Hints of Heloise

by Laura Lippman

  She pulls out the plastic boxes of prepared food—salad, a roasted chicken, asparagus—and places them on the broad granite counter where they eat most of their meals. She could put the food on actual serving platters, but why bother to disguise its origins? Brian, who flew to the home office in Atlanta this morning, won’t be home until almost ten, and he’s the only one who cares if food is homemade, and only because he hates to think she’s had a free moment to herself. As if, she thinks, gathering up the pair of Crocs that Maggie has left in the middle of the kitchen floor, then rinsing the glasses and plates left over from the kids’ snacks, which almost certainly ruined any appetite they had for dinner. The phone rings. Once, the kids would have vied to grab it, but the two oldest have cell phones and the youngest have IM accounts, so the phone holds no interest for them. She lets it ring, thinking it might be Brian, whining for an airport pickup, which she has no intention of providing, but then notices that the caller ID is displaying her insurance agent’s cell number.

  “Meghan,” Dan Simmons says. “I didn’t think I’d catch you.”

  “Oh, I’ll always let you catch me, Dan.” More cute than pretty, Meghan has been an outstanding flirt since her early teens. Much better than Heloise, with her ice princess shtick. Does she drop that superior manner when she is with her clients, or is that part of her appeal? Her sister’s secret life excites Meghan, a fact she barely admits to herself. On those rare occasions when Brian wants to have sex with her and she manages to muster up the energy, she pretends she is Heloise and he is a client. That she is in charge and he has to leave when they are done, handing her a nice stack of large bills. As if.

  “You’re working late,” she says.

  “Yes and no. I’m in my little home office, returning all my calls, but already starting on cocktail hour, as you can see.”

  The Simmonses are next-door neighbors, their house a mirror image of Meghan’s, only Dan has availed himself of “Mommy’s office.” Sure enough, she looks through the window over her kitchen sink and sees Dan across the way, hoisting a martini. Dan is fun.

  “Ah, Daddy’s little helper,” she says, walking over to her refrigerator and locating a bottle of wine, suspiciously deep on the bottom shelf. The health education segment at Hamilton Point turns children into anti-alcohol Nazis, and Michael keeps hiding her wine behind the milk. “We’ll have a drink together. What’s up?”

  “You called me,” he reminds her. “Two days ago. Left a message at the office.”

  “Sorry. I forgot.”

  “Hey, it’s a pleasure to have a client who calls me,” he says. “Most people run when they see me coming, like I’m that guy in Groundhog Day.”

  She laughs, although she has no idea what he is talking about. Movies, sports—most of men’s conversational milestones are lost to her, but she pretends to get them. “Well, with four kids and a husband who’s on the road three days every week, I have to make sure we have all the coverage we need.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dan says, “if a plane goes down, you’re fine.”

  “I worry that the airlines are so broke these days that we won’t recover a cent.”

  “Well, it’s true, if Brian actually died in a plane crash, there probably would be a war of deep pockets, with my company fighting the airlines’ carrier over who had to pay out. But it’s also true that we’re talking about something that has virtually no odds of happening. What you really have to worry about are the kind of mundane accidents that no one thinks about. Slip in the bathtub, a fall down the steps. And cars, don’t get me started on those death traps. I think you have adequate coverage for that, but I’ll review everything. I know you told me that Brian has a handgun, but it is kept in a safe, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Okay, because we require that. Meanwhile, I don’t think you have enough disability coverage, but almost no one does. And have you thought about some of the financial products I mentioned to you the last time you both were in—”

  Screams rise from the family room, providing her a graceful way to end the conversation. “I better run before blood is shed,” she says. “It’s so hard to get out of leather.”

  Dan laughs. He probably wishes that his own wife was so chipper and cavalier about household calamities. Lillian Simmons is a big-boned slob who looks ten years older than her age, but she is also absolutely reliable, the go-to mom of Hamilton Point Elementary, the one who can be counted on to bail out any forgetful snack mom. That’s the thing about wives. All men want them, they just don’t necessarily want the ones they have.

