Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel

by Julie Lawson Timmer

  Kyle set their lattes on the table, and she took a sip of hers while she waited for him to sit. Still standing, he cleared his throat. “You, uh, have any cash? It came to nine forty, and I only had a five.”

  “Nine dollars for two coffees?” she asked.

  She reached for her wallet and gave him a ten. He paid the barista and sat again. “Look,” she asked, “could you at least come over every other day or something and walk this crazy dog of his? If he’s going to be out looking for a job, then putting in his hours, plus staying up on homework, he’s not going to be able to get up at five every morning and tire it out. And I can’t have it tearing up my house and howling while I’m trying to work.”

  “I’m really not a dog person, is the thing,” he said.

  “Neither am I!” she said. “But it’s not just about the dog, Kyle. You’re Jesse’s father. He needs you. Not only to take Angel for walks, but to just be with him. Spending time, talking, doing father-son things. He’s spiraling. Can’t you see that?”

  “Well, I’m really not set up to have him over at my new place,” he said. “It’s small. I don’t even have a TV. And the fridge is one of those dorm room ones that hardly hold any food; the kid would starve. And I can’t imagine you really want me coming around your place every other day. You divorced me, Markie. You wanted me out of your life.”

  It was a typical Kyle move, blaming his bad behavior on her, and she opened her mouth to call him on it. But his body seemed to have sagged, suddenly, and his face, normally bright with optimism, seemed weary. Markie changed course, and instead of berating him, she softened her voice and said, “We’ve known each other forever, you and I. We have a son together. I never imagined we would stop being in each other’s lives. You can come to the house. To walk the dog or just to hang out with Jesse. It’s fine with me.” Fine was a stretch, a very long one, but she was willing to extend herself for her son’s sake.

  Something in Kyle seemed to break then, and his body and face both crumpled. Markie had never seen him look so broken. She felt her exasperation melt away as compassion took its place. She tried to think of something encouraging to say to him, but before she could come up with anything, he leaned forward, his voice low and unsteady, and said, “The thing is, I don’t blame you. Look, I know I’m not a guy who spends a lot of time on self-examination, but even I’m not too dense to have given a bit of thought to why my wife didn’t want to be married to me anymore. I screwed up. I know I did. I’m . . . what was the word you used? Flaky?”

  She started to apologize, but he waved her off and went on. “And you were right,” he said. “I’m a complete flake. Always have been. The only time I was anywhere close to being a stand-up guy was when I was with you. On my own, I’m . . .” He looked away for a long moment before facing her again and whispering, “I’m a fuckup. I know I am. I mean, for God’s sake, I just had to ask my ex-wife to help cover two measly lattes. Yeah, I owe Danny money, and a few other people, too. I got fired last week, and I’m not sure if there’s a job around here I haven’t already been hired for and canned from. Plus, I’m hardly a shining example of fidelity or honesty or any other moral you’d want to pass on to a kid. So what the hell do I have to offer Jesse?”

  Markie moved to speak, but Kyle held up a hand to stop her. “He takes after you, thank God,” he continued. “I know he had this one huge lapse of judgment with the spray paint, but we both know that’s not who he really is. He’s a grounded kid, an honest one, a responsible one. He’s going to be a good man. I agree with you that he needs to get away from these guys he’s been hanging out with. They’re a bad influence. But so am I. He’s better off without me.”

  “Kyle,” Markie said, reaching for his hand, “you can’t believe that’s true.”

  “We both know it is,” he said. He stood. “I need to get out of here.”

  “Wait!” Markie said, rising as he made his way to the front of the shop. “We don’t both know it’s true! I think—”

  But he was gone.

  Jesse jogged up the walk, tossed his backpack onto one of the patio chairs, and, out of breath, asked if she had checked into her job idea. His sincerity filled her with regret. They were failing him, she and Kyle. She needed to do better.

  “I did, and it didn’t pan out. I’m sorry.”

