I made my way out, retraced my steps, and left the bag in the front plant bed of Madison’s house, along with three dirty and lurid tennis balls, one on the grass, one on the brick edging, and one on the soil.
In minutes I was back in my “quarters,” out of my sneak-thief outfit and into my nightgown. I slept as fast and hard as young Ethan.
I usually rose the earliest and went outside to collect the paper. The thick St. Augustine was wet, how or why in this dry climate I wasn’t sure. This morning I had clattered around the kitchen first, the surest alarm clock that control-freak Madison would respond to.
“Mother Hubbard!” Madison stood in the front doorway in her thick terrycloth robe with THE GREENHOUSE SPA embroidered on it, triumphant at having caught me misbehaving like a naughty child. “Get off the grass. Your slippers will get all wet and track it inside. That stupid woman who delivers the paper is supposed to throw it on the dry driveway. Why they let her do the job if she’s too feeble to manage it, I don’t know. There goes her Christmas tip.”
I gestured to the front plantings. “I was just going to pick up those unsightly tennis balls.”
“Tennis balls! Why are these kids suddenly playing in the street when they have every place else to do it! And who lets those dogs and cats roam at night to fertilize our lawns?”
“They may be homeless.”
“Not in this neighborhood, unless someone is dropping them off. Honestly. You get back on the driveway! Look at these awful things. Look like they’ve been in dog’s mouths, or worse.”
She was leaning over the plants like a fury, picking up tennis balls, brushing leaves and twigs aside to search for more in the brightening light of morning.
“And here’s one of Mrs. Berwick’s cheap, silly Technicolor rubber garden snakes! They so trash up a yard. What’s it doing—oh!” she screamed.
She dropped what she’d caught hold of. “It bit me.”
Rings of primary color—red, yellow, black—vanished back into the green leaves. Poor fellow. He’d have to make his own way in the world now. Maybe he’d find a lady friend.
Madison had fallen to her knees. “I can’t believe I touched that loathsome thing! It was all cold and dry. It didn’t look real.”
Snakes come in all colors, some a dust-dull hue to camouflage them against desert and dirt, some leaf green to live in trees, some ultrabright to warn possible predators that they are not worth messing with.
Madison was amazingly ignorant about anything beyond her own selfish circle of interests. I knew the old saw, of course. Red against black is a friend of Jack. Black against yellow will kill a fellow.
Or an outlaw in-law.
Madison tumbled over on her side, moaning and looking very unwell. Her face seemed to be bloating. That would look so tacky in the casket. I collected the empty purple velvet bag and shuffled around to the back driveway, as ordered, leaving the newspaper lying on the lawn with the scattered tennis balls.
No one would be up or out for at least an hour or two. And by then it would be too late.
The snake plants will look quite nice on either side of the two-faced fireplace that serves the great room and family room/kitchen behind it. They’ll add a clean and sculptural touch. Also a hint of something living. They won’t require any work at all. Being virtually unkillable.
And, oddly enough, I’ve grown strangely fond of them.
VI. Snake in the Grass
The coral snake found in Texas is the only black, red, and yellow crossbanded serpent whose red and yellow bands touch [and is] locally common in suburban neighborhoods. Coral snake venom is largely composed of neurotoxically destructive peptides and is, therefore, more deadly than the venom of any other North American reptile.
—Alan Tennant
Unless it is an out-of-work mother-in-law. I shut the library book and checked the return date. Plenty of time, and I had laundry and supper to do. A mother’s work is never done.
Joy Ride
Nancy Pickard
Marianne Roland would have been the first to admit that, of the two of them, the Other Woman was much the nicer person. Her husband’s mistress was a sweetheart. Everybody who knew her said so, even if they didn’t realize they were saying it to his wife. The Other Woman was kind and generous as well as being sweet and affectionate. She was good-natured as well as being thin, blond, and young. Marianne knew herself to be none of those things. Not thin, not blond, not kind, or generous, or sweet, or affectionate, and certainly not good-natured or young. It was no wonder that her husband, Lee, had taken up with Jennifer Ludlow instead of remaining loyal to Marianne. Given the choice, any half-wit might have done the same, she thought, and Lee was no half-wit. Lee was the male equivalent of Jennifer, only older. In spite of the age difference, Lee and Jennifer were a natural match, and everybody who Marianne had tricked into saying so, said so.
Really, she thought as she filled out an index card with certain pertinent information, as befitting the female half of a match made in heaven, Jennifer Ludlow was an angel.
Or soon would be.
Marianne, who could at least claim a sense of humor, smiled.
The index card she was filling out, in a handwriting that slanted left where hers normally slanted right and that crossed ts in ways that she never did and dotted is straight up instead of off to one side, and capitalized where she never would, said: 2005 Mercedes ML 350 SUV. Black. Fully Loaded. Under 5,000 Miles. She listed a price well below its Blue Book value and added, Private Owner Must Sell Fast.
Irresistible, she felt sure.
When she finished, she laid the card flat on her dining-room table.
She removed the rubber gloves she had worn to do the job, walked them over to her trash bin underneath the kitchen sink, and threw them in.