  A slip in the bathtub. A fall down the stairs. An accident on the twisty snake that is Old Orchard. A plane falling out of the sky. She should be so lucky. She trips over another pair of Crocs—the things seem to be breeding—and calls the children to dinner, and something in her voice silences the bedlam instantly, bringing them to the table with heads down. Mom’s mad. Walk carefully. She hates seeing her children like this, controlling them through her anger, but her incipient fury seems to be the only power she has over them, over anyone.

  BRIAN DUFFY SQUEEZES into the last open spot at the bar, putting his elbows down before he realizes the wood is still damp from the bartender passing a wet dishrag over it. As if that filthy bit of cloth could make anything cleaner, he thinks with a shudder. It takes him several minutes to get the bar wench’s attention, and in the time he waits, his order somehow mutates from a defensible light beer to a vodka martini, a double. Sure, add a quesadilla and some chips. It’s not like he’s going to get dinner on the plane and there’s never anything waiting for him at home.

  Airport bars used to be kind of sexy, based on the movies and television shows he had watched as a kid. Sweeping views of planes taking off and landing, well-dressed people sipping cocktails and speaking low, charged encounters between strangers. Now they tend to be like this one, a cramped windowless room in Atlanta Hartsfield, where you have to fight for every inch of space. On the trip down, he read a paperback that began with a man meeting a beautiful blond in an airport bar and he had found that one detail more far-fetched than the high-tech crime caper that had followed. Airport bars are the new saltpeter.

  Look at this one. On his left, two honeymooners, post-honeymooners by all appearances, weary beneath their red-tinged tans, barely speaking to each other as they contemplate the rest of their lives together. To his right, one of those corporate women who travels with a roller bag she can barely lift, the kind of woman who won’t make eye contact with a man until she drops her suitcase on his head. A bitch, a ballbuster. Just his type. In fact, she looks uncannily like the woman who fired him three hours ago.

  He still can’t believe he had to fly to Atlanta to be fired. All the signs were there—the lack of a clear agenda for today’s meeting, the fact that they wanted him in and out in a day, when they usually brought people in the night before, put them up at the Ritz-Carlton in Buckhead. Funny, he was the company’s de facto executioner for seven years, flying into various branches and firing people under the rubric of “reorganization,” and yet he didn’t see his own death coming. “You know we always do these things face-to-face, Brian,” said Colleen Browne, whom he thinks of as Cold-Faced Bitch, a woman he has wanted to bend over a desk since the first time he saw her, and never more so than when she was firing him. He considered it, for a fleeting second, thought about grabbing her, ripping away her little black suit, forcing her facedown onto her BlackBerry so hard that she would end up sending text gibberish to everyone in her address book.

  But negotiating a decent severance had seemed more pressing. At least he had the context to do that, to get a good package. Six months’ salary, a full year of medical, no small thing with four kids. Still, he thinks of the CEOs who fuck up companies and walk away with ten, twenty million, and he thinks maybe he should have fucked the brunette instead. The country’s tiptoeing into a recession; his sector, financial services, is in particularly bad shape. Six months might not be enough, a
nd thanks to Meghan’s free-spending ways, they don’t begin to have the savings they should. He orders another drink. He can’t bear the thought of going home, having to tell Meghan about this. What would happen if he missed his plane? It happens, and he’s in Atlanta Hartsfield, so anything is credible.

  But then he would be in some dopey airport hotel, with nothing but porn to keep him company. He wants the real thing, but he can’t kid himself, he has no game left. The only way for him to have sex tonight is to pay for it, something he’s never done. Okay, something he says he’s never done. There have been a few furtive hand jobs here and there, on the way home from Baltimore, but nothing more because he’s worried about catching something.

  He pulls out a card given to him by a guy he met three weeks ago, a lobbyist employed by the company, who got a little loose over dinner and started talking about this amazing escort service in the Baltimore-Washington area. The card has nothing but a number and a set of initials: WFEN. Sounds like an AM radio station. His plane gets in at eight, if he’s lucky, but he always fudges his arrivals, tells Meghan he’s coming in at least two hours later. What if he just went to this place instead, telling Meghan that he was still in Atlanta? Ah, the beauty of cell phones, the liar’s best friend.

