“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I’ve been trying to call. Did you get any of my messages?”
She looked away, embarrassed. “A few.”
“And you haven’t been online, either. You didn’t leave me any choice. I had to come.”
“I told you we were done.”
“But that’s all you said! You were so mad after the interview. You started packing, and all you’d say was that it wasn’t going to work out, we didn’t have a future, and you had to leave.”
“Because it’s true,” she said. “We’re just messing around. You’re not leaving Phoenix. You can’t. I don’t blame you for that.”
“So come to me.”
“I’ve got a job here,” she said.
“Aldi’s?”
She didn’t like the way he said that, even though she usually said the name with the same tone of disbelief: Aldi’s? “No. I’ve got a job offer with a company. As a—” It sounded ridiculous to say chief financial officer. “As head of finance.”
“Really? Irene, that’s great!”
“And I want to do it.”
“Of course you do,” he said. “I mean—” He took a breath. “I’m really happy for you.”
He was telling the truth. Even though it meant that she was choosing the job over him.
“I just want you to be happy,” he said. “You deserve to be happy.”
Also the truth. And she felt horrible.
“What we had was fun,” she said. “Those nights in Hotel Land—I loved that. But it wasn’t real life. It wasn’t serious.”
“I thought it was pretty damn serious,” he said.
“You need to find someone who can be with you and Jun. And I need someone who can handle me and Matty. This was never going to work out.” She kissed his cheek. “I enjoyed every minute of it, but it’s over.”
“Over?”
“I’m sorry,” she said. She kissed his cheek again. “So sorry.”
FRANKIE
Frankie had become a ghost to his wife. Loretta made up her hair as he talked, did her makeup. Ignored him as he dressed. Then she walked straight through him—or near enough.
He followed her downstairs. She said hello to Teddy, asked about the men in the living room (“Radon testing,” Teddy told her). She poured herself a cup of coffee and then walked out to the backyard.
The entire time, she’d never looked at Frankie, even as he said, over and over again, “Loretta, I’m sorry.”
Buddy had turned the back patio into an outdoor kitchen. Ground lamb sat out in big stainless steel bowls, and a plate held a mound of freshly chopped mint. God he loved Mom’s lamb sausage. Buddy was at the grill, wrapping potatoes in aluminum foil. Loretta thanked him for the breakfast rolls. He nodded and kept working.
Loretta lit a cigarette—her first, and favorite, smoke of the day. He stood beside her and they pretended to watch the kids playing. The medium-sized Pusateri boy had lost his Super Soaker and climbed a tree, and the younger ones were trying to shoot their smaller water pistols at him. Luckily they were ignoring the orange canister that sat on the lawn only a few feet away from the tree. Left over from one of Buddy’s projects no doubt. And knowing Buddy, it could have held anything, from compressed air to mustard gas.
After two minutes, Frankie broke—and broke the silence. “Come on, sweetie,” he said. “Please say something.”
If she’d just talk to him, he had a chance of winning her back. She’d been mad at him in the past—God yes, a hundred times—though never as completely, as thoroughly as she was now. But if she listened to him, he could find a crack in her anger, and slip in a few words. He could crowbar his way into her heart.
His greatest fear had always been exile. The day Loretta decided she’d had enough and left him, taking her love, and the girls, away from him. He knew that on his own he was nothing. Less than nothing: A subtraction. A black hole. A taker. If all that taking served no purpose, if he couldn’t turn around and pour it all back into his family, he was lost.
He said, “I did this for you, you know.”
That got her. She looked at him, and her disgust sliced through the smoke.
“For you and the girls,” he said.
“You lost the house,” she said. “For us.”
She spoke! He tried not to show his relief. “That’s true,” he said. “But the reason—”
“You made your children homeless.”
“Temporarily,” he said. “I’m going to make this right.”
She shook her head, her eyes on the middle distance. Took a drag on the cigarette. Exhaled. He’d become invisible again.
“Loretta…”
“No one would blame me if I left,” she said quietly. “When you went bankrupt and lost the business, my friends said I should leave. When you spent a year pretending to run a casino in our garage, I said nothing. I stayed silent even when you dropped a safe on my car.”
“The casino thing was only a few months,” he said. “And the safe was an accident.”
“But this. You borrow money from the mob? For what, Frankie. What the hell are you trying to do?”
Polly noticed them, and ran over, followed by Cassie and an older Chinese girl. They all carried bright-colored water pistols. “Can we sleep in the basement tonight? With Jun?”
“Jun lives in the desert,” Cassie said. “She sees scorpions all the time.”
“When’s the picnic?” Polly asked.
“Didn’t you just eat cinnamon rolls?” Loretta asked them.
“We want hot dogs,” Polly said.
The youngest Pusateri boy, who seemed to be the same age as the twins, gave up on trying to shoot his brother and ran over to them. “When are the hot dogs?”
Frankie said, “Go play, kids. The adults have to talk.” Smalls and the rest of the family were in the house, and Buddy wasn’t moving. He nodded toward the garage. “Give me two minutes,” he said to Loretta. “Please.”
