Rules of Lying (Jane Dough Series) (19 page)

“Marissa
is
a fraud,” she said in a low voice. “For one thing, she’s got a microphone set up out here so she can hear what you say. But mostly she tells you what she sees. Not in your future, but in your eyes. What
you
are thinking. People tend to believe as they already think.”

I smiled tremulously and blinked back my tears. “You’re kind,” I said.

Angie shook her head. “If she said you would win the lottery tomorrow, would you have believed her? Would it have come true? No. But your wariness, your body language, your lack of joy make it seem likely you’ll believe the dour fate she related to you. You might even make it so—a self-fulfilling prophesy.”

My
lack
of
joy?
Now I wanted to cry even more. Mark thought he would get a big promotion, Sue thought she would find true love, and I, with my great big fat lack of joy hanging out all over the place, thought I was never going to have any money. Great. I was happy now.

Angie held out her card. “I have a true gift of sight, though I doubt I can tell you how you’ll end up in your old age.”

I reached for the card, and my fingers brushed hers. She froze for a moment, and a strange light flashed in her eyes.

“Men are coming out of the woodwork,” she said in an odd, throaty voice that didn’t sound at all the same as the voice she’d been using.

I seized the card and stepped back, putting some space between us. “What do you mean?”

The connection was broken, and she laughed a little self-consciously. “I don’t know exactly what I mean. Just take care. No one is as he seems.
No
one.”

For crying out loud. This was supposed to make me feel better? I looked at Sue, whose eyeballs appeared ready to pop out of her head. She was staring at Angie as though she was the second coming of Christ.

“Let’s get out of here,” I muttered, “before one of us goes nuts.”

That night I had a dream that cockroaches were pouring out of the woodwork. All along the baseboards they came crawling out. Some had short, round, black bodies typical of the cockroach and others were palmetto bugs, long and brown and winged. All had big, bulging, malevolent eyes that stared intently at me.

I woke up sweaty and scared, trying to scream. The sweat was from the sticky night air and no air conditioning, but the fear was something else. I was afraid that deep down I’d decided men were cockroaches, and if that were so, I would never write a bestselling romance again.

I
was besieged by contractors all day. Every time I got started on a task in the yard, a guy showed up and I had to stop what I was doing. My back was just about broken from bending over to pick up shingles, so I didn’t mind being interrupted from that task.

Hank’s electrician had come out at the crack of dawn, secured the pole, and replaced the mast, but I wouldn’t have electric until the power company ran the line from the pole to my house. Hank had stopped by to drop off my charged-up cellphone. And he’d programmed his number into it and said to call when I wanted to charge it again.

Four different guys quoted on the roof, which, of course, needed to be replaced. Unfortunately for me, the previous owner had put a second set of shingles over the first roof, rather than replace them, which meant I would be charged for the removal of two roofs. One of the contractors, a guy with spider tattoos over the knuckles of every finger, said that sometimes the second roof provided a thicker barrier, but in the case of
my
roof, which he also checked from inside the attic, it just helped cover up rotting wood.

Great. That was an extra expense, at least on his quote. The other three didn’t bother to go into the two-hundred degree attic, so they didn’t know about the rotting wood.

There was a four-thousand dollar difference between the highest and lowest of the four estimates, and none of the contractors quoted specifics, like the shingle design or whether or not they would install shingle-over vents. In addition, I wanted red shingles like those I already had, but they would only quote brown or tan.

The guy with the spider tats kept pressing me to give him the job, but I put him off. For one thing, he was strange. He held his right hand in front of himself, palm down, and kept flexing it open and shut, making the tattoos grow into big fat spiders and then shrink back up. While he spoke to me, he stared at the spiders. It gave me the creeps.

Plus, he insisted on pulling his van into my garage, which meant I had to take my car out since all the crap I stored in the garage took up too much space to allow for a second car. He never gave an exact reason other than to say he didn’t want to make a bunch of trips back and forth from his van in the heat, which seemed odd for a guy who offered to climb into a stifling hot attic.

While spider guy was checking out my attic, I called Richard to see if he could recommend one contractor over another. When quotes vary that much it can be a case of the quality of products, service, skill, or just plain dishonesty. I couldn’t look these guys up online, and there was no way I’d get through to the Better Business Bureau by phone. Richard didn’t know any of them personally, though, so I just took the quotes and said I’d get back to them.

I tried not to think about how I would pay for the roof. I decided to stay focused on getting my yard done before my ninety days were up. I couldn’t do anything about the swamp, so I put it out of my head for now. The rickety buildings were gone, thanks to Flossie and Julie—and Hank and Keith. All that was left of the yard work, really, were the weeds, which included palmetto thickets that had grown in among Brazilian pepper trees and God knew what else on my second and third lots. I’d just have to work my ass off to clean them up.

