Down the road, two women were hand in hand, walking a dog. One of them was tall with long blonde hair. The other had short red hair. Real short. And she looked about thirty pounds lighter than the Molly I’d known. I squinted and stepped forward.
Oh my God, I thought. I turned Molly into a lesbian.
Molly and her girlfriend let the dog off his leash, and he came bounding toward me. Molly paused for a moment and slowed her pace as she noticed me standing on their front stoop, then hurried after the dog. The dog was a huge Great Dane and possibly the most laid-back animal I’d ever seen. He gave me a quick sniff and circled me once, seeming to approve my existence in his space. Then he walked over to lift his leg on the fence. I looked at him.
“What, they didn’t just take you out for that?”
He threw a glance at me, and I swear he shrugged.
“Wanda?” Molly stood about five feet from me, staring. The blonde was another ten feet back, not looking as approving of my existence in her space as the dog had been.
“Molly. Hi.”
After a moment, she smiled. I saw tears form in her eyes. She stepped forward and gave me a hug.
“It’s good to see you,” she said. She sounded like she meant it. That had to be good, right?
I hugged her back and then took a step toward the blonde, holding my hand out to her. “Hi. I’m Wanda. I’m not a lesbian.”
It wasn’t graceful, but it got the point across. The blonde smiled and shook my hand.
***
Greta and Molly had decorated their home country-kitchen style. I’d never seen so many knickknacks in my life. Shelves of rag dolls, little straw hausfraus, and ceramic vegetables lined the walls.
“Wow,” I said, looking around. “This place must be hell to dust.”
Molly smiled and placed a tray with a pitcher of iced tea and two glasses on the kitchen table. Greta came over and patted me warmly on the shoulder. “It’s nice meeting you, Wanda. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
I smiled. “Nice meeting you, too.”
She kissed Molly on the cheek. “I’m gonna give you girls some time to catch up.” She put her hand on Molly’s arm and gave a gentle squeeze. “I’ll just be in the living room if you need me.” And she left.
Molly filled our glasses and sat down.
“Greta, huh?” I said, nodding my head in the direction of the blonde’s departure and giving Molly a grin. “I didn’t know you had it in you.”
She smiled, and I saw a faint blush on her cheeks. “So tell me about yourself,” she said, leaning back in her seat. “How have you been?”
“Good,” I said. “I left Channel 8.”
“That’s good,” she said softly. “I don’t think that place was good for you.”
“Yeah. I think you’re right.”
There was a moment of silence in which a big white elephant named George sat down in the middle of the table. There was only one way to get rid of him, so I did it.
“I tracked you down because I needed to talk to you,” I said. “I needed to tell you that I’m really sorry. About what happened.” Silence. I took a sip of my tea and then elaborated unnecessarily. “With George.”
Poof. Elephant gone.
“You shouldn’t be,” she said. “I let him drag you out of the house. I should have called the police. I should have done something.”
It had never occurred to me for a second that she might not hate and resent me, that she might feel bad for not having done enough for me. Just goes to show, a little self-absorption goes a long way.
“No, no, it wasn’t your fault at all.” I felt the emotion catch in my throat. “That’s just... crazy.”
“I abandoned you to him.” Her voice was small and tight. “You needed help, and I ran away.”
“You had just gotten your life back together. I brought all that crap right to your doorstep.”
“I was so scared,” she said, and looked up at me as the tears spilled over her cheeks. “I’m so sorry.”
“No.” I grabbed her hand and gave it a squeeze, watching as her face blurred through my own tears. “I’m sorry.”
Greta appeared out of nowhere, dropping a box of tissues on the table, handing each of us a smile, then wordlessly retreating back to the living room. I grabbed a tissue and wiped my face.
“You know, it’s not my style, but I can kind of see where you’re coming from,” I said, nodding in Greta’s direction. “There isn’t a man in the world that would ever do that.”
Molly laughed. “Yeah, she’s great. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
We sat back, wiping our eyes, blowing our noses, and staring at the walls full of knickknacks. Then I broke the silence. “So you mean all this time, you really thought that was all your fault?”
