Lucia reclined in her seat, her right leg dangling out the open window, bare foot catching the wind between its toes. She looked like Mindy felt. It was the Thursday after the dinner rush, the last lazy gasp of the week before Friday and the weekend rush.
“You wanna get drive-thru?” Mindy asked. “The guy can check your uterus when we pull in.”
Lucia’s head lolled in Mindy’s direction. “Is that a comment on my skirt?”
“It’s a comment on your bajingo, which your skirt is pointing at.”
Lucia aimed herself straight ahead. “Drink it in. Don’t need an ob-gyn anyway. My bidness is in perfect working order. I should know, I’ve used it often enough.”
A car passed in the other lane, its light flying over Lucia. The strength of the beam turned her thin skirt transparent where it was bunched on her inner thighs. Mindy could see black panties caressing her fair skin.
“Can I ask you something?” Lucia said. Her voice was faraway, like a fairy tale.
Mindy pondered it. You never could tell where a conversation would go with Lucia, now that she was back with Quentin. It was like walking through a minefield. If Lucia asked her for relationship advice, Mindy was swerving into oncoming traffic. “Only if I get to ask you something.”
“That’s fair. You wanna go to church with me on Sunday?”
Mindy gave her a look. She’d noticed the crucifix necklace that was part of Lucia’s look, but she’d kinda thought it was just there because it looked good with her boobs. She winced at herself before considering the offer. “I don’t know. The…orientation going to be an issue?”
“No, no, it’s not that kind of church. They’re cool. I mean, they’re not a rave—” Lucia made a desultory gesture, like she was describing a movie she’d enjoyed but was trying not to oversell it. “But they’re cool. And, like, it’s fine if you don’t want to—”
“It’s not that I don’t want to, it’s just—ya know?” Mindy winced again. “I’m not an atheist. It’s just I’m not that religious. Honestly, I kinda thought you…”
The conversation was moving ahead in fits and starts. Lucia couldn’t do anything to smooth it out. “What, because I don’t march around an abortion clinic? I used to be in the children’s choir, remember?”
“Oh yeah.” Mindy vaguely recalled seeing Lucia in a weird-looking Victorian dress thing on a few Sundays. “Did you quit?”
“Didn’t really have time. Work and…stuff. Anyway, some of the people there were really helpful with my mom.”
“What about your mom?”
“Just some stuff. She’s fine now. Hey, what’d you want to ask me?”
“Just…you know how in She’s All That, Freddie Prinze Jr. made that bet to make Rachel Leigh Cook prom queen and they started dating… That’s not us, is it? Like, there isn’t some bet or…or prank…”
Lucia turned to stare at her. “You think I’m being nice to you to set you up for, what, some YouTube video?”
“The thought had crossed my mind,” Mindy said weakly.
“No. No, I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Well, people don’t just start being nice to other people all of a sudden—”
“Nice people do—”
“Usually they want something.”
The heel of Lucia’s hand met the orbit of her eye. She ground it in. “I don’t want anything from you, okay? Do you think this is some Carrie kinda thing? Like, just because I have more than five Facebook friends, I must be some kind of sadist?”
“I don’t think you’re a sadist—”
“Mindy, I would never hurt you.” Lucia was staring at her so hard that it was almost uncomfortable—only it wasn’t. “If I’m being nice to you, it’s because I like you. Okay?”
“Okay,” Mindy repeated. Noncommittal.
“Why wouldn’t I like you, Mindy?”
The GPS indicated one last turn to their address. Mindy whisked her fingers across Lucia’s calf. “Put your leg down. We’re here.”
Lucia put her feet down in the car, smoothing out her skirt as Mindy switched off the radio. They came up on the lit house on a dark block. It was a good neighborhood but bland, too manicured—lacking that lived-in feel Mindy saw on her own street. White people farm, her big brother would call it. Mindy took her flashlight, double-checked the house number with it, then gathered up the customer copy and merchant copy of the receipt. “Call him. It says he wants to be rung when the pizza arrives. Guess his bell doesn’t work.”
Lucia’s eyebrows knitted inward. “He didn’t promise a tip, now we’re going to put him on our phone bill?”
Outside the car now, Mindy gestured for Lucia to hand her the pizzas. “Just call him.”
