by Joni Rodgers
This was the brief moment in March when the knock-kneed azalea bushes miraculously came out with colors so bountiful, so embarrassingly tender, that homeowners were willing to overlook the shrub’s snaggle-ass lack of beauty the rest of the year.
In that fleeting, spell-broken moment, Penn Hewitt found a small, sweet stab of hope for himself.
Denny McCoy scuffed through the pea gravel that carpeted the city-block-sized playground that separated the moderately upscale street where Felice Aceveda had lived and died from the mouth of the swanky cul de sacs of Marchwood subdivision. She untangled the climbing ropes that dangled from the tall swing set, ducked under the jungle gym and stood at the bottom of the steep metal staircase that spiraled up into the giddy heights of the rocket slide.
Denny didn’t want to climb up in there. She had a thing about heights. But she also had a thing about not being ruled by fear, so she headed up, fingering the safety on her gun to make sure she wouldn’t shoot herself in the ass if she fell.
The first level wasn’t bad. This was the tier where the plastic lip of the little kids’ slide sloped gently down to a soft landing just three or four inches above the pea gravel. Nothing remarkable going on in there usually. The second tier invited the more adventurous middle schoolers. From here, there were two ways to get down: a shiny steel fireman’s pole or a twirling tube slide.
Or, if they were brave enough, they could climb a narrow red ladder up into the top tier, a breezy cage of steel bars topped by the conical nose of the rocket. From there, the climber again had two choices: a long, straight slide that was slicker than spit and got searing hot under the blazing sun or the certain broken neck that would result if one of the cage bars were to give way.
Swallowing hard, Denny pushed her damp palms against the back of her pants and started up the ladder. Coming eye-level with the steel floor, she recoiled from the smell of spilled beer. Broken glass glinted at the perimeter of the round cage.
Denny paused to pull on a pair of latex gloves from her pocket before she gingerly picked up a used condom and dropped it into an empty cigarette pack. A mostly-eaten bag of Doritos lay near the grommeted lip of the steel slide. She reached out and nudged it with her foot to make sure there were no roaches on board, then picked it up and sprinkled the chips through the bars. Sparrows were on them before they flittered to the ground, and Denny stood for moment, listening to them squabble, contemplating the large white house at the end of the cul de sac across the street.
Kenneth Aceveda would be able to see the place from here—see the girl’s bedroom window—plain as anything. If the girl had binoculars or even a digital camera with a good zoom on it, she’d be able to see him, too.
Denny wasn’t fond of this girl, Hope Halloran. She was a spoiled, rich brat. Boo hoo, I’m from a broken home with seven bathrooms. That type. Hope’s parents refused to believe she was tweeking until she was caught doing it with a bunch of other meth heads under the boat dock at the pricey rehab facility. Once a guy like Kenneth Aceveda had his hooks in a stupid, spoiled girl like Hope Halloran, you could pretty much forget it.
“You’re wasting your time,” Maddie had told her.
But Denny also had a thing about lost causes. She got Hope into a program that paired recovering junkies with rescue dogs. Big ones. Not pursy little kick dogs. Dogs that took a significant degree of respect and caring.
Hope’s dog was an elderly mastiff-elkhound cross named Solomon, and she was pretty good with it, even though it was old and farted like Satan’s fry baby and drooled like a whale. The thing drove Hope’s mother crazy, and both Hope and Denny took a lot of delight in that, because Hope’s mother—Dr. Grace Bovey, a contentiously divorced psychiatrist—well, she was a case unto herself.
“Recipe for crazy,” Maddie had said. “Flat out no one in this world is zooier than a shrink.”
Denny did her best to steer clear of the mom and still keep an eye on the girl. And the dog. For a while, it was hard to say which one was in more trouble. Things were going all right, though. Had been for a good while. Hope was taking classes to get her GED, volunteering with Habitat For Humanity on Saturdays, talking about college. The last thing she needed was Kenneth Aceveda cooking meth on the other side of the playground and slithering around the neighborhood after dark.
Denny took her iPhone from her pocket and took a few photos, then she scraped the broken glass into the Dorito bag, wondering whose job it was to clean this playground equipment. Not hers, that was for dang sure, but she didn’t have it in her to leave that kind of thing where some little kid might touch the condom or cut herself.
A brave little kid. Because not many little kids would climb all the way up here.
That kid shouldn’t get punished for being fearless. Denny wasn’t excited about touching the condom herself, but she was proud to stand between that little kid and the kind of people who crap things up in this world.
~ . ~
Something Awful (a love story)
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jr