Molly nodded, and she teared up again. “I haven’t forgiven myself. I should have stayed. I shouldn’t have let him take you away. I should have called the police. I should have pressed charges.” She heaved a staggered sigh. “He could have killed you.”
I smiled. “But he didn’t.”
She smiled back. “That’s right. He didn’t.”
We clinked our iced-tea glasses together and drank, and I pretended that George wasn’t still out there, somewhere, probably still looking to kill me. The world could sometimes be a much better place when you didn’t acknowledge reality.
***
“I’m going to count backwards from three,” the soft voice hummed. “When I get to one, you will open your eyes, and you will feel rested and relaxed, and you will know the name of the song you’ve been hearing. Three... two... one.”
I opened my eyes. The room was darkened, and the smell of incense was cutting a swath through my sinuses. The hypnotist, a small, wiry woman named Grace, leaned into my line of vision. “How do you feel?”
“Rested. Relaxed.”
Grace smiled a toothy, gapped smile. She was a woman in her fifties who operated out of her basement. When she took me down there, I half expected her to offer me a good deal on some pot. Looking at her, I still wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a stash in a back room.
“Can you identify the song?” Grace asked. I leaned back against the sofa and rubbed my eyes. I listened. The music floated in. The crescendo built. I hummed along. It disappeared.
“No. Can you?”
She leaned forward. “Hum it again?”
I hummed it again. She shook her head. “No. Sounds familiar, though.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s my problem.” I pulled out my checkbook.
“Hey, Grace,” I said as I scribbled away eighty-five dollars I’d never get back. “How did you know you wanted to be a hypnotherapist?”
She smiled. “The aliens told me.”
I raised an eyebrow at her. This was what you got for picking someone at random from the yellow pages.
“Don’t suppose those aliens can tell you what my song is, do you?”
She laughed. “No. They can’t read minds.”
“Okay, thanks so much for your time,” I said, handing her the check. “And may the force be with you.”
***
“I am so excited!” Elizabeth placed two glasses of milk on the table and grabbed a warm chocolate chip cookie off the plate. Her face was bright and her eyes were lively. “The radio station is so cool. I only have to work between nine and three, and I have my own office.”
I dunked a cookie into the milk. “I feel kinda guilty eating the good stuff after the kids are in bed.”
“Get over it,” she said, stuffing a chunk of cookie in her mouth. “That’s the first thing you have to learn before you become a mom, or you’ll waste easily three or four years just beating yourself up over stupid shit.”
I nodded and dunked the cookie again. “Good advice, Dr. Mackey.”
“I’m not a doctor.” She dunked, then smiled. “Matt, my producer, wanted to call the show Dr. Liz. He was really surprised when I told him I wasn’t a doctor.�
�
“Really?”
“Yeah,” she said, smiling as she popped a bit of cookie into her mouth. “He said I was so smart that it never occurred to him that I wasn’t a doctor. Isn’t that sweet?”
“Oh, man,” I said, shaking my head.
“What?”
I laughed. “Nothing. I just can’t help but notice the special smile when you mentioned Matt. Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Elizabeth flushed. “No. Not yet.” She grinned and took another bite of her cookie. “But he’s been sending... I don’t know... vibes.”
“Beware the vibe,” I said. “Whatever happened to that, ‘I’d rather be alone forever,’ crap you were trying to feed me?”
Elizabeth sighed. “Sometimes saying ‘never’ or ‘forever’ makes it easier to get through the day. And, I mean, it’s not like Matt and I are dating. It’s just that I’m... open to possibilities.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure it’s a great idea to open up your possibilities to your boss.”
She chewed thoughtfully for a moment, then shook her head and grinned. “Just because something’s not a great idea doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do it.”
I held up my glass of milk. “Preaching to the choir, sister.” On that, we clinked our glasses and drank.