“I’ll call him collect.”
“No, call him!”
“Bad enough if we drove all the way out here for nothing but the wear on our tires…”
“Fine, use my phone.” Mindy nodded to it, sitting in the cup holder. “Slide to unlock.” Then she turned and walked up to the house, ending the discussion.
The last thing she saw was Lucia dialling the number on the third part of the receipt, a long scrap of thermal paper that included the customer’s full address and order.
Mindy, meanwhile, trudged upward. Mr. Louis Card’s house was one of those that sat on a little hill with a steep driveway and a set of stairs going up the front lawn. She could never live in a place like that. Make her neurotic backing out of the driveway every morning.
At the front door’s pale and lonely light, a welcome mat read, Enter Freely, Leave Safely, And Leave Some Of The Happiness You Bring. Mindy restrained herself from knocking, just unwrapped the pizza and presented it along with receipt and pen for inspection. The door didn’t open, though she heard Lucia in the car below, introducing herself brightly as “Dragon Pizza Delivery Service!”
Another long moment later, Lucia cupped the phone to her chest and yelled up, “He says it’s open.”
Mindy turned the knob and gave the door a push. The hallway was dark, the illumination from the porch light slicing into it and revealing only dirty tile, then carpet and a hint of stairs. There was a smell of butterscotch.
“El?” Mindy called down, turning.
Lucia leaned out of the driver’s side window, phone cupped. “He says come in.”
“Tell him I can’t.”
“What?”
Mindy came down a few steps, out of the porch light, the butterscotch smell receding. She said again, not raising her voice, “I can’t go inside.”
“Oh right, because he might be a serial killer.” Lucia nodded.
“No, because it’s corporate policy.”
“Corporate policy for dealing with serial killers.”
“Just tell him I can’t come in.”
Lucia put the phone to her ear again.
“Because corporate policy!” Mindy insisted.
Lucia gave her a thumbs up as she spoke. Mindy turned back around. She could see something stirring in the darkness now. She walked back up the stairs to get a closer look, but when she came to a stop on the door mat, all was still again. Just a door yawning open and a bunch of shadows. Mindy held the pizzas.
“He wants to know who he’s talking to if you’re at the door!” Lucia called up.
“You can answer that!”
“Right, right…” Mindy heard Lucia jabber at the level of polite conversation while she stood there rocking on her heels and feeling the heat coming off the pizza. Always comforting, that warmth. No one wouldn’t tip for pizza you could feel was hot.
He came out of the shadows suddenly, fast and low, his footprints only sounding as he came off the carpet and onto the tiled landing, big meaty feet slapping on the tile with an almost moist sound. He was big, a six-foot-big number, dressed in boxer shorts and a wifebeater that revealed an equal number of dark hairs on his thick arms and legs. Fat neck and broad shoulders led down to a barrel chest and to an impressive belly that bulged over the elastic wais
tband of his boxers. He looked like he could’ve been a wrestler gone to seed except for the head curiously perched on his neck.
It was dominated by cleaver cuts for eyebrows and a mustache, ruddy cheeks, and a fat, flat, broken nose. A smug face made for aviator sunglasses, a coach’s whistle, and a Cuban cigar.
“Yeah? Hi there,” Mr. Louis Card said, his Texas accent broad. Not a cartoon, but almost proud in its curling consonants, its cut-off vowels. “You couldn’t just bring me the pizza?”
Mindy wished people would just let her do the spiel. They let cashiers do the spiel. “Uh, no, sir.” She handed over the pizza. “Corporate policy, ya know.”
“Yeah, yeah, because I’m a serial killer or something.” He looked at her accusingly.
How had she not noticed his eyes before? They protruded, big and bloodshot from under his bushy eyebrows.
“No, sir. I think it’s more to do with stealing. So, if something goes missing in the next few days, you’ll know it couldn’t possibly have been your…humble delivery driver,” she finished in a self-effacing rush.
“But the door was open. You could’ve walked right in and taken anything. Maybe I oughta search you.” Then, eyes blazing at her, Mr. Louis Card laughed with his mouth opened as wide as his jaw would go.
Mindy didn’t like it. It seemed too loud. Like when people in movies turned up the music to cover the sounds of a murder. She didn’t join in his laughter.
