by Tanen Jones
She was about to sign when I thought suddenly, I’ve never spelled out our last name for her, and I seized the pen from her in a panic.
“Ow!” she said, glaring at me. “What’s your problem?”
I made a heroic effort and swallowed the hairy, half-chewed leaf in my mouth. “I think I’m supposed to sign first, because I’m older. Right?”
Albert scratched his head, a tic that caused his shoulders to hunch as if he were embarrassed for me. “Honey, it doesn’t matter. Just sign on any of the beneficiary lines.”
I nodded seriously and wrote in schoolmarm cursive Leslie Voigt Flores. When I handed the pen back to her I tapped once on Voigt, hoping she’d understand.
Mary scowled at me and scribbled underneath my name. It was almost illegible; no one would have been able to identify a misspelling in the first place. The only clear letters were the R and the V, inscribed in huge narcissistic loops.
Albert glanced briefly at the paper and put it back inside the manila envelope. “Perfect,” he said. “I’ll take this out to Angela.”
“Oh, we can do that on our way out if you like,” I put in. “Since we’re going past her desk. It wouldn’t be a bother.”
Mary gave me a slack-faced look of exhaustion.
“No, no,” Albert said, his sparse eyebrows drawing together. “I can do it, Leslie. Do you need me to show you out?”
“No,” Mary said, cutting me off. “Don’t worry about getting up. Thank you so much for seeing us, Albert. I’m thrilled we’ll have more time to visit together before I go. You’re so sweet for making time.”
Albert sat up a little straighter in his leather chair. “You’re just as I remember, Robin. Your father would be proud of you.”
They shared a warm moment. My face heated; I was drowning in this greenhouse air. I had to get out.
“I’ll go call the restaurant right now,” I said, standing up too quickly, making the chair wobble on its legs. “Nice to see you again.”
“You too, Leslie,” Albert said absently, turning back to his papers. Mary patted his hand. I jerked the door open and walked dizzily into the hallway, sucking in a lungful of dry air.
Mary passed me, moving with the lazy satisfaction of a big cat, and said, “Bye, Mrs. Guzmán!”
“Goodbye, sugar,” Mrs. Guzmán said as I passed her.
I followed Robin in silence to the elevator. It wasn’t until I got in that I realized my mistake and corrected myself mentally: Mary, not Robin.
She straightened her polo dress and ran a hand through her blond hair. It was still rootless, natural-looking. “What’s wrong with you?” she said pleasantly.
I looked away. “What do you mean?”
“You acted like a crazy person in there. You were pushing too hard.”
My throat burned. I swallowed. “I panicked,” I said, fighting to sound normal. “I thought we were going to get the checks today.”
“What’s a few more days?” Mary said, pulling out a tube of lip balm. “You said it was for your house, right? Are they gonna foreclose this weekend, or what?”
The elevator slid open and I hurried out toward the lobby doors. The light of the late afternoon was nearly blinding through the glass. I blinked hard.
“Leslie?” Mary called from behind me.
I pushed through the doors.
38
Mary
My phone had buzzed in my purse during the meeting with Albert. Now Nancy’s text floated up to meet me as I glanced at the screen. Can you meet me at the Frontier in an hour and a half?
Yes I’ll be there, I texted back as we turned into the Floreses’ driveway. “I’m going for a walk,” I said to Leslie.
She gave me a startled look. “Well, I have to go pick up Eli,” she said, pulling the parking brake and glancing at the car seat in the garage. “There won’t be anyone to let you in.”
“I’ll just wait for you, then.” I smiled sweetly at her.
Her phone started ringing; she wasn’t looking at me. “Fine.” She got out and headed for the car seat. “Just be back for dinner.”
I didn’t have any intention of waiting around for her to get home, but she took the call before I could tell her that I wouldn’t be back in time for dinner. She could wait around for me tonight. I had things to do. As I made my way across the lawn, I heard her say quietly into the phone, “Yeah, of course. Everything went well.”