Then she picked up the card between the pincers of some blunt-end eyebrow tweezers and carried it with her to her car—which was not a 2005 Mercedes ML 350, but rather a gleaming silver 2006 Infiniti FX, which was ever so slightly more expensive.
The phone number she had listed on the card was also not hers.
With the afternoon free to finish this last task before the main event, Marianne took her time driving all the way across the state line from her home on the Missouri side of Kansas City to a prosperous suburb on the Kansas side. Once there, she found an ordinary, L-shaped mall with a coffee shop. She walked in and ordered a tall latte. As she waited for the barista to call her order, Marianne lingered by a bulletin board where dozens of people had left their calling cards, want ads, and sales notices.
Child care. Lawn mowing. House repairs. Cars, vans, and trucks for sale.
Her own sales notice and the tack in the top of it was in her left hand, hidden by a paper napkin that also kept her fingerprints off of it when she lifted the napkin to the bulletin board and pressed the tack into the cork.
“Tall latte for Susan!”
Marianne whirled around, checking to see if anybody was looking her way. As she expected, no one was—because who would pay any attention to a plain, stocky, middle-aged woman in drab slacks and blouse? Satisfied that she was as good as invisible to the mostly younger, hipper crowd, Marianne walked confidently over to pick up the coffee she had ordered under the name that also was not hers.
“This isn’t right,” she complained to the barista. “I ordered a mocha latte.”
The words popped out of her mouth before she grasped the paradox of calling attention to herself when the last thing she wanted to do was make people remember her. Unfortunately, some habits—like demanding service she didn’t deserve—were hard to break.
Marianne attempted an apologetic smile.
“Sorry,” she murmured, aiming for a sweet tone.
Maybe the barista would confuse her with a nice person.
The young man behind the counter frowned and took the cup back in order to stare at the order written on it. Regardless of the fact that it said exactly what Marianne had ordered, he did what she knew he
was trained to do, “I’m really sorry. I’ll make you a new one. Mocha latte? you said.”
Normally she would have promptly demanded, “With whipped cream, and I already paid for it!” but this time she said meekly, “Yes, please.”
“No problem,” he told her.
When he handed her the new, more expensive drink, he also handed her a card entitling her to a free drink the next time she visited the franchise. It often worked that way. When it didn’t, she raised hell until they gave in.
Jennifer would never do such a greedy thing, Marianne knew.
As if stealing another woman’s husband was not greedy!
So far, so good, she thought as she left the shop, sipping her caloric coffee.
Jennifer probably drank only nonfat lattes.
If she was even addicted to caffeine at all.
Jennifer probably drank only herbal tea, as Lee started to do soon after he’d hired her.
It hadn’t taken great deductive powers to figure out that Lee was having an affair with somebody. Late nights, missed suppers, always “too tired” to have sex. Two weeks of that was all it took; down from three weeks the time before and way down from the whole damned year it had taken Marianne to finally catch on the first time, many years before. As always, finding out who was the tricky part. Once she’d accused the wrong woman. That was humiliating and required a change of jobs on Lee’s part. He hadn’t been happy about that, but he was never one to complain all that much about anything—not with Marianne’s millions to persuade him, time after time, that she was, when all was said and done and all the money counted, infinitely more attractive to him than any other woman could ever be.
But this time felt different to Marianne.
Maybe the difference was just that Lee was old enough now, had worked long enough and done well enough and made enough money on his own, to feel freer than he ever had before in their marriage.
Sweet, nice Jennifer looked like trophy-wife material to Marianne.
But she was one potential trophy wife who was going to get her brass peeled off.
The index card Marianne left at the coffee shop had little strips cut along the bottom of it, and each little strip had a phone number, so all a prospective Mercedes buyer had to do was tear a strip off.
Call 6 to 7 P.M. weekdays, Marianne had put on the index card.
Lee was always gone then—shouldn’t be, but was.
So she was free to park in the lot of the grocery store where the pay phone was and hang around the entryway reading free newspapers and bulletin boards until it rang. On the second night, it did ring and she reached for it.
“I’m calling about the Mercedes?” a young female voice said.
“You’ve got the right number,” Marianne assured her.
“Can we come see it?”
“Sure. When did you have in mind?”
“To night?”
“To night’s good. How about eight-thirty?”
“Okay. Where are you?”
“Meet me in the church parking lot at a Hundred and Fourth and Oak; you know where that is?”
“We can find it. Are you a minister, or something?”
Marianne laughed. “No, I just don’t want people coming to my house. You understand, I’m sure.”
“Yeah,” the caller said. “I get it.”
“Okay. Eight-thirty. Church parking lot, a Hundred and Fourth and Oak. You’ll recognize me because I’ll be the one with the black Mercedes, but what will you be driving?”
If the caller had said something light and compact like a Mini Cooper, Marianne would have come up with a reason why she couldn’t meet her after all. But when the girl said, “We’re in a truck,” Marianne smiled at the wall behind the pay phone.
“I’ll be watching for you,” she said.
When she hung up, her heart was pounding. A truck! How lucky was that?