He went in through the side door. He was surprised to see a long Mercedes station wagon—with the hatch up.
Loretta closed the garage door. She surprised him by talking first. “I know you love the girls. Mary Alice as much as the twins.”
“That’s true. And I love you. I’m going to make this right. I have plans. I’m going to get the house back, and things are going to be great.”
“I don’t need great,” Loretta said. “I don’t need you to be great. I just need you to be here.”
“I am here! I’m here for the family!”
“No, I don’t know where you are. And I’m not going wherever that is. I can’t live like this,” she said. “I can’t take—” They’d both heard the noise. An animal grunt.
Loretta frowned at the side window of the vehicle. Frankie turned. In the back of the wagon were two shapes. He leaned forward, put a hand on the glass.
Irene and some Chinese guy looked out at him. They were stretched out in the cargo area, and the skin-to-clothing ratio was higher than he would have expected.
God damn it. Was there nowhere in this place to be alone?
Loretta walked out of the garage.
“Now you decide to get laid?” Frankie said. “Jesus, Reenie.” He followed his wife into the yard, and hoped she’d still be his wife when the day was over.
22
BUDDY
The World’s Most Powerful Psychic will never be twenty-eight years old. He wonders if it’s the stress of the day that will kill him. For example: the damn window shades! The garden-level windows run along the patio, and yet again, the metal blinds he installed have been hauled open.
He’ll also never get to eat these lamb sausages. With Joshua’s help he managed to chop all the garlic, and on his own blended four pounds of ground meat and another pile of the mint-feta mixture, but now he’s almost out of time, and he has to make all the patties. He’s preparing the food outside because this is where (a) there’s enough room, and (b) he remembers doing the
cooking for the morning.
Loretta walks out of the garage, looking sad, and Frankie comes out after, talking talking talking. He wants to tell them both that it will all work out, but he doesn’t know that, not really. After 12:06 today, they’ll be in uncharted territory.
He’s having trouble concentrating as time rolls closer to zero hour. And zero minute, and zero second. Though which second has always been a mystery. What knowledge he has is accurate, but it’s not precise. Exactitude escapes him.
He takes out his crayoned checklist and goes over it for the third time in ten minutes:
clean grill
squirt guns
drill (F’s bag)
compressor
window shades
potatoes
lamb patties
front door
potato salad?
basement door
hot dogs
other dog
window shades AGAIN
At the bottom, he scrawls an addition:
LOCK WINDOW SHADES!!!!
He checks his watch. The patties will have to wait. He goes inside to the kitchen sink, washes his hands, and walks into the living room.
Graciella spots Buddy and says, “Are you sure I can’t help?”
He waves her off, then remembers something. “When the doorbell rings, have Teddy answer it.” Then he grabs his toolbox from the hall closet and retrieves his drill from Frankie’s tool bag.
“Can we have the boy?” Archibald asks.
“Try to sound less ominous,” Teddy says. He calls for Matty, and he comes up from the basement, freshly showered and changed, but wary.
“Sit over here,” Archibald says. “Right here on the couch.” To Buddy this sounds equally ominous.
Destin Smalls says to Matty, “Remember what I told you about your grandmother? Later, you’ll look back on this as the moment you stepped into her shoes.”
“What, high heels?” Teddy says, and Graciella laughs in her low, throaty way. Teddy does love an audience.
Archibald tapes electrodes to the backs of Matty’s hands, humming as he works. Matty sits very still, like a prisoner being prepped for the electric chair. Buddy has much to do, but he wants to see this part. And because he remembers seeing it, he knows he has enough time before he has to go downstairs to the fuse box.
“Now please, I want you to concentrate,” Archibald says to Matty. “Focus your attention on the silver van outside. Can you see it?”
“I can’t,” Matty says.
“Close your eyes, and do what you normally do when you’re remote-viewing.”
“That’s what I’m saying—I can’t do that.” He looks at Teddy. “I have a…routine I’ve got to follow.”
“What kind of routine?” Smalls asks. “Meditation? Some of our operatives—”
“You don’t need him to leave his body,” Teddy interrupts. “Just record his resting tau state and we can get down to business.”
“Will that give us what we need?” Smalls asks Archibald.
“One way to find out,” the tiny bald man says. He flips two switches on the control board, and puts his finger over a third button. “Beginning measurement…now.”
He presses the button. The needle of the biggest gauge slams into the red zone and stays there. A whine starts in one of the machines, and grows higher in pitch.
“Huh,” Archibald says.
A flash erupts from one of the devices. A loud pop! sounds from below, and all lights in the house go out.
Buddy hustles to the basement, where Mary Alice and Julian, Graciella’s oldest son, sit in front of the now-blank TV, holding game controllers. “What happened?” Mary Alice asks.
Buddy goes to the far wall, flips open the fuse box, and resets the circuit breakers. Lights come back on, as does the TV.
Buddy walks past them and sets to work on the window shades with the drill that he’s retrieved from Frankie’s tool bag. Each shade has a flange that rests against the wood. He doesn’t have time to be clever, so he drives screws directly through the flange into the wood. He really wishes he’d remembered this earlier. He could have made locking hooks. (Except he wouldn’t have made hooks, because he didn’t remember doing that. He was so tired of Future Buddy being such an idiot.)
