“She has her good days and her bad days,” he said, puffing away. The smoke hung in the windless air, our own personal smog alert. I hated wind but right now I longed for it.
I waved away the smoke. “She says things are missing.”
“She’s imagining. Sign of early-stage dementia. What kinds of things?”
“Art. Jewelry. The dragon table—where is it?”
“What table? I didn’t take a table. What am I going to do with a table?”
“It was worth a lot of money.”
“Lots of people go in and out of the house,” he said. “There’s no telling. Old people are hungry for friends.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Is it?” Ben set down the cigarette and pulled off his T-shirt.
“You’re growing a belly there,” I said.
He gave me the stink-eye.
Three crows perched on the branch of a huge ficus tree, complaining about something or other. He stamped out his cigarette, lit another, and offered me the pack.
“Stop doing that,” I said. “It took me forever to quit.”
He shrugged. “Whatever.”
“And the house is filthy. I found an empty milk carton beside her bed.”
“She was probably thirsty.”
I didn’t laugh. “You were supposed to look after her. Make sure she has food and a clean house.”
“I am!”
“You’re not doing a good job of it.”
“Why don’t you move back, then?” he said. “You can take care of all this crap.”
The underwater lights of the pool came on. Ben went into the house, returned a few minutes later in his trunks, and dove in.
I stood to stretch. My mother was on the other side of the slider, gazing out. I waved but she made no gesture to show she saw me and evaporated back into the darkened house.
“What’s up with all the darkness, Mom?” I said, stepping inside, sliding the glass door shut behind me.
“The bulbs burned out,” she said, and wandered back over to the slider. “Your brother thinks he’s a fish. Always swimming.”
When we were kids, my brother and I would swim as close to the bottom as we could, lie on our backs, and open our eyes. Above, the water became a stained-glass window to the world. Once, as we surfaced, I pushed Ben back under and held him there, wishing, in a way, that he’d drown so I’d get back the attention he took from me when he was born. I still had nightmares about it, only in my dreams he sinks to the bottom and my father dives in to save him. I always wake up before they surface.
By the light of my phone, I searched the drawers for bulbs. I replaced what I could and switched them on. Somehow, when all lit up, the house looked even dingier. I heated up a mac-and-cheese entrée in the microwave, made a salad, and as I set plates on the table, Ben hefted himself out of the pool, dried off, and came in.
“Are you hungry?” asked our mother, who was already at the table.
“Have an appointment.” He kissed her on the check, gave a little wave to me, and said, “Good to see you,” then scampered down the hallway and out the front door.
“Your brother always has meetings.”
“At night?”
“He’s a very busy man.”
She got up. I heard the bathroom door close. When she was back, she said, “I can’t find my ruby ring. It was in the bathroom drawer.”
“What was it doing in the bathroom?”
“That’s where I keep it.”
I went to look, riffled through her vanity drawers, and found it, wrapped in a tissue.
“Here,” I said, placing it in front of her plate.
She picked it up and studied it. “Where was it?”
“In the bathroom,” I said. Hard to know what she imagined and what was real.
I drained the bottle into my mug, but I needed more than wine. I needed Ernesto.
“C’mon, Mom, you have to eat.”
She took a bite. “He was such a sweet boy,” she said. “I used to dress him in the cutest outfits.” A bemused expression skittered across her face. “So smart.”
What I remembered was a smart-ass kid who always tattled on me, who pulled scary pranks, and who once almost got me killed when we were on our bikes at a busy intersection.
I tonged salad onto our plates.
“He must be gambling,” she said. “What else would he do with the money I withdraw from the bank?”
“The bank?”
“Sometimes we go to the bank so I can take out money. Last week it was two thousand. What does he do with it?”
“Dollars?”
“He says we need things. Repairs.” She gestured. “House is old.”
There goes my inheritance.
“I meant to ask: where’s your car?” I said.
She shrugged. “Ask your brother.”
“Oh my God. He doesn’t tell me anything useful and neither do you.”
She pushed back her chair, wandered over to the windows, and gazed out at the pool flashing blue in the darkness. “We used to have such parties. Frank would come by. He had a house a few streets over. This was before he married Barbara. Do you remember him? You were just a little girl. He’d come over and we’d sit by the pool and drink Jack Daniel’s. That was his drink, you know. He was a very nice man, always nice to you. I have all his albums. He gave them to me.”
I remembered Sinatra, how he would sing in our living room, all my mother’s friends gathered around.
She sighed. “I’m going to bed.” Before she disappeared around the corner, she said, “Where does the time go?”
I’d begun to wonder the same thing myself.
Slippers scuffed down the hallway, followed by Joey Bishop’s nails slipping across the floor. Her bedroom door clicked shut. I held Ernesto’s business card, kept turning it over in my hands, and finally gave in. I texted him, asked what he was doing. Watching TV, he said. Come over, I said. He lived in Cathedral City, the next town over, and could be here in a half hour.
I cleaned the kitchen and paged through a newspaper that had fallen from the stack. A feature about the growing crime of elder abuse in the desert, prevalent because there were more and more older people coming here with property and money.
