Authors: Lisa Lutz
Rae puts a worn blue high-top sneaker on the table. I smack her foot off, but she puts it up again.
“February, this year,” she says, “I take third place in the eighth grade tetherball tournament. I’m wearing the shoes. June, same year. I score eighty-three percent on my algebra final without cracking the book. I’m wearing the shoes. Last Thursday, I narrowly miss running my bike into a squad car. I’m wearing the shoes. But still, I rotate!”
“Get your feet off the table,” my mother snaps. Rae retires her shoe to the floor and glares, once again, at Uncle Ray. I decide to remind my sister of some recent events and their implications.
“In case you didn’t notice, Rae, today you were bribed. That high-tech, digital surveillance camera you received is not a free gift. Do not be mistaken. The gift is intended to persuade you to be at least moderately polite to your uncle during his stay here.”
Rae doesn’t believe me. She sustains a half grin, waiting for the punch line. When none is offered, she looks around the table, eventually turning to my dad.
“Is it true?” she asks.
“Yes, pumpkin. It’s true.”
I
t had started when Rae was thirteen and I ignored it. We all ignored it for a while. She did it after school, on weekends and holidays, when the sun was shining and she felt like a bike ride or a stroll. But then Uncle Ray moved in and with his presence came another able-bodied workhorse. Not that he worked hard—on the contrary, but hiring Uncle Ray over Rae, whether that was a conscious or unconscious decision, made sense. Billing out for the work of a fourteen-year-old girl brought in twenty-five dollars an hour, plus expenses. However, billing out for the services of a retired SFPD inspector, we could charge fifty dollars an hour. Besides, Ray could drive and pee in a jar (a gender-specific talent that should not be underestimated). There were four sound reasons to use Uncle Ray over Rae and, generally speaking, you could rely on Ray staying out of the bars until the end of his ten-hour shift. It was only Rae who noticed that her assignments had waned over the last few months. Only I noticed how Rae was compensating for this loss.
Now, at age fourteen, my sister’s curfew had been set at 10:00
P.M
. on weekends and 8:00
P.M
. on school nights. Until recently she had never tested those boundaries. Rae has only two friends in school—Arie Watt and Lori Freeman—both of whom have curfews well before Rae’s. That said, on a typical school day, Rae came home at 5:00
P.M
., sometimes 7:00 when she was studying with Arie or Lori, and on the weekends, she never left the house unless she was on the job, going to a movie, or had a specific plan with one of her two friends. There were rare sleepovers (at Lori’s) and even rarer supervised parties. But for the most part, Rae’s home was her castle and she couldn’t wait to be safely ensconced within it or at least within the surveillance van.
So when she began testing the limits of her curfew, when she would arrive home flushed and clammy from running the last distance before the clock struck eight, I knew she was hiding something. I could have asked Rae what she was up to, but that is not our way. Instead, I followed her.
Rae had mastered the B-minus average that my parents mandated. She had mastered the B-minus while doing virtually no work beyond school walls. I picked up the tail at the end of her school day. Rae hopped on her bike and rode up to Polk Street. She carefully wove her lock from the front wheel through the base of the bike, as my father had taught her, sat on a bench, and pulled out a schoolbook. An uninformed observer would tell you that she was studying while waiting for a bus—the book, her school uniform, and the bus bench would evidence that assessment. But I knew she was prowling for someone to tail. A few minutes later a woman in her early thirties, carrying an oversize purse, exited the bookstore a few doors down. She pulled some papers from her inelegant bag, ripped them in quarters, and tossed them fervently into the garbage can that was sitting next to Rae.
The woman’s jittery hands and nervous bearing piqued Rae’s interest. My sister closed her book as the woman took her leave, waited the requisite twenty seconds, and then followed her. I was still parked around the corner at the other end of the block. I quickly started the car and turned onto Polk Street, driving as slowly as I could until I caught up with Rae. I made a quick turn in front of my sister as she was crossing the street.
