“I guess I should probably touch base with her. Send flowers.” He thought of the soups he’d had sent to Sadie on the eve of Gary’s funeral. Soothingspoons.com’s comfort quartet: chicken noodle, minestrone, rustic potato, and something French and unpronounceable involving leeks. He’d never tasted a spoonful of their product. As far as he knew, Veronica hadn’t either. Yet they sent them and sent them, every time somebody passed. “Flowers or something,” he said.
“I think she’d prefer not to be disturbed.” Sadie’s tone was icy in a way he didn’t really follow.
“Ahh, well. Maybe I’ll catch her at the HOA thing today. She’ll be there, yeah? I bet she’ll want to speak her piece.”
“She’s certainly good at that.” Sadie’s sour mouth reminded him of Lily’s.
“I don’t really know her,” he said. “I told the reporter that, too.”
“Well, I’ve been getting to know her. What you said—she certainly deserves it.”
“And here I thought you liked everyone.”
“Not Mona. I don’t mind about the boy, and I hope she can sell and move on fast, but—I think you were right on the mark about her. She was awful to Lily.”
“That I’d have paid to see. Your girl can more than hold her own.”
He was edging close to too far or had stepped beyond it. He didn’t know Sadie as well as he might, but that much he could guess. You didn’t mess with the granddaughter. But no. She grinned as if he’d meant to compliment. That bright Sadie optimism. She wielded it like a cudgel. Veronica was right. He should see a damn shrink. He should’ve been seeing one for years. Look at him. You were supposed to go after women like Sadie—generous women, warm, who went optimistically through their lives like kindergarten teachers. You were meant to be happy when things came easy. When you said your piece and forgave and were forgiven in turn. Veronica, or life, or his own fool nature had really done a number on him. All that Sadie sunniness and what hooked him, hard, was his neighbor’s vitriol toward Mona, her unexpected snappishness, the intricate sweep of her sarcastic bow.
ANGELS AND ORIFICES
THE GODS OF EXCESS DRAMA evidently had it in for her. For lo, there was Nicky Tullbeck in all his stalktastic glory. He rang the bell; Gran jumped a little even though she was facing the window and had to have seen him approach. Multiple choice: Gran was (a) mentally casting Benjamin Thales as her very own wrinkled Romeo, (b) running through the list of third-tier relatives to pawn Lily off on, or (c) having a series of tragic but minor and wholly age-appropriate ministrokes. Gran opened the door. “Lily’s unavailable right now,” she said. “Lily is taking a bit of a break from amusements.”
Translation: grounded. At least she’d spelled it out. The morning had been a case study in passive aggression. Lily had been the one to say good morning and she’d been the one to ask any and all questions. Gran’s answers were pleasant, but not pleasant enough to balance out their terseness. And then there was the visual coding. Gran’s laptop had—cue the spooky music—mysteriously vanished and the printed activity schedule had migrated from refrigerator to trash can, which only went to show that Gran was out of practice. Grounding was so much harsher if you saw the world buzz along without you.
Nicky Tullbeck apologized. “I hate to intrude on your family time, ma’am, but I’m here in an official capacity. I’m a reporter. From the Crier.”
An intern. Lily let the fabrication slide, considering the self-puffery involved in elevating herself to official Rosko spokeswoman. Which, oh fuckadoodledoo, had to be why he’d come. Her guts felt jumbled and quick and sick. Gran smiled and let Nicky in. He was careful to wipe his shoes on the mat. Either they were new or he’d gone a little nuts with the polish.
“Lil-lay,” he said, with the same smug inflection adolescent males the world over appeared to find so genius. It would serve Gran right if he actually was a stalker. He’d hack Lily to bits and scatter the various joints around The Commons’ award-winning greens. The per-vet’s property value would tank due to his proximity to the murder house and he’d reap exactly the sympathy he’d shown Mona Rosko. And Gran. She’d pickle inside, remembering how she’d flounced her way through the girl’s final morning, conveying to the best of her ability that Lily < Ben. Mom’s hair would go guilty white and refuse to hold dye. Dad would be hospitalized in short order with a roiling triple ulcer, but not before establishing a scholarship fund for Tyson Rosko in lieu of funeral flowers.
