, about those books not being a replacement for the people they were about, but I decided right then to do it anyway. A photograph of Einstein isn’t Einstein, but it’s still valuable. Maybe the books weren’t everything I wanted them to be, but that didn’t mean they weren’t something. And maybe it was time to start thinking about what to do with them once I was done. The DeLucas hadn’t wanted theirs, but that didn’t mean nobody else would.
Zip and Ed were watching reruns of some Travel Channel show about Italy when I got out of the shower. They made only a token show of complaining when I paused the DVR.
“I had a conversation with Virginia Werm this morning,” I said.
“She talked to you?” Zip asked. “Or she chased you away from her house with a hedge trimmer?”
“No, she talked to me.”
“Is this the lady with the eye patch? The one who’s always telling me to go back to Mexico?” Ed asked.
“Uh, yeah. That’s her.”
“Excellent,” he said. “Carry on.”
“Okay, so apparently she’s had enough of the crap with the Rothgars. And she wants me to stop it.”
“You can’t stop it. You tried to stop it. We all tried to stop it,” Zip said.
“Yeah, well, she may have threatened to shoot me if I can’t take care of it.”
“You?” She pointed out the window toward the Rothgars’. “Why not shoot them? Wouldn’t that be the more direct approach?”
I stared blankly. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Christ, Tom.”
“Well, sorry! I’m under a lot of stress here, Zip.”
Ed said, “To be honest, though, Wolf and Rex are a hell of a lot scarier than you. If I was going to threaten to shoot someone, I’d pick you, too.”
“Why, thank you, Edward.” I grabbed Zip’s half-finished crossword puzzle off the coffee table and wrote the word raid in the margin. I traced it over again with my pen and doodled a picture of a beehive underneath. Around the beehive, I wrote the word smoke.
I tapped the pen against my eyebrow and then got up to pace in front of the couch. “Anyway, she did have kind of an interesting idea.”
Zip smiled and stretched her arms over her head, bringing one hand down to rest on Ed’s shoulder. “Did it involve calling in the Justice League? ’Cause I think that’s what we’re down to.”
“Not the Justice League. She said we’ve been wasting our time going after the Rothgars’ house. She said we need to go after the guests directly.”
Zip scoffed. “What does she suggest? Going after them with a shotgun?”
Ed said, “I’m too pretty for prison.”
“Nobody’s going to prison.” I amended that. “None of us are going to prison. But it’s got me thinking. We need something bigger. Like, a lot bigger.”
Ed frowned. “We barely pulled off the pig thing. How do you suggest we do something bigger?”
“That’s just it,” I said. “We need more people. We can’t pull off anything major with three.”
“Where are we going to get more people?”
I pointed out the window. Zip and Ed got up and looked out at Mrs. Lee’s as a dozen old ladies, tipsy from her infamous dry-sherry punch, tottered home on canes and walkers and, on her porch, Regina Lee, Cookie Schwartz, and Jo Coffey toasted each other and belted out “My Way.”
“Tom, no,” Zip said.
“Tom,” I said, “yes.”
Zip made the executive decision that we needed pizza to continue this conversation, so I wiped ants off the counter again while Ed ordered. Zip opened and closed the refrigerator repeatedly, looking for something to go with the pizza.
“Couldn’t we even make a salad?”
“Out of what?” Ed said. “All you have is milk and mustard.”
I rinsed the sponge in the sink. “You know where the grocery store is.”
“If I felt like going to the grocery store,” Zip said, “I wouldn’t be ordering pizza.” Ed, who was still on the phone, stuck his tongue out at her. “I mean, Ed wouldn’t be ordering pizza.”
Ed hung up the phone. “Thirty minutes,” he said.
“Ugh,” Zip said. “We never had to wait thirty minutes in New York.”
“You’re welcome to go back there,” I said, not really meaning it, and then worrying because I didn’t want Zip to think I did mean it, and go back to New York, and leave me alone with Dad and Rex and Wolf. I turned around to say so, but she w
as busy putting mustard on two-week-old celery.
“Hors d’oeuvres,” she said proudly, by way of explanation.
“Um,” I said.
Ed sat down at the kitchen table and nibbled at a piece of the celery before putting it down. “Next time,” he said, “I’ll bring some of my mother’s kimchi.” He looked over at Zip, who was hunting in the pantry for napkins without finding any. “Kimchi?” he asked.
“Hmm? Oh, of course. Everybody likes kimchi,” she said, picking up a piece of celery and taking a bite, then making a face. Ed grinned at her. I rolled my eyes.
“So,” I said, “about this plan. Here’s the problem: we need the cops. The only way Wolf can’t retaliate is if he’s in a jail cell. But we need a distraction so he won’t be able to break up the party even if he figures out the cops are coming.”
Zip made the celery into a smiley face on the plate, and Ed gave the smiley face angry eyebrows. “We could call the local news,” he said. “Give them a tip. It doesn’t have to be real, just as long as they show up with cameras and see a bunch of kids with beer. That might distract everyone for a while.”
“I like that,” Zip said. “But it can’t sound like a hoax, or they won’t come.”
“No,” I said. “We can’t do that. Willow’s mom works for the local network. She might get fired or something.”
Ed pulled on his lower lip. “Do you really care? This whole thing is kind of her fault.”
I flinched a little bit inwardly and thought about Willow in my bed, her hair smelling like blood oranges and her skin hot and alive, her eyes looking at me like she’d just seen me for the first time. I could go after Rex and Wolf, but hurting Willow’s mom meant hurting Willow, and the thought of it made me sick. “I’d rather not make this worse for Willow than it has to be.” I spread my hands out on the table. “We don’t need the reporters, anyway. I have a plan.”
Zip leaned back in her chair. “Let’s hear it, Tommy-Tom.”
I spun a piece of wilted celery across the table at her. “We need something that’ll freak the guests out so badly Wolf won’t be able to hide them. Something way bigger than what we’ve tried.”