by Tanen Jones
“No,” she said, coming to a stop so slowly that the car behind her honked. She was not a frequent driver. I don’t even remember if she had her license. She looked over at me, blinking her lengthened eyelashes. “Don’t tell him, okay? This is just for you and me.”
I was a practiced sidekick; I gave her a wink. She laughed.
We drove for what seemed like a long time. I expected that we were going to a ballroom, or maybe somebody’s enormous house, so I was surprised when she pulled into the Monroe’s parking lot near Arroyo del Oso and began touching her hair in the rearview mirror, as if she were about to get out of the car. “Are we here?” I asked.
She glanced at me. “Yeah, of course. Here, fix your skirt.” She pulled on the belt loops of my denim skirt until the side seams were again at my sides.
Inside the restaurant, she took my hand and guided me to a corner, where several tables had been pushed together to accommodate a lot of people I had never seen before. “Chrissy!” a gray-haired woman called out. “Over here!”
I glanced up at my mother, who was wearing an open, cheerful expression that was almost as jarring as the clothes. “Hi, hi, hello,” she said, kissing the woman on the cheek, embracing other strangers as if she’d known them for years. “Merry Christmas!”
“Merry Christmas!” the table chorused.
“And who are you?” the gray-haired woman asked me.
“My name is Robin Voigt,” I said, offering her a hand.
Instead of taking it, she turned to my mother and said, “She’s so cute! Did you teach her to do that?”
My mother glanced at me, slightly puzzled, and said, “No, but I love it!”
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Oh!” the woman exclaimed. “You can call me Miss Susan. I used to work with your mother at Macy’s—how long has it been now, Chrissy?”
“I don’t even want to think about it,” my mother said. “Too long!” They laughed together, and I stared between them, amazed.
“You work at Macy’s?” I said.
“I used to,” my mother said, barely looking at me. “I worked there for years before I got married. You know that.”
I hadn’t known it at all. For the next forty-five minutes, I watched my mother drink two glasses of wine and eat from a community basket of chips and salsa and say things that sounded like lines from a TV show, like “Tell me everything, don’t leave out a detail!” and “How did I guess…” and “Well, she’s a handful!” She knew my grades in school and had a picture of Leslie in her wallet—I’d never seen her carry a wallet before, only her old pink purse. She talked about Daddy’s job and our trip to the Grand Canyon, and threw back her head and laughed until she choked when Miss Susan brought up a story about her hiding from a customer for three hours in the employee bathrooms.
On our way home, we stopped and bought KFC chicken, which she paid for with money from the wallet I’d never seen. “Do you always go to the Christmas party when you go away?” I asked.
“I go every year,” my mother said absently, sorting her change by size in her palm.
I selected a penny from her hand and put it in my shoe, startling her. “Leslie always lets me have a penny,” I explained.
“I see,” she said.
“How come you’re so dressed up?” I asked, hoping to press my advantage before her Christmas-party chattiness died away.
She glanced down at herself. “I used to dress like this every day,” she told me. “You had to wear hose or they wouldn’t let you work.”
Leslie was watching TV in the living room; she jumped up as soon as we came in the front door and watched with her mouth hanging open as my mother put the chicken on the table and arranged napkins on everyone’s placemat. I strutted in behind her, being sure to make eye contact with Leslie: Yes, that’s right, she chose me to go with her on her secret excursion. As we sat down to eat, my mother went to bed. She stayed in her bedroom for the next two days, and when she came out again she was back to herself, soft clothing, soft voice, that shuttered expression that meant we weren’t to upset her by asking too many questions. Leslie was too proud to bug me for details, and I was too busy trying to understand it myself: whether once a year our mother became a stranger, or whether she was a stranger for the rest of the year and only once a year became herself.
21
Mary
I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Cramped and dark, a little hump of clay in the middle of the desert. Like some kind of burrow. The old man hadn’t read his own books or listened to his own music or opened the blinds in his study. He’d just stayed in, dying, as if it were an activity. That kind of sadness leaves something behind. It was all over the house, a blue film, spots on your vision that stuck around.
I’d tried to cheer us up with the record, but the feeling only lasted for the length of the song. Then the dimness set back in, infecting us both. I had this horrible idea that anybody who stayed in that house too long would turn ghost.
In a way I already was one. I was walking around a dead girl’s house, wearing her face. Sometimes I could see it in Leslie’s expression when she looked at me. For that moment I wasn’t Mary to her—I was Robin.
That night after the Floreses had gone to bed I went out on the back porch, dying for a cigarette and some anonymity. It was eerily quiet for a neighborhood with children; noise ordinances, maybe, or rich-people thick walls. And the outdoors itself was free of that heavy, ambient buzz you got in other states, states with trees.
I hadn’t been out here before, and my window faced the street, so I was shocked when I saw they had grass in their backyard. Thick, fresh-cut green grass that must cost a fortune to maintain, even though it wasn’t a full lawn, just a curvy patch bordered by a rock garden and a line of rattleweed bushes. I squatted to touch it. It was cool and slightly damp, as if they had just watered it.