Chapter Ten
That weekend, the kids went with Jack to visit his mother, and Elizabeth went to Atlanta to see her sister. I scheduled Anne Marie, Bones, and various hired elves to run the Santa Station and had an entire weekend to myself.
The first thing I did was head to the grocery store and buy as much junk as I wanted. Around the kids, I was trying to help Elizabeth set a good example, so I’d been up to my ears in apples and graham crackers and orange juice. Now that they were gone, it was all Doritos and Coke, pudding and M&M’s. I was going to be sick as a dog and wearing sweatpants all the next week, but it would be worth it.
And, for old times’ sake, I got a bottle of my old friend, Albert.
Friday afternoon and evening, I watched cable television. There was a twelve-hour Trading Spaces marathon, and about five hours in, I started to wallow. I was thirty-two years old, eating Doritos on a sofa that wasn’t mine, and watching neighbors decorate each other’s homes on a television that wasn’t mine. The only neighbor I’d ever known in my entire adult life was Elizabeth, and I couldn’t even trade spaces with her because I was living in her damn house.
The realization that I was a spinster freeloader crying over a home design show took me to a new low. This was even worse than the Lifetime movie thing. I looked over to my lonely bottle of Albert, sitting untouched in a brown paper bag on the coffee table.
Two hours later I was still watching Trading Spaces, with a Scotch flush on my cheeks now, and the pathetic feeling of being a permanent resident in Loserville had cemented into firm, unyielding blocks around my ankles.
I slept on the sofa, waking up when the first light of morning infused a pale glow into the drapes. My head hurt, my stomach was queasy, and the realization hit me that I was way too old for this shit. I took the Doritos, the M&M’s, and Albert, put them all in a big trash bag, and walked it out to the curb, returning to retrieve Albert at the last minute. Dad had been right about some days requiring Scotch. I stuffed the bottle into the back of Elizabeth’s liquor cabinet, knowing that someday I’d probably be grateful I did.
Even with the trash on the corner and an orange digesting nicely in my stomach, I didn’t feel better. Restless, I grabbed the keys to my car and headed out to Wal-Mart, where I bought a pair of running shoes, blue shiny nylon running pants with stripes down the sides, a T-shirt with that obnoxious Nike “Just Do It” slogan on the front. If it wasn’t for my love handles and some serious thigh jiggle, someone might even have taken me for the athletic type.
It was still fairly early in the morning when I headed out for my run. I ran to the end of the driveway and tripped over the trash bag while trying to pull off the tag that I’d left on the neck of my T-shirt. It wasn’t a sterling start.
It’s also important to note that just because pants are shiny and nylon and have running stripes on them, it doesn’t necessarily make them running pants. Or maybe it was that my wearing shiny nylon pants with running stripes didn’t necessarily make me a runner. At any rate, I hadn’t made it to the end of the street before I decided that maybe power walking was more my style.
I power walked through Elizabeth’s neighborhood, trying not to look like a geek with my elbows kicking and my legs snapping. The air was just cold enough to be sharp on my lungs, but not so cold that a little movement couldn’t keep me comfortable. I zipped through Such-and-Such Lane and Cute-Suburban-Home Way and marveled at how many wind socks these people seemed to need.
I was about halfway around So-Cute-You-Could-Just-Throw-Up Circle when I saw it. Like all the other lawns, it was perfectly manicured and had about a foot of chilled morning mist hovering above its surface. What was different on this one was the For Sale sign. I slowed down and walked up the driveway to the single-car garage and picked out a sheet from the plastic box hanging on the Realtor’s sign.
Hardwood Floors.
Fireplace.
Open Floor Plan.
I walked up to the window and pressed my nose against it, trying to see inside through the slats in the blinds. It was empty, but that was about all I could tell, except that the hardwood floors looked shiny and full of promise. I folded the Realtor’s sheet into eighths, stuffed it in my pants pocket, and power walked back to Elizabeth’s house, my mind whirling with possibilities and pipe dreams.