“Can I give you a lift?” I offered as I rolled down the window. She knew that I had followed her. She knew that I knew what she was doing. I could have written out the math equation she was internally calculating. Defiance was typically not Rae’s method. Unlike me, she acquiesced whenever her heart allowed for it. She knew enough to avoid raising further suspicion.
“Thanks. I didn’t feel like walking,” she said, getting in.
I said nothing, thinking this might be a one-time deal and so what if, after school, my sister on occasion shadows complete strangers? It
is
exercise, isn’t it?
I let it slide for a few weeks, as she tested her curfew more and more. Then it appeared that she had scaled back her recreational surveillance. She was suddenly returning home before dinner and staying in her room most of the night. My parents attributed the solitude to Uncle Ray avoidance. I, on the other hand, was not so ready to trust someone who shared my DNA.
My attic apartment sits just above Rae’s bedroom on the second floor. An outside fire escape connects the two rooms. When Rae was five, she caught me sneaking out one night and discovered an alternate passage into my bedroom. I quickly disabused her of this habit, not just because it was dangerous, but also because my bed sat just below the window and her late-night entrances usually involved leaving size-three tread marks on my face.
Six Months Ago
I heard the slow creak of the fire escape ladder shortly before 7:00
P.M
. I was about to look out my window when the telephone rang.
“Hello.”
“Hello, is this Isabel?” a male voice asked.
Generally I don’t answer questions like that, but this was my private line.
“Yes. Who is this?”
“Hi. My name is Benjamin McDonald. I met your mother at the library.”
“The library?”
“Yes.”
“Which library?”
“The main library. Downtown.”
“What was she doing there?”
“I assume checking out books.”
“Did you see her with any books?”
“I think so.”
“Do you remember which ones?”
“No.”
“Not even one?”
“No. Anyway, the reason I’m calling—”
“What were you doing there?”
“Where?”
“At the library?”
“Oh, I had some research to do.”
“Legal research?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact.”
“So you’re a lawyer?”
“Yes. So I was thinking that maybe we could—”
“Have coffee?”
“Yes. Coffee.”
“No. I’m no longer having coffee with lawyers. But could I ask you a question before we hang up?”
“All you’ve been doing is asking me questions.”
“Good point. What did my mother tell you about me?”
“Not much.”
“So why did you agree to this?”
“She offered me a twenty percent discount on investigative work.”
I hung up the phone and raced downstairs.
“Mom, we need to call in the white coats and have you hauled off just like Blanche DuBois.”
My mother clapped her hands together enthusiastically. “Benjamin called, didn’t he?”
“Yes. And I can guarantee he won’t call again.”
“Well, Isabel, there goes your raise.”
“You weren’t going to give me a raise.”
“Yes, I was. If you went out with Benjamin. But now, nothing.”
“I can get my own dates, Mom.”
My mother rolled her eyes and said, “Of course you can,” then switched subjects, since she knew nothing was going to change. She would continue fixing me up with lawyers and I would continue dating men who could comp my drinks.
“I’m taking you off the Spark Industries background work tomorrow and giving you a surveillance job,” Mom said.
“New client?”
“Yes. Mrs. Peters. Called last week. She suspects her husband, Jake, might be gay.”
“Did you suggest she ask him?”
Mom laughed. “Of course not. Business is slow.”
I returned to my apartment and reviewed the materials for the following day’s surveillance.
At 10:15 that night, I heard rattling on the fire escape. I turned the lights off in my bedroom and carefully peered through the curtains. I caught sight of Rae’s legs wiggling through the window into her room. I quickly slipped on a pair of sneakers, defenestrated myself, and climbed down the fire escape. I crawled through Rae’s window before she had a chance to take off her shoes.
“I have a door, Isabel.”
“Then why aren’t you using it?”
“Cut to the chase,” she said like a cowboy in an old Western.
“Surveillance isn’t a hobby.”
“What’s your point?”
“You have to stop following complete strangers.”
“Why? You do it all the time.”
“I follow people when I’m paid to do it. Get the distinction?”
