Stay At Home Dead

by Jeffrey Allen

  “Guy was a total j-e-r-k,” I said, slapping two pieces of pizza onto my plate.

  Carly eyed me suspiciously. She’d picked up on the fact that when we spelled words in her presence, there was a reason for it.

  “Did you just spell a bad word?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Then what was it you were spelling?”

  I looked to Julianne. I blamed her for birthing an intelligent child.

  “Your daddy just likes to spell, honey,” she said, sliding into the chair across from me. “Makes him feel smart.”

  Carly nodded, as if, yes, she recognized my need to feel smart, then went back to building her leaning tower of pizza.

  “And they impounded the van?” Julianne asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I got Cedric to take us over to get the rental. Then I had to go and buy another car seat to get us home.”

  “When was the last time you saw Benny?” Julianne asked, picking up the glass of Shiner Light I’d poured for her. I say glass because if I ever even suggested that Julianne Winters might drink beer from a bottle, I would probably never be given the opportunity to sleep with her again. She’s kinda weird that way.

  “Don’t even know.”

  “Guess.”

  I thought about it. I could remember plenty of times in high school seeing his ugly mug staring at me from the other side of the line. And I certainly recalled the night he turned my knee into Silly Putty. In a small town like Rose Petal, I saw him once in a while, but it was always in passing and we didn’t speak. It was uncomfortable, and both of us hurried to be the first one to look away.

  “Maybe about a month ago,” I said. “Saw him coming out of Delilah’s as I was driving by. But I haven’t spoken to him since high school I’d bet.”

  “And remind me. Who’d he end up marrying again?” Julianne asked with an amused smile.

  “You know who he married, Jules.”

  “No, my memory is failing me, Deuce.” She sipped from the beer, her eyes wide. “Who?”

  “Yeah, Daddy,” Carly chimed in. “Who?”

  “He married Shayna,” I said, then bit off a chunk of pizza.

  “Ah yes,” Julianne said, as if it was coming back to her. “Shayna Linihan. Your first love.”

  “Stop.”

  “Shayna,” Carly said, then looked at me. “Who’s Shayna?”

  I glanced at Julianne, shaking my head. My wife was beautiful, smart, and funny. Sandra Bullock with an attitude. Not much to complain about, really. But she did love to see me squirm, and she could poke the needle with the best of them.

  “Shayna was someone I used to know,” I said. I pointed to the tower of pizza. “Could you have at least a few bites?”

  “Sure,” Carly said. She grabbed the top piece, crumpled it in her mouth, and smiled. “Shayna was your friend. Right, Daddy?”

  Julianne chuckled and raised her glass in my direction before taking a drink.

  Shayna Linihan and I dated our junior and senior years of high school. Everyone thought we would get married. Hell, I thought we’d get married. But after I’d busted up my knee and my dreams of being a football star at Texas A&M went up in smoke, Shayna went up in smoke, too. Somewhere along the line she’d ended up with Benny. Though Julianne and I ended up together, I’d had the misfortune of not having any idea who she was in high school, a fact she still enjoyed bringing up.

  All things considered, looking at the two women I now shared my life with, I’d gotten the better end of the deal and then some.

  “Yes, kiddo, she was my friend,” I said. “But I haven’t seen her in a long time.”

  Carly nodded like she already knew that and returned her attention to her pizza.

  “Don’t worry,” Julianne said, eyeing me over her glass. “It’s a bunch of noise over nothing. You didn’t kill him, and when they do the processing, they’ll figure that out. It’ll all go away.”

  I grunted. Julianne wasn’t a criminal attorney. She handled complex civil stuff, and I trusted her opinion. But not much ever went away in Rose Petal.

  Carly pointed toward our front window. “Someone’s here!”

  Visitors excited her like nothing else. Be it the mailman or the UPS guy or someone selling something, she treated each and every arrival at our front door like Santa Claus.

  And she was right. A giant black Lexus was parked at the curb in front of the house and a man was exiting the vehicle.

