“We do! And after that,” Edwina said, “I want to ride the merry-go-round. I really want to.”
“Come on, Mommy,” Edwina said, walking back to where Natalie stood gazing off into space. “Lock said we’re going to win teddy bears. Come on.” Edwina tugged at Natalie’s fingers and tried to pull her along.
“I have to find the bathroom,” Natalie said. “I’ll catch up in a minute. Go win your dolls.” Without speaking, Natalie handed Augie to Lock, who now had to manage carrying his son while looking after two children. He didn’t want the girls to pick up on his disappointment at Natalie’s distant demeanor.
“Okay, Natalie,” he said. “The squirt gun game is on the midway, up there on the left past the cotton candy stand. Come back soon.”
Natalie didn’t say a word to Lock and the girls, but turned and walked in the opposite direction.
Lock helped the girls aim their squirt guns at the moving targets—rusty metal ducks and rabbits—and succeeded in helping them win two small teddy bears. Compared to the fluffy bears as big as Dahlia on the top display shelf, the two they won were paltry, and he could see the kids’ looks of dissatisfaction. Edwina pouted and Dahlia pointed to the bigger dolls.
“Anything we can do about this?” Lock softly asked the barker, who made a face. Lock slid a five-dollar bill across the counter in such a way that the girls couldn’t see it.
The barker took the bill and put it in his pocket, but didn’t change his sour expression.
“Buy another two games and we’ll see what they win,” he said.
Lock surrendered more tickets. The man flipped a switch under the counter and started the game. Both girls giggled while holding the guns and aiming at the targets. Dahlia’s aim was way off and splashed the back wall of the booth. After another minute, the water stopped and the girls looked at the barker expectantly.
“Look what you two have won,” he said without the slightest trace of interest. “Two bigger bears. But you have to give those two back first.” He pointed at the prizes he had given to the girls before. When they didn’t move, the man leaned over the counter and took the bears from them and sullenly handed the kids two more, only slightly larger than the first ones. He then glared at Lock. “That’s the best I’m going to do.” The girls didn’t look thrilled.
Lock’s phone rang. He saw it was Natalie’s number, or else he might not have answered.
“Hey, can’t find us?” he asked. Then he listened and his face fell. “At least come back and say goodbye to the girls,” he spoke in a whisper. “And you have to be back in two hours with the car. The kids might not even last that long, and then what am I going to do?”
A few minutes later, Natalie appeared as Lock was buying the girls two paper cones of frighteningly bright red cherry water ice. Lock didn’t want them to ingest the notorious red dye, but gave in at their insistence, telling himself that it would be impossible to protect them from all the world’s threats. He’d have to pick his battles—and dye-in-water-ice wasn’t one he chose to fight that day.
Natalie stooped down and gave each of the girls a token hug. “Mommy has to go,” she said, rising. “I’ll be back soon.”
Edwina grabbed her mother’s hand. “No, Mommy, we’re going on the merry-go-round. I’m riding the white one with the golden mane. Come with us. You can hold Dahlia on your lap, because she’s too little.”
“Lock will hold her, honey,” Natalie said.
“No!” Edwina stomped her flip-flop. “He has to hold Augie. You hold Dahlia, and I can ride the horse myself.”
Natalie shrugged and, without kissing Augie goodbye or making eye contact with Lock, walked off.
“Two hours, max,” Lock shouted after her. “Sooner, if you can.”
She kept walking but raised her hand and backward-waved at them. All three of them watched Natalie leave. Augie was asleep in the baby carrier, his head resting against Lock’s chest.
“Why is Mommy leaving?” Edwina asked, looking at Lock.
Lock felt bad but didn’t want to think about where Natalie might really be going—she had told him she needed to run to the diner to settle some dispute over a check she had supposedly added up incorrectly. He wanted to believe her, but he didn’t. It was apparent she didn’t care to put much effort into constructing a more credible lie. That made it worse for Lock. To distract himself, he reached into the baby carrier and gently tilted Augie toward him and admired the beauty in the sleeping child’s face.
“She has to go to the drug store for something, honey,” he said to Edwina, “but don’t worry. She’ll be back soon.” He realized he had just lied to her, something he had a strict policy against, but telling the child the probable truth, in this case, would have done more harm than good.
Lock turned toward the crowds of people and caught a glimpse of Natalie’s back as she made her way through the throng toward the parking lot.
As she pulled up, Natalie saw Jerome Freel standing in his driveway, attired in the golf clothes he had been wearing all day. She liked that he was waiting for her.
He moved in close, wanting a kiss, but Natalie put her hand on his chest and pushed hard.
“Not out here,” she said, and walked past him and into his foyer. He followed her in and closed the door behind him.
“How about now?” he asked. “It’s not a public display of affection if we’re alone in a house.”
Natalie offered her cheek but wouldn’t let him kiss her on the mouth.
“What’s bugging you?” asked Freel, who turned and adjusted the position of his golf bag, which was leaning against the wall and looked like it was getting ready to tip over.
“Nothing. Just Lock and the kids. They dragged me to some stupid carnival and I had to miss my yoga class. And I have plenty to look forward to tonight—the eight-to-two shift of high school boys and old couples who believe in two-dollar tips.”