I didn’t want to believe that’s what Ben was doing. But somebody was doing something nefarious.
Such a sweet little boy.
When did sweet turn to sour?
I flipped through the paper. Buried on page five was a story about a pool drowning from electric shock. A lot of swimming pools in Palm Springs were built before 1963 and not all were up to code. Who even knew to get the wiring of their pools checked twice a year?
I called my brother. He picked up.
“What did you do with her car?” I asked.
“Look,” he said. “You’re not around. You don’t know what goes on here.”
“Enlighten me: what goes on here?”
“She’s losing it,” he said.
“Today you said she has her good days and her bad days.”
“You’re afraid for your inheritance, aren’t you? I’m the one who deserves payback. You left. You don’t care about Mom.”
“Fuck you,” I said, and hung up. My face felt hot. I found a bottle of tequila in the liquor cabinet, probably five years old from when Jerry was still alive—maybe from their last cocktail party—and set it on the counter. There was a faint rap on the slider. A silhouette of a man framed against the turquoise of the pool. I jumped.
“You scared me,” I said, hand on heart, sliding open the door.
“I have a key for the gate,” Ernesto replied.
I held up the bottle. “Look what I found. I’ll pour us some over ice.”
We took our tumblers out to the pool along with the half-full bottle and sat side by side on lounge chairs.
“I’ve been thinking about you,” he said.
“What did you think?”
“You in that bikini.” He tapped
his forehead. “It’s right here.”
“I thought of you too,” I said. Tequila was wending its way through me, tamping down the circuits, loosening the boundaries between me and everything else.
He took hold of my hand and gave it a tug.
“Come sit with me,” he said. I snuggled into him on the lounge chair as if I’d known him forever. He stroked my arm, then my shoulder, trailed his fingers over the cliff of my clavicle and kept traveling south under my tank top. He gave my chest a delicious massage.
“You have some hands on you.”
“That’s not all I have,” he said, which is when he tugged at the waistband of my shorts and I let him. I pulled them off, pulled his off. We fucked by my mother’s pool under the stars as the bats fluttered among the palm fronds.
Afterward we jumped in the pool to rinse off, wrapped ourselves in towels, and went back to the lounge chairs. I poured us more tequila and we toasted to us.
I awoke as the sun inched up over Indian Canyons. On the other side of the pool a coyote sniffed the water. I clapped my hands and he jumped over the gate and ran.
Inside, my mother was still asleep. After a shower, I tied on my sarong, brewed a pot of coffee, and checked my cell phone. A message from my brother.
“I don’t appreciate being hung up on—”
Delete.
Another message, this one from Little Dick. “Greta, I keep telling you, I’m sorry. It was a mistake. I meant it when I said want to marry you.”
Delete.
Screw them. Screw both of them.
My brother continued to come over every night to swim—usually at sundown when my mother went to bed. We ignored each other. My mother was the same, ignoring me but vaguely glad I was here.
Each night as soon as Ben left, I’d text Ernesto. He’d come over and we’d have sex, and then we’d talk. Mostly I talked. Over the next few nights, I told him the long story of my past with Daniel, my painting, why I was here. Admittedly, I’d grown addicted to his silky fingers that made my body feel things it hadn’t felt in years.
It was bugging me, what my mother said about going to the bank. I wondered if I’d find out anything if I went through her expandable file.
As soon as I started riffling through her file, I found papers for a reverse mortgage. What the fuck? I about exploded out of my sarong.
My mother was in the garage, going through a box of old photos.
“Why’d you take out a reverse mortgage on the house?” I asked.
Studying a faded color photo, she said, “Ben told me I should spend the money before I croak.”
“But what do you need it for?”
“I don’t need it but just in case.”
“Unbelievable,” I said, and returned to the file and the bank statements, accompanied by a huge headache that two Advils and a glass of wine helped to mute.
That night as Ernesto and I lay naked in the balmy night air, I said, “I have to do something, go to court, get power of attorney or something, so my brother doesn’t take all my mother’s assets.”
“Court takes a long time, no?”
“By the time it goes through, my mother could be penniless. Fifty grand is already gone.”
“How much is left?”
“Around a hundred grand. Probably more.”
“Still, a lot of money,” he said.
We watched the glimmery blue water, listened to the mockingbird that ran through its repertoire of cell phone ring-tones, and sipped tequila. My eyes fixed on the underwater light.
I brought up the article. “I’ve read that a lot of pools here are not code compliant. Old pools, old wires.” I paused before asking, “Is it painful, drowning that way? Do you think it hurts?”
“The swimmer feels a tingling, becomes kind of numb, can’t get out, gets sucked under.”
“My brother swims all the time,” I said.
“I check pools to make sure this does not happen.”
A shiver ran through me when I realized what I was thinking. I wanted my brother gone and I needed Ernesto’s help to make it happen. There was a name for that, and it wasn’t good.
The next evening when Ben came over, he brought Mom a cherry pie, her favorite, and exclaimed for the universe to hear that he’d hired a cleaning lady.
He went out to swim laps and Mom went to bed. I stood over the glistening pool.
“I know what you’re doing,” I said.
He pretended not to hear me. Water in his ears or something.
