by Thomas Perry
There were a lot of middle-class women in the business now—a few graduate students, lots of divorcées, and a lot of women from other countries who figured nobody back home would ever find out.
As soon as he was settled in his hotel and could get a shower, clean clothes, and a good dinner, he would get his laptop computer onto the wi-fi network and begin shopping for a girl. Boston was an important, delicate job. The sooner he got out of sight the better.
Moreland was good at scanning the ads. The ones he wanted would often mention their strawberry blond hair in the ads. Red hair was rare, so they would call it red, but sometimes they said blond, so he had to be patient, click on the ad, and see the photographs. Some described themselves as “the girl next door.” He often clicked on those, even though he thought the description was misleading. The real girl next door when he’d been young had been reddish blond.
He had been fourteen when he first became interested in Mindy Jones. She was already out of Jamestown High School and working as a waitress in the restaurant down by Chautauqua Lake. He used to see her outside her parents’ house, most of the time dressed the way she always was, in blue jeans and a T-shirt and sandals, her long strawberry hair loose down her back. She picked colors that set off her hair and green eyes. She had been coming and going this way for as long as he could remember. A few years earlier, when he was only about eight, she had stopped being a skinny kid, like the other girls in the neighborhood. He remembered thinking that all of a sudden she looked like a movie star.
At fourteen he found it hard not to watch her walking to her car carrying the clean, crisp white waitress uniform on a hanger. She would open the back door of the car and then bend to lean inside and hang the uniform from the little hook, slam the car door, and turn. A couple of times she turned fast, and he saw the green eyes focus on him for a half second and then pass on as she got into the driver’s seat.
Joey often saw her on her evenings off getting picked up by young men for dates, and more rarely, usually in the summer, he would be awake when she came home. The street would be silent and deserted, and he would hear the radio first, playing music that was audible because the car windows were open and so was his bedroom window. As the car came up the block somebody would turn off the music and then he’d hear only the hissing sound of the tires moving along the pavement. Joey would watch to see if the boy walked her all the way up onto the front porch, if they then put their arms around each other and kissed. Most of the time the car would just stop and she would be out the door and up the steps by herself. She was very light-footed and quick. Once, when the car moved off again, instead of going inside she walked to his side of her porch as far as the railing. She stood still and looked up at his window for about thirty seconds.
Joey had been sure that nobody could see him in the window, watching her and her date like a voyeur. He had his bedroom door closed and his lights off, but she seemed to be looking right at him. He stayed absolutely still, not even breathing for fear of confirming her suspicion—and suspicion was what it had to be—not only that he was watching, but that he had done it before. At last she turned, but as she did, her face was caught in the porch light, and she was smiling.
Then it was a Friday night, just a day before his parents planned to drive to Milwaukee to visit his grandmother. He couldn’t go because he had summer school on Monday. He had to make up a math course. His mother was worried about his grandmother’s health and didn’t want to put off the visit, so they had convinced themselves that he was mature enough to stay home and take care of the dogs.
His mother woke him up next morning at six and took him around the house explaining all the self-explanatory items on her lists of things for him to remember. He nodded at the right times and then waved to his parents from the porch as they drove off.
It wasn’t until late afternoon that he heard the knock on the back door. When he looked out, he could see it was Mindy. She was wearing a white summer dress. He opened the door and she stood there on the steps, smiling. “Hi, Mindy,” he said.
She was beautiful. Her strawberry blond hair was shining in the sunlight and the dress fitted her perfectly. It was the kind that made him stare, because he was sure he could almost see through it. He didn’t do that now. She said, “Can I come in, Joey?”
“Uh, sure.” He stepped backward and she came in and shut the door and relocked it. Her movements were always so quick and graceful that he almost didn’t get out of the way quickly enough. He tried to compensate by stepping backward, but she seemed to take that as an invitation to advance, so he was still within the danger zone, where his adolescent clumsiness would be evident if he didn’t stay alert to her movements.
“You had to think about that for a second, didn’t you?”
“No,” he said. “It’s just that my parents went to Milwaukee, and I figured you wanted to talk to them.”
She shook her head, then stepped past him, put her arm through his, and walked, pulling him with her out of the kitchen and into the living room. “I already talked to them. They asked me to come and check on you. They said you were grown up enough to handle everything. I guess they just didn’t want you to be lonely. You don’t have a girlfriend, do you?”
“No,” he admitted.
“Ever had one? Oh, maybe you’re too young for that—to even think of it.”
“No, I don’t think I am. I just haven’t found the right one.”
“I know how you feel,” she said. “I’ll tell you a secret about girls. Boys never seem to figure this out, but what you’re thinking about them, they’re thinking about you, too.” She looked at him closely for a few seconds while he thought about that, and then brought her face close to his with an imitation of his wide-eyed naïveté. “They wish they could get your clothes off and fool around with you too.”