A half hour later I was boiling water for instant oatmeal when the phone rang. I glanced at it and let it ring, figuring Elizabeth’s answering machine would take a more reliable message than I would. The machine clicked, Elizabeth did her ,“Leave a message at the beep,” routine, and then Walter’s voice came through the line.
“Elizabeth? This is Walter Briggs. I’m looking for Wanda. I don’t know where she is, and I need to talk—”
“Hey, Walter,” I said, my breath almost as choppy as when I was running. My heart had started boom-boom-booming at the sound of his voice, and I had practically cracked my kneecap lunging for the phone. “What’s up?”
“Wanda?” His voice sounded tense. “I’m glad you’re there.”
“Yeah,” I said, coiling the cord in my hands, almost cutting off the circulation. “What’s going on?”
He paused for a moment. “I need you to meet me at Hastings General,” he said. “I think we’ve found your ex-husband.”
***
Walter was waiting in front of the hospital entrance when I got there. He looked so young, standing out in the cold with his hands tucked in the front pockets of his jeans, his Harvard sweatshirt ruffling a bit in the breeze. He took a step toward me when he saw me coming.
“Hey,” he said with a concerned smile. “How are you?”
“Peachy. What’s up?” I asked him, a little annoyed at the, “I’d rather tell you in person,” bit he’d given me on the phone.
“Let’s go inside.” He put his hand on my elbow and guided me through the automatic doors toward the hospital lobby.
“Walter,” I said, running my hands over my arms, “are you trying to freak me out? Because if you are, you’re doing a really super job.”
Walter sat me down in a row of seats by the registration desk, taking a seat next to me. His face was taut, his eyes locked on mine. I tried to glean some clues from his expression, but all I got was that there was news and it was bad.
“Remember my friend, the private investigator who was looking for your ex?”
I nodded, my mind leaping from scenario to scenario, imagining what George had done to land himself in Hastings General. I saw fleeting images of bar brawls, resisting arrests, drunken car accidents. I felt Walter’s hand covering mine, and I entwined my fingers tightly in his.
“We think we may have found him. Here, in to
wn.” I had images of him in my apartment, destroying my things. Scaring or hurting my landlady, Mrs. Forini. Harassing my neighbors. I heard Walter say something, but it was lost in the static in my head.
Walter leaned his face down into my line of vision. “Did you hear me? We need you to identify the body.”
“The body?” I said, my heart clenched as my mind snapped to Mrs. Forini. But she has family here. They wouldn’t need me to identify...
Oh. A hush fell over my world. I replayed Walter’s words in my mind, finally accepting on a conscious level what I’d known the moment I heard his voice on the phone but hadn’t yet been ready to believe.
George was dead.
“Okay,” I said, standing up. “Okay.”
Walter put his hand on my shoulder. “Are you sure you’re ready to do this? Do you need a moment to—?”
“To what?” I asked. “To prepare myself? How exactly would I do that?”
He nodded and guided me to the nurses’ desk, asking for directions to the morgue, explaining to the woman at the desk who I was, handling the whole situation so that I didn’t have to say a word.
As we whirled through the hospital, I got the story from Walter. His friend had picked up George’s scent in Kansas but lost him in Mississippi. A few days earlier one of his police buddies had mentioned arresting a guy from Alaska. He checked up on it and found that one George Lewis had been brought in on a drunk-and-disorderly and had been released to the Randall P. McKay Shelter for Men. When Walter’s buddy went there to follow up, he was told that George Lewis had died in his sleep the night before.
Now it was up to me to determine if the dead George Lewis was my George Lewis.
An elevator ride and one long, narrow hallway later, the morgue attendant was leading us to a wall of metallic drawers, pulling one out and folding the sheet down to reveal George’s face. It’s a funeral home cliche, the whole, “He looked so much like himself,” thing people say about the dead. George still had the scar above his left eye that he’d gotten in a knife fight before I met him, and the birthmark on his chin was exactly where it used to be. But he looked nothing like George. He looked wooden, and cold, and peaceful. George had never seen a peaceful day in his life, and he certainly hadn’t earned one in death.
Time Off for Good Behavior Page 15