And its arrogance! At least the last time, it had lurked less obviously. Now, it didn’t seem to care who noticed, including me. It made me feel impotent and doomed. Drivers squeezed around me, honking horns and expressing displeasure with fists and fingers. “Women drivers!” one man shouted, so upset he rolled down his window in the freezing night to insult me. “Women!” he bellowed.
I wasn’t interested in challenging his sexist assumptions. I was interested in the driver of the car in front of my house. How dare he think he could be that blatant! Here I am, parked and waiting to off you, girl. Walk right on over, dummy. Who did he think I was, Little Red Riding Hood?
Unless it wasn’t the wolf at all. I squinted. The car was dark. Not just nighttime and dim lamplight dark, but paint-dark. Too dark for a gray car at any hour. I breathed again as I made a left into my street and squeezed the Mustang half on the pavement between a set of hitching posts.
I tapped the driver’s window. “Staking me out?” I asked.
He blinked, shook his head, and emerged, one long leg at a time, unfolding and stretching. “Where’ve you been? I’m freezin’ my—”
“Why didn’t you use your key?”
“Din’t want you freakin’ when you walked in. Which seemed likely.”
There was justice in his statement.
“Been shoppin’?” He tapped the canvas bag I reflexively clutched, the one that had LIFE!! JOY!! stenciled in silver script. The periods under the exclamation points were stars.
“At a seminar,” I mumbled as I unlocked the door. “Where’s Jinx?” I looked around, afraid she was lurking in another entry way, ready to rush in with him, like a thug.
“At the apartment.” He sounded annoyed. I couldn’t figure why. Macavity looked annoyed, too, but that was easier to understand.
“I’ll make coffee.” I tossed the LIFE!! JOY!! bag on the counter. A pink tablet slipped out. It had a multicolored message arching across its top: RAINBOW THOUGHTS ON THE LANDSCAPE OF MY MIND. I shoved it back into the bag before Mackenzie could spot it and make a comment. Then I noticed that the stupid book on getting dates was still out, another breach in my armament. I slipped the bag on top of that, too.
Mackenzie dropped his overcoat onto the suede chair. “Anything to eat? I’m starvin’. That wasn’t exactly my idea of dinner.”
There was comfort knowing Jinx had picked a dumb restaurant. There was less comfort watching C.K. pace the living room. I ground coffee beans and my teeth. Failure to settle in was a bad sign.
“We have to talk,” he said.
Just once, I’d like that sentence to preface a discussion of something good, say world peace, or poetry, or how beautiful I look today.
I ducked behind my counter, theoretically in search of grub, actually because it was as far away as I could get from whatever we had to talk about.
My cupboard belonged in
Little House on the Prairie.
I had only the leftovers of domesticity fits: flour, rice, a sack of navy beans, a jar of pearl barley, some Chinese dried mushrooms, and nothing that crunched or snapped or took less than an hour to prepare. Why did they call those inert, useless things provisions when they provided nothing whatsoever? Chips provide. Peanuts. Frozen pizza.
“You’ve gone weird,” I heard. Mackenzie was attacking me while I foraged for him. “You’re like a girlie girl from a Fifties sitcom, and I don’t get what’s happened. Runnin’ out of the restaurant tonight, out of the deli the other day. I can’t get to you, talk to you. You act like I’m imposin’, and you’re mad all the time, too.”
He said all of it without benefit of a single final
g
or hard vowel. I squatted behind the counter, translating swampese into Philadelphia. Meanwhile, I found a dusty box of cookies I must have hidden from myself. They didn’t look worth retrieving, but I had no other option. “If somebody shot at you,” I said as I stood up, “and I acted like it was a silly and meaningless event, would you get mad?”
He nodded a grudging acknowledgment. “The difference is, I’d say so. I’d treat you like a human who understood. I’d try to work it out.”
I hate to be accused of something I’m actually guilty of. I took my time arranging a plate of cookies that looked like iced credit cards. I finally spoke, clipping my words as neatly as I could. “It would be easier for you to speak your mind to me or to work it out with me because I wouldn’t have an old
flame
staying in my house, coming along for the ride and the talk and the working out. My old
flame
wouldn’t be eyeballing us and saying, ‘Goodness me!’ every few seconds.”
Mackenzie smiled, even tottered on the edge of a laugh before his expression sobered and soured. “That’s what we’d better talk about,” he said.