He felt himself blushing, his cheeks hot with embarrassment, and felt grateful when she kept her gaze ahead and kept walking with him. He wondered for a second why she was walking him up the stairs. He formed a theory, couldn’t think of an alternative theory, and noticed he was sweating now. A familiar change was taking place.
He edged slightly behind her so she wouldn’t be able to see him while they climbed the stairs. But after she reached the landing she took two more steps and stopped, and he bumped into her. She half-turned and looked at him with mild amusement. “Don’t feel funny. That’s what’s supposed to be happening. Which is your room?”
“Down there on the end.”
She took his hand and walked with him to his room. When they were inside she closed the door and locked it, then turned. “I’ve never been up here. I was going to ask you to show me around, but that can wait.” She stepped so close that they touched, as though they were dancing, and then she kissed him gently on the lips, just as though he were her date taking her home, and they were on the porch. Her arms were around his neck, and his hands had found their way to her slim waist. She pulled her face back a foot and looked into his eyes.
She said, “I can do something really nice for you. It’s a big favor. But you have to be able to keep a secret. Can you keep a secret and never tell anyone as long as you live? If you can’t, I’ll understand, and I’ll respect you just as much for being honest with me.”
He looked at her beautiful white skin and saw her clear green eyes studying him, waiting. He decided. “Yes, I can. I will.”
“I believe you,” she said. “If you’re not telling the truth, I’ll go to jail. You know that?”
The thought had never occurred to him, but he nodded. He remembered that a young married woman had been caught with a teenager and sent away. Was that what she meant? He smelled her perfume, a very subtle scent that seemed to be natural and reminded him that a woman was not made of regular flesh and bone and muscle like a man.
She raised her face and kissed him again. It was the first time he ha
d felt anyone’s tongue in his mouth, and then he imitated what she had done, and that was the first time too. After a few minutes of kissing and feeling her hands on his back and her body touching his, she pushed him back a foot. “It’s a lucky thing you’re a good kisser, because you haven’t had a lot of practice. We’ll fix that, too.”
She stepped back another foot and pulled her dress up over her head and off. She was wearing a half-slip, then stepped out of it so she wore only a white lace bra and matching panties, with the same pattern of lace along the edge. It was no less than what girls wore on the beach, but it had an entirely different meaning, a different intent, and so the sight made his knees weak.
All of her movements were quick, almost birdlike. Suddenly she was back, kissing him with her arms tight around him. As he embraced her, his hands were now on the bare skin on the small of her back, and he was amazed at the beauty and the sheer rightness of the way she looked and felt. As she kissed him, she unbuttoned his shirt and pushed it off his shoulders.
Then she whispered, “Don’t be shy,” and she knelt in front of him, undid his belt, and pulled his jeans and underwear to his ankles. He was embarrassed at the way his penis was jutting upward, uncomfortable that it was beyond his control, but she gripped it with her hand and kissed the end of it, then ran her tongue along the bottom of it, and stood up.
She kissed him softly as she took the rest of her clothes off, and then gently steered him onto the bed. As he freed himself of his shoes and socks, he looked at her standing in front of him.
She said, “You’re wondering what I’m thinking, and whether you’re handsome enough, and grown up enough, and all that. I’m thinking that you are. And we’re going to have such a good time.”
The only part of what she said that confused him for a second was that the good time was in the future. He was already having the best time of his life, lying here naked with this completely naked woman who was as pretty as any woman he had seen on television. She had that shining reddish blond hair against the ivory white skin that made her seem more naked than anyone else could be.
And then she distracted him by turning and stepping to her white dress, taking a strip of three little square packets wrapped in a handkerchief out of the pocket, sitting beside him, and tearing one off the strip. She held it up. “You know what this is, right?”
He had gone to a school where he’d had teachers waving them around in sex education class about once a year since fourth grade. “Sure.”
“You’re going to wear it. You’re always going to wear one.”
She tore open the packet and handed it to him. He held it, turned it around, and prepared to put it on, but she snatched it and deftly but slowly unrolled it onto him. They came together, and the feelings were all intensified. They began slowly and gently, but soon he began to move faster.
She whispered, “Lie still for now. Let me do the moving.” And he did. His hands touched and explored and everything he did was welcome, even received as though she had been eagerly awaiting him for some time. He lasted for a while, but when her movements began to quicken, and she uttered little cries, he felt himself swept along and he let go.
After that everything stopped. Slowly, in the profound stillness, the world began to come back to him. She lay motionless on top of him for a couple of minutes, then stirred, and they were separated. She lay naked beside him on his bed with her eyes closed, and he slowly kissed her from the top of her forehead to her toes. She said, “Better take the rubber off before it drips. Wrap it in toilet paper and leave it on the sink in your bathroom.”
When he came back they cuddled on his bed for a time while she talked. “That was way, way better than I ever imagined. For such a young guy, you’re great.”
“Thanks. You’re—”
“I know I am,” she interrupted. “We’re going to have an amazing time this summer. Just keep our secret. Never tell. Never talk to me in front of anyone.”