  The woman who answers the phone has an odd voice, a little toneless and loud. “Yes?”

  “Is this . . . WFEN?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’d like to make . . . a date.”

  “And how did you hear about us?”

  “How . . .” He provides the name of the guy and there’s endless clicking, like at an airline ticket counter.

  “Name and birth date, please, along with the credit card you plan to use.”

  “What?”

  “We do not take new customers without a referral and all customers must be subjected to a criminal background check.”

  “What if I want to pay in cash?” Meghan does the bills, no way he’s putting this on a card.

  “That’s fine, but we still have to have a credit card on file.”

  Even in his frustration, he admires the setup. Someone has thought this through. Plus, they’re not asking for the security code, so he doesn’t think they can charge anything, and if they did, it would be easy enough to get the charge off his card. And the lobbyist said the one he had was worth every penny, a real pro. Brian’s just drunk enough to give his real name, although he lowers his voice while reading the card number into the phone.

  “Wait, please.” He’s put on hold, very pleasant jazz music to keep him company. The woman comes back on the line faster than most service reps, that’s for sure.

  “I’m sorry, we cannot take you.”

  “Hey, that card is good.” Shit, has Meghan pushed it beyond the limit again? And he needs this, he has never needed anything more, he decides, than anonymous, nasty sex with someone who has to do whatever he says.

  “We cannot take you.”

  “Look, if you want another card—”

  “We cannot take you.”

  “Did something come up on the background check? It has to be a mistake because I’m clean as a whistle.”

  “I’m sorry.” The woman hangs up, and when he redials, no one answers.

  Seven hundred miles to the north, give or take, Heloise and Audrey sit in Heloise’s refinished basement, the one where Heloise keeps her office, and look at the number on caller ID. Audrey opened a document on the computer as soon as she picked up the phone, per Heloise’s instructions. But there was no criminal background check, no quick peek at credit records. The moment Audrey put the caller on hold, she summoned Heloise to the basement and asked her what to do.

  “My brother-in-law,” Heloise says. “My fucking brother-in-law. What are the odds?”

  “He would have been eliminated geographically even if he weren’t a relative,” Audrey says. “He’s within the ten-mile radius.” Heloise won’t take any client with a home address in her son’s school district.

  “I almost wish I could take him on as a client, give him to Staci down in D.C.,” Heloise says. “If Brian got rid of all that tension he’s carrying, he might be a better husband and Meghan might not look so furious all the time. But I can’t risk it. And, frankly, he can’t afford it, based on what I know of that household’s finances. If he wants sex, he’ll have to sleep with his wife or settle for good old-fashioned adultery with someone at work.”

  Audrey frowns. She has rather strict views on the sanctity of marriage, an interesting position for a woman who oversees the office of a thriving sex business. It is an even more interesting position for a woman whose hearing loss was caused by a vicious beating by her own husband, who also happened to be her pimp. Still, she was faithful to him, within the compartmentalized system that defined their relationship. She had sex with other men for money, but only her husband had her heart, and this remained true right up until the moment she killed him in the middle of another beating. Paroled a year ago, she was referred to Heloise by an old friend.

  “Better to use a street-level worker,” Audrey says, using the term Heloise prefers. “As long as he wears a condom. Don’t you always say adultery is more expensive in the long run?”

  “Indeed,” Heloise says. “Now who’s out tonight?”

  “Gwen, in Annapolis. The senator got a bill out of committee, and he wanted to celebrate. But he never goes late. The GPS shows they’re already at the hotel and I expect her safety text within the hour.”

  Audrey’s phone buzzes at just that moment and the two women look down to see the message: “Babycakes.” Just as bondage freaks have their safe words, Heloise assigns each of her girls a silly, frequently changing term to text when a date ends. Between that and the GPS that each girl wears on the inside of a wide bangle bracelet—Ho-jacks, the girls call them—she hasn’t had a problem. Yet. But that’s the nightmare that looms largest, the fear that she will be summoned to the morgue one day, asked to identify one of her employees.