  Her words were almost drowned out as Angel, trapped inside in her crate, resumed the deafening protest she had kept up most of the day. Jesse ran inside and reappeared a moment later, the dog leashed. He held her off with one hand as she jumped up, desperate for attention, and used the other to fish his cell phone from his back pocket.

  “So I can call Trevor and say yes?”

  Markie was tempted to tell him, look, it was a lovely gesture, his promise to pay the Levins back, and she was proud of him for even thinking of it, but the entire thing was getting a little too complicated. Maybe a handwritten letter of apology would be an adequate alternative. How long could he avoid the wrong path if his workmate was one of his co-vandals? Damn her ex and his uncanny ability to burn bridges with every colleague and acquaintance he’d ever known! If not for Kyle’s unpaid debt to Danny, there would have been an alternative that kept Jesse’s conscience strong while also keeping him away from Trevorandthehoodlums.

  “Mom?” Jesse said, holding his phone aloft. “Can I? Call him? His dad’s there until five today, and he told Trevor I could come in and—oh, hi, Mrs. Saint!” He waved, and when Markie turned to look and saw no one, he explained, “She was on the porch, but she just went inside.”

  Markie bowed her head in defeat and sighed. She couldn’t believe what she was about to suggest, but anything was better than letting him spend more time with Trevor the spray-painting twit. Taking a breath, she gestured across the fence and said her next words as fast as she could, before she lost her nerve.

  “Go talk to her. She has a list of things Frédéric could use help with. When she first told me, I didn’t think you’d be interested, but, obviously, things have changed. The list wasn’t all that long, but I bet if you tell her what you’re trying to do, she’ll add to it.”

  “You want me to talk to Mrs. Saint?” he asked, incredulous. “You want me to work for her?”

  Markie chastised herself for the sighing and muttering she had done about their neighbor in her son’s presence. From now on, she would keep her griping to herself.

  She nodded. “It would probably be a lot less physical than the lumberyard.”

  A self-conscious smile flickered over his lips. “I was starting to worry about that, to be honest. Trevor’s a lot bigger than me. But you really think she’d come up with more stuff? A thousand bucks’ worth?”

  “I do.”

  “That’s, like, crazy.”

  Before Markie had a chance to reconsider whether perhaps Trevor might be the lesser of the two evils after all, Jesse took off across the patio, Angel running behind. She watched as they sped across the lawn, jumped the fence, and sprinted the rest of the way to Mrs. Saint’s side door. Jesse knocked, and a moment later, Frédéric answered, bowing stiffly in greeting. He exchanged a few words with Jesse, then called over his shoulder.

  Mrs. Saint appeared, opening her folded piece of paper and holding it out to Jesse, who took it with one hand and held the dog’s collar with the other as she pulled to get in the door. Markie waited for Mrs. Saint to point to the screened porch or the tie-out or some other place where Jesse could secure the animal so she wouldn’t sneak into the house. But the older woman stepped back, pulling Frédéric with her to make room, and beckoned the boy and his pet inside. The door shut behind them, leaving Markie alone, gawking at her neighbor’s closed door.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The thud of a closing door woke Markie at 5:45 on Wednesday morning. She panicked for a moment, recalling the last time she’d been woken by a noise in the night, but a moment later she heard Angel whine from the sidewalk outside her window. Peeking out, she saw them walking down the street, Jesse hol
ding plastic bags in one hand, the leash in the other, as the animal tugged, trying to get him to move faster. He resisted and forced her to walk beside him at his ambling pace, and Markie grinned. The boy might want a dog, but he did not want a morning jogging routine. Angel would have to get used to the fact that her owner was a video gamer, not a runner.

  She was finishing her second cup of coffee when the two of them came panting in an hour later.

  “I tried getting up earlier,” he said, “I really did, but I just couldn’t do it. Sorry. I know you think she needs to be out a lot longer.” He collapsed on the floor, struggling to muster the energy required to unhook the leash. “Even the hour killed me.” He closed his eyes and appeared to be settling in for a nap.

  “Jesse,” she said, “it’s quarter to seven.”

