Liar's Market

by Taylor Smith

  She gave him a kiss and a tickle. “Hey there, Jonah-man. Are you and Spidey going to get up today, old sleepyheads?”

  He grunted and rolled over, his SpongeBob pajama bottoms twisting around his chubby legs.

  “Come on, little guy. It’s a great day out there. Today you make volcanoes at camp.”

  She moved to his bureau, humming Good Day, Sunshine to coax him out of rumpled sleep as she laid out his clothes on a chair—a blue-and-green-striped tank top and tan cotton duck shorts. She hesitated over the sock drawer.

  “Do you want to wear your new sneakers today or sandals?”

  “Sneakers,” he mumbled.

  She laid some blue tube socks on the pile of clothes and a pair of his miniature-size blue jockey shorts, and parked the running shoes next to the chair. “Okeydoke, buddy. All your clothes are here. If I leave them and go down to get your breakfast ready, can I count on you to get yourself dressed?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “You sure?” she said, leaning over him with a smile and another tickle. “You’re really, truly, for sure awake? Or do I need to dress my superhero this morning?”

  He giggled and rolled over on his stomach once more. “Mom! Really, truly, for sure. I can do it myself.”

  “You’ll wash your face? And brush your hair? Cause I’ve gotta tell you, bud, you are not a pretty sight at the moment. You don’t want to be giving Miss Mindy a fright attack.”

  “Mo-om!”

  “Okay, okay. I’m going down to make your breakfast. But you’ve got ten minutes, all right? Up and at ’em, Adam ant.”

  She left him rolling off the bed with a grunt as she headed downstairs, fully expecting to have the kitchen to herself.

  In his time, it seemed, General MacNeil had lectured his own son on the importance of being known as a man who didn’t waste valuable time. There’d been a period in Drum’s wild youth, Carrie knew, when he’d had no interest in the old man’s advice, but then he’d been recruited by the CIA and his outlook had apparently undergone a transformation.

  By the time Carrie had met him, he was already rising through the Agency’s ranks. In the seven years they’d been married, he’d rarely taken breakfast at home, preferring to have his “girl” bring something to his desk while he read the daily intelligence brief and the overnight cables.

  So that morning, she was taken aback when she came downstairs to find Drum sitting at the table in the breakfast nook, reading the Washington Post and looking as unhurried as she’d ever seen him.

  The breakfast room in which he sat was a glassed-in solarium set off to one side of the big, wood-paneled kitchen. The house had been refurbished several times since its original construction in order to keep up with modern amenities. The solarium had been added in 1968, the year General MacNeil had been named to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

  Carrie could see Drum’s blue shirt reflected in the wide bay of lead-lined windows behind the round oak table, but other than that and his long, sprawling legs crossed one over the other, he was completely hidden from view. Sun shone through the glass panes behind him, casting a patchwork rainbow across the kitchen’s terrazzo tile floor.

  “You’re still here,” she said.

  “Mmm…” he murmured from behind his paper. “You have a real knack for pointing out the obvious, sweetie.”

  “I thought you’d be long gone. Is Margaret on vacation?”

  These days, Drum’s “girl” was a forty-eight-year-old executive assistant with steel wool for hair and, according to him, a swaying, pickup-size rear end that made him wince every time she left his office. Neither tact nor political correctness had ever been his strong suits.

  “No. I’m sure she’s busy grumbling as we speak about the coffee I’m not there to drink.”

  Apparently Margaret had bristled his first day back at headquarters, when Drum had interrupted her admin spiel and sent her out to the directors’ mess to fetch coffee and a bagel while he made some calls. He had no use, he said, for her “feminazi attitude.” His secretary in London had fetched his meals during the four years he’d been there; and so had his previous girl at Langley when he’d been head of the counterintelligence unit, as well as the one before that, who’d taken care of him in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

  “Now I get an EA with delusions of grandeur and a chip on her shoulder,” he’d complained that first week back. “Is that what comes with a promotion these days? A seventh floor office with a view to kingdom come and clerical staff with attitude? EA, my ass. Whatever happened to secretaries?”