* * *
—
I did walk for a while, bored and killing time. No one passed me, and I considered taking the too-white sidewalk all the way to the edge of the neighborhood, where a sandstone wall kept the less enterprising bobcats and coyotes out. If I wanted to, I could scale the wall, or follow the main road out and around to the mountains. I could walk from spring desert to snow, still in my shirtdress.
Instead I went back to my car. The air was still smarting from the heat of the day, and a scent of ozone rolled in from the west, where the clouds occasionally flickered like a flashbulb going off. It would rain soon.
The Frontier was a restaurant across from UNM, open almost twenty-four/seven except for a few hours in the early morning, just long enough to clean everything and start again before dawn. Parking consisted of a vaguely L-shaped strip of pavement behind the restaurant, crowded with the protruding backs of pickup trucks and SUVs, that created a meandering path just large enough for one car to pass, going forward or shamefacedly backward when they reached the end without finding a space. Inside, it seemed to go on forever, one roomful of red vinyl booths giving way to another hung with patterned rugs, until you reached the main room, dominated at the far end by a long low counter whose upper wall disappeared under a row of at least ten signs containing the restaurant’s hundreds of menu items.
I got a carne adovada burrito and waited in one of the slatted wooden booths under a chandelier made out of a wagon wheel. It was crowded in the main room, the noise of the busboys and the diners occasionally interrupted by the order-up bell, like the triangle in a kindergarten orchestra. I amused myself by smiling at a boy waiting to order. He looked like a student at UNM, with curly black hair and thick glasses, and he was horrified at being caught staring. He pulled his hoodie up, then looked back at me a dozen times in several minutes. I met his eyes serenely each time. When he got to the front, I heard him stammer, having forgotten his order. Three people passed him in line as he studied the menu boards, cheeks burning.
Nancy walked in just then. Her hair was wet from a shower, pushed back from her forehead, and she was wearing gray sweats and a sleeveless jersey slung over a sports bra. Her arms were thick with muscle, unevenly tanned from her short-sleeved uniform, and her body was tense. She scanned the room for me, and I waved.
“Robin,” she said, throwing herself into the booth across from me. “Hi.”
“Hi, baby,” I said, echoing her from earlier. “You look tired. Are you okay?”
She waved a hand in front of her face. “I’m fine. Just…”
I tilted my head.
Nancy checked her watch, abandoning her train of thought. “Sorry for asking you to meet me again right away, but I looked up the address you gave me.”
I didn’t want to appear too eager. “Do you want any food? I could get you a plate of something.” I pushed the remains of my burrito to the edge of the table.
A bit of warmth crept over her face. “I’m not hungry.”
I waited, but I couldn’t hold out long. “What did you find?”
Nancy sighed. “Look, I don’t want to scare you. It could be nothing.”
My pulse jumped. “What is it?”
She glanced at my hands, inches away from her own on the table, and her fingers twitched. “The place—it’s a gym now…It used to belong to a guy named Francis Clery. Frank Clery. It was a pawnshop for a while, but I guess they sold it aft
er he went to jail.”
“He went to jail? For what?”
“Pretty recently. Aggravated assault against a household member, one of the DV laws. He hit his wife across the face with a gun, cracked her eye socket. She’s fine, but he’s doing eight months. That’s a third-degree felony.” She blew out a breath. “Assuming she doesn’t lose her nerve. It’s hard to make DV cases stick.”
I frowned. “I don’t…” I caught her eye and added quickly, “I mean, that’s awful. But what does it have to do with Leslie?”
Nancy laced her fingers together, gripping until the knuckles turned white. “We…keep track of this guy. Not officially. There’s been no cause to arrest him, and I think everyone thought he’d go down for tax evasion, but you live for moments of stupidity like this. She ran to the neighbors’ house and called us. We’d gotten complaints before about disturbances, but she’d always sworn he never hit her. This time, we took care of it before he could get to her. Had an officer on the corner already, got him booked for the assault practically as soon as she hung up.” She shook her head.
