Never once taking her eyes off Mr. Breeder, the woman unzipped her bag, turned it upside down, and let a shower of frilly things—bras, panties, negligees—tumble into the open washer. The final insult was the way she emptied her Woolite bottle, slowly and with relish, the way you would drizzle syrup on a sundae.
“That all your own hair?” she asked, turning to Shannon and leaning down to grab her braid between her fingers and her thumb.
Shannon nodded.
“You get tired sometimes?” Her voice was low. There was hot-pink lipstick on her perfect teeth. “I get tired sometimes.”
“Well, it’s a little much in the summer—” Shannon started, but Mr. Breeder had had enough. He held up his hand to silence them and looked at Shannon, his cheeks shaking with fury.
“Darlin’,” he said to her. “Call the police.”
Shannon didn’t move. She was riveted by the girl’s stare and the grip of her broken nails on her hair.
“Fine,” Mr. Breeder said. “I’ll do it myself.”
The cops did indeed come. Well, the cop, Randy Richardville, lights flashing. And his two deputies, Jack and Zane. Right behind them was the press.
* * *
By the time Shannon got to her grandmother’s the story was all over town, at least that’s what Granny told her and Granny tended to be in the know, thanks to her weekly visits to the Hair Barn for a shampoo and set. Also, Granny never turned off her TV, and local news, along with junk food and a never-ending game of solitaire, seemed her main source of consolation for a life lived alone.
“Breeder’s flipped his lid for good,” Granny said, hobbling down a dark hallway into the kitchen, where Shannon stood with an angel food cake in her hand. Granny’s rubber-tipped cane made sucking sounds against the hardwood. “What the hell was he thinking?”
Shannon put the cake down on the counter and grabbed a knife from a beer mug next to the toaster. Her grandmother’s house used to smell like Pine-Sol, but that was years ago when Granny was still spry. Ever since Rita died, Shannon cleaned the house when she could, and it’d been too long between visits. There was an odor of spoiled milk about the place and of microwave dinners and unwashed sheets.
When Shannon was a girl, she used to love to visit her grandmother’s stately home on Peach Street, to get lost in the upstairs bedrooms while Granny made a pie or ironed Grandpa’s shirts. Granny always left her alone to wander the house, to go from room to room, picking up knickknacks and making up stories. Back then she didn’t like to share Granny or her house with anyone if she could help it, not even Rhae Anne. The only time she remembered playing with another person at Granny’s was the summer Camila lived with them and her memory of those days was sketchy. Mostly she recalled walking with the beautiful girl through the back hall where the linoleum—yellow roses on a silver background—echoed their steps back at them. And their breathy version of “Follow the Yellow Brick Road.” Together they traced the chains of flowers from doorway to doorway, their feet kicking up dust motes that spun in the half-light of the hall like disturbed spirits. At one point, Camila had whispered, “I want to stay here forever.”
“Forever,” Shannon whispered back.
But the passing years had been cruel rather than kind. Grandpa Washburn died broke. Spencerville Fun Spot, the amusement park he’d built with his brothers, was shut down by the state in the eighties after one too many accidents involving drunk employees and the Tilt-a-Whirl. That private catastrophe was followed by a string of bad investments and old-people scams. Then Granny got sick. Rita, too. Time turned the floor flowers gray, and the house, once so beautiful, seemed to be falling apart around Granny without her really noticing. Or caring. She lived in squalor with only her television and a fake bird for company. The bird, which Granny had named Johnny Carson, was a battery-powered parrot that cocked its head and chirped incessantly. It was a present from Rita and for that reason, Granny refused to get rid of it or power it down.
“Polly want a cracker,” the bird squawked from its perch near the refrigerator. “Land ho!”
“How are you, Granny?” Shannon asked.
“Don’t change the subject, missy. Tell me all about the showdown on Beacon Street. Inquiring minds want to know.” Granny maneuvered herself up to the table and looked up expectantly at Shannon, who put a slice of cake in front of her.