  “That was fast,” Audrey says. “Even for the senator.”

  “Well, getting a bill out of committee,” Heloise says. “It can be pretty exciting.”

  She goes upstairs to read to Scott. He’s getting too old for this, but Heloise argues that it’s really for her, that she won’t read the Harry Potter books if they don’t read them together. She has a date at ten, but Scott will be tucked in by then, safe under Audrey’s care.

  TWO

  Why did we let him sign up for travel soccer?” Brian asks, and not for the first time. “It’s not like he’s going to grow up to be, what’s his face, Beckham. And it’s such a drag on the household when he has one of these games out in butt-fuck, Maryland.”

  Meghan, who actually thinks the same thing all the time, fixes Brian with a disapproving stare. “How does it affect you? The Marshalls are driving Michael, both the girls have already left for sleepovers, and I’m taking Mark to that all-day rehearsal for the regional band competition. By the way, his teacher says he’s going to need a new trumpet next year, he can’t keep using the school instrument.”

  “Great, how much is that going to cost?”

  “Jesus, Brian, who cares? You make plenty of money.”

  “Actually, I don’t.”

  He stands up, carries his plate to the sink and rinses it, then puts it in the dishwasher, which is full of clean dishes, but never mind, Meghan knows a sign of the apocalypse when she sees one. Brian has occasionally removed his own dishes from the table, but to rinse it and put it in the dishwasher? Things must be very bad indeed.

  “What are you saying, exactly?” Pay cut, pay cut, pay cut, she prays. Please be a pay cut. Or maybe a bonus didn’t come through.

  “I was fired.”

  “When?”

  “Almost ten days ago.”

  Yet he has been putting on a suit every morning and driving away. “So where have you been—”

  “Starbucks. I thought I would find something so fast that there was no need to trouble you
with it. And I did get severance.”

  “How much?”

  “Jesus, Meghan, don’t overwhelm me with your sympathy and concern.”

  “How much?”

  “Six months.”

  “You’ll find something new.” It’s a question, a plea.

  “Yeah, but—it’s bad out there, Meghan. I may not make as much. We may have to move. Who knows?”

  Who knows? Meghan knows. She knows what it’s like to live in a house where money is tight. She knows what it’s like when a family falls back a step, what it feels like to try to get by with less than one is used to, how it’s almost impossible to catch up ever again.

  “Clean the basement,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You have a Saturday free, you’ve been sitting in Starbucks for two weeks, doing nothing, while I run myself ragged—the least you could do is clean the fucking basement.”

  “You know what, Meghan? This is way harsh, even for you. I lost my job, for no good reason. You’re supposed to be on my side. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “I have to take Mark to this thing. Which you knew. So don’t blame me because I can’t sit at the kitchen table and rub your head, talking about the job you lost two fucking weeks ago. We’ll talk later. You promised to clean the basement months ago, so do it. It might feel good, accomplishing something. For a change.” She raises her voice, which has been a tight hiss for this entire discussion. “Mark! Time to go.” Then back to the hissing register: “There are boxes in the garage and the county dump is open until two P.M. on Saturdays. Don’t forget that broken old computers can’t go in the landfill.”

  She stares him down and he drops his head, shuffling off to the basement. She checks her watch. “Mark!” This is her second-warning voice, louder than the first but still not angry. The children know what Brian has just been reminded, that it’s Meghan’s softest voice that is to be feared. Funny, because she’s never gone beyond that voice, so what is it that they fear, what power do they assign to her? Mark comes bounding down the stairs, ready for the battle of the bands. It will be a long day, and once he’s with his friends, he won’t want anything to do with Meghan. He certainly won’t stop to think what the day is like for her, how it feels to sit for hours in the drafty arena in downtown Baltimore, with only a library book, a mystery from the library, to keep her company. And the girls are giggling with friends while Michael is chasing a soccer ball down a muddy field somewhere in Western Maryland, and there are Melissa’s fucking Crocs again, or maybe Maggie’s, left in the middle of the mudroom floor.