The Good Sister (16 page)

Chapter 9

A
mid-life crisis car. That’s what I need
, Al Witkowski thinks as he turns the corner onto Redbud Street late Thursday night.

Yeah. Something fast and sporty, like a Mustang or a Jaguar.

If Al had a car like that, the woman upon whom he’d just spent two hundred bucks for a fancy dinner at Salvatore’s Italian Gardens would be coming home with him for a nightcap, instead of heading in the opposite direction.

It was a blind date—sort of. They’d met through the online matchmaking service someone had suggested to him. He’s made connections with quite a few women over the past couple of months, but no one he wanted to see more than once—or, if he did, it wasn’t mutual.

When he got to the restaurant tonight, his date was waiting for him. Marianne was a businesswoman—a big plus since Al is looking for a classy woman this time around. Someone the complete opposite of his ex-wife, whose heavy eyeliner and bleached blond hair he found much more alluring two decades ago when he accidentally got her pregnant. That was before all the body ink she started adding when she turned thirty. Ugh.

There was no way in hell Marianne had a tattoo hidden under her prim gray skirt suit. That was another plus. He found her to be attractive enough, though—here came the negative—she was at least forty pounds heavier than in the photos he’d seen, and those didn’t exactly show a slender woman to begin with.

The extra weight seemed less unappealing, though, as the evening wore on and the wine flowed.

Marianne seemed interested in him throughout dinner, and agreed to come to his place for a nightcap. But when they got outside and she spotted his old pickup truck, still sporting a big dent in the fender from where the street plow sideswiped it on Tuesday morning, she changed her mind.

Probably just as well.

Even if Al had convinced her to follow him over here, Marianne probably wouldn’t have ventured into his small apartment above Chimera’s Dry Cleaning. A woman like her in a place like that? No way.

He never thought it would come to this: living in a hole-in-the-wall, driving a dented piece-of-crap truck he can’t afford to fix, his business flailing in the lousy economy, never seeing his son, who’s in the army and stationed in Germany, or his daughter, married young and living in a Florida trailer park . . .

“It could be worse,” his brother Bobby invariably says when he complains.

“Yeah? How?” Al always asks, even though he knows the answer. Bobby got all his stale wisecracks from their father.

“You could be dead.”

Dead is about as bad as things can get. But life—at least as Al knows it right now—is just barely a step above.

If I could just find someone to share it with . . .

“Get a dog” was his brother’s advice. Al ignored it.

But for Christmas, Bobby went and got him a puppy.

“Now you’ll have someone to talk to,” he said as the little mutt licked Al’s stubbly chin.

“But not someone who can talk back to me.”

“Trust me—that’s not a bad thing” was his brother’s reply. Bobby is long-married with three daughters.

Al named the puppy Roscoe. Having a dog does help with the loneliness, but it’s not enough. He needs more.

Female companionship wouldn’t make the rest of Al’s problems magically disappear, but it would sure put a smile on his face for a change.

So he keeps putting himself out there. Chatting with women on Internet dating sites, on bar stools at happy hour, in the produce department at Wegman’s—wherever, whenever he gets a chance.

The problem is, he’s not the handsome man he was in his youth, not even when he shaves and puts on a nice dress shirt and shiny shoes. The women who would bother to give him a second glance aren’t his type. They’re the type who wear bifocals and Buffalo Bills sweatshirts, their curly hair cut short and their bright blue denim jeans cut short as well, riding slightly too high above their white rubber gym shoes.

Where, Al wonders, do you go to meet someone with looks, style, personality, and a solid career who wouldn’t stick her nose in the air at a blue-collar guy who’s a little worse for wear? Preferably a nice Catholic girl who lives right here in Buffalo; someone whose attitude, when it comes to marriage and babies, is been-there, done-that; someone old enough not to have kids still at home and young enough not to be a doting grandma . . .

Someone like Sandra Lutz.

Oh, Sandra . . .