Shannon was early. She usually got to Granny’s around dinnertime, but there was no point in her staying at work. She’d spent most of the morning trying to help customers get through a tangle of TV reporters, who, with their cameras and microphones and antennaed white vans with their own pictures on the side, reminded her of a swarm of gnats. No one could do any laundry if they couldn’t get in the door, and Mr. Breeder, eager to talk to anyone holding a microphone, forgot Shannon was there at all. At one point she heard Larry’s mistress, restrained by a puffing Randy Richardville, tell Mr. Breeder that she planned to sue him for everything he had. “You’ll be speaking to my lawyer,” she said, and Mr. Breeder, calmer now that he had reinforcements, replied, “Just make sure he talks American.”
Shannon didn’t want to think about any of it. “You obviously saw the news,” she said. “Why don’t you tell me?”
“Well,” Granny said, drawing the word out and putting her fork down with a flourish, “Breeder’s saying that all the Mexicans do is crap on his floor and break his machines, and that foreign hotsy-totsy is calling him every name in the book. But I don’t know. She didn’t look like the kind to drop trou in the middle of a Laundromat to me.”
“It was a little girl. She peed her pants and there was some on the floor. Mr. Breeder saw it and went nuts.”
“And who cleaned it up?” Granny asked.
Shannon didn’t respond.
“I thought so. You gotta quit that job, girl. I’ve told you and told you. You’re too good for that place, just like your mother was too good for Driving K’s.”
“Flying J’s,” Shannon said automatically.
“You know what I mean.” Granny ate her cake quickly. She usually had two pieces to Shannon’s one, said angel food cake was mostly air anyway, and Shannon supposed she was right. “All this on top of that Daisy what’s her name going missing. I don’t recognize this town anymore.”
“Daisy Gonzalez,” Shannon said. “She lived next door to me. I mean she lives next door to me. She and her dad. I don’t know them well, though. They sort of keep to themselves.”
“That’s modern times for you,” Granny said. “Not knowing your neighbors. When I was your age we practically lived in our neighbors’ houses. Children running back and forth, shared dinners, sleepovers. You’d forget whose kid was whose. We’d do anything for each other. And now what? We sit tight in sealed rooms? We have decks instead of porches. We Tex-Mex instead of talking.”
“Text,” Shannon said.
“Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!” Johnny shrieked.
“Anyway, the way things change, you start to long for death,” Granny said. “I guess that’s how it’s supposed to work. When I go I won’t miss this place, I’ll tell you that much.”
“Argh, matey!” said Johnny. “Prepare to walk the plank!”
Shannon leaned against the counter, tired and fighting off a headache. “Hey, Granny, do you know Irv Peoples?”
Granny glanced up from her cake. There were crumbs at the sides of her mouth. “That shut-in roadkill collector?”
“Is that what he does? He collects roadkill?” So she was wrong about the kittens and/or rodents. Live ones, anyway.
“I believe so. Don’t make that face. It’s not his hobby or anything. It’s his job. At least that’s what your mother told me. They were friends of a sort. Didn’t he use to shovel your walk in the winter? And clean your gutters?”
Shannon nodded, remembering Rita at Christmas, baking thank-you cookies for Irv and a few other men around town who came by the house to help with odd jobs. Shannon couldn’t recall ever having to shovel snow or rake a
single leaf, and she certainly didn’t have Josh to thank for that.
“I bet he still does,” Shannon said, “but he’s always so quiet and secretive about it I never have a chance to thank him.”
“He’s a nice enough guy, sure,” Granny said, “but why Rita saw fit to buy property in such a cursed place as the Bottoms was, is, and forever will be beyond me. Not that she ever listened to her parents. So stubborn.”
Shannon reached back and grabbed the end of her braid. Then she snapped a few split ends off and threw it back over her shoulder. “Do you think I should cut my hair?”
“Why?”
“Josh just kind of said something about it. That maybe it wasn’t pretty anymore.”
“Josh is a dead end.”
“Don’t start.”
“Don’t you ‘Don’t start’ me. I promised your mother on her deathbed that I’d keep an eye on you and it would be breaking my promise to turn a deaf ear and a blind eye on your relationship with that boy. He’s a Seaver and Seavers are Seavers no matter what. They don’t change. They are born trash and they stay that way, world without end, amen. You know, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if a Seaver’s behind that girl’s disappearance. Hank, maybe. Him and his gun club buddies. The whole thing stinks of Seaver.”
