“I see,” said Rhett. He didn’t know whether to let on to Tula what had happened that day. He was toying with the idea in his mind, especially considering that he was close to Tula, but something held him back.
I’ll tell her,
he thought.
Not yet. I want to see how she answers my questions before I let her know what her brother did to me. There’s no doubt in my mind at this point that he set that all up for me. Who the hell keeps a mechanized tank that dumps spiders down? The real question is what he was hiding in there. I’ll have to go back to find out. If he thinks he can keep me out with the spiders… Okay, it was a good strategy, and I don’t know how he figured out that I’m scared of them, but I’m gonna beat it.
“Has Max ever shown cruelty, like to people or animals?” He dared himself to ask.
Her eyes flashed up, as if she’d heard crackling lightning. “Cruelty to animals? No! Whatever would make you want to ask that?”
“Your brother doesn’t exactly give me pleasant vibes. I just want to know all I can about him if we have to keep living with your parents.”
She stared at him. “What’s going on, Rhett? Quit hiding things from me.”
He swallowed. “Look, you don’t think it’s a little odd that bad things keep happening to us? You don’t suspect your brother at all, especially after what happened with the lost Craigslist apartment? How could your parents possibly know what we were doing unless they were told by someone? And what about the touching at the beach? Are
you
withholding information from
me
?”
Her eyes became wide and dry. “I can’t believe this. I can’t believe that the man I want to marry is talking to my like I’m a criminal being investigated. I’m not taking this. Enjoy your dinner alone, Rhett. I’m going home.”
She stood straight up, marching down the line of booths towards the front doors. The patrons, from grizzled men with white mustaches to acne-prone nerds, watched her as she went. Rhett bolted up, chasing after her. Before he could pass the podium at the front of the restaurant and pass through the front doors, he was briskly halted by a surly hostess.
“You’re going to have to pay, sir, before you exit the building,” she announced with a droning tone of voice. Her greasy brown hair was pulled back into a tight bun and she had a large mole on her jawline.
“But my girlfriend,” he spat, trying to gaze past the woman towards the dark parking lot. He could catch pockets of Tula standing to the side, talking on her cell phone. “I just need to talk to her. I’m not going to run off on you.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know that. You have to pay before you step outside the building. Company policy.”
Rhett groaned deeply as he was navigated back towards his table. “Hurry up, then! Here, just take my card. Don’t bother with the check. Hurry, hurry!”
The hostess rolled her clamshell eyes, grasped the card, and then walked off towards the back in her thick white sneakers. Rhett stared out the tiny round window next to his booth, meanwhile, keeping an eye out for Tula. Three minutes later, after signing off the $23.37 for the meal, his blood pressure had gone down and he was less motivated to chase after his girlfriend. He reflected in that time that it might have been better that he hadn’t caught up with her right away. She was angry, he was angry, and there wasn’t usually much good that came of two angry people conversing about something. In any event, by the time he got outside, there was no one standing outside anymore.
Someone must have given her a ride close by, or she called a taxi,
he thought. He walked towards his Camaro, running a hand through his hair as he sighed.
We both just need to calm down. I’m not going to knock on her door when I get to the house tonight. Maybe I could buy her flowers to smooth this whole thing over? It couldn’t hurt.
He sat in his car for a moment, appreciating the dark and silence. There was a line of trees ahead of him, and behind that, a concrete wall. He watched how the leaves danced in the wind, a streetlamp shining on them.
She’s upset, and she has a right to be. I wouldn’t want to be talked to like that either, to be honest. But what the hell! I have a right to my own opinions. There’s something going on that I don’t know about, something that I feel like everyone is withholding from me. I need to find out the truth, but I need to do it in as delicate a way as possible. I at least have her mom on my side. At least I think I do. I can’t get away from the family, so I’ve gotta figure everything out. The not knowing is driving me crazy.