“You guys keep someone on the corner at all times because he beats his wife?” I said, thinking it through. “Or…you keep a guy on the corner because…”
Nancy’s dark eyes met mine. “Because people hire him to kill other people sometimes.”
I didn’t say anything for a long time. “How do you know?” I said at last.
“We don’t.” She shrugged. “If we knew for sure, he’d be in jail for that instead of for assault. But there are guys you hear things about, even if you never have enough to arrest them. Look, maybe Leslie just went to the pawnshop.”
“But you don’t think so, do you.” I watched as Nancy cast her eyes down. “Why not?”
Nancy spoke to the table. “If it was just the address, sure. But you gave me his phone number. That’s not the store’s phone. That’s a personal cell. Maybe he bought it just to talk with customers. But why give them another avenue to bother him at all hours of the day and night?”
“Some businesses do that,” I said absently. “If he’s posting online and wants people to be able to text in offers.”
“That’s true,” Nancy replied. She pressed her lips together, then said measuredly, “He doesn’t post online.”
“You guys track that too?”
“Like I said, we figured he’d go down for taxes. His business doesn’t make enough for him to drive a ’67 Camaro. He had it restored and repainted within the last year.”
I raised my eyebrows. “What’s that, twenty grand?”
“More. No pawnshop in Corrales is moving enough to throw that much money away on a single car. He takes in people’s grandma’s jewelry, guns, art pieces from Santa Fe where the frame is worth more than the canvas. There’s no way.”
“Maybe he’s a drug dealer.”
She tapped her fingers on the table. “The thing is, if you’re pulling down enough to move out of your mom’s basement and start restoring classic cars, I’m probably going to hear about it. It’s a hazard of the trade when your customers regularly get pulled over with your merchandise in their car.”
“But, I mean, how can it be profitable? There aren’t that many murders per year, right? It’s Albuquerque, it’s not, you know, Los Cabos.”
Nancy shook her head. “We get lectured on it every fucking month at the station. Violent crime here is more than twice what it is on average in the rest of the country. Most of it’s opioids. People assaulting one another because of drug money. I’m not surprised you don’t think it’s dangerous here, though. It’s not really dangerous for you.”
I looked up. “Because I’m white?”
Nancy lifted her shoulder. “And you don’t do drugs. Your biggest risk is what happened to Jennifer Clery.”
I pressed the name into my mind. “His wife.”
“Yeah.” She slid her hand across the table to cover mine, then withdrew it just as quickly. She’d remembered we were in public.
“Then Leslie has to be even safer. You should see their house. They have a lawn in the backyard, a real lawn, with real grass. And she doesn’t do drugs. Dave—her husband—he smokes a joint from time to time, and he hides it from her—that’s how much of a teetotaler she is.”
“What else do you know about Dave? Is he an angry person?”
I let my hands fall into my lap and glanced down. “Dave would never. He loves her.” But my mind was going a mile a minute. Had Leslie found out about the money to Elaine Campbell? Had she confronted him and—?
The lines around Nancy’s mouth deepened. “If you listen to those guys when they get arrested, that’s why they do it. Because they love their wives.”
“No way,” I said. “He’s got this big family, older sisters, loves his mom. They have a baby—he loves the baby.”
“How about Leslie?” Nancy asked. “I don’t mean to be—you know. But while you were gone, did she have a big support system like that? Or did he isolate her?”
I fell silent.
“If he controls the finances, it can be very difficult to leave. Some women say they feel like there’s no way out.”
We gazed at each other for a few moments.
“I have to know,” I breathed at last. “Because when I think about it, I want to say Leslie doesn’t have it in her. But I can’t say that. Because I know she does.”
“If it makes you feel better…” Nancy trailed off, then swallowed and started again. “Most people do. When they feel trapped, most people do have it in them.”