  Tan skin, frosted blond hair that was combed back and hung down to his shoulders, a matching goatee around his chin and mouth. His slate gray suit clashed with his alligator boots and bright pink tie.

  “Hit me over the head,” I said.

  Julianne picked up her empty beer bottle, clutched it by the neck, ready to take a swing. “Wait. Why?”

  “So I don’t have to talk to Billy Caldwell.”

  4

  The doorbell rang, and Carly scrambled from her booster seat to the door.

  “Can we pretend we’re not home?” I asked.

  “Too late,” Julianne said, following Carly to the door.

  Carly grasped the knob, twisted with all her might, and swung it open.

  Billy Caldwell cleared his throat. “Hello, little girl. Is your daddy home?”

  “Yes,” Carly said. “Why are you wearing funny boots?”

  Suddenly, I felt much better about her opening the door.

  “Carly,” Julianne said, coming up behind her. She smiled. “Hello, Billy.”

  Billy ran a hand over his jacket. “Julianne. Good evening.”

  I moved into the doorway. It had been a few months since I’d had the displeasure of running into Rose Petal’s worst lawyer. That wasn’t an official title he’d won, just one that I’d privately bestowed upon him. His skin was a weird combination of orange and brown, the result of too much time in an overzealous tanning booth. “What do you want, Billy?”

  “Evening, Deuce,” Billy said, still looking at Julianne. “Hoping you had a moment.”

  “We’re having dinner, Billy,” I said. “What do you want?”

  He moved his eyes from my wife to me. “Heard you had a little trouble over at Cooper’s this afternoon.”

  “Did you?”

  “Those boots look like snakes,” Carly observed. Julianne put her hands on Carly’s shoulders and marched her away from the door.

  “Guy in the boots looks like one, too,” I muttered.

  “What’s that, Deuce?” Billy asked, leaning forward.

  “We’re in the middle of dinner,” I repeated. “What do you want?”

  Billy hooked his thumbs in the belt loops of his pants. Which would’ve looked very Texan if he had been wearing jeans rather than a cheap, knockoff suit. And if the car out at the curb was a dusty pickup truck rather than a leased Lexus.

  “Well, I didn’t wanna go runnin’ to the police without talking to you first,” he said, raising a bleached eyebrow. “But maybe I should.”

  “Maybe you should.”

  The eyebrow settled. “When did you find out?”

  “Find out what?”

  “That I was representing Benny.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and my pizza’s getting cold.”

  “That I was representing Benny in a lawsuit.” Billy Caldwell smiled, exposing his highly polished veneers. “Against you.”

  5

  When I was twelve and Billy Caldwell was thirteen, I punched him in the stomach. It was lunchtime at Ranger Middle School, and he was taunting a younger girl, maybe ten or eleven, about the large, chocolate-colored birthmark below her left eye. The mark looked a bit like a smashed brown crayon, but Billy wanted to know if a cat crapped on her face. Big, glistening tears rolled out of her eyes and over the birthmark as Billy laughed at his incredibly stupid joke. A couple of his buddies chuckled behind him, pointing at the girl.

  She lived down the road from me. Saw her all the time, but didn’t know her name. I did know, though, that if
my mother found out I let anyone get bullied in my presence, I’d be crying from the belt she would take to my behind.

  “Shut up, Billy,” I said, stepping between him and the girl.

  Billy carried himself with an unearned arrogance even at thirteen, and he lifted his chin in my direction. “You gonna make me?” Then he smiled. “She your girlfriend or something?” The smile grew. “Maybe it was your cat.”

  I was a year younger, but we were the same size, something that wouldn’t be true for long, as I’d pass him the next year and keep on growing well over six feet by the end of high school, while he’d top out just under.

  “Hey, Billy,” I said. “Does it hurt?”

  His smile got all screwed up. “Does what hurt?”

  I stepped in and buried my fist in his gut. His eyes bulged and he bent over, his cheeks flooding with color. He fell to his knees and dry heaved.