I glanced back at the empty yellow-lit door and took off my shoes. The grass was probably full of mosquitos, but it felt so good on my feet. I hadn’t walked on grass in ages. You don’t get much in Vegas outside of the golf courses. I probably looked like a moron doing mini laps in the backyard, holding my sneakers in one hand and grinning my face off, but I didn’t stop, happy to be unobserved.
Except I wasn’t unobserved. At the edge of the house, near the neighbor’s property line, I saw a slow orange blink in the darkness, like a firefly, and then I realized what it was.
“I thought you were asleep,” I said.
“Shit,” said Dave, nearly dropping his joint.
I laughed. “That’s not a ciggie…David.”
His dark face was unreadable until his teeth flashed suddenly. “Forgot my manners,” he said. “I won’t tell Leslie if you don’t.” He held out the joint to me between his thumb and finger.
“I do not mind if I do,” I said, setting down my shoes and taking it from him. “So, what, do you stand at the side of your house at ten at night every Monday? And Leslie thinks you’re just, like, taking extra long in the bathroom?”
“Watering the lawn,” he said, retrieving the joint from me. “What are you doing out here?”
There was a little singsong lilt in his voice; automatically I replied, “Looking for you,” as if he were a customer. I leaned back against the wall, next to him. “You know, I usually don’t go to sleep until three in the morning where I live.”
“How old are you? Twenty-something? I used to be able to do that.”
“Around here?” I made a show of looking around the corner at the quiet driveways.
He chuckled. “The nightlife scene is more in the UNM area, not so much out here.”
“If by nightlife you mean ‘doing exactly what we’re doing now, except with Solo cups,’ sure.”
“Vegas really spoiled you, huh?” Dave said, inhaling. “Too good to climb a mountain and drop acid like a real Burque
ña?”
“I hate it here,” I said truthfully. “I don’t know why you live here. I mean, why not at least move to Colorado and smoke whenever you want?”
He tilted his head back and seemed to consider. “My mom is here, for one thing. Eli’s abuelita, she’d be pissed if we moved away. And the food, I always miss it. But mostly it’s because for the last ten years Leslie’s been taking care of her pops.”
He glanced at me. I thought he didn’t intend it as a guilt trip, but he didn’t not intend it either. He was waiting for my reaction. I didn’t give him one.
After a minute of silence, he went on. “He had a home aide, you know, but Leslie was over there all the time. Real sad thing, the way he went.”
“How come you don’t tell Leslie you smoke?” I said abruptly.
“Ah, come on, Robin.” He flicked the end of the joint, examined it, then stepped on it.
“I’m serious,” I said, eyes following him as he deposited the butt behind the rattleweed. “You put the baby to bed and get stoned in your backyard—why should she care?”
He gave me a flat-eyed look, the first negative expression I’d seen cross his face. I felt a small thrill at getting a rise out of him. “You seem real smart,” he said. “You figure it out.”
He started to walk back across the grass. “Night, David,” I called after him.
He looked back at me. The light from the doorway was a bright rectangle behind him, flattening him into silhouette. His black eyelashes flickered in profile as he blinked. “Night.”
22
Mary
Tuesday morning I woke up to a piece of paper on the floor in front of my door.
Appointment is Wednesday 4:30 p.m.
There are leftovers in the fridge.
Please be ready for dinner at 7 tonight!
So I was trapped in their house until they got home. Fuck. I smoked my morning cigarette in the closet, hugging my knees to my chest. Where had Leslie gone? She didn’t have a job—and the baby was at daycare—why had she left me here alone? Had I done something to upset her yesterday? I went back through yesterday’s mental file. I’d been super nice to her, I thought. I’d offered to babysit and I’d helped her pack up real neat. We’d gotten through almost a whole bookshelf together. And I’d wanted to poke around for way longer in the room full of faces, but Leslie had looked like she was gonna throw up, so I’d made sure to head right out and help her calm down.
I could just leave. But I had no car, and what if the door locked behind me? I’d be stuck outside all day.
For a second, sitting there among the extra coats and dry cleaners’ bags, trying not to light anything on fire, I imagined myself getting on a bus, going to LA or Utah with my five hundred fifty in cash. Leslie and Dave had a ton of nice things lying around. I could find something good to pawn. That might buy me the first few nights there, and then…The fantasy fell apart. I put out my cigarette on the baseboard and fumbled for the door.
There had to be a spare key. Everybody had a spare key lying around somewhere. And if Leslie was going to lock me up in her enormous fancy house, I was going to snoop. It was basically my right.
Downstairs first, into the kitchen. I went through all the drawers, looking for the junk drawer, but there was no junk drawer. Each one had its own custom-shaped plastic organizer. Silverware, nicer silverware, spatulas, pizza cutters—it was like looking through Patrick Bateman’s kitchen. So then I went through the cabinets, but those were just as neat, pots and pans grouped by set (she had three separate matching sets of cookware, including one of those shiny copper kinds that I’d only ever seen in magazines). The only messy part of the kitchen was the baby cabinet, which was a shambles of cartoon-printed plastic cups and spoons. I poked through those, mostly just out of surprise that Leslie had allowed a single area of her kitchen to be less than spotless.