But Sierra. Sierra would speak at the all-school memorial. She’d wear blush half a shade lighter than her usual NARS New Order and mascara that was strategically not waterproof. When her eyes brimmed, even the stoners in the back row would see the streaking and think that poor, brave, beautiful creature. Teachers would cut her slack on assignments and she’d commandeer the Lily Birnam 1995-2010 yearbook spread, selecting photos in which she looked better than the dead girl, or at least ones where the camera had caught her at a thinner angle.
Gran offered Nicky a cup of coffee, apologizing that it was only instant. Apparently there was a genetic predisposition toward that thing Dad did where you had no idea exactly how pissed he was until he squared his back to you and became pleasantness cubed to whomever else was in the room. Dad had learned from the best. Gran offered Nicky his choice of mug, spooned the powder in herself, stirred, and presented him with sugar in an actual sugar bowl. Nicky chose the Forest Park Day mug apparently at random, but who knew what might happen. Even now he was filing the school name away. He’d hitchhike to St. Louis, lurk by the entrance for the 3:15 bell, break out the chloroform, and bury Lily alive. Police would be stymied until Gran remembered how she’d let the slavering beast boy into her home. For the rest of Gran’s life, even a whiff of coffee would set her retching.
Nicky sipped. He let out a commercial-worthy sigh. He took a chair at the kitchen table.
Lily resisted the pamby girl impulse to fold her arms across her chest. Talk about a cascade of causality. First you look weak, then you act weak, then you are weak. “What do you want?”
Gran shot her a look and mouthed manners. The intern was unperturbed. “This doesn’t taste like instant. Thanks again. Lily’s been such a valuable source. I wanted to firm up a few details.” His voice was shiny as his shoes. Lily stood barefoot in her Cherry Pi pajamas. Critics, take note: If fashion were really nothing but fluff, that wouldn’t matter. But it did. She wished she were confidently pencil-skirted. Nicky said he was looking for confirmation of the daughter’s name. “You said Carrie Rosko, right? I’m guessing with a C?”
“They’re going to love you at Rice next year.” Brilliant maneuver, putting him on defense. Genius, really. No wonder Lily was universally beloved.
Nicky’s mug steamed. Gran took a small sip from her own. “We don’t actually know the Roskos that well,” she said. Her face was open and apologetic.
Nicky shifted focus. “Still, you know her a little. What’s she like?”
“Prickly,” said Gran. She looked out at the cul-de-sac and the orderly green beyond. She faced the Thales house, not the Rosko, which was apt enough.
“How so?”
“She doesn’t—” Gran paused. She picked up a spoon and clattered it around her coffee cup. Then she looked at Lily, proper eye contact and everything, for the first time since the accident. You could see her thinking, all those cogs and sprockets. No, I won’t out my granddaughter to a reporter.
Lily’s heart sprang seesaw. Pop quiz. Keeping it secret means (a) Gran loves you and has your back or (b) Gran’s embarrassed. “Mona doesn’t approve of me.” Might as well spare Gran the trouble of saying it.
“You mean the job you’re doing?”
Awareness sliced through Lily with the word. Job. Game over. Gran looked confused, and no wonder. She settled the spoon neatly onto her napkin. When she spoke, she looked at Lily, not the intern. “Mona’s under tremendous pressure. Unimaginable. And pressure like that . . . some people turn into diamonds, but most of us turn into—let’s
be polite and say orifices.” She laid her hands neatly parallel to the spoon. Gran, who couldn’t say gay to a reporter but had no trouble with the Latinate plural of asshole.
Nicky’s stylus was out and scrawling. Lily was pretty sure Gran had meant all that for her alone. “Don’t quote my grandmother,” she said, and her voice was hard and low. It had to be. It had to counterbalance the suntanned vulnerability of her legs, the boxers patterned with twinned cherries and 3.14159, the Greek letter–emblazoned circle-with-a-slice-out pie splayed over her breasts like a target.
“It’s fine, Lily,” Gran said, but it wasn’t.
She wanted to die. Really, truly, and actually. There was a reason mortal and mortified had 44.444-forever-4 percent of their letters in common.
Nicky said, “I’m just here for the daughter’s name. Maybe her rank and service branch if you’ve got them. You’re sure she’s Rosko, like the mom?”
Gran asked how on earth they’d know.
Nicky’s attention shifted to Lily, joy of joys. Her bones rubberized, giving the flesh of her nothing to tense onto. “Yeah. Rosko. I guess.”
“You guess?”
“I’m not really the official spokesperson.” She pulled it off without the creep of blush. At least there was that.