“Jinx? I’d rather talk about who shot me tonight.”
His right hand clenched into a fist, but he spoke very softly. “I know you want to connect your attacker with this case, want to make sense of ever’thin’ all in one package, but not ever’thin’ fits all the time.”
“It wasn’t Lydia, then, was it?” I asked. “Was she still being detained?”
“Would you believe the phone was broken? Spent ten minutes and fifteen quarters findin’ that out.” He sighed. “But, it doesn’t matter. A lunatic with a gun shot at you. There are too many of both those things around.”
He made me so nervous and angry that I bit into one of the cookies, which made me yearn for tofu and gluten. “I never believed Lydia shot at me or at her husband. It was somebody else—the somebody who murdered Teller. It seems open and shut to you—and probably to the police, too, because none of you know all the facts. Or want to.” I lifted the cookie plate and presented it to Mackenzie who, hungry or not, shook his head.
“Teller was a bigamist,” I said. “His first family thought he was dead. He stole the idea of the centers from his ex-wife—his not-ex-wife—who wants what is hers. She found out this week—the day before he was killed. As did his children, who I know were in the Teller house the night of the murder.” I took a deep breath. “As were other people, like a teacher from my school who was suing Teller for swindling his franchisers.”
Now, finally, Mackenzie sat down, or rather sank down on top of his coat, which he then roughly pulled out from under him. Macavity, who’d been flirting with me, switched allegiance and began staking out Mackenzie’s newfound lap. I wondered if female cats were as fickle.
“Give it up,” he said in a near whisper. “Maybe she’s a real nice lady, but she killed her husband. Lucky you didn’t get there sooner, or she’d have blasted you away, the way those women do.”
“What does that mean—
those
women?”
“It’s the worst call, a domestic dispute. Woman phones for help, so you get hold of the husband, she gets hold of the gun and blows away the person tryin’ to help her.” He shook his head. “Women,” he said.
“Lydia didn’t—”
He sighed. “Mandy, most times the most obvious solution is the solution. Stop obsessing about it.”
“It’s all circumstantial!” I said.
He nodded. “True. But pretty serious circumstances. The thing is, I’m upset somebody shot at you, but I think that was a separate, unrelated event. You watch, tomorrow she’ll change her plea to guilty, or self-defense.”
“Poor Lydia. First her husband victimizes her, now you. You collectively. Everybody.”
“Try and remember that she killed somebody.”
“She did not!”
“You’re right. And also, everybody is nice and pretty and rich and goes to the country and lives happily ever after.”
I ate another one of the cookies. I had nothing left to lose, including taste buds. “Your stubborn insistence that this case is closed leaves the real killer out there, gunning for me.”
“Where’s the logic?” Mackenzie asked. “If he’s out free, not even suspected, why does he need to hurt you?”
“Because he doesn’t know that. He just knows there’s another story, another way of looking at this, and I’m getting hit on by one of the loose ends.” I stopped.
“What?” Mackenzie asked.
I shook my head. I had an itch inside my brain, but I couldn’t scratch it. Or identify what bothered me all of a sudden. “Anyway,” I said, “everything was converging on Teller—his first wife, their kids on the one side—scandal plus major money demands, plus more from a teacher accusing him of creative bookkeeping and a class action suit against the company.”
“Okay, and the tension built, so he did what those men do and beat up on his wife yet again, and she shot him.”
“No.”
“Nobody ever said life was fair.”
“Somebody must have. Life should be fair every so often, or what’s the point?”
Mackenzie shook his head rather wearily. “This isn’t what I wanted to talk about.”
My turn to exhale too loudly. “I know. You want to talk about old sweethearts.” I was pleased that the teakettle let out its unholy steam at the very moment I alluded to Jinx.
Mackenzie excused himself—it had been a long wait out in that car, he explained—while I poured water into the filter and took the opportunity to listen to my phone messages.
I dreaded a threatening or frightening message, although it would be nice to have proof to show Mackenzie.
Perhaps whining students could be labeled threats. Seniors considered the final year of schooling nothing more than decorative packaging, the academic equivalent of frilly paper bonbon cups.
Josh Di Marco claimed he had injured his coccyx shoveling his parents’ driveway. Now he couldn’t sit in hard chairs—library, school, desk—and wanted 4F status as far as term papers were concerned. My students’ creativity is exercised only on avoiding chances to be creative.