He’d had a crush on her since they were kids growing up in this neighborhood. She was known as Snobby Sandy back then, in part because her father worked not in the local factories but as a dentist, and in part because she gave off a hint of sophistication even then. Her aloofness didn’t bother Al, though. It set her apart from the usual gaggle of gossipy, giggly girls.

For years, Al tried to work up the courage to ask her out. By the time he finally did, after she’d graduated from Fordham and moved back home, it was too late. She smiled and showed him the engagement ring on her left hand, and that was that. A few months later, he became the groom at a shotgun wedding.

He and Sandra lost track of each other for years as they dealt with the serious business of being married and raising kids. But eventually the kids were grown and she got her real estate license and he started running into her around the neighborhood again. By then he was divorced, she was divorced . . . he could have sworn it was meant to be.

He was wrong.

Not a day goes by that Al doesn’t think about what happened to her.

It was such a shame . . .

The last time he saw her, he was personally overseeing a job she’d hired his company to do: emptying out the big old mansion around the corner on Lilac Street, directly behind his rented apartment.

The Addams House, they always called it back in the old days.

“Did you ever take a dare and sneak inside?” Sandra asked when he met her there on a long-ago summer day to give her an estimate for the moving and storage.

“Sure—how about you?”

“No. I was always too chicken. I thought it was haunted.”

“You believe in that stuff?”

“Don’t you?”

“Nah.”

Ironic—there he was, acting all macho, when really he was too chicken to even ask her out. Every time he saw her, he tried to work up the nerve, but it was just like when they were kids. He kept beating around the bush, and the next thing he knew it was too late . . .

But this time, not because she was married.

This time, for good.

Sandra’s death was a damned shame.

Every time Al looks out the back window of his apartment and glimpses the mansard roofline looming above the treetops on the next block, he’s zapped with a bolt of regret, thinking of her and what might have been.

Too bad I can’t move out of this neighborhood
,
or at least off the block, so I could get away from all this
shoulda coulda woulda.

But the rent here is all he can afford, thanks to the economic situation and his lousy ex-wife.

“Guess she really took you to the cleaners—literally,” Bobby likes to crack. He can be an insensitive jerk sometimes.

Al sighs. Time to put his latest romantic mishap behind him. Right now all he wants is to take Roscoe out for a few minutes, then sit on the couch, catch the tail end of the Sabres game, and drink a beer.

About to pull into the curbside spot where he usually parks, he thinks better of it. He probably shouldn’t leave the truck on the street anymore. That’s just asking for trouble. It might get hit again, or someone might break into it or steal it.

Are you kidding? Who’d want this piece of crap?

But he shouldn’t take chances. He doesn’t have the time, patience, or money to deal with further misfortune.

He backs up and pulls into the driveway that runs alongside the dry cleaner to a small rear parking lot occupied by a couple of Dumpsters, potholes, and weeds. The landlord told him he can park back here anytime, but he never does—mainly because he’d have to walk all the way back out to the street to get to his door.

God knows he can use the exercise after all that pasta tonight.

If only he had the money, he’d join a gym, get back into shape . . .

Maybe he should start taking the puppy for real walks instead of letting him briefly nose around the weeds growing in sidewalk cracks in front of the building, encouraging him to do his business so they can get back to the couch.

Yeah, it’s not a bad idea. He can start off slow, just a couple of blocks, maybe five, ten minutes, and work up to a brisk half hour or more. The extra pounds would probably melt away in no time if he did that every day.

As the high beams illuminate puddle-filled ruts, Al steers recklessly through them rather than going around. Maybe all that spattered mud will hide the dented truck body, he thinks darkly as he notices, through the trees, the familiar mansard roof of the big old house on Lilac Street.

Sandra
.

If he had asked her out on that last day he saw her—which turned out to be the day before she died—would she have said yes? If she had said yes, would they have gone out that night? If they had gone out, would he have gone back to her place?

He could have died in that fire, too.

Or he could have saved her life.