  “That. Does that hurt?” I asked.

  He dry heaved again.

  “Guess so.”

  School suspended me for a day, but my mother took me out for a hamburger to celebrate.

  Now, twenty-plus years later, Billy was sitting on our sofa and I felt that same urge to knock the crap out of him. Some people just look like they could always use a good punch to the stomach, and Billy Caldwell was one of them.

  Carly walked over to him, her hands behind her back, and smiled. “I’m three,” she said.

  I really needed to work on her people-judging skills.

  Billy glanced at her, gave here an insincere, thin smile. “That’s nice, darlin’.”

  “You gonna get to it, Billy?” Julianne asked from her perch in the doorway. “Because unlike the rest of the women in this town, I am not conditioned to offer you something to drink just because you’re in our home.”

  Julianne’s people-judging skills, however, needed no work.

  He kept the fake smile on his face and looked at me. “You and Benny had a history.”

  “No, Benny and I used to play football against one another,” I said. “Just like you and I used to play together on the same team. You played against him, too. That’s not history. Those are facts.”

  Billy shifted his weight on the sofa, crossed one leg over the other, exposing more of the alligator boots. “You weren’t the only one hurt in that collision, Deuce.”

  My knee throbbed for a moment. “Funny. I remember being the only one they had to carry off the field.”

  Benny hit me clean. I went across the field, caught the ball, and Benny nailed me coming from the opposite direction. He crashed into my knees and my left one caught, I heard a pop, and when I hit the ground, it felt like someone had set my leg on fire.

  “I’m three,” Carly said, holding up three fingers toward Billy. “And I’m almost four.”

  He gave her a tight smile and nodded, then looked at me. “He had shoulder and neck problems for years after that.”

  I shrugged. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “Your knee caused those problems.”

  Julianne burst out laughing, not bothering to hide her amusement. “So you’re here to tell us that Benny was going to sue Deuce? For hurting his neck and shoulders?” She laughed again. “Seriously?”

  I so totally loved my wife at that moment. She was my hero. Or heroine. Or someone I wanted very much to dress like Wonder Woman for just one night.

  Billy gave a slow nod. “That’s exactly what we were going to do, Julianne.”

  “Do you own a calendar?” I asked. “You do realize that was eighteen years ago and not, like, last weekend, right?”

  His cheeks flushed. “He was hurting, and we had a doctor determine that those injuries were caused by you. Doctor was willing to testify.”

  “Doctor who?” I asked. “Seuss? Zhivago?”

  “I’ll be four very soon,” Carly said, now holding four fingers up in the air.

  Billy ignored her. “I’m not here to argue with you, Deuce. I’m here to be up front with you.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  “Benny’s dead, and just based on how y’all are reacting right now, I’d say I was right.”

  “About what?”

  “About thinking I better tell the authorities that you may have had motive,” Billy said.

  I looked at Julianne. She was just shaking her head, like she couldn’t believe we’d never moved out of Rose Petal.

  “That suit, obviously, won’t be able to move forward now that Benny’s passed,” Billy said, tugging at the collar of his shirt. “However, we are examining the possibility of a civil lawsuit.”

  “Civil lawsuit?” Julianne asked, sounding like she was about to giggle again.

  Billy couldn’t look her in the eye, so he looked just past her. “Wrongful death. Like O.J.”

  Finally. I finally had something in common with O. J. Simpson. Dream come true.

  “I’ll be four very soon,” Carly repeated, holding her fingers up as high as she could to get them in front of Billy’s face.

  Annoyance flashed across Billy’s face. “Little girl, I am talking to your daddy. Stop interrupting.”

  Carly’s face fell and her bottom lip jutted out. She turned and ran to Julianne, attaching herself to her mother’s thigh.

  “Get up,” I said.

  “Deuce, I’d like ...”

  I stood. “Get up now.”

  Billy pushed himself off the sofa.