  He’d left no room for doubt that if Margaret wanted to continue as assistant to the Operations Deputy, she’d carry out her duties in the way he expected. At the same time, he told Carrie, he’d put in a personnel order for someone less prickly to occupy his outer office. Easier on the eyes, too, while they were at it.

  His newspaper rustled now as Drum set it down on his lap, closed his eyes and massaged his temples.

  “Another headache?” Carrie asked.

  He nodded.

  “Can I get you some Tylenol?”

  He exhaled heavily. “Already took three.”

  “Do you think you should see a doctor about these headaches, Drum? You’ve been getting them ever since—”

  He picked up his paper, shook it out, and went back behind it. “It’s just a headache.”

  Carrie took a cup from a hook under the wooden shelf that ran the length of the kitchen’s brick-lined inner wall. The display rack held part of the collection of brightly colored hand-thrown pottery that Drum’s mother had amassed in the course of the General’s military postings around the world.

  “So you didn’t call in sick or anything?” she asked, pouring out her coffee.

  “I’m not sick. I’m going in.”

  “You don’t need to let Margaret know?”

  “I’m not there to answer to my staff. Pays to keep them off balance. Anyway, if she checks my calendar, she’ll know I’ve got a meeting across the river this morning.”

  “Oh.” Carrie moved to the walk-in pantry and withdrew a box of Cheerios. Could she possibly have worse luck?

  On the other hand, she thought, studying the deep vertical tension lines atop the bridge of his nose, Drum was not exactly a happy camper these days, either. After the tragic end to his posting in London with the murder of the young student from Maryland, he’d landed back home in the middle of another political firestorm. Everyone was looking for a scapegoat for the security lapses that had brought the nation’s morale so low. Congress and the press were calling for heads to roll. For the past eleven months, Washington seemed to have been seized by endless rounds of self-examination, mutual recrimination and accountability reviews as every department, agency, official and politician tried to avoid being stuck with the hot potato of blame. And rather than take up the operations position he’d been angling to obtain for so long, Drum found himself saddled with make-work projects that seemed designed to do little more than provide the illusion of CIA industriousness and hold the Agency’s critics at bay.

  “Is it another one of those committee meetings of yours?” Carrie asked.

  “Something like that,” Drum said wearily.

  Before she could probe further, Jonah burst into the kitchen with an ear-piercing cry. “Nyaow!” His arms propellered two toy star fighters, one gripped in each small hand. The two craft wheeled and dipped, exchanging imaginary phaser fire. “Chinnng! Chinnng!”

  He bounded across the terrazzo tiles, ready to take his usual leap onto one of the bar stools lined up along the long baker’s table that served as the kitchen’s center island, but at the last moment, he caught sight of his father. The rubber soles of his new blue Nikes squealed to a halt, the lights in the heels flashing wildly.

  “Daddy?”

  Drum turned another page, glancing up. “Hey, sport.”

  “How come you’re home?”

  “Obviously, because I haven’t left yet.”

  Jonah c
limbed up onto one of the tall bar stools and sat quietly, his star cruisers in silent running mode now as he waited for his breakfast.

  Carrie took a blue bowl from one of the glass-fronted cupboards, and set it on the island in front of Jonah, studying him and his father surreptitiously as she poured out his Cheerios. Her son was strawberry-haired, gaptoothed, freckled. His coloring had come from her end of the genetic pool, as had his mischievous green eyes. He was wearing the blue-and-green-striped tank top and tan shorts she’d put out for him, and his stocky little body fairly purred, now that he’d thrown off sleep.

  Drum, by contrast, was forced to sit sideways at the breakfast table in order to cross his long legs, the polished toe of his soft, black Italian brogues tapping a chronically impatient beat in the air. Would Jonah eventually stretch out like that? Carrie wondered, trying to imagine what it would be like to have a son who towered over her the way his father did.

  “Can I get you some breakfast, Drum?” she asked.

  Mistake. When he finally looked directly at her, his deep blue eyes narrowed and the paper fell into his lap. “You look very nice this morning.”