It was going to happen. She was going to do it. This was it.
At first, Marianne had suspected his secretary.
Lee wasn’t, she knew, all that imaginative and clichés had never bothered him. Give him a little pulchritude right under his long and handsome nose and he’d take it, saving himself the trouble of going farther and looking harder.
But then she heard a rumor that the secretary was a lesbian. Marianne decided that even if the woman swung both ways, it would be far too complex an affair for Lee to bother with. It wasn’t that Lee was lazy; it was merely that he was beautiful and so things and women came easily to him when he wanted them to. Too easily to have to work for them or to have to put up with complicated circumstances. She and all her money had come easily to him, too, and she knew perfectly well that if there had been a prettier girl with just as much money anywhere in the vicinity, he would have grabbed her instead. But none of the prettier girls were as rich as Marianne, or else they were already taken, and so Lee had grabbed the plain but extremely golden ring.
She had wanted him desperately then and she desperately wanted to keep him now.
To find out who the woman was this time, Marianne had ended up resorting to a maneuver that had worked once before.
“Hi, this is Tracy down in personnel,” she said, calling the extension of one of his more junior people who had never met or talked to the boss’s wife. “Are you the new girl up there, or am I thinking of somebody else?”
“Not me, honey,” was the answer. “I been here since God created staples.”
“Well, then, who’s new?”
“You probably mean Jennifer Ludlow.”
“I probably do,” Marianne had said, a bit of a growl to her tone.
“She done something wrong?” the employee asked, responding to that tone. “I’d be surprised, you know, ’cause she’s really nice.”
“Is she?”
“Oh, yeah; you wouldn’t think somebody that good-looking would also be so nice, but she is, she just is.”
“Everybody loves her?”
“Oh, yeah. Who wouldn’t? She’s a sweetheart. You want her extension?”
“Please.” And Marianne had written it down: 1121.
One one two one. Added up to five. And five was the loneliest number that Marianne had ever seen.
Sometimes Marianne was aware that having been born wealthy had given her a self-assurance that other people didn’t have, but most of the time she took her own self-confident style for granted. It allowed her to look as if she belonged when she did things like walk up to the front door of her vacationing friends’ home, unlock it with the emergency keys they had left with her, and then walk through the house as if she owned it and march down the stairs into the garage. Once there, she climbed into their 2005 black Mercedes ML 350 SUV, used their automatic opener to raise their garage door, and then backed the car out as if she owned it, too.
When a neighbor watering his flowers looked up, she waved at him.
And then she closed the garage door, backed into the street, and drove away.
If a question arose when her friends came back from Aruba, she would tell them, “I had to borrow the Mercedes while the Infiniti was in the shop. Good thing you were gone so I could use it.”
At the grocery-store pay phone, when Marianne heard such a young voice, she had wondered about it. What were kids in a truck doing looking at a Mercedes? But when their headlights approached and they pulled up beside her, she knew it was going to be just fine. Their vehicle was no beat-up farm truck, but rather a small, powerful, shiny thing that must have cost nearly as much as the car they had come to see. And when a girl stepped out of the passenger’s side and a boy from the driver’s side, they turned out to be good-looking and dressed in the kind of sloppy-chic clothes that the sons and daughters of Marianne’s friends all wore.
Somebody has Daddy’s money, she thought as they walked up to her, giving her smiling glimpses of their perfect teeth. And I ought to know.
Privileged kids. Kids with bright and shiny futures.
Too bad about that, Marianne
thought without regret or remorse.
Turning her smile up a watt to match theirs, she said “Hello!” with nearly as much warmth as she thought Jennifer might have done.
“Hi,” they chimed back at her.
She had parked behind the church so they had to drive around it to find her.
“Looks like you’ve already got a nice truck,” she observed.
“His,” the girl said, and grinned.
“And the Mercedes?” Marianne asked them.
The boy also grinned and then he pointed. “Hers.”
Even though the boy moved with a cocky air, it was obvious they were car-buying innocents. He made a show of popping the hood and looking under it, but Marianne could tell that he didn’t know a dipstick from a driveshaft. Neither did she, but it didn’t matter to somebody who had trust funds to foot the bills. Some people, Marianne thought as she watched the boy fuss, are mechanics, and some people support mechanics.
They were a little older than the girl had sounded on the phone. Marianne had half expected sixteen-year-olds to drive up, but these gorgeous kids looked to be in their late teens or early twenties. He had very short spiky blond hair. Hers was dark and glossy brown and hung like sable to her waist.
Marianne would have been jealous if she hadn’t known what was in store for them.
They didn’t ask why she was selling a practically new car. Either they didn’t care, or such possibilities as bankruptcy had never entered their lives yet.
Marianne held out the keys.
“Test drive?”
The boy grabbed them. “Oh, yeah!”
“There’s only one problem,” Marianne said.
They both looked at her then, alert as sleek deer, listening.
“Just before you got here, I got a call. Kind of a family emergency that I’ve got to do something about. How about if we trade vehicles. I’ll meet you back here in an hour. That’ll give you more time to try it out.”
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