Shannon sighed. She didn’t believe any of the Seavers had it in them to hurt an innocent young girl. They were all bark, no bite, especially Josh, who rarely did anything now beyond roll joints and blow pot smoke at the fish tank in an effort to intoxicate their neon tetras. Sometimes he filmed the results—fish rotating slowly at the bottom of the aquarium like tiny, bright hotdogs—and posted them to Facebook, tagging his cousins and half cousins and cousins twice removed. LOL, they’d comment. ROTFLMAO. Haha looks familiar!
Granny was still talking. “You need to find yourself a decent earner,” she said. “That’s what I had in your grandpa. He didn’t set the world on fire but he worked and he worked hard and he made me comfortable most of the days of my life. But that Josh. I hear he lost his job to a Mexican. Apparently he, meaning the Mexican, is actually willing to do a decent day’s work, unlike Josh, who—”
“How did you hear that? About Juan taking Josh’s place?”
Granny winked. “I have my ways.”
“Ah. Rhae Anne.”
“Maybe. But it doesn’t matter who I heard it from. It matters that it’s true. Josh Seaver simply cannot, or will not, keep a job, and in my humble opinion that’s no man at all.”
Shannon knew what was coming next. Once Granny got going on Josh’s essential worthlessness as a man, a much longer and tiring monologue was sure to follow, so Shannon left her cake untouched and grabbed a mop and five-gallon bucket from the utility closet. While Granny treated her to an exhaustive list of Josh’s faults—bad temper, lack of ambition, too many tattoos—Shannon dumped a capful of bleach into the bottom of a bucket for the second time that day, cut it with water from the tub, and let it sit for a moment while she stripped Granny’s bed, throwing all the linens in a garbage bag for later. Mr. Breeder let her use the washers and dryers for free after hours. Access to the equipment, along with catastrophic health coverage and all the bleach she could ever want, was what Mr. Breeder liked to call “the perks of the job.”
“And don’t even get me started on that boy’s dope habit,” Granny shouted from the kitchen while Shannon pulled a set of striped sheets tight over the mattress and shook a light blanket out on top. “Your cousin Paulie tells me he sees Josh over at that what’s his name’s house almost every week buying dope by the suitcase and him as unemployed as a doornail so I guess you’re paying for that and my God, honey, is there anything you don’t do?”
* * *
By the time Shannon left her grandmother’s house it was dark and a full moon was hanging low over Tony’s Pizza, closed by the look of it. She passed the Hair Barn, bright and still bustling, and made a right on Beacon, heading for Breeder’s. She could go home, but Josh would probably be there and she could catch his hopelessness quick as a cold. Chances were good that if she went home right then, she’d walk in on him not-so-surreptitiously surfing porn. It had happened before, several times now, and if she complained, he called her crazy, a jealous bitch, asked her if she was on the rag. But was it crazy jealousy to wish your boyfriend didn’t spend much of his free time ogling other women? Especially when those women had bodies that looked as if they’d been polished and painted, and overlarge lips and eyes and breasts like a Barbie doll’s or a Disney princess? Rhae Anne told Shannon not to take Josh’s porn habit personally. “All men look at it,” she said. “Larry does. Josh does. They all do. It’s no big deal.” But Shannon did take it personally and didn’t know how not to because Josh, who once declared he’d never need porn again as long as he had Shannon to satisfy his every need, could hardly be bothered to glance at her now. Shannon felt that without any real notice or time to change the trajectory of things, she’d been replaced by a bevy of Asian beauties and blond MILFs and barely legal teen queens whose dial was always set to sexy, who had no other job but to be sexy, all day long, all night even. Such beauties weren’t burdened with body odor or dead mothers or ailing grandmothers or insurance payments. At least for the ten minutes it took for men like Josh to get off on them. They had no desires of their own beyond being fucked by the man on-screen, longer faster harder, and being looked at, loved for their poreless skin. So easily placated, those women. So ready-made for pleasure.
But when the cameras stopped rolling, Shannon supposed porn stars were just like her. They took off their fake eyelashes and cake makeup and went home to apartments with leaky faucets and countertops strewn with unpaid bills and men with porn habits who would call them crazy menstruating bitches out of self-defense. Shannon shook the bracelet and read her birthday on the gift charm. Off by a day. Nice, Josh. Very nice.