“I figured as much.” Nicky tapped his head and grinned. “Rice, remember? The Stanford of the South?” He made a face like he couldn’t believe he’d said that. “I bet you never even met the Roskos.”
“I did. I have.” Lily sounded about five.
“So the deal with the mom—”
“Is something you’ll have to ask our neighbor directly.” Gran stood.
“She doesn’t return calls.” Nicky sounded about five, too.
A birdlike tilt of her head conveyed Gran’s disinterest. Nicky tried Lily. “I can’t get confirmation of a service record for Carrie Rosko. I’ve tried Caroline, Carolyn. So before I waste any more of my time on this, I’d like to know how much you were messing with me.” He spoke like someone who watched a lot of cop dramas. Sierra would probably be weak with lust. “The only Carrie Rosko I can find is down in Florence,” he said.
“So? We have bases in Italy.” Lily was pretty sure, at least. And it sounded good.
“Florence, Arizona. As in, the women’s penitentiary. Inmate number”—he checked his phone—“583446/RO.”
“R and O aren’t numbers.”
“You know what? You’re crazy. You’re a crazy person.”
Thank the Drama Gods for Gran, who indicated the door. She upped the wattage of her smile. “Off the record?”
Nicky hovered. “Yes.”
“Completely?”
“Completely.”
“My granddaughter’s something of a drama bug. She’s down here after being nearly expelled from her school for bullying. She got herself mixed up with the Roskos; yesterday, she practically put another neighbor in the hospital. She’s just spinning you around.” She touched his arm, conciliatory. “I’d head back to my desk if I were you.”
He went. The screen door needed oiling.
Gran wheeled on Lily. “Official spokesperson?”
Lily made a squeak not unlike the door.
“Look at me.”
Gran was fully dressed already: cream-colored trousers, silk blouse, low-slung necklace with a round fob. Subconscious stethoscope. She’d rather be across the street Florence Nightingaling. She steered Lily to the window. Lily could taste the warmth of her own mouth. Gran pointed. “That’s the Romers’ house. New car, right there in the drive. Convertible. Leather seats, like they always wanted. Why don’t you go egg it?” Gran moved through the kitchen like a javelin, sharp, lean, designed for speed. She flung the refrigerator wide, popped open a Styrofoam clamshell and began grabbing eggs. “Here. Take them. Go.” Lily’s hands cupped by instinct. Gran said, “After, you can TP the Driskells’. Maybe play a round of ding-dong-ditch.”
It was the combination of words that did it. First Sierra, then Gran. Lily was destined for a lifetime of getting ditched for some skeezy possessor of a ding-diddle-dong. Her nails clicked against an eggshell’s white-blue curve. She wasn’t going to cry two times in as many days. She said it simply. “I lied.”
“Yes, Lily. I deduced that. Saint Louis University, remember?” Gran tapped her head in imitation of Nicky.
“I wanted him to feel bad.” Right now, she wanted that for everybody. “He was being creepy.”
“How?” Gran waited.
Lily talked with her hands more than she realized. She was completely inarticulate now that they were full of eggs. Mom would never ask how. Mom’s general preoccupation with the many ways Internet and pedophile were predestined to intersect made creepy the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card. “You really wouldn’t get it.” Gran liked Ben. Her sketch meter wasn’t calibrated right.
“I probably wouldn’t. I’m notoriously unsympathetic. Christ, Lily. I live here. I’ll still be living here once you leave. What goes on in your head?”
That things were better yesterday. That an astounding number of things rhymed with cunt.
“And now we’re going to have to deal with that woman again. Let her know you’ve loosed a reporter. It doesn’t feel good to be blindsided. I’ll tell you. It does not.”
“He’s only an intern.” Lily wanted to crunch the egg in her hand. First the pop and then the splintering, then the bright ooze of yolk out her fingers. A measuring look from Gran said: I know your makeup entirely. Two-thirds water, one-third viscous fuckupitude.
Lily said, “I should apologize.”
“To Benjamin, too.”
A door-to-door campaign. Let the trumpets sound.