  “Ugh,” he groaned, lifting himself slowly. “I’ve got to get Lola in fifteen minutes.”

  As Markie predicted, Mrs. Saint had been more than willing to add to Jesse’s list until it resembled a work order that would total $1,000 over several months. Some things she would come up with as she thought of them, she told him, but others she added right then as he stood in her sitting room, Angel at his feet. The new items were all Lola-related: walk her to school in the mornings on his way to high school (a block from the elementary), walk her home in the afternoons, take her along on his after-school walk with Angel, help her with homework.

  “How’s that for easy money?” he said when he returned from talking with his new employer. “She’ll pay me for basically walking myself to school and walking my own dog!”

  Mrs. Saint was worried the girl wasn’t getting enough exercise, she told Jesse. Plus, she sensed Patty needed more breaks from Lola, as did the others, including Mrs. Saint herself.

  “And here I am,” he said, “looking to earn some cash. So it’s all, you know, a win/win or whatever. ‘Shooting the single bird with the identical bullet’ is what she said, actually.”

  “I told her I didn’t think a ninth-grade boy would want to hang out with a second-grade girl,” Markie told him. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be a problem if you asked her for other jobs instead. I saw the list, and it was all Frédéric’s stuff. Maybe Bruce has some things.”

  “I don’t mind,” he said, and she was shocked.

  When he had first seen Lola on the other side of the fence shortly after they moved in, he begged Markie not to make him go over and introduce himself.

  “I mean, I sort of mind,” he admitted. “But Mr. Levin minded what we did to his store, so who am I to mind what I have to do to pay him back?”

  “I’ll feed her,” Markie said, gesturing to the dog. “You go shower.”

  “For real?”

  “You can’t be late on your first day of work. Not for any job, even one for a neighbor.” It sounded so much like her father that she felt compelled to add, “And I’m proud of you. For what you’re doing to make things up to Mr. Levin. So I want to help.”

  “Proud,” he repeated, as though he had possibly heard her wrong. “Not ashamed that I have something to make up to him for in the first place?”

  She thought back to Sunday morning and how she’d had the sense that he had extracted all the shame from the atmosphere around the house. Her father, whose spirit had now settled into the kitchen, having heard her mini-lecture on the importance of timeliness, rose inside her. Clayton could find stray pockets of shame between the particles of oxygen and nitrogen suspended around them if he had to, after which he would trot them out in the form of “I can’t believe a child of mine would stoop this low,” or “How will your mother and I show our faces at the club after this?”

  Markie drowned his presence in a mouthful of scalding coffee. “Proud,” she said, pointing to the basement door. “Now, shower. Hurry.”

  “You’re the best, Mom.”

  One point to Markie. One to the French Canadian, for the dog and the job. Zero to Clayton the Commander.

  As it turned out, an hour-long stroll was not enough to tire Angel for the day, and before she finished her first file, Markie knew there was no way she would be able to work with all the fussing going on in the other room. By ten, she had been through half a bag of dog treats in an effort to bribe the animal into being quiet. She had stuck all of Angel’s toys through the metal bars, had reached in to pet her, and out of sheer desperation, had even sung to her.

  Nothing worked, and Angel had gone from whining to crying to barking and, finally, howling. The windows were open, and Markie couldn’t help hoping the noise was disturbing Mrs. Saint, too. She was tempted to let the dog get louder to teach her neighbor a lesson. But she couldn’t afford another two-file day like Tuesday, so she clipped Angel’s leash on, opened the back door, and let the overly energetic animal drag them both to the tie-out.

  “You have a time-out, young lady,” she growled as she switched the leash for the tie-out clip and stomped away.

  She heard Bruce’s voice as she reached the door. “Sounds like someone’s not behaving well.”

  “She needs way more exercise than we thought,” Markie told him. “And Jesse is physically incapable of getting up early enough to make that happen. I haven’t gotten a minute of work done since Monday. I don’t think Mrs. Saint realized how high maintenance she’d be. This breed is . . . something else.”