Maybe they’d be married right now, and instead of renting this depressing apartment, he’d be living over on Wayside Avenue in Sandra’s—

As the headlights arc across the overgrown patch of property beyond the parking lot, Al instinctively hits the brakes, startled to see something . . .

No.
Someone
.

Someone is back there.

He only has a quick glimpse before the figure disappears into the trees bordering the yard of the Addams House.

Last he knew, the place was still sitting empty, just as it had for years when Al was a kid. He’s driven past it a few times and seen light glowing in the front windows, but he knows it’s coming from the lamp timers Sandra set so long ago. You’d think the bulbs would have burned out by now.

Has someone changed them?

Is someone really sneaking around the yard there?

Maybe, thanks to all the cabernet he drank at Salvatore’s, he’s just imagining things.

Yeah—or maybe it’s Sandra’s ghost, back to haunt the old place—and you.

For a moment, Al sits thoughtfully rubbing the stubble on his chin, his foot still on the brake.

Come on. You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?

Nah.

Still . . .

With an abrupt shake of his head, Al pulls the truck around and leaves the parking lot, deciding to take his chances on the street after all.

A
ngel 770 is online.

Seeing the message bubble pop onto her laptop screen, Carley sits up straight and pushes her glasses up higher on her nose. It’s about time. She was on the verge of drifting off to sleep.

That wouldn’t necessarily have been a bad thing. She’d welcome any means of escaping the latest nightmare . . .

Well—almost any.

While waiting hours for Angel to show up online tonight, she had revisited the anti-bullying forum, paying particular attention this time to the many threads about suicide. She was trying to get some insight into Nicki’s frame of mind before she died, but wound up relating to some of the posts herself.

Yet as miserable as Carley’s life has become, she can’t imagine taking that final step—crossing the line between thinking she might be better off dead, and actually doing something about it.

No, she’d never do that, because when she dies, she wants to go to heaven. Otherwise, what’s the point?

QT-Pi: where have u been today?

Angel 770: y whts up?

QT-Pi: trouble

Angel 770: ???????

Carley hesitates.

Angel 770: ru ok?

QT-Pi: no suspended

Angel 770: srsly?

“Yeah. Seriously,” Carley whispers glumly, suddenly wondering why she’d been so eager to discuss what had happened.

It’s not as though Angel can magically make it all better. Maybe she could if she were a friend IRL—Internet shorthand for
in real life
.

If Angel were a friend IRL, she could watch Carley’s back at school and eat lunch with her and choose her for her team in gym. And this Saturday night—while the rest of the world, the Sacred Sisters world, anyway, goes to Spring Fling in the Cardinal Ruffini gym—they could have a sleepover and eat junk food and watch scary movies.

But Angel is just some girl who lives a few thousand miles away, in California.

Sunny California, where Nicki used to want to live.

Yeah.

No matter how great a listener Angel is, no matter how effective her insight into Carley’s problems, she’s still going to vanish into cyberspace at the end of this chat and Carley’s going to be left feeling more alone than ever.

Especially now that Nicki’s gone.

Carley’s been thinking a lot tonight about the falling out she had with her best friend. She has a feeling it wouldn’t have happened if they had still been connecting daily in person, rather than just over the Internet.

It all started with a post Nicki put on Carley’s Peeps page last fall, not long after school started.

OMG carls whats up with your hairrrrrrrrr
, she wrote beneath a photo Carley had posted.

Stung, Carley immediately deleted the photo, along with the string of comments beneath it. There were only a couple of them above Nicki’s, and they’d been posted by a couple of the Sacred Sisters girls she’d recently met.

One said,
2 cute

Another,
luv ittttttttt

And then there was the insult from Carley’s so-called best friend.

Maybe Nicki was just jealous, she thought at first. After all, the photo showed her with Sarah Bielecki, a girl from her art class. The teacher had chosen the two of them, along with Kendra Hyde, to tape yellow and red construction paper leaves to the bare branches of the big painted tree in the hallway—a good excuse to get out of the stuffy classroom on an Indian summer afternoon.