“Where’s the receipt, anyway?” he demanded, sounding as defensive as a cornered animal.
“Here, sir.” She handed it to him, along with the pen, and moved to help hold the pizza boxes as he signed. Holding it against his prodigious belly, he gave her a sharp glance at her gesture. She withdrew her hand, shocked at the sheer rancor in his look. Close to him, the butterscotch smell was almost overwhelming. If it was cologne, he must’ve slathered it on.
“Thanks,” he concluded gruffly, shoving the receipt back.
“And…my pen?”
He dropped it on the pizza box. She swiped it and the receipt up in one pass. “Have a nice night.” Then she was down the first step, the second, the third—
“You didn’t have to be afraid.”
She stopped out of politeness, turning around to see those bare feet—their thick, yellow toenails—padding out onto the porch. Big, almost moist sounds against the pavement with each step. “I wasn’t.”
“I’m a cop, you know. State trooper. You should be more trusting.”
“It’s corporate policy. Sir,” she added belatedly. She slotted her pen into her pocket for something to do with her vacant hands.
“It’s rude. Feels rude. Might not order from you guys again.”
“Sorry. Sir.” Then she remembered Lucia watching. Imagined her jawing on the way back, telling Mindy she should’ve punched the guy in the balls and ran, because who would’ve taken some middle-aged weirdo’s side over a teenage girl? Or Lucia jumping out of the car and doing it herself. “If you’d like to call my manager, I’m sure he’ll explain why he thinks it’s a good rule.”
Mr. Louis Card just stared at her, his eyes with that casual rage, his eyebrows twitching, his mustache bristling. “You drive safe now.”
“Always do.” She turned and went down the steps, not especially fast but definitely not slow, telling herself she would not stop if he told her he had burst into flames.
Lucia opened the door for her, slid into the front seat, tossed the empty pizza bag onto Lucia in the other seat, dropped the signed receipt into the cup holders, and hit the gas. A block later she thought to buckle her seatbelt.
“How much we get?” Lucia asked, breaking the silence and swishing up the receipt. “Motherfucker! Zip?”
Mindy glanced at it briefly when Lucia held it up for her. “He didn’t give me cash.”
“Aw, and he put a big fucking zero in the tip section! That fucking burns me, man. Like we would put a number there and get fired over, like, five bucks. He’s saying we don’t deserve to get paid for our labor and we’re cheats. Dickwad!”
“Put it in the glove compartment.”
“Huh?”
Mindy opened up the glove compartment. “It’s that thing.”
“I know what it is, I just don’t—” Then Lucia looked inside and saw that along with the tire gauge, the car’s manual, and a rubber-banded assortment of insurance information, there was a rat’s nest of crisp and wrinkled receipts.
“Put it in already, I don’t want them to spill out.”
Lucia shoved the receipt inside and shut up the compartment again. “Okay, sensing a story there, Mindy.”
“It’s nothing. Some dumb therapy thing—”
“Is it voodoo? Voodoo would be awesome. You could get, like, a paper cut from them signing the receipts and then—”
“It’s Twitter.”
“Mm?” Seeing a receipt caught in the door, Lucia opened the glove compartment again, pushed it fully inside, and sealed it back up.
“I…” Mindy put a finger to her brow, rubbing at the throbbing vein she felt there. She hated confrontation. Felt like she’d failed at polite society, not whatever asshole was confronting her. “Someday, when I’m rich and famous, I’m gonna tweet those dicks’ names and addresses, and everyone’s gonna know they—are—lousy tippers!”
“Holy shit,” Lucia tittered.
“It’s gonna be one of those Twitter accounts that go viral. Whenever anyone gets a bad tip, anywhere in the US, they’re gonna post the receipt there. Name and shame. I wonder if that handle’s taken…” Mindy wondered, liking the sound of it: @nameandshame. Then she shook her head. “I’m probably never going to do it.”
“You should. You should do it. I like the sound of that.”
They came out of the white people farm, out of the inverted shadows of yellow streetlamps and onto the highway, the only thing darker than the night that surrounded it. Finally freed of the thirty mph limit, Mindy pumped them up to forty-five, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. Only five miles over the speed limit, though. That was the real limit in Texas.
Lucia rested her head on Mindy’s shoulder. “I love it.”