  “Oh, she knows her dog breeds,” Bruce said, glancing at the dog, who was busy digging a deep hole in the middle of the yard. “I’ll take care of that hole later. And hey, I bet Patty could walk her sometimes. She could go way longer than an hour since she ain’t in no rush for school or nothing in the mornings. She’s fast, too. Got those long legs. Probably make a big difference.” He turned to Mrs. Saint’s house. “You want me to get her out here to talk about it? She could start today, I bet.”

  For Markie, the notion of even more traffic over the fence was worse than the thought that Angel might keep her from ever reviewing another file. It made her chest tighten to think of it, and in her anxiety, her next words came out snappish.

  “I thought she had a job,” she said.

  She heard the irritation in her voice and was appalled at her own rudeness. Bruce wasn’t responsible for any of this. He didn’t appear offended, though, and Markie considered the fact that he seemed not to read social cues very well. Maybe his mess-ups on the job were more about not hearing the subtleties in communication than they were about not being a capable gardener.

  But he deserved no less respect because he wasn’t easily offended. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve just had it with this today.” His expression showed he still didn’t follow, so she moved on. “Anyway,” she said, “I can’t afford a dog walker on top of her food and . . . everything else.” She gestured with the leash to indicate that it, too, had come at a price, along with the crate, the bowls, and the toys. But it hadn’t, of course, and neither had Angel herself. Mrs. Saint had provided it all. “Well, the food,” she corrected herself.

  “Oh, you don’t got to worry about her food,” Bruce said. “I’m planning to stop for a new bag every other week when I’m over there at the nursery. Pet store’s right beside. And you wouldn’t need to pay Patty, neither. I’m sure Mrs. Saint would just make it part of her job. She’s always looking for ways to add, you know, variety. Patty’s not one for doing the same thing over and over.”

  Markie shook her head. The last thing she wanted was for Angel to become part of Mrs. Saint’s master plan to keep her so-called Defectives occupied.

  “I couldn’t let her walk my dog without paying her for it myself,” she told him firmly. “And I can’t afford to pay her for it. So Angel gets a time-out on the tie-out. And that’ll have to do.”

  Four more time-outs and a lot of begging, chasing, and cursing later (but very little file reviewing), Jesse arrived home, dropped his backpack, and dove onto the area rug to unlatch the crate door. Angel leaped out, and he fell back dramatically, pretending to be pinned underneath her.

  “How wa
s she?” he asked.

  Markie glared at him, but he was too busy with the dog to notice.

  “How’d the walks to school and back go?” she asked.

  “Not as bad as I thought. Lola isn’t one of those talker girls like I was worried she’d be. She’ll answer questions, maybe say one or two other things, but other than that, she keeps to herself.”

  “Sounds like you.” She didn’t add “lately.” She wondered if he even remembered a time when he spoke in paragraphs, or even sentences longer than about five words.

  “Even though she didn’t say a lot, I could tell she liked the company. I get the feeling she’s kind of lonely.”

  Markie regarded her son. In the past few days, so much of the real Jesse had shown through the grumpy teen veneer. She would never say it to him, but it struck her that messing up in a major way was exactly what he had needed in order to reset himself. She thought about Kyle’s unexpected contrition at the coffee shop and wondered if he was going through a similar thing. She hoped so, for his sake and for their son’s.

  “Are you going to help her with homework today, too?” Markie asked. “Or maybe that’s not every day? I can’t remember how much schoolwork you had at her age.”

  “Every day. I guess she’s a really crummy reader, so there’s always that to practice. Plus, today she’s got a math work sheet.”

  Markie pictured Jesse sitting at the table in Mrs. Saint’s kitchen, trying to explain math to Lola as their neighbor hovered nearby and attempted to pry information out of him about his mother or commented about his too-baggy jeans or his too-long hair.

  “That’s a lot of time to be spending over there,” she said, trying for a casual tone. “Homework with Lola, and also the chores with Frédéric?”