I’ll talk to Max tomorrow and I’ll talk to Tula. Tula first, I suppose, since she gets home before he does. I guess I could talk to Max tonight, but I don’t want to create a scene and make everything worse than it already is. Fine then… Tomorrow. I’ll find out everything. If people want to continue being secretive with me, whether Tula or her brother… Then I have to start making some serious decisions. But I don’t want anything bad to happen. I just need to remember to be calm and collected.
Calm and collected, calm and collected, calm and collected…
He took a deep breath and started up the car. Pulling out of the parking lot, he didn’t manage to get far past the first stop light. A great thundering pulled and shook from under the hood before the bundle of bolts simply stalled in the middle of the road. Rhett felt as if his guts liquified and spilled out from the bottom of him as he sat in the driver’s seat. Panicked, he turned the key of the car once more, hoping he could get his precious vehicle going again far enough to the house, only a few miles down the road. Fulfilling his worst nightmare, the car cranked over and over again but never turned over.
It was relatively empty out that night, but he didn’t want to be stuck in the middle of the road while he figured out what to do with himself. Putting his car into neutral, he got out and pushed from the back until he was situated far enough on the side of the road to figure out what in the world was going on with the Camaro. Pulling the hood up, he didn’t spot anything in particular wrong right away. As soon as he checked the oil level, however, he got his first hint that something was amiss.
“Man, that smell! What is it?”
He pulled the stick to just under his noise, taking in the unfamiliar fumes. Thinking on it for a moment, he considered what the smell could be. Loosening the entrance to the oil and leaning over, he took another heavy sniff.
“Bleach! It’s bleach! Someone put bleach in my car!”
He was so full of pent-up rage that he didn’t know what to do with himself. He felt like it would have been appropriate to holler, kick at the ground, and curse expletives to God, but what good would that do?
He stood and stared at his car, the hunk of metal he had spent the better part of his youth repairing with his grandfather. There were so many happy memories associated with the heirloom. In the beginning, he would bring lemonade to his grandfather as the man worked, sitting on a stool and recounting the names of all the parts of the car. When he could accomplish that, his grandfather would lean him over and tell Rhett exactly what he was doing as he did it. Rhett was endlessly fascinated with machinery as a child, and looked forward to going over every weekend to spend time with his granddad. He felt lucky that he had someone who stopped to patiently spend time explaining every little thing about the car. Any question that little Rhett had, his grandfather went into detail explaining the answer. And as he got older, he was the one explaining to his grandfather what he was doing to improve the car and why he was doing it. Until, that is, his grandfather passed away of cancer.
All those joyful memories,
he thought,
are being pissed on right now. Someone took that bleach and they urinated all over my happiness.
He grit his teeth.
All he could do at the time was call for a tow truck and have it taken to the garage he worked at. His boss would understand, he knew, if he explained what had happened. In the meantime, he knew that he would have to borrow the spare car his mother owned—a dusty 1992 Honda Accord. It was once owned by his good-for-nothing father, left to rot in the driveway after he ran off on them to Vegas. Rhett had repaired it in high school, his second project after refurbishing the Camaro. At the moment, it resided at his mother’s residence on the other side of Davis.
I should probably have a talk with my mom while I’m over there,
he thought.
It’s about time I had a heart-to-heart with her. As far as she knows, everything is just dandy in my life right now. The last she heard from me was when I said that I was moving in with Tula’s family.
He called his mother in the parking lot of his work, sitting on some cement as he explained in vague terms what had happened. She promised to come pick him up right away, and they hung up. Rhett left a text to Tula, figuring that it wouldn’t look good if he didn’t come back home that night without any explanation.
Car broke down. Gonna crash at my mom’s. Cu later?
A few moments later, a response:
Really? I thought u just repaired it.
Bleach in the oil.
After that, no response.