The smell of Lucia’s hair erased the butterscotch from Mindy’s memory. “Thanks for coming along with me.”
“Anytime, girlfriend.” Lucia snapped her finger.
“No, I mean it. He may still have his two bucks, but I have someone to call him an asshole with. So, who’s the real winner?” Lucia rubbed her hand on Mindy’s knee in answer. Her hair trickled down Mindy’s short shirtsleeve like a beam of sunlight wisping at her bicep. “You know what you are? You’re my good luck charm. Even if I don’t get a tip, you make me feel really—fortunate.”
Lucia turned the car stereo back on. The jazzy music was warm coffee poured down their throats. Invigorating and relaxing them at once. And Lucia’s head on Mindy’s shoulder was just heavy enough, just warm enough, just right. Lucia reached up and smoothed out the hem of Mindy’s sleeve where it had folded back on itself. Her fingernail traced briefly over Mindy’s skin.
This fast, highway markers and lane dividers became a hypnotic blur in the headlights lulling them into a trance. Then, like a snap of the fingers, a stray dog appeared in the road. It came up so fast, it was like they were standing still and the dog was speeding toward them. Mindy spun the wheel, braked. The car veered to the side with the dog full-on in the headlights. It slipped into the darkness down below. There was a bump as they swung into the turn lane. Then they were surrounded by empty night. The dog had disappeared as fast as it’d arrived.
Mindy broke the silence before it was fully formed. “Did I hit him? I turned… I fucking turned!” She pounded the steering wheel. “Shit! SHIT!”
More than anything else, she felt frustration. She’d seen it, she’d reacted—why hadn’t that been enough? Why did the dog have to be there, right there, just when she was too close to do anything about it? What the fuck was she supposed to do? Just… She’d hit it.
; “You didn’t hit him,” Lucia said vehemently. “It was…the brakes, the gears, they make noises when you turn too fast—”
“I hit him! He was in the fucking road and I was going fast like a fucking idiot and I hit him!”
Mindy’s foot twitched on the pedal. The speedometer rose like water coming to a boil. She was beginning to cry.
“Mindy, slow down.”
She hit the wheel like it was at fault, like it hadn’t turned fast enough, like it hadn’t responded well enough. Her fist hammered at it, setting the horn off. “Fucking—”
Wind shrieked in through the cracked window, roaring against the rear windshield. Mindy screamed with it, frustration becoming anger, anger the only thing bigger than her sadness. She kept thinking of, kept hearing that thump. The brief glimpse she’d had of the dog circled in her mind, spinning in her like a top—a border collie, it’d looked like.
Big and cute and majestic and she’d killed it. She’d slaughtered it without even looking, hadn’t even thought about it, just stepped on it like she was a big evil monster and it was her victim. What was even left of it now? Scattered meat, a smear on the roadbed—what was left after she’d murdered it?
As the speedometer climbed to eighty, Tate’s Creek Bridge loomed ahead of them, its iron trusses aimed at them like sawblades in shop class, ready for them to be run through.
“Mindy, we’re gonna get pulled over…”
She felt the tears drip off her jawline—they’d made it all the way down her face without her knowing. Her throat felt like someone was choking her. She was a dog-killer. A fucking monster.
And then Lucia’s hands were on the wheel, holding it steady as she said in Mindy’s ear so it went right to her brain, “Stop. Stop the car. Stop the car now.”
As clumsy as a woman drugged, Mindy picked her foot up off the gas pedal and set it down on the brake. Where it belonged. She applied the pressure steadily, constantly, and they slowed in little gulps. At twenty miles per hour, Lucia eased them off the road and onto the dry brown grass that was the new desert in Texas. There they came to a stop, a stone’s throw from the drop-off of Tate’s Creek. Its waters laughed a good seventy feet down.
Gently, so gently, Lucia took hold of the gear shift and pushed it through neutral, through reverse, into park. She let it go. Mindy closed her eyes, heard Lucia turn the key in the ignition and kill the engine. The great beast of the car—the murderer, the murder weapon—sighed and cooled and slept. Only the headlights stayed on, shooting into the night to expose the bridge’s iron trusses. The bleached white bones of some long-dead monster.
Ex-Wives of Dracula Page 5