The biggest problem right now, though, was the knee-high grass and weeds that I had to trek through. Until I picked up the shingles and other non-yard debris, my yard guy wouldn’t mow. It was hard enough to lug yard trash to the curb without worrying about tripping over the grass. Plus, mowing the grass kept the mosquito population down. Since the mowing wasn’t happening, mosquitoes were taking over.

I was picking up shingles and tossing them onto the driveway when I heard the rumble of skateboard wheels on asphalt and glanced up to see a neighbor kid fly past my yard on his board. His family had recently moved in across the street, two houses down, on the other side of Alberto. I hadn’t met the family and hadn’t planned to introduce myself since a number of items, including my purse, which I had stupidly left in my car, disappeared from my open garage the day they moved in. But I could be spontaneous when I had to be, even if Sue said I wasn’t.

I waved my arms to get the kid’s attention. He did a complicated thing that made his board leap from the pavement and end up in his hands. He stood there staring at me.

“Do you need a job?” I asked.

“Yeah. I was fired from my job at the mall. I only got to work two weeks.”

“Oh.” I didn’t know what to say to that, mainly because I couldn’t believe he was old enough to work in the mall. And then there was the firing thing. How does one get fired after two weeks? It was a shame I hadn’t known he was old enough to work a real job
and
that he’d been fired from one before I asked if he wanted a job. Next time I would try a little chatty conversation before getting into something I might regret, but this time I was stuck.

“Look, if you want to make some extra money, I’ll pay you ten dollars an hour to pick up my yard.” Ten dollars an hour was good money for a kid, even one old enough to work in the mall. I really only needed him for three or four hours, and that was all the time I could afford to pay him for anyway. And I’d have to go without the occasional beer for six months to do that.

He didn’t say a word. I wondered if he’d been fired because he was dimwitted.

“You know,” I said slowly, just in case, “you could pick up all these sticks, roof shingles, pieces of paper, and cardboard. All the stuff that the yard guy won’t mow around. You have to keep the natural stuff—the branches and sticks—separate from things like shingles though. Or else the trash guys won’t pick it up.”

Rules, rules, rules. Everybody had rules they expected people to live by. I was getting sick of following all these rules, but seeing as how I was broke, about to be tossed out of my house, and without any influential friends who could make people disappear, I had to follow them.

He was still staring. What was with this kid?

“I guess not, then,” I said, turning to walk away.

“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said. “You got a rake?”

I fished through the garage for a rake, elated at this turn of events. Event, anyway. Nothing else was turning, but I wouldn’t complain. Then I hopped into my car to run a few errands.

When I returned two hours later, there was one pitiful pile of debris on the driveway. It held four sticks and a shingle. Oh, and the rake. The pile had the rake in it too.

I got out of my car and looked around. Maybe some big emergency, such as an uprooted tree falling onto his family’s power line, had taken him from his work. No, I was the one with the uprooted tree problem. This kid didn’t seem to have any problem, especially a work-related one, since he was too lazy to work. No work, no problem. I picked up the rake and contemplated carrying the four sticks to the side of the road. I kicked them there instead.

Why did life have to be so freaking hard?

*****

I had just shivered through another cold shower when someone knocked at my door. I had always appreciated electricity but never so much as I would when I finally got it back. The heat made it impossible to do anything, and yet I had to keep working. And I had to keep taking cold showers.

Through my peephole I spied the neighbor kid, looking properly chastened. Or maybe not. I wasn’t sure what that look meant. Maybe determination. Maybe he’d come to collect his five minutes’ worth of salary. I was curious enough to want to find out.

I opened the door, and he just stared at me. Again with the staring.
Earth to kid.

“I was thinking maybe I could help you out
now,”
he said.

I stuck my head out and studied the sky. The sun was setting. and it smelled like rain.

“I think it’s getting a little late to work now, don’t you? And besides, aren’t those rain drops?” I asked, nodding behind him where a couple of sprinkles were hitting the walk.

I decided not to say anything about his leaving the rake on the pathetic pile of sticks. After all, I hadn’t told him what his hours were. I’d just assumed he would start immediately.

“No, I could help you out right now,
if you know what I mean.
”

Did I not just tell him it was getting too late for yard work? And what did he mean by
if you know what I mean
?

“No, I don’t know what you mean. What do you mean?”

“You know, I could tap your ass.”

I meant to say “Huh?” but my mouth just dropped open and stayed there until something closer to “Ugh” came out. I was still clueless about his offer, but the word
ass
had me worried. It wasn’t a word I’d expected to hear.

He gave me an
are you a stupid idiot
kind of look to match the disgusted shake of his head.