“Darling,” the second and final message began, “we couldn’t be more delighted.”
I put cups down on the coffee table. Mackenzie stood on the bottom tread, head cocked to hear the message.
“Uncle Mike and I—”
“Omigosh—it’s Aunt Lila!” I said. “She never calls.”
“—we want to have you both to dinner. Your young man sounds dreamy, but of course, you deserve no less. Pick a date and let me know. This is cause for celebration.”
Mackenzie looked both flustered and pleased. “You told her I was dreamy?”
My scalp went on follicle alert. Bernard! Bernard was growing like fungus.
And as if on cue, the telephone rang. I wasn’t going to answer it, but Mackenzie raised an eyebrow and professional suspiciousness hazed my home. I lifted the receiver. “Finally!” my mother said. “You’re home.”
I was about to perform an emergency mythectomy on my own mother. But how? Did oral surgeons have occupational hazards that could do Bernard in? If the man simply ditched me, left me waiting at the altar, my mother would lose face with Aunt Lila and the entire Elysium Condo Square Dance and Discount Shoppers Association.
Mackenzie drank coffee and looked relaxed. He enjoys watching me cope with my mother. It’s the same drive that makes bullfighting popular in Spain.
“Could the two of you come next weekend?” my mother asked. “I know it’s short notice, but so is this engagement. Besides, next weekend there’s a Valentine’s Day party right here at the condo. The plane tickets are our treat. What do you say?”
What could I? It’s awkward for a thirty-year-old to admit having an imaginary friend. “Next weekend looks a little—”
“That’s what I told Dad. You’re young and in love and you must have your own plans for Valentine’s.”
What would she say if she knew the only plan I had for Valentine’s Day was to still be alive?
“So Daddy and I will use the tickets and come up there,” my mother said.
Which obviously was what she wanted all along, because this way she’d see her grandchildren in the bargain.
I envisioned Bernie in front of a firing squad. I wondered if he’d want a last smoke. “Mom,” I said, gently, because she was having such a good time. “This is difficult to say, but—”
“I
knew
something was wrong! I told Daddy that if everything was okay you’d have called by now. What is it?”
“It’s…Bernard.”
“Who?” Mackenzie asked. “Who’s Bernard?”
“Of course it’s Bernard,” my mother said. “Who else would it be? But what about him?”
“He’s a…” I wanted to be honest and say a figment, but I was afraid she’d think that was some rarefied oral surgery subspecialty. “…a drug…” Fiend? Dealer? “Abuser,” I finally said.
“Is this a student?” Mackenzie asked. “Mess with people like that and then wonder why somebody takes a potshot at you?”
My mother was equally horrified but for different reasons. That mother-of-the-bride dress in her mind was disintegrating. “Drug abuser!” she echoed, horrified.
I explained how his problem had begun with laughing gas and escalated, until now it was hopeless. Mackenzie looked incredulous, but I was really into the spirit of the thing. “I had no idea,” I said, “but this afternoon I saw tracks on his arm and the whole ugly story came out.”
It would please my mother to think that until this afternoon I hadn’t seen Bernard’s inner arms, let alone other body parts. It was a small and virtuous repayment for the grief of the world’s shortest engagement.
“Was it Bernard who shot you?” Mackenzie asked. “You’re coverin’ for him?”
I kept waving at him, shushing him, trying to hear my mother.
“Oh, darling, how awful,” she said. “I just don’t know about men anymore. They can be so disappointing, can’t they?” She described a no-good seventy-eight-year-old Lothario breaking the hearts of the widows of Boca Raton. “Maybe you should get help for Bernard,” she suddenly suggested. “They do wonders at Betty Ford, and think of the famous people he’d meet.”
I wasn’t sure if this suggestion was a result of her generous nature, or a desperate attempt to salvage a fiancé. A little cleaning and Bernard would be good as new.
I therefore had to bury the man deeper, beyond the farthest reach of my mother’s charity. “It’s not only that,” I said, hoping I sounded on the edge of heartbreak, “turns out he
never went to dental school!
He’s been drilling under false pretenses.”
And that did it. Bernard was history. I weakly agreed I’d live to love again and that, yes, that book on getting dates had some clever ideas, and I declined her offer to fly north and hold my hand, and then, in a voice only half as animated as it had been, my mother said she needed to make other calls, including, to my enormous relief, Aunt Lila.