“You don’t fool me,” I continued, and sat on a lounge chair with my drink, hoping to intimidate him into leaving. I watched him swim back and forth—not for much longer, though, if things went as planned. I used to like my brother more, even love him, but for years now he’d been all about Ben and I’d had my fill.
That night Ernesto and I went at it in our usual place, on the lounge chair beside the pool. Thank God for mothers who go to bed early and for magenta bougainvillea that grows tall along stucco walls surrounding properties. Sex with Ernesto was good for my nerves—better than any antianxiety medication. This thing with my brother had my nerves sheared raw.
We rinsed off in the pool, then sat on the bullnose edge, sipping tequila.
“I’d be willing to give you some of the money.”
“Excuse me?” he said.
“The last straw was the reverse mortgage. He needs to pay. You can help me, can’t you?”
He took a long sip. “Oh, chica, this can be very dangerous.”
“It’s a lot of money, you even said that.”
“I know, but I—”
“You know how to make pools safe, right? So, you must know what makes them unsafe.”
“I can’t disconnect anything, but I can do something, make the wiring look frayed maybe.”
“No one will ever know you had anything to do with it. I’d never tell them how to find you. Why would I?” I ran my hand over his lower regions, said, “Ernesto, I would do anything to show you my appreciation for your efforts on my behalf,” and we went at it again.
Afterward I said, “I need a picture of us,” and reached for my phone.
“Oh, no,” he said, “I don’t like to take pictures.”
I leaned my face against his anyway, reached out my arm, and took a selfie. My breasts and his bare chest were in the shot. So sexy. A photo to keep me company on hot desert nights.
“I’ve never met anyone like you,” he said as I licked a bead of sweat from his cheek.
“There’s more of this for you, whenever you like.”
He shook his head, kissed me hard, and said, “Tomorrow I’ll come over and play with the wires. Just don’t forget and jump in the water yourself.”
My brother took my mother out for breakfast, just the two of them. I did errands. When I returned, I dodged yappy Joey Bishop—maybe he’d get dizzy and faint from spinning as he barked—and stood before the pool. It looked so pristine, so very innocent. I dropped in a palm frond to see what would happen. It did not sizzle. It did not fry. I wasn’t going to jump in to test it. Hopefully Ernesto had been here and done his thing.
I was in the bathroom slathering on sunblock when Mom returned—shuffling down the hallway, followed by her frantic little pooch, and she said, “I’m going to rest.”
“Where’s Ben?” I called after her.
“Had to work.” And closed her door.
Work. What work?
When the sky turned lavender, the pool lights came on. I poured a drink and heard the front door.
Ben was here, using his key, striding through the house like he owned it, heading for the pool. I purposely didn’t turn on any lights in the living room so I could watch him.
The desert wind stirred up fronds and dust, sweeping them against the house and into the pool. The south end of town rarely got hit hard, but this evening the wind was wicked and sent a standing umbrella onto its side, missing Ben by inches. He jumped out of its way, then picked it up and leaned it again
st the stucco wall.
My mother’s bedroom door creaked open.
Shit.
Out scampered Joey Bishop, who sniffed my feet, barked, and ran out the open slider toward the pool.
“Don’t!” I called. He trotted back, spinning as he barked.
My mother moved beside me, watched my brother standing by the water. The room was freezing; she must have turned the air down to sixty-five.
“We saw Ernesto at breakfast,” she said.
“Who?” I responded, playing dumb.
“Your boyfriend,” she said. So, she’d seen us outside. “Ben took me to Cathedral City, some little restaurant. Your boyfriend was there, with his wife and kids.”
My brother dove in, began swimming laps.
I felt suddenly hot all over. “How do you know they were his wife and kids?”
“They called him Daddy.”
Ben slowed and seemed to struggle, as if an invisible force was pulling at him.
“Why isn’t he moving?” my mother asked, her voice quavering.
“Maybe he has a cramp.”
I felt awful. A mother shouldn’t have to watch her son die.
“Call 911!” she cried, flailing her hands about like startled birds. I found my phone and called.
Ben gestured toward the house for help, then stopped struggling, and was sucked under. He rose to the surface and lay inert on the water.
The sirens grew close and then the paramedics were here. I let them in and said the way a frantic person would, “My brother! He’s in the pool!” and three men rushed past. Joey Bishop spun like a top out of control, barking till he went hoarse.
I followed them out.
“Did your brother know how to swim, ma’am?”
“Of course!”
“Does he take drugs?”
“I don’t know! He comes over every night to swim.”
They mumbled among themselves, then one of them went over and unplugged the wiring and filter and whatever else was electrical; the other two used the leaf skimmer and a rope to pull his limp body from the pool. They administered CPR but Ben didn’t respond.
The carved dragon table, the Slim Aarons photos. Ernesto, with a wife and kids? The world was full of rats.
As they continued administering CPR on my brother, I rushed inside. I would give them Ernesto’s business card, give Ernesto to them. Mom sat in the dark of the living room and there was Sinatra again, singing about a piper man and losing someone to the summer wind. But as I held the card, I realized that by giving them Ernesto, I would also be giving them me.
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