Three minutes later, Maye gasped when Patty pulled the car to a stop in front of an absolutely perfect house.
It was an adorable English cottage, Cotswold style, with a half-timber and stucco façade and a hipped roof with curves along the peak lines and corners. A massive tapered chimney—complete with a little ash door—sat alongside the rounded front entry. It was as perfect through the front door as it was on the outside. It reminded Maye so much of her house in Phoenix; the layout and proportions were almost exactly the same, the living and dining rooms were painted the same colors, the rug in front of the fireplace was identical to the one Maye had in her own living room fifteen hundred miles away. She had only gotten as far as the kitchen when she turned to Patty and told her that she was so sure Charlie would absolutely love it, she was ready to make an offer.
Patty winced and paused for a moment. “There’s something you need to know about this house,” she said cautiously, as if she was trying to prepare Maye for something wholly dreadful and nefarious, and put her hand on Maye’s arm gently.
“The current owners are…” she continued in a whisper, “…Republicans.”
Maye smiled. “It’s okay,” she whispered back. “As soon as we move in, we’ll make our gay friends get married here.”
But minutes after pulling into the driveway of her new house with her husband and dog, Maye’s vision for her celebratory housewarming party had taken a downward turn. Her husband was staring at the house expressionless and motionless, almost like he was in shock.
“Charlie!” Maye finally said, desperate for a reaction. “Charlie, please say something!”
“This is our house?” her husband said, looking at her suspiciously.
Maye nodded.
“Are you sure?” he asked her in a very serious tone. “If this is a joke, it’s not very funny.”
“What’s the matter?” Maye said, her heart sinking even further. “You hate it. You hate it. I’m sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing. There just wasn’t much to choose from, Charlie, unless you wanted to live in an iris. It seemed right at the time. I’m sorry. You saw the pictures I took, you said you liked it….”
“I do like it,” he replied. “But what’s the catch?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “What catch?”
“Everyone on this street mows their lawns,” Charlie nearly yelled, pointing to the neighbor’s immaculate front yard. “I mean, these people have lawns. There are no cars resting on cinder blocks parked on them. I haven’t seen a couch on a front porch yet, and a herd of feral cats hasn’t descended on our car to pee on it yet. Where’s Crack Park? I don’t see a crack park! Where will our neighbors get their drugs? Where will our neighbors sell their drugs? And where’s the halfway house? Every street in our last neighborhood had one!”
Maye smiled broadly and shook her head. “There’s no crack park, Charlie,” she said, laughing. “There is a park a couple of blocks away, but it has a playground and a soccer field. Our neighbor over there is a psychologist and an artist. The one across the street is a librarian. The neighbor over there was a diplomat in Belgium. We live in a different place now. We don’t live in the hood any longer.”
“I won’t have to pick up needles and bullet casings in the street anymore?” he asked, floored.
“Nope,” Maye assured him. “And I’ll never have to call the cops on a hooker wearing nothing but a see-through shirt standing on the corner trying to drum up some business while the schoolkids are making their way home in the afternoon.”
Charlie paused for a moment and looked at Maye again. “Are you sure this is our house?” he asked.
“Let’s go inside, I’m dying for you to see it,” she suggested, fumbling for the keys in her purse.
“Come on, Mickey!” Charlie said as he followed, and the dog bounded into the front seat and out of the car.
Maye opened the front door. The house had the eerie quiet of a place that had just been left, the same kind of quiet that floated through the rooms of their house in Phoenix only several days earlier before they left and locked the door for the last time.
“What do you think?” she asked as the sun streamed in, dust particles swirling and suspended in air.
“It’s great,” Charlie said, smiling. “Just like you said.”
“Did you see the French doors to the dining room? And look at the moldings. That’s all original. And there’s fir in the hallway. And penny tile in the bathroom. And a dishwasher, Charlie, there is a dishwasher.”
“Well, show me around!” he said, laughing as he grabbed her by the shoulders.