The bracelet, she realized, parking in the same spot she had that morning, was a bribe and nothing more, an inelegant move in the unhappy chess game that had become their relationship. It was like the time Josh made her a home-cooked meal to keep her from asking about his job search. There was a catch. There was always a catch. Literally. The bracelet had yanked out most of the wrist hairs on her right arm. But what was he trying to make up for this time? What had he done or failed to do and when would she find out?
She did not want to think about any of it, so she stepped out of the car, a slow burn spreading up her back, and almost ran into the old woman from before, the grandmother type Mr. Breeder had chased out the front door. The woman was standing on the Laundromat steps, a plastic pitcher in her hand. A dark liquid splashed out onto the sidewalk, coating the concrete in something viscous and iron smelling.
Shannon stood transfixed, watching the woman shake the last drops of liquid onto Mr. Breeder’s cardboard sign, now letters-down in a puddle. Her cell phone buzzed in her pocket.
“Rhae Anne.”
“Oh my God, Shannon. What the hell?”
“What the hell what?”
“The Mr. Breeder thing, duh. And that Mexican woman who’s going to sue him. It’s all anyone’s talking about.”
“Oh.”
“Well, that,” Rhae Anne said, “and Daisy Gonzalez gone missing. It’s like we’re living in the Bermuda Triangle all a sudden.”
A hair dryer whirred on Rhae Anne’s end and Bob Seger sang about Hollywood nights, high rolling hills.
“And listen to this. Larry told me that the Ranasack Apartments people, you know, Helman Yoder’s illegals, are putting some sort of voodoo on Breeder’s in revenge for that sign he put up in his window. Larry said they drew a bunch of blood, the whole kit and kaboodle, even the kids, donated it I guess in some back alley behind Tony’s—that must have been sterile—and they’re going to throw it on Breeder’s steps or something. Can you believe it? And there’s talk it’s all related, that the voodoo people might have taken Daisy and that they’re going to demand ransom from rich whites—Mayor Rodgers, mayb
e, or that carpetbagger Mike Marino—to get her back. Bermuda. Effing. Triangle.”
“Wild,” Shannon said.
The old woman turned and stared at Shannon. She put her finger to her lips. In the moonlight, she looked like something out of a fairytale, all except the Reeboks on her feet and her Daytona Beach trucker hat. Shannon watched as the woman took off down a narrow alley, pitcher flopping against her hip.
Rhae Anne drew a long breath. “I said to Larry I said, ‘We really should call Randy Richardville,’ but he was like, ‘What’s he gonna do?’ And Breeder is kind of an ass. Are you listening to me? Larry said that it’s supposed to bring about nine hundred years bad luck, that blood, so you’d better call in sick tomorrow. Get that stuff on you and poof, you’re gone. And you know what I think? I think the whole town’s in for it.”
Shannon looked down at her feet. The blood had leaked down the sidewalk onto her sandals. In the amber glow from the streetlight it looked like tar or quicksand.
“Listen to me, Shannon,” Rhae Anne said. “I don’t know how Larry knows all this. Guess he got it from the Internet or something, but anyway it’s serious. I love you, girl. I’d kill you if something happened to you.”
Shannon knew she was supposed to laugh. Rhae Anne did it for her. “You okay, sweetie?”
Now, Shannon told herself. I should tell her. About Larry and that beautiful woman with the pink phone and stockpile of sexy lingerie. That the woman threatening to sue Chuck Breeder was the same woman keeping Larry out nights. I should tell her. Right now. “Hey, Rhae Anne. There’s something—”
“Oh shit, honey. Gotta go,” Rhae Anne said. “Mrs. Hochstetler and her monthly mom perm. Talk soon, okay?”
“Okay.”
Shannon put her phone back in her pocket. She looked around her, up the street. Down. Only storefront windows stared back, dark beneath metal awnings and broken neon signs. She was alone with the sky and the moon. She looked down at her bracelet, recalled the sight of Josh’s unwashed, bent head as he secured the silver clasp. The charms shook there at the end of her arm, hung out over the pool of blood where reflections of white clouds were scudding, small ships on their way home. Wait, Shannon thought. Wait for me.
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