His mother pulled up after a few minutes. She owned a nearly-new cherry Mazda Miata (quoted as saying that it was, “The perfect car for a woman under 30 and over 50.”), dressed in only a long loosely-strung silk robe. Rhett hopped in, glad to be in the company of someone he knew without a doubt would always be on his side. At least, on his side when it wasn’t blazingly apparent that he was in the wrong.
“Hey, Mom,” he greeted kissing her on the cheek. She smelled of lavender and fresh oranges.
“Hey, son,” she responded. “How goes it in paradise?”
He just let out a sigh. “Don’t ask.”
She flashed him a smile only a sultry older woman could accomplish, and they were off. His mother had birthed him when she was twenty-seven, having married her louse of an ex-husband only three months before. She was an assistant to an editor at the time, only making a pittance, and had stuck around with Rhett’s father for longer than she would have liked to admit. At the age of fifty-one, she had advanced to becoming a full-fledged editor along with a consultant, becoming more successful than her husband ever hoped to accomplish as a ‘professional poker player.’ In fact, he had come crawling back to her when he heard that she had bought a $700,000 house in the country. She promptly called the police when he showed up on her property, threatening to shoot him with a shotgun for trespassing.
Maybe we should have moved in with my mom,
Rhett thought. But then he remembered something:
Oh, that’s right, Tula’s parents would have never allowed that. It had to be at her place.
“How are things with you?” Rhett asked, trying to get his mind off of his troubles.
“Oh, you know me. I always try to keep myself busy. Work, the garden, travel, some new recipe I want to make… you. There’s always something going on with me.”
“No men?” Rhett mentioned with a playful jab.
“Hah! You’re the last person I’d think would be pestering me about that. No, son. Men are nothing but trouble, including you. I love you, dear, but when was the last time you called me that didn’t include asking for my help?”
He swallowed, and when he did, it felt like he was swallowed down battery acid. “Sorry, Mom. I’ll try and be a better son from now on.”
“Good. Now, you’re going to borrow that Honda? I wanted to blow some bullet holes in it before trashing it, but I remembered that you were the one who restored it, so I kept it around.”
“Do you try to shoot up all of your remnants of Dad?”
“God willing. Keep on good behavior, and you won’t be next.”
He grinned. Why the hell
hadn’t
he kept up with his mother? It was absolutely refreshing not having to keep up appearances with someone. She certainly didn’t care about maintaining some kind of image. Now that he had a drop of joy inside of him, he felt less apprehensive about spilling all his problems to her. On the car ride home, he tried to explain as much as he could to her, from the beginning—Max’s introduction, the oven, the trip to San Francisco, Tula wedding problems, the events at the beach… He only managed to get through half of the entire story, but it seemed like enough for her to form a solid opinion. Pulling up to the front entrance of her gorgeous Victorian home, she put the car in park and swung the door open. The front of her house was covered in pink roses, and the smell of them was simply wonderful.
“Well, I don’t like the sounds of it,” she said, heading for the front door.
She poured him a glass of whiskey on the rocks, and they conversed in the middle of her recently-renovated kitchen. He finished his story, detailing everything he could think of, including what had happened when he went searching through his room.
“Honestly, son, I think we’re dealing with a run-of-the-mill sociopath,” said stated.
“Huh?”
She shook her head, placing her glass down. “I always tried to get you into reading books, but I guess my efforts failed. Maybe if you read a mystery or two in your life, you could spot a culprit when you see him.”
“Well, I do suspect that Max is up to something.”
“He is quite
obviously
up to something. It’s what you’re going to do about it that matters. You stated that the door on the closet door swung closed and that a collection of spiders fell down on you. You also mentioned that you found a key inside of a book. If that’s not a giant sign that he had something to hide, I don’t know what is. He’s an engineer, for crying out loud! He used his knowledge to do all this, and is probably using his knowledge to spy on you in some way.”
Rhet absorbed the comment like a sponge, realizing that what his mother said was very likely true. “But why would he try to lock me in his closet if he wanted to keep me out?”