“Everyone will be at the HOA meeting. We can catch them there. Them and anyone else you manage to piss off.” An electronic beep punctuated the words. Gran had left the refrigerator door ajar too long. She banged it shut with a quick jut of her hip. A clock once hung on the wall of Gran’s St. Louis kitchen, its face sunk into the round belly of a happy sculpted chef. She must have left it behind when she moved. The clocks here were digital and the silence between Lily and Gran was itchy for want of that old-fashioned tock and tick. Gran sighed. She fidgeted with the tuck of her blouse. “I said some terrible things,” she said, and laughter escaped, brief and blunt as a bottle uncorking. “I can’t believe I said those things to you.” She shook her head. Her earrings jangled and there was laughter in that sound, too, silvery and gentle. “Your grandpa and I always fought fair. You say what’s upset you. You say why. Then it’s done.” She made a fist and slapped it into her open palm. “Angels and orifices. Too many people don’t know how to fight fair.”
“I didn’t hit him on purpose. Ben. Mr. Thales.”
Gran nodded, the earring chime a cue that Lily could set down the eggs. She lined them end to end, careful, as if they were irreplaceable.
“Benjamin lost his daughter at your age. I just found out. He doesn’t like to talk about it. She was troubled; then she up and left and he never saw her again.” Another head shake, the earrings’ melody out of place now. “I can’t believe I said those things to you.”
Brainflash: the per-vet had better reason than basement bodies for the encyclopedic mess he’d made of himself on TV. For his freakish take on twenty questions: do you ever hitchhike? Have you studied self-defense? Today’s special chez Commons: a plate of pan-seared context. Benjamin Thales was sad.
Brainflash squared: Gran liked him because he was sad.
It was a thought too intimate to lend voice to. Instead: “Gran. I’m not going to run away because we’re in a fight. I’m not that big an idiot.” One egg nested in her grandmother’s hand. Lily picked up another. She hoped so hard it felt like prayer: Let the eggs be the reason they didn’t touch, not the ugly things that hung between them. Gran returned her egg to the carton. Lily handed her a second and then a third. She reached for a fourth. She cast her mind forward to the HOA meeting and then to the guest room down the hall a
nd along the row of hanging blouses for the neckline best suited to penitence.
THE GOLDEN COUPLE
WHEN MIDNIGHT CAME, AND THEN one, and Ali still wasn’t home, Seth pinched a dose of the Ambien she never used and went to bed angry. He wasn’t supposed to do that; just ask half the people who’d offered that chestnut, unsolicited, at his wedding. Yet the world still spun on its axis. He woke hours later to a soft headache and blanched light. There was soap in the soap dish now. There was no hair in the drain. His skin looked mottled and the inside of his mouth felt foul and plush. He was glad he’d taken the Ambien. He could blame the back-bottle list of side effects that he hadn’t bothered to read. He didn’t have to be the kind of man who felt physically wrecked because he’d fought with his wife.
The shuttle took a circuitous route and he was late to work. Main Street was closed to all but foot traffic as workers set up for Founder’s Day. Aside from a Post-it that said Nicky Tullbeck was out firming up sources, Seth’s desk was empty. He had no pressing matters to attend to. He was not usually a breakfast person but felt inexplicably ravenous. He ate the salad he’d brought from home and someone’s lemon yogurt from the staff fridge. He heated water for the Top Ramen he kept in his desk for emergencies. His tongue felt corroded from the salt, and he longed for the orange that had been on Alison’s desk. He took an early lunch break and dawdled over his burger. Back at the office he won several games of FreeCell. Out his window, the festival stage went up. A parade of golf carts were turned away from Main Street and puttered off in search of parking. Carnival booths unfolded. Three o’clock and he was hungry again. Plenty of time to grab an iced coffee and apple hand pie before the HOA meeting. He walked to the café. He walked back to the Hacienda Central, brushing crumbs from his hands. He hated that building. He’d hated it a long while now. He hated its clock tower and its terra cotta roof, hated every turquoise and buff tile in its mosaic window borders and the way the foyer had the hushed, echoing quality of a capitol rotunda. He passed a couple reading the plaque Alison had put up, commemorating the 2008 restoration of the building’s original Mission-style details. It was the size and shape of a small gravestone and implied rather than explicitly stated that the building had been around long enough warrant such attention. He wanted to remind the couple that Hoagland Lobel broke ground on the place in April 2005. That or tell them how much of their HOA dues were going toward Alison’s eBay price war over the 1906 cornerstone from some failed Kansas savings and loan. Lobel’s contractor claimed it would be a piece of piss to fit the block neatly into the overall façade, making it look as if the building had been around that long.
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