In the corner of the kitchen, beside the entrance to the hallway, there was a nook for a desk, with a wine rack and a tiny hanging lamp built into the wall above it. Below, on the desk, the family Mac sat, draped attractively with real ivy from a real ivy plant, which took up one of the wine-bottle nooks above. I jiggled the mouse and the screen woke up, prompting me for a password. flores, I typed. The password box shook itself no. floreshouse. Flores. password. password123. The computer informed me that I had two more tries before it would lock itself. I found the power button on the back of the screen and held it down until the computer shut itself off.
Off to the side of the kitchen was a narrow wood-paneled laundry room, which contained a washer and dryer, a rack for clothes, and a hanging organizer with detergent, dryer sheets, a fabric tape measure, shoe inserts, and a couple of Dave’s baseball caps. The only evidence of mess was a piece of twine shoved into the corner of one of the pockets and a loose silica gel DO NOT EAT packet.
The living room had no place to hide things except in the giant walnut entertainment cabinet. It had two wrought-iron doors beneath the TV that matched the style of the chandelier in the entryway—like, who even knew they sold matching chandeliers and entertainment cabinets? I searched through the shelves on my hands and knees, but it was only wires and a lot of DVDs and video games, along with one of those big yellow phone books and a couple of the baby’s things, a blue plush kitten and a play piano. I sat back, red-faced, then thought, You dummy, and went to the front door.
I kept it carefully propped open as I searched the mat and the little pots containing succulents on either side of the door. The neighbor, a curly-haired mother with her kindergartner, saw me standing on my toes to run my fingers over the doorframe. She waved and I waved back, keeping a smile on my face as my fingers discovered nothing.
I went inside again and hustled over to the rear door. No key there either. It finally hit me what was so strange about my search: there were no hiding places in this house. Everything was so perfectly organized, each surface cleared of stray items, that there was nowhere to stuff any of the little indiscretions that occurred in any normal house—the stash of Ding Dongs, the Christmas-gift receipts. And Leslie and Dave had more than the ordinary number of indiscretions. She was lying to him about their finances, about her sister. He disappeared every few nights around the corner of the house. Where were the corners, the space behind the bookshelves, the lockbox on top of the refrigerator?
Then I thought: I’m the secret. Her house is my lockbox.
I closed the back door and sat against it, breathing in the air-conditioning.
When the house phone rang, I startled so badly I hit my head against the glass. It rang again, deafening in the empty house. I unfolded myself slowly and went to the phone, which sat on the desk in the kitchen nook, next to the computer.
I picked it up in the middle of the third ring. “Hello?” I said, then remembered to add, “Flores residence.”
I could hear breathing on the other end. No one spoke.
“Hello?” I said again.
The other person hung up before I could say, Sam?
I set the phone back in its cradle. It couldn’t be Sam. How would he know where I was? He’d left with my money—he hadn’t seen me go with Leslie. And even if he had followed me to the hotel, would he have followed me all the way to Albuquerque?
There was no way. I was safe here. I did my pranayama breaths, one nostril, then the other.
I hadn’t checked upstairs yet.
Leslie and Dave’s bedroom was bright, even with the gauzy white curtains drawn. A huge soft bed dominated the room, with the bathroom to the right; light filtered in from the bathroom too, via midcentury-style glass blocks. The bedding matched the curtains except for the red Chimayo blanket covering the foot of the bed. On the walls hung framed paintings, one a modern-art bloody splash of orange, and the other a reproduction of Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Their wedding portrait rested on one side table, a black-and-white shot of their fi
rst dance in a roomful of blurry faces and fairy lights. They had a huge flat-screen television angled on top of their dresser across from the bed.
I squatted to look under the bed. Nothing—not even dust bunnies. I lifted the pillows.
There—my first secret. A flat silver tablet. The screen was dark, but the tablet hadn’t shut down. It was still running, overheating; the bottom nearly burned my palm as I picked it up and pressed the power button. The screen lit up immediately, no password needed.
Dave’s tablet. He’d been logged in to Facebook, and now he was logged in from his work computer, so that everything he did showed up on the tablet in my hands. Dave was messaging with someone named Elaine Campbell, whose profile picture showed a tiny figure on a snowboard. Goggles covered the top half of her face, leaving only her smile visible. She had dental-assistant teeth.
They’d started chatting just a few minutes ago. I scrolled upward to the timestamp, and started reading even as the chat spooled out below.
9:53 A.M.
me: Joanna’s eyes are following you around like you a steak girl
Elaine: She can’t do anything about it ;)
me: No but I guarantee you we’re about 5 minutes from another email
“Just a reminder, the employee dress code applies to everyone!!!”
Elaine: Maybe she has a crush on me
me: I’d attend that wedding
Elaine: It’d just be me and her, bare knuckle boxing in a field
Whoever knocks out the most teeth gets to take home the registry gifts
me: lololol
Elaine: You’re lookin fly today too btw
me: It’s that dress code chic, I know you don’t know about it
Elaine: Haha
I do like your hair though, it’s all soft today
me: Ran late this morning
Elaine: Are you bringing the smallest Flores over this week?
me: Not sure yet.
Elaine: Last week was fun :)