After he’s finished, Julian says, “That was…loud.”
Buddy puts away the drill.
Julian says, “And it’s pretty dark in here.”
“It’s perfect,” Mary Alice says kindly. “Less glare.”
Buddy goes into the laundry room and gets down the supplies he bought a few weeks ago. One of them is a shallow metal dish. He fills that up at the utility sink and brings everything out to the big room. He sets the bowl on the floor, and hands Mary Alice the plastic bag. The girl looks confused.
Buddy’s sympathetic. For the longest time, this was the memory that most confused him. But now, it makes perfect sense. “I’ll be right back,” he says.
He hurries to Mrs. Klauser’s house and knocks on the front door. He can hear Miss Poppins barking in excitement, and a second, even higher-pitched noise. The yipping increases in intensity when Mrs. Klauser opens the door.
“I was wondering if I could borrow Mr. Banks,” he says.
She laughs. “Take him all day! I don’t know how you talked me into this. He’s a terror!” But she’s smiling. She’s more energetic than she’s been in months.
Buddy acknowledges Miss Poppins with a pat to the head, but then scoops up the ball of white fluff next to her. Mr. Banks is barely two months old, all head and paws, and his puppy coat is so soft. Buddy holds the little creature’s face to his own, and it licks his face. Mr. Banks still has that lovely puppy smell.
He carries the dog back to the house, and as soon as he enters the backyard he has the attention of every child. They rush him. Squealing.
“Don’t scare him,” Buddy says. “This is Mr. Banks. I wonder if you could take care of him for me, for just a while?”
This is a rhetorical question. They follow him as if he’s the Pied Piper, and he walks them into the basement. Even Matty, now freed from the smoking devices and the attention of the government men, has been attracted by the commotion.
Buddy says to Jun, “Have you ever taken care of a pet?”
She nods excitedly. “I have a cat.”
“Then you’re in charge. Don’t let them squash him.” He puts the puppy in her arms.
He does a quick head count: three Pusateris, the twins, Mary Alice, Matty, and Jun Lee. Eight is the correct number, so that’s a relief.
The children don’t notice him leaving, and no one squawks when he closes the steel door. He checks his watch. 11:32. So little time! He sets the timer beside the door to thirty minutes and presses enter. The magnetic locks engage with a reassuring thunk.
MATTY
He was still shaky after frying the house’s electrical system, but he had to admit that the puppy helped calm him down. When the lights blew, Grandpa Teddy had rushed over and unplugged him, over the objections of Destin Smalls. “One test!” Teddy said. “That was the deal.” They kept arguing, and Matty escaped to the basement with the other kids to play with the dog.
Even Malice was enjoying herself. Somehow she’d gotten possession of a bag of pet toys. Inside was a real bone, a rubber ball, and a selection of squeaker toys in the shape of small animals that Mr. Banks would supposedly be happy to kill. She distributed them to the younger kids, and they seemed more excited by them than the dog was.
After playing Santa, Malice sat down beside him. He realized that the smell of her also calmed him down.
“So,” she said, in a voice pitched so that only he could hear. “My mom and Frankie are probably getting a divorce.”
“Whoa. Really?”
“It doesn’t look good.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“Can you tell me now what you and Frankie have been up to?”
“Uh…”
“Because wha
tever it is, it got our house taken away from us.”
“I don’t know what he’s been—”
“Don’t say that. Don’t. If you fucking lie to me, I won’t be able to take it.”
“I don’t want to lie to you,” he said.
“So don’t. Just tell me. Please.”
He was not about to tell her about her dad, and the mobster thing. But it would be such a relief to have one person his own age know what he was going through. Especially if it was Malice.
He looked around. The room was full of kids, but they were all paying attention to the puppy.
“He was helping me,” Matty said. “Helping me do stuff.”
She waited for him to explain.
“I’m like Grandma Mo,” he said. “I can travel outside my body, and see things.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?” That might have sounded harsh from someone else, but the way she said it, it meant That’s amazing.
“You believe me?” he asked.
She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, Matty. I’m in the family. The shit I’ve seen?”
Relief flowed through him like cool water. He didn’t know what she meant by seeing shit; he hadn’t seen anything until something happened to him. Before that it was all family stories and rumors.
“I thought I was going crazy at first,” he said. “I’m getting better at it, but I still need…help. To make it happen. Psychologically, and uh, physically.”
“So that’s where I fit in,” Malice said.
He felt himself blush.
“It’s okay,” she said. “There’s nothing to be ashamed about. True, you’re a little young…”
“You think so?”
“Sure. But now it makes sense why you were so desperate. You needed to get high.”
It took him a moment to process this. “Right,” he said. “That’s where you came in.”
“Though I have to tell you, I’ve never seen someone smoke up and get such a boner.”
His throat seized, and he coughed.
“At the playground?” she said, oblivious to his distress. “Man, Janelle and I looked over and you were like, shwing!”
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