“It won’t be much longer, Nat. You know that. I tell you that every day.”
Natalie sighed. “I guess you’re right. I shouldn’t take my frustration out on you.”
“That’s okay. I had a terrible day too. Shot a 107, if you can believe that.”
“Yes. That’s a rough thing to have to live through. But you’re strong, Jerome. You’ll survive.”
Natalie stared him in the eyes as she tore off her t-shirt and unzipped and stepped out of her shorts—rendering herself totally naked in one graceful motion.
“Oh my Lord,” he said, his eyes falling not on her body but on the tattoo of a snake slithering up her thigh. “Dazzling.”
“Me?” she asked.
“That snake. Fantastic, just fantastic.”
“Thanks, couldn’t have afforded it without you.”
Freel crouched down to see it better. “That guy knows his stuff. It almost looks like a photograph.”
“I thought you’d like it.”
“I do.”
“So does Lock. Loves it.”
Freel stood up. “Fuck you, Nat. Why’d you bring him into this?”
“Oh, calm down. What are you worried about? He’s the one getting screwed over. Relax.”
Freel stood there, fuming, and tried to hide it.
“Ah, poor baby,” she said. “Did I hurt your feelings?” She grabbed him by the throat, pulled him close, and kissed him hard. “That make you feel any better?”
“You’re getting warmer,” he said, taking her hand and leading her up the spiral staircase.
Natalie kicked the sheets off her while Freel laid on his side, working to catch his breath. She checked the clock by the bedside. “I have fifteen minutes before I have to leave to pick them up. I’m taking a quick shower.” She got out of bed and Freel watched.
She spoke to him from the bathroom. “You hear anything from Witt’s lawyer? Like, is anyone getting any closer to writing me
a check?”
“Humphries. I spoke to him yesterday,” said Freel.
“I hope you have good news. I really can’t play this poverty game much longer. At the carnival, the most Lock could come up with for rides was twenty dollars. Twenty dollars!”
“Yeah, well. Back to Humphries. What a dick. Anyway, the forensic accountant we hired is almost finished with her analysis, and she told me it doesn’t look like Witt has concealed any assets. At least none that she could find. I was hoping he was hiding entire companies he owned. But that’s not the case, and that’s too bad for us. Humphries actually said, ‘I told you so’ to me. But the joke will be on him. And the good news is that Witt seems to be worth somewhat more than you think. Maybe three or four million more. That could be almost half yours someday in the very near future. We’ll know more about that mid-week.”
Natalie exited the bathroom and dried herself with a giant, dark-blue cotton towel. “I’m sorry I said that about Lock. I was teasing you, but now that I think about it, it was a dopey thing to do.” She knew she had to play nice from time to time, but just enough to keep him from getting sulky. Jerome would never admit it, but he liked that she made him jealous.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, opening the nightstand drawer and removing his black, leather toiletries kit. “You made it up to me.”
“Just so you know, I got that snake for you and no one else. I’m sorry he gets to see it even for a little while.”
He waved her explanation away and then opened the kit, removed the vial, and tapped a little mound of power onto the nightstand surface. “All will go according to plan. We just have to be patient.”
“I know,” she said. “But three kids and Lock? I have to say the serenity prayer all day long.”
37
By the time Augie was almost four months old, Natalie had grown weary of all the demands the infant constantly made on her. Although she was good at hiding her irritation, Locked noticed but chose to say nothing.
A few times when he was sick, Augie cried off and on all night long. Natalie never once got out of bed to comfort him—it was always Lock. And Augie was an aggressive crawler—he started crawling months earlier than most babies do—and had to be watched all the time when he wasn’t in his crib or his playpen.
Even though breast-feeding was supposed to reduce the risk of a child having allergies, Augie had severe reactions to the eggs, soy, peanuts, and cow’s milk—ingredients often found in the recipes for homemade baby food that Lock discovered online.
“I don’t know what to feed that brat,” Natalie once said in the infant’s presence.
“Damn it, Natalie,” Lock said. “Watch what you say. You know he can sense your emotions.”
Natalie laughed. “Where’d you read that? Some touchy-feely stay-at-home-dad website or something?”
Lock bristled. “And don’t call him a brat,” he said. “He’s pure love in a diaper. And I don’t know of a kid who’s less whiney than Augie.”
Natalie laughed again and sulked out of the room in her bare feet.
Sure, walk away, Lock thought. That’s what you do, isn’t it? It’s your nature.
Late that evening, after Lock did the putting-the-baby-to-bed routine, he got into bed and tried to kiss Natalie goodnight. She was still pissed and rolled away from him.
“I just want to say goodnight,” he told her. “We agreed to never go to bed angry at each other.”
“That would be easier to do if you weren’t acting like a dick all the time.”
He tried to kiss her again.
She turned her back to him. “Too bad,” she said. “That’s what you get for always siding with Augie and talking to me like I’m twelve years old.”
Natalie fell into silence while Lock lay there in the dark with his eyes open, wondering about the woman next to him. She was asleep in minutes and didn’t say a word to him when she arose the next morning and left for an early yoga class.