“I just want to call somebody!” she said gleefully as she opened the French doors to the dining room. “I want our friends to come over and see it! I’m so happy you like it. Who should we call? We’ll call and get a pizza and have some people over.”
“Sure. Call everybody. If they leave their houses now, they’ll get here by next Wednesday.” Charlie looked at her. For a tiny, microscopic second she had forgotten that she now lived in a town where she didn’t know anybody except for her Realtor. Her friends were in Phoenix. She was in Spaulding.
“Well,” she concluded. “Who says we can’t have a pizza party, just us? We love pizza and Mickey loves the crust.”
“You’ll have friends soon,” Charlie reassured her. “It takes time in a new place. Please do not get all weird because you’ve lived in Spaulding for forty-five seconds and you don’t have a best friend yet. This is a whole new life. Nothing will be the same, but it will end up just as great and it will be fun getting there. We have this whole town to discover. And if you don’t have a friend by your birthday, I’ll buy you one.”
“Promise?” Maye laughed. “Please get them at the bus station and make sure that they’re at least three sizes bigger than me and with awful hair, like a bleach job with a perm on top, even if you have to pay by the pound. For once, I want to be the hot one, even if it means by purely relative terms.”
“Whoa,” Charlie said as he gravitated toward the backyard-facing windows of the dining room. “It’s huge. That lawn is huge. It’s bigger than our lawn in Phoenix. You didn’t tell me it was so large. It’s going to be a big project every week. Every week.”
“Nice try, Charlie,” Maye replied. “But you can relax, Mr. Big Project. I can see through you like Paris Hilton’s dress. I already got the name of a lawn company from Patty. They’ll be here in a couple of days to give us an estimate.”
“Oh, thank God,” he said, exhaling. “I thought I might have to even go out and buy a lawn mower and then break it for that to happen.”
“I learn from my mistakes. Which brings up another point: you are hereby banned from the area under the kitchen sink, any and all inner or outer workings of the potty, and anything in the basement that appears to in any way be even mildly associated with plumbing.”
“I can do the under-the-sink thing,” he insisted. “I can! I can!”
“The last time you said ‘I can! I can!’ the toilet wound up sideways on the floor and you were holed up at your computer waiting for Norm from This Old House to e-mail you back and tell you what you had done wrong,” Maye reminded him. “I left my job at the newspaper to come here, Charlie. I’m freelance now. We’re going to be living on an assistant professor’s salary until I can get some things going. We don’t have the money to pay for plumbing repairs plus the collateral damage that happens when you even think about picking up a screwdriver. And Norm never replied, Charlie. He never e-mailed you back.”
“You don’t need to remind me. But just so you know, I am still clinging to the thinnest of faith that one day, Norm will appear in my in-box. I haven’t given up on him yet,” Charlie said reluctantly. “Norm would never let a man and his sideways toilet down. But okay, no under-the-sink thing.”
He looked at her and then hung his head in utter disappointment. But if Maye didn’t know better, she’d have sworn she thought she saw him smile.
After the movers arrive
d and unloaded all of their earthly belongings, Maye unpacked, found the grocery store, the dry cleaners, and a pizza place and tried to learn about her new town. So far, she’d learned that the Indian and Thai restaurants were great, the Italian and Mexican horrible. She learned to avoid traveling two streets down when it was sunny, due to the girl who liked to sunbathe or just talk to her neighbors with her banana boobs experiencing as much public viewing as her nose, which, frankly, was much more perky and enjoyable to look at. Running into her was akin to watching the Discovery Channel but with an additional element of lingering horror and the sudden desire to wear a bra at all times.
Maye liked Spaulding; the people were friendly, everyone said hello to her at the grocery store, and Charlie loved his new job. He had been welcomed in the English Department immediately and had been making lunch dates with other professors and occasionally meeting people after work for a beer. He was fitting nicely into the small, tightly knit town, and frankly, Maye was starting to become a little jealous.