Every day that summer he woke up remembering the last time he’d been with her and feeling overwhelmed and grateful that it had not been a dream. After his parents returned from Milwaukee, he and Mindy had to find other ways to meet. He sometimes pretended to go to summer school but slipped back to the house next door while Mindy’s parents were at work. Other days he pretended there was some reason why he had to stay late at school for extra help. On days when there was no school he went on bike rides and met her at prearranged places, where she would be waiting with her car.
As the summer went on, she helped him learn things. “Want me to show you something I really like? Do this and it will make me go completely crazy. I can’t control myself when—yes, just like that.” Maybe because he was so much younger, and because he worshipped her, she was not uncomfortable controlling what they did and teaching him. He paid close attention to anything she was willing to teach him, thought about it between meetings, experimented and studied her responses.
By the beginning of August, he was so thoroughly enthralled that she was the central and only essential part of his life. He woke up from dreams about her to think about her. In silences he heard her voice. While his parents and Mindy’s were at work, they had the run of both houses. They had sex in every room.
There was never a slipped word, a revealing look. He never told any friends or acted as though he had been doing something they didn’t know about. He never made a mistake. When she walked from her house to her car, he didn’t even seem to notice her.
Their affair didn’t end when she’d said it would. It continued through the fall, winter, and spring until the following summer.
One day Joey saw a new man arrive at her house in a black Audi. He got out, walked to her door, and rang the bell. On later reflection, Joey Moreland realized that what he had seen was Eric Coates’s homecoming from the army. When the doorbell rang, Mindy flung open the door, threw herself on him, and kissed him.
The next afternoon as soon as Joey came home from school, Mindy arrived, came in through the kitchen door, and met him inside his room. He looked at her beautiful green eyes and the tentative posture and knew there was trouble. Most days as she came in the door of his room she was already unbuttoning or unzipping. Today she was standing looking at him with her hands knitted as though she suddenly didn’t know what to do with them.
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Eric came home.”
“Who’s Eric?”
“My boyfriend.”
“Oh. Where’d he come home from?”
“A lot of places. He was a soldier,” she said.
“So you and me—you know—is this going to be a problem?”
She nodded. “You knew it wasn’t going to be forever. The first time I came over I’m sure I told you it was just for then, just for last summer. I’m, like, eight or nine years older than you.”
“I love you.”
She put her arms around him and kissed his forehead, his cheek, his eyelids. “I love you. You know that. But if word of what we did got out, I’d be in jail, and your life would be ruined. It’s not normal. At first this was just going to be me having some fun while Eric was deployed, trying to keep myself from dying of loneliness by playing with the cute boy next door. It would keep me from cheating on Eric. But by the end of the summer it was, like, the best sex ever. And I feel closer to you than I’ve ever been to anyone. But it’s got to end now so we can fit in with other people and have okay lives. Do you understand?”
He was devastated. He just felt deprived, rejected, and sad. He didn’t know what to say to change her mind. “You can’t just do this. I don’t want any other life.”
The time he had devoted to Mindy he now devoted to Eric. He began to learn about Eric. He got the license number of the Audi and used it to get the name and address of the owner. He rode his bicycle to Eric’s apartment, hid it in a carport behind the
building, and walked past, recording the hour and the people who came to the apartment building. He wrote everything he observed in a pocket notepad. On weekends he sat at his bedroom window and watched for Eric’s car to arrive and pick up Mindy. His preparation took sixty-two days. Summer had already become fall before he was ready.
He visited his uncle Dave’s apartment across town while his uncle was at work. He got in using the key his uncle kept with his parents in case of an emergency, and he didn’t spend long inside. He examined his uncle’s guns and settled on a compact .38 revolver, partly because it was way in the back of the drawer, where Uncle Dave probably seldom checked on it or took it out to fire, and partly because it was simpler than the semiautomatics, and he had no idea how to clear a jam.
The next night he rode his bike to Eric’s apartment. He wore black jeans, a navy blue hooded sweatshirt, and black sneakers. He hid the bike in the back of a different carport, it seem that had been vacant during the whole time since he had been coming to study Eric.
The rest of the job was not as difficult as he had expected. He waited in the bushes near the lot in the back of the apartment building where Eric parked his car. At a little after two a.m., when the bars closed, Eric drove up the street, turned into the driveway of the apartment building, and parked his car in his assigned carport. Before he could get the door all the way open to get out, Joey was beside him, firing over the driver’s-side door into his head.
Joey put away the gun, walked two carports down the row, got on his bike, and left. He rode fast along the route he had planned. It went down a pedestrian path across a large city park, along the side of the high school athletic field, and along the route of some old railroad tracks that had been torn out. His ride crossed a quiet street and then led right up to his house. He was never on a street that the police patrolled, and never passed a house with a light burning. He was upstairs in his bedroom by two-forty-five, hid the gun inside the box of a Monopoly game, and was asleep by three.