  I stepped in front of him, my back to my wife and daughter. “You ever talk to my daughter like that again, I will hit you in the mouth, Billy.” I made sure my voice was low enough that Carly couldn’t hear. “And even if you don’t, I may just hit you, anyway, because it would make me happy. Take those ridiculous boots and get out of my house.”

  Billy hesitated for a moment, and I stepped in a little closer. He never got over me shooting by him in high school on the growth chart. Over the years, I’d come to realize that that was one of the reasons he hated me. There were plenty of others, but that was one of them. Silly, but true.

  Billy cleared his throat, tried to smile, but it came off more like he’d swallowed a tack. “I’ll let myself out.”

  I followed him to the door and watched him go down the walk to his car. He stepped in and drove away.

  “What are you looking at?” Julianne asked after a moment.

  I turned around. “Thought I saw a lizard in the bushes wave good-bye to his boots.”

  6

  Carly, like always, quickly forgot about Billy’s reprimand and after a bath and bedtime story was snoring before I left her room. I, of course, wouldn’t ever forget it and knew I’d still be pissed off for days.

  Julianne was downstairs in our room, wearing a Longhorns T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, working a piece of dental floss through her teeth.

  She stopped for a second and pointed a finger at me. “Thought you were going to hit him.”

  I stripped off my T-shirt. “I should’ve hit him.”

  “Maybe. Blood would clash with the ... everything, though.”

  I grunted and went into the bathroom, washed my face, pulled off my jeans, and fell into bed in my boxers. I grabbed the latest issue of Sports Illustrated off the nightstand and paged through it.

  “Tough to read when you’re using the pages as a fan,” Julianne said, sliding into her side of the bed.

  I grunted again.

  “Speak, caveman.”

  I set the magazine down. “There are days that I despise living here.”

  Julianne smiled a perfectly flossed smile. “Wednesdays and Thursdays for me. Rest of the week I don’t mind it.”

  “Come on, Jules.”

  “Sorry. Continue.”

  She was slipping into her attorney speak, but I let it slide. “It just gets old. The past never goes away, and that’s all anybody ever cares about.”

  “Yeah, but that’s part of the charm, too, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know that it is anymore, Jules.”

  She proppe
d herself up with her elbow on her pillow. “You had a bad day, Deuce. But all of this is just silly. Billy can bluster all he wants about suing, but he’s got a handful of nothing, okay?”

  “I’m not worried about Billy,” I said, fibbing just a bit. “I’m worried about Carly.”

  “Carly?”

  I looked at my wife. “I’m not sure I want her growing up in a place like this. A place that won’t ever let her move forward. Is that fair to her?”

  Julianne placed a hand on my arm. “This is where we grew up. It’s where we live. It’s home. One bad day doesn’t change that.”

  I shook my head. Truth was, I’d been thinking a lot lately about raising Carly in a small town where everyone would know her every move. There was no anonymity available to her. And like it or not, having Julianne and me as her parents wouldn’t make it any easier. Her stay-at-home dad was still talked about as one of the best athletes Rose Petal had ever seen. And while her mother was one of the most successful people in town, she was also remembered as Rose Petal Queen of 1989.

  Was it fair to impose our past on our daughter? Create absurd standards that had nothing to do with anything?

  I wasn’t sure.

  Julianne leaned over and kissed me on the cheek. “Carly is going to be a wonderful person wherever she’s raised. Her mother is beautiful and her father is ... What are you again?”

  I tried to look irritated, but it faded to a smile. “I’m cool and collected.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “And stunningly handsome.”

  “I look forward to some day meeting her father, then.” Her eyes flickered for a moment. “I am concerned about one thing, though.”

  “What?”

  “Benny Barnes.”

  I nodded. I’d been thinking the same thing. Someone went to a lot of trouble to make sure Benny was found in the van. My van. And while I knew that I hadn’t killed him nor had anything to do with his death, there was a knot in my stomach that didn’t seem to want to go away.

  “I know,” I said. “Someone’s not too happy with me.”

  “Well, yeah,” she said. “But that’s not what I meant.”