With his position at the university, Charlie had a built-in network of potential friends. Maye worked at home; her network consisted of Mickey, the various petition bearers who knocked on her door, and the guy she had hired to mow the lawn, who had little or no best-friend potential. When he arrived, he immediately noticed the Arizona license plates on her car and, after hocking up some rotten lung tissue and shooting it to the gravel of Maye’s driveway, mentioned that she ought to go and get new plates. That day.
“Cops drive up and down the street,” he explained. “Takin’ notes. For you, they’d write down somethin’ like, ‘Arizona license plates.’ Then they’ll come back and check on you. If thirty days has passed and you still got Arizona license plates, they’ll know you were the Arizona license plates house and write you a ticket. Happened to a friend of mine. Not from Arizona, though. From Arkansas.”
Maye nodded politely and promised to take his warning under consideration. As she showed him around the property so he could give her an estimate, he stopped in the middle of the yard and looked her dead in the eye.
“You got yellowjackets in Arizona?” he asked with a grim look.
“I guess,” she sputtered. “I don’t know. What do they look like?”
“If you don’t know what they look like, you ain’t got ’em,” he said, shifting his weight from one foot to another and pointing a dirty finger at her. “Come July, the yellowjackets get mean and they’ll sting you ’cause it’s hot. Come August, they’ll kill you ’cause it’s hotter. You need a trap. A yellowjacket trap to kill ’em afore they get to you. They’re killers. Happened to a friend of mine.”
“The one from Arkansas?”
“No,” he said sternly, and walked toward the fence that separated Maye’s backyard from her neighbors’. Something had evidently traveled under that fence a number of times, as the soil was pushed and patted down, making a groove in the dirt deep enough for a small dog to get through.
“Look at that,” he said as he pointed to the groove, sucking air and spit between his teeth with a squeak. “You got raccoons somewheres close. They’re comin’ into this yard. Do you know what to do when you see a raccoon?”
“To be honest, I don’t,” Maye answered as nicely as possible. “But I’m from Arizona, as you know by my license plates, a land full of scorpions, black widow spiders, tarantulas, rattlesnakes, plague-infected prairie dogs, and hawks that carry golden retriever puppies off into the sky. I’m sure if I see a furry woodland creature in my yard, I’ll figure it out.”
The lawn man put his hands on his hips, looked away for a second, and then looked back at her. “You gonna figure it out before or after it’s got its teeth sunk in your cheekbone and its claws in each of your ears?” he hissed. “Raccoons are nothin’ to mess with! You see one in the daytime, you run. Raccoons are nocturnal animals, and if you see one when it’s light outside, that thing’s got the distemper and it’s crack-ass crazy. Don’t make eye contact. Never look it in the eye, or it will rip your face off with its claws and eat it like it was a Fruit Roll-Up.”
After a moment, Maye thought of several things to say.
The first one was, “Am I on Candid Camera?”
The second thing was, “Do you live near a lot of power lines?”
And the third thing was, “Take my advice and start buying bottled water, because whatever’s coming out of your well should be classified as a biological weapon.”
But none of those things were very nice, although, truth be told, Maye would have picked the best one and gone for it if she wanted to mow her own lawn. So instead she looked at the lawn guy, smiled, and said, “So, what about that estimate?”
“Twenty-five a week,” he said simply. “And the right to defend myself if a mad coon comes at me.”
“Deal,” Maye agreed.
Maye’s circle of potential friends was smaller than her lawn guy’s brain. It was hard to meet people her age—she was a childless woman in her thirties who worked at home. There were few opportunities to encounter someone like herself, unless she were to start stalking candidates in grocery stores. Her days were quiet; she ate lunch alone. When the phone rang, it was a friend from Phoenix calling to check on them, fill them in on the latest gossip, and tell them how much they were missed. Although her friends had the best of intentions, Maye couldn’t help feeling even lonelier after each and every call.
Her life, she realized, was going to become very, very dull.
Spaulding, however, had a way of shaking things up.