  “Oh…thanks.” Despite the old shorts and tank top, wasn’t it obvious she was too carefully groomed for someone planning nothing more than to drive their son over to his summer day camp a few blocks away?

  “How about some toast or a bagel?” she asked, anxious to deflect attention. “Or cereal? I could do up some eggs.”

  “No,” Drum said, his appraising gaze never wavering. “I will take some more coffee, though.”

  “In the travel cup?” Every evening, she set up the coffeemaker to brew by 6:00 a.m. and left a clean, lidded travel mug on the counter next to it in case Drum wanted coffee for his ten-minute ride over to Langley.

  But he picked up a ceramic mug sitting on the table beside him and held it out. “No, just refill this, would you?”

  Carrie collected the coffeepot and carried it over.

  The tall windows behind him overlooked a long lawn dotted with weeping willows whose branches swept the lush grass, kept green by an automatic underground sprinkler system that even now was chuck-chucking rainbow sprays into the early morning air. But the windows in the house were all shut up tight against the heat and humidity that never seemed to dissipate in the long Washington summer. Nights here were too warm and the pollen too thick for Jonah, who suffered from mild asthma, to sleep comfortably without air-conditioning.

  The lawn ran down to the banks of the Potomac. A couple of sculling teams were out on the water, oars moving in smooth unison as the shells passed the MacNeils’ boat slip. The dock was repaired and re-varnished every year, although in the time Carrie had been married to Drum, they’d never had a boat. When they’d come back from London, she’d asked him about getting a kayak or sailboat she and Jonah could paddle around in that summer, but Drum had said something about currents in the river and the matter had been dropped.

  Carrie set his refilled cup in front of him, cursing the tremble in her hand that made it clatter, trying to read his body language and gauge his mood. “So, you have a meeting downtown?”

  “Mmm…”

  “Where?”

  “The Bureau.”

  “What time?”

  He’d gone back to reading his paper, but he set it down again, frowning. “Why do you ask?”

  She turned away. “No reason. It’s just unusual to have you here in the morning, that’s all.”

  “Well, the meeting’s at nine.” He dropped behind his newspaper screen once more.

  On the way to the fridge, Carrie glanced at the antique railway clock on the wall. It was now seven-fifty-five. The FBI was…where? Pennsylvania Avenue, wasn’t it? It would take him at least forty-five minutes in rush hour to get across the river and down the Mall and park the car. Surely he’d have to head out shortly.

  If he left in the next few minutes, there’d still be time for her to run up and change into something more appropriate—a skirt and blouse, at the very least. No lawyer, friend of a friend or not, was going to take a woman in shorts and a tank top seriously. Could she change later? Her appointment wasn’t until ten-fifteen, and even though it was over in Alexandria, there was probably time to come back after she’d dropped off Jonah. But if she did that, she ran the risk of running into Althea and her inevitable barrage of questions and small complaints. How would she explain to her mother-in-law why she was getting so dressed up this morning?

  Why was nothing ever simple?

  Propping the fridge door open with a hip, Carrie reached for the milk with one hand and the carton of orange juice with the other, trying to estimate how long it would take her to negotiate the traffic she herself would face. She kept one nervous eye on Drum as she poured juice into a glass.

  “I want some banana on my cereal,” Jonah said.

  She added milk to his bowl and replaced the cap on the jug. “Please may I have…?”

  Jonah rolled his enormous gray-green eyes. “Please may I have some banana on my cereal?” He’d lost one of his top front teeth the previous week and the resulting gap had given him a lisp and a lop-sided cant to his sweet mouth.

  Carrie smiled and pushed back his sandy hair, leaning over to kiss him on the forehead. “Yes, you may, you handsome devil, you.”

  He started to smile before he remembered to grimace and wipe his forehead with the back of one hand. Then he turned his attention back to his star cruisers, dive-bombing them over the bobbing oat circles in his cereal bowl.

  Across the way in the solarium, Drum lowered his newspaper once more. “Jonah, what’s the rule about toys at the table?”