“I like it enough to do it for free.”
“We give you as much work as we can.”
“Not as much as I used to get.”
“You could get hurt, Rae.”
“I could get hurt playing squash.”
“You don’t play squash.”
“Not the point.”
“You could follow the wrong person and get kidnapped or murdered.”
“Unlikely.”
“But not impossible.”
“If you’re talking about me quitting cold turkey, it is not going to happen,” Rae said as she slipped into a chair behind her desk.
I sat down across from her. “How about you cut back?”
Ray scribbled on a square notepad, folded the paper into quarters, and slid it across the desk. “How does this number work for you?”
“You need to spend less time with David,” I said, commenting on her technique. When I unfolded the paper, I practically shouted, “Ten percent?”
“The point of writing it down is so you don’t say it out loud.”
“Yeah? Well, ten percent does not work for me.”
Rae pushed a pen and notepad across the table. “I’m willing to negotiate.”
I chose to play it her way, since I knew we’d be negotiating the method for hours if I didn’t. I wrote down my number, folded the paper, and slid it back to her.
Rae laughed incredulously. “Not in this lifetime.” She jotted down her own number and slipped it back to me. “Let’s see how this works for you.”
“Fifteen percent? You can’t be serious.”
“You’re doing it wrong! Don’t say it out loud.”
I wrote down my own number again and held it up for her to see: forty percent. “Rae, I’m not leaving this room until you agree to that.”
Rae mulled it over and figured there had to be a way she could make that work.
“If I trim my recreational surveillance by this number, then I’ll need to compensate for it in other ways.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“At least one day a week, you take me on one of your jobs.”
“If that’s how you want to spend your weekends.”
“And holidays and administrative half days.”
“It’s a deal.”
After we shook on it, Rae confidently suggested, “How does tomorrow work for you?”
According to Mrs. Peters, Jake Peters was playing tennis the next morning with an unidentified male whom she believed to be his lover. The job would begin at the San Francisco Tennis Club. Mrs. Peters had already followed her husband to that site on a number of occasions and there was no need to risk getting burned for a ten-minute drive from the Peterses’ home to the club.
In the morning, I drank coffee with my mom and went over the case file on Mr. Peters, which included the schedule Mrs. Peters provided for her husband. Between my second and third cup, and right after my mom said, “Maybe you’d be less snippy if you cut down on that stuff” and I replied with, “Please don’t use the word ‘snippy,’ it doesn’t suit you,” Rae hopped downstairs wearing white shorts, a pink Izod shirt, and socks with pom-poms, carrying a Wilson aluminum tennis racket.
“Mom, do I look okay?” asked Rae.
My mother glowed with approval. “Perfect,” she said.
“Rae, you’re wearing a pink shirt,” I observed, praying for a logical explanation.
“I’m not blind,” she replied, reaching for the Froot Loops. I was about to protest, but remembered it was Saturday. Rae shook the box, hearing the weak resonance of powdered sugar. She poured the leftovers into the bowl, which offered up not even one solid loop.
“Bastard!” Rae shouted.
“Rae, Grandma was married when she had your uncle,” my mother corrected.
“Sorry,” Rae said, then replaced the prior insult with “big fat jerk.”
“Thank you,” my mom said, as if a lesson had really been learned here. “Sweetie, look on the bottom shelf in the storeroom behind the paper towels.”
Rae burrowed in the nether regions of our pantry and surfaced with a box each of Cap’n Crunch and Lucky Charms. My mother, brilliant at anticipating potential conflict, had bought a secret stash. Sometimes she amazed me.
“I love you,” Rae said more sincerely than you might imagine.
“I thought you wanted Froot Loops,” I said.
“I didn’t know I had options,” Rae replied, pouring herself two separate bowls of sugar.
I knew the answer to the question as I was asking it. “So what’s up with the outfit, Rae?”
Rae turned to our mother before she answered. My mom nodded the
go ahead, you can talk
nod.
“Mom’s invoking section five, clause d.”