“Tap your ass,” he repeated, before trying two other terms I’d also never heard of. Was I really so out of touch with teenagers? I guess that’s an upshot of not having cable.

When he used the “F” word, though, I knew exactly what he meant because the “F” word had been around forever.

To say I was dumbfounded would be putting it mildly. He was a kid, or at least he appeared so to me. I was looking down at him, and I was only five feet six. Then I realized that the door stoop was a half a foot lower than my floor inside the house, so he was actually a little taller than me.

“How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” was his sullen reply. “Old enough to know how to do it.”

Hunh.
Men twice his age still didn’t know how to do it. If I was paying someone for sex, it was gonna be someone who knew how to do it.

What was I saying? I’d shoot myself dead before I paid for sex. In fact, it hadn’t been all that long ago when men would have been willing to pay
me
for sex. Now I was not only annoyed that he wasn’t cleaning up my lawn, but I was insulted that he thought I had to pay for sex. Because I didn’t have to pay for sex. Really, I didn’t. To put it in the words of George Costanza of
Seinfeld,
“I can get sex, baby, I can get sex.” Or at least I
could.
I wasn’t sure about now.

But that wasn’t the issue. If I never had sex again, I wouldn’t be desperate enough to do it with a kid—or anyone else I didn’t want to do it with. I had a battery-operated device wrapped in a hand towel, stored inside a shoebox that was stuffed inside a bigger box labeled “worthless junk” that was in a plastic storage bin in a corner of my closet. I didn’t need
anyone.
Really.

Then the mother in me took over, which was quite a shock since I didn’t know I had one. Which meant it wasn’t the mother in me, it was the Dough in me, the part that can’t help but judge others and tell them what to do. But, hey, he was a kid. What else could he be expecting?

“Is this how you’re making money?” I demanded. He shifted his eyes away from me. I assumed that meant
yes.
“Because this is dangerous. You don’t know what kind of diseases people have, not to mention the fact that what you’re doing is illegal.”

“Do you want it or not?”

“No, I don’t want it! What is wrong with you? I could go to prison for the rest of my life for doing something like that. If you don’t care about getting diseases, don’t you care at all about ruining someone else’s life?” I was thinking a little guilt never hurt anyone. Especially this kid, evidently.

“I’m rescinding my job offer too, so don’t touch anything in my yard.”
Or anywhere else.

He shrugged. “Whatever.” He turned to leave and then stopped and threw back a look. “You’re not gonna tell my mom, are ya?”

That certainly put his offer into perspective. As if I’d needed that.

*****

Sue stopped by to pay up on her debt. I relieved her of the responsibility because I wasn’t up to listening to her scream. I led her through the house to the patio where we could catch a slight breeze in the 95-degree heat. The temperature in the house was closer to a hundred.

I filled her in on the situation with the boy. Her eyes went wide, then thoughtful. “Would you consider him a man?” she asked.

“What? What kind of woman do you think I am? He’s sixteen. How could I think of him as a man?”

“No, I’m just wondering if he’s one of the men coming out of the woodwork.”

I got a shiver all the way down my spine. I didn’t even want to contemplate that. More likely, it was all the contractors Angie had been “seeing.”

“So, what do you think?” I asked Sue. “Should I tell his mother what he’s doing to make money?”

“Is she the one with the orange hair and black roots? Wears a transparent thong bikini when she does yard work?”

I nodded. A transparent thong bikini was hard to overlook.

“Then, no. She looks kinda hard to me. She might see it as an opportunity—if she even believed you. And let’s hope
he
doesn’t say anything either.”

Oh God. I realized what Sue meant, and if the newspaper ran a picture of me with the words
seduced
and
minor
in the headline, I would definitely have to kill myself. If I didn’t, one of my sisters would do the job for me.

Sue snapped me out of my thoughts. “You’re gonna be sorry you didn’t go to the street party when I tell you who I saw.” A smug smile settled on her face.

“Who’d you see?”

“Just about everybody I’ve ever met. It was a town street party, after all, and I hung out next to the alcohol concession. But I’m talking specifics, so give it your best guess.”

“Bryan Rossi?” He was the only person I wouldn’t mind running into.
If
I had electric so I could blow-dry my hair and put on make-up by something other than candlelight. On second thought, it was better that I hadn’t gone.

“Hell, no. If I’d seen Bryan Rossi, I’d have gotten you and dragged you back there kicking and screaming. I think you should go out with him. You’re not really looking for a husband, and he’s not looking for a wife—apparently—so you’re perfect for each other.”

Perfect for each other. It sounded so nice. Except it would be a little embarrassing when I became homeless in the middle of our relationship. “It’s too late. I missed my chance.”