She was so beautiful, even under the fluorescent lights. Her body was marked by strong, clean lines connecting one element to the next. It made her appear more sharply present than everyone else in the room, the way the cowboys looked in old Westerns. I couldn’t imagine her killing anybody, although I knew she’d been in the army.
“Can I talk to him? Frank Clery?” I asked.
Nancy leaned back. “I can’t bring you in. And anyway, he wouldn’t tell you if it’s true. He’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut most of the time.”
“I have to try.” I put a catch in my voice. “I have to know.”
“Why don’t you ask Leslie?” Nancy said. “If it’s true, she needs you right now.”
It was a good question. It took me several seconds to come up with an answer. “You don’t know how messed up our relationship was until last week. She hated me. She’s allowing me back into her life on a very, very temporary basis.” True. “If I start accusing her of—of crazy shit like this, she’ll throw me out immediately. And if she does that…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think she’ll ever let me back in. She could die, Nancy. If Dave is really doing…what you think he’s doing—if she’s that far gone…I could be her last chance at getting help.”
Nancy ran her hand through her hair. “Clery is not a nice guy, Robin. I don’t know what you think you’re going to say to him to make him talk to you.”
I was getting somewhere. “I’m an actress. I’m great at getting people on my side. I can see into his psychology.”
She smiled reluctantly. “An actress, huh?” Like she thought I was being cute.
“I know it probably won’t work,” I said, pressing my advantage. “But it would mean a lot to me if you’d let me try. This could be my last chance too, at—at having a family.” At staying in New Mexico. At staying with Nancy.
I let my eyes fall to Nancy’s mouth, her hands.
She bit her lip. “I could let you in for five minutes tomorrow. Visiting hours at the jail start at twelve-thirty.”
The man in the paper hat at the register yelled out, “Next up, next up!”
“Nancy,” I said, leaning forward in the booth, tilting my chin up. “Thank you.”
A flush saturated her face. “It’s only five minutes,” she said. “You know
where the station is?’
“Yeah.” I got up from the booth, stretching my sore limbs. “We should go.”
Nancy dropped her eyes. “You’re right.”
As we passed the rows of booths and hanging plants, I saw the student from before. I winked at him behind Nancy’s back, high on my victory. He stared after me, his expression panicked, as if I’d threatened him.
In the dark outside, among the newly sparse cars, Nancy stuck her hands in her pockets. It was raining now, a soft patter turning the dust on the asphalt to rivulets of mud. I couldn’t see her features clearly, but I could feel her eyes on me. “You seem different,” she said. “Than you were in high school, I mean.”
“I grew a couple inches,” I said. “Can’t you tell?”
She didn’t laugh. “I just meant you seem…I don’t know.”
I swayed toward her, letting her wrap her arm around my waist and pull me the rest of the way in. When our lips separated, I said, “I have to go soon. Leslie will wonder where I am.”
Nancy’s gaze stuttered. Someone was expecting her too. I waited for her to pull away, but instead she kissed me again, harder, pushing me against the wet car. I wondered if she ever thought about leaving her, if she had thought about what could have been, all these years. If there was some way I could stay in New Mexico. If there was some way she could come to Los Angeles. As long as I was Robin, someone would be in love with me.
My skin against the metal started to feel too hot. Like I was getting sick. A fever, maybe. I put my damp hands over my face and Nancy moved to pull them away.
“Robin?” she said.
I didn’t know what my face was showing her. “I have to go,” I said again. “I’ll see you tomorrow. At the jail. Okay?”
39
Leslie
On the way to pick up Eli I found myself thinking inexplicably of my wedding. Dave and I had gotten married at the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe in midwinter. It had snowed that year, enough to make driving difficult, and his cousin Dani had almost spun out on the highway. But inside the chapel it was cloyingly hot from the candles and the body heat of so many people packed into the wooden pews. My face was red, and I felt my dress sticking to me as I went down the aisle.