When she returned to the condo—much later than Lock had expected (though he said nothing to her about it)—she was ready to pick up the bad vibes where she had left them the night before.
“I’m not going to fight with you, Natalie,” Lock said. “I want to love you, not battle you.”
Natalie said nothing and went into the bedroom to change out of her yoga clothes.
“I want to have dinner tonight at La Tierra,” she said, returning from the bedroom and wearing her cut-offs and a t-shirt. “Find a sitter, will you?”
“La Tierra and a sitter? Honey, that’ll be north of a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“I thought you were going to get a better job than that crappy auto parts place and that stupid shirt they make you wear.”
Lock wanted to fire back that they both had jobs where wearing nametags was mandatory, but he held his tongue. “I’m working on it, Natalie, I don’t like the job either. But as of now, my options are narrow.”
“I know you’re trying,” she said, “but we hardly get a chance to go out, and when we do, it’s on a small allowance we give ourselves or because I was able to shake a few extra bucks out of Witt. Movies and a cheap dinner at the Mexican place, or a picnic at Valley Forge with the kids. We don’t have a night life anymore. Do you think I don’t remember my sixty-dollar manicures and my hundred-and-twenty-five-dollar yoga lessons? Let’s work harder at getting more money. I make shit at the diner. I need a vacation.”
Lock wondered if he was devolving into the same kind of lousy provider his father had been. But something would turn up. He wasn’t going to stay broke indefinitely. After all, he had a son to take care of. It was true he was struggling now, but that condition didn’t trouble him nearly as much as it did Natalie.
Lock lifted Augie out of his playpen and set him on the floor. He let the infant reach up to grip his thumbs, so that Augie could pull himself up into something like a standing position. Without much prompting, Augie did so and grinned and opened his eyes wide, thrilled at his accomplishment. Lock turned to see Natalie’s reaction, but she was staring out the window.
“Check this out, Natalie,” he said. She glanced over, saw her baby standing, and shrugged.
“Great,” she said. “Terrific. Now he can pull everything off the coffee table. What’ll you teach him next? How to fire a gun?”
While Lock continued to play with Augie, Natalie said that she was prepared to go to Witt and ask him for even more money than he was already shelling out. Lock told her not to do it, but she laughed.
“I’m not staying destitute for the rest of my life,” she said, examining her unpolished toe nails. “Witt’s got more than he can ever spend. He’ll give me more.”
The next night, just after nine, Natalie, wearing her waitress’s uniform, sat back up in the passenger seat of Freel’s car and flipped open the mirror built into the sun visor. She inspected her makeup and reapplied her lipstick.
She ran her fingers through her tousled hair and thought about the conversation she had had with Freel earlier. She didn’t know if she could fully trust him, but she did believe his affection for her—as base and superficial as it was—was sincere. She knew she could do worse than Jerome Freel.
“I’m still not clear about how we can get Lock to leave me,” Natalie said to Freel. “He’s too attached to his ridiculous idea of having a family. I could host a gangbang every night, and he’d stand by me. He’d be doing it for Augie. Getting rid of him won’t be so easy. Definitely not as easy to manipulate as when we let him think he was hatching the plan to crash the car and frame Witt.”
“I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before,” said Freel, re-buckling his seatbelt. He rested his hands on the steering wheel and looked out the windshield at the trees illuminated by the street lamps on the other side of the deserted parking lot. “It’s simple. We just tell Lock that Augie is my son, that we took a p
aternity test. That’ll frost his balls. If he demands to see the results, you can show him. I have the lab’s letterhead, so it will be easy to scan it and make up a fake test result. I’m pretty good at Photoshop.”
“Don’t you think there will be a little problem with that?” she said. “Just telling Lock the baby’s yours? Just by showing him a piece of paper?”
“You mean his reaction?”
“Yes,” Natalie said. “He’s driven when it comes to Augie. He’ll go crazy. He’s been acting the role of father ever since Augie was born. Actually, even before that. Lock’s fanatical about him. All the baby food has to be organic.”
“No,” Freel said, “nothing to worry about. Look at it from Lock’s perspective. He’s already questioning whether or not Augie is mine. It panics him just thinking about it. When the official-looking lab report hits him out of the blue, he’ll be so upset he’ll totally believe it. I guarantee it. He’s basically a drunk, isn’t he? What’s he going to do besides break down and start drinking?”
“That’s not true, he’s a good man,” she said. “He was good at his job at CPS. And he’s good at being a father. I’ve just outgrown him.” Natalie took Freel’s hand. She sat there, fingers entwined with his. She said nothing. A moment passed and Freel pulled his hand back.
“That’ll practically kill him,” Freel said, “the poor bastard.” He laughed.
“It’s not funny,” she said. “You’re not the one who’s going to tell him. You’re not the one going to see his face.”
“All you’d need to do is give him the news and then avoid him until he’s out of the condo.”
“It’s that I don’t love him. I never did.”
“I thought you said you did.”
“I might have. Once. Yes, I did. For a few days, at least. I admit I was pretty confused when I got out of prison. I must have been out of mind to think it could work with Lock.”
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