  Two chubby hands whipped into his small lap, then reappeared a moment later without the spaceships. “Sorry. I thought that was at dinnertime.”

  “You think good manners only get brought out once a day? Your mother lets you get away with that?”

  “No, sir.”

  Carrie was already at the refrigerator, putting away the milk and juice, and her back was to the table, but she winced as she lifted a banana from the hanging wire fruit basket and a paring knife out of a rack over the counter. Avoiding the critical gaze that now encompassed her as well as her son, she returned to the center island. Silence hung heavy in the room while she peeled back the skin and sliced the fruit with quick strokes, the sun glinting off the steel blade as each creamy piece tumbled into the bowl.

  “Eat up now, sweetie,” she murmured. “It’s almost time to go.”

  “Carrie?”

  She’d moved back to the sink and was slicing the peel into small pieces, letting them fall into the plastic bin where she saved vegetable scraps, egg shells and coffee grounds for the garden compost pile. She paused. Would she even be here come fall to turn the last ripe batch of compost into the flower beds?

  “Carrie, would you have the courtesy to face me when I’m addressing you, please?” Drum’s voice was dangerously polite.

  She straightened and turned. Don’t provoke him. Not today.

  He’d folded the paper and set it aside, focused solely on her now. Hard to believe she’d once felt protected and safe inside the tight cocoon of that icy gaze. Out of the corner of her eye, she noted Jonah sitting very straight on his stool, towhead down, concentrating intently on the spoon moving rhythmically up and down between the blue bowl and his mouth.

  “I was going to make Jonah’s lunch and tidy up,” she said evenly. “Rose will be in at nine and your mother likes to leave a neat kitchen for her.”

  Althea’s housekeeper had been with the family for over thirty years. For the first twenty of those, she’d lived in the small servants’ quarters out behind the kitchen, but now, she just worked weekdays from nine to two, doing cleaning, laundry and light cooking, and she lived with her daughter in Arlington. At one time, Carrie had thought the unoccupied maid’s room at the back of the house would make an ideal studio for her own use, but that plan, like so much else in her marriage, had died of neglect.
<
br />   “I’ve never understood why my mother feels it necessary to clean the place for the maid,” Drum said.

  “Pride, I guess. She doesn’t like Rose to think we live like animals.”

  “Like I care what a servant thinks.”

  “Well, your mother does, and since I may not be back from driving Jonah before Rose gets here, I’d better do it now.”

  “Why wouldn’t you be back? It takes five minutes to get over to the rec center.”

  Carrie was gathering up ingredients for Jonah’s lunch. Keep it simple. “I have some errands to run after I drop him off.”

  “Such as…?”

  “Well, I need to pick up your suit at the dry cleaners and return some books to the library. And I need to drop by the pharmacy and the grocery store. The refill on your mother’s blood pressure medication should be ready, and I wanted to get some chicken breasts for dinner. Are you going to be home, do you think? I was thinking of doing them on the grill.”

  “Doubtful. How long are you planning to be gallivanting around this morning?”

  “Not long. Maybe an hour or so. Could you let me have some money?” she added. He’d never believe her otherwise. He wouldn’t expect her to have enough cash on hand to buy groceries and pay for the prescription and he didn’t like her to have a debit or credit card. She could write checks on her household account, but carrying plastic was just an invitation to strangers to steal your personal information, he said. She didn’t dare point out the Amex and Visa cards in his wallet. That was never the same thing. She just prayed he wouldn’t tell her to wake Althea for the prescription money. That carried its own set of hazards.

  “Can I be excused?” Jonah asked meekly.

  His bowl was scraped clean, though it was hard to say whether that was indicative of a sudden growth spurt or a desire to escape the tension in the room.

  “Did you have enough to eat?” Carrie asked him. “How about some toast or a bagel?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am,” he said, glancing at Drum. “I should go and brush my teeth now.”

  When Carrie smiled and nodded at him, he scrambled off the stool. He was already halfway to the door when Drum’s voice called, “Jonah?”