One afternoon shortly after they moved in, Maye was unpacking books in her office when she heard a loud rustling in the nearby bushes and then quick, heavy footsteps. Mickey raised his head from the corner where he was sleeping and looked at her, his ears pinched back with caution. The footsteps became louder and more urgent and she thought that perhaps a Bigfoot had wandered down from the mountains in search of vittles and maybe a lady friend, two of the only things that could ever make a man leave his cave, because Bigfoots don’t use toilet paper (number three in The Only Things That Could Make a Man Leave His Cave). The look of alarm on Mickey’s face all but confirmed it. Before she had collected enough bravery to investigate, she saw a large, hairy blur dart past the window, and then she heard the thudding footsteps in her front yard. Mickey ran to the front door with a piercing bark, and Maye followed, but when she reached a window that gave her a good enough angle to see what was going on, the figure had vanished. A pot of dahlias lay knocked over on the front porch, much like Charlie’s toilet, mulch hurled in a wide, violent spray, with several leaves from the laurel hedge that separated her yard from her neighbor’s scattered recklessly about.
Maye was speechless, puzzled, and admittedly a little shaken. She looked at Mickey, who returned her exact expression and quietly whined.
When Maye told Charlie about what had happened, he brushed it off like it was a Mickey hair clinging to his sweater.
“This is a running town, Maye,” he said. “People run home from work. The university has a star track team. Maybe someone was training for a marathon or something. No, I don’t think it was Bigfoot coming down from the mountains to scavenge an already gnawed-at corncob from our trash, and I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, just like I don’t think your head will be peeled like a boiled tomato by a mad raccoon. Stop focusing on the wacky stuff, and see all the great things this town has to offer. Calm down, and maybe you won’t hear an urban legend running through the bushes and the yard; maybe you’ll just see a jogger.”
The next day, Maye was upstairs organizing the linen closet when she heard Mickey run to the door and begin barking ferociously, his nails scraping the wood floors. From the upstairs window she saw the laurel hedge shake, and she ran downstairs as the dog scratched at the front door and growled. As her hand grasped the doorknob, Mickey dropped to all fours and whined. Maye was too late; the intruder had evaporated. The dahlia pot, again the victim of the unseen, was still rolling slightly on
its rim when she opened the door. That night, she said nothing to Charlie.
Maye and Mickey decided that the invisible Bigfoot was not going to make a fool out of them again. The following afternoon, Maye waited by the front door. She wished she had a net. An hour passed, then two. Mickey lay before the fireplace on his side but with his eyes wide open. Maye wished she had a dart gun. They waited.
Suddenly, with almost no warning, Maye heard several thuds, then a loud clattering crash, then more thuds, coming closer, closer, louder, closer, and with a sucking whoosh Maye swung open the door with all of her might to catch the intruder in the act.
Click! With a silvery, blinding flash, Maye’s camera captured the wide-eyed shock of the hairy creature, evident as it lurched backward and tried to shield its eyes, emitting a tiny, almost inaudible squeal. In a split second, Mickey jumped on the intruder and knocked it off the porch steps. As Maye got her first full view of the suspect, sprawled on the ground with Mickey’s paws planted on its chest, she felt a new kind of horror as she saw just who it was that was screeching.
“What are you doing?” screamed the man in navy shorts, a light blue shirt with a blue emblem across the left breast, thick blue socks, and black regulation oxfords. “Call off your dog! Call off your dog!”
“You’re the mailman,” Maye said quizzically, noticing his long, untrimmed white beard and his silvery hair pulled back in a ponytail that was longer than any girl’s hair when Maye was in sixth grade, looking eerily like the dark wizard Saruman in The Lord of the Rings. His dark, sunken eyes glared at Maye as she called Mickey to her side; the mailman scrambled to his feet.
“I’m not a mailman,” he asserted defensively, nearly hissing. “I am a United States Letter Carrier. And that dog of yours is a menace!”
“I’m sorry,” Maye replied. “We heard a loud crash and then someone running through the yard. He’s just protecting me.”
“Garbage pickup isn’t until tomorrow,” the letter carrier sneered, pointing at the curb. “What was I supposed to do, jump over it?”
There's a (Slight) Chance I Might Be Going to Hell - v4 Page 3
