I could do this. I was tough. I may be small and have prematurely white hair, but I’m as psychologically and physically fit as you can be at my age. And as I’ve explained, I can disarm a grown man before he could say … anything.
How can I put this?
Next to somebody like me, Chuck Norris is just a wuss. How hard could it be to be a good aunt?
Three
Cops will tell you the absolute worst sound in the world is click. That’s the sound a gun makes when it jams. But in relationships, I learned that click is good. It’s what happens when, in the course of an exchange of two or three sentences, you know you’re going to be friends or lovers.
I clicked with Carlo DiForenza like that, during a class I took from him at the university right after I retired and just before he did. Before I married Carlo two years ago, my name was Brigid Quinn. I had devoted my whole life to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, being pimped around the country posing as a prostitute, a drug runner, a human trafficker. I did it for much longer than is considered psychologically healthy. You don’t make any friends working undercover. The only people you meet are the kind of people you don’t want to be friends with.
Just as I had to learn to be a wife later in life, I had to learn to be a friend. Mallory Hollinger and I met at St. Martin’s in the Fields. Besides being more truthful, going to church was the only other condition that Carlo asked of me, and because I had had some bad experiences with the Catholic church, we compromised on Episcopalian. I didn’t realize how close it was until our first Sunday service.
The main difference was that just before the procession down the aisle, a voice at the back of the church said, “Please silence your cell phones at this time.” That was the signal for everyone to stand for a hymn—all the verses.
Another difference was that the congregation didn’t rush out during the final hymn—again, all verses—to try to beat each other out of the parking lot; instead they went to what they called “coffee hour.” Anything that includes coffee is a good thing. I had gone to the table where the silver urn was to get my share of the beloved brew, and when I came back to where I’d left Carlo standing alone, I noticed a woman talking to him.
She was a big woman, though I wouldn’t say fat, more majestic. What made me take notice was her height, and the way she blended her laughter into Carlo’s. As I got closer I noticed she had a thin scar, hardly noticeable, on her left cheek. And her upper lip was a little bigger than the lower. She was thrusting that lip at Carlo like a horse smelling a sugar cube. With a disagreeable flutter I thought what a good-looking couple they made, an advertisement for an erectile dysfunction drug.
I laughed at myself and shook off the thought.
“Here’s your coffee, honey,” I said, and handed it to him, then turned to the woman. “Hi. I’m Brigid,” I said, smiling, pleased that I had regained my security enough to not sound like I was guarding my prom date. She stuck out her hand and shook mine with a surer grip than your average female boomer. The thing about Mallory Hollinger wasn’t that she was knock-down gorgeous. Quite the contrary. She just acted like nobody had ever told her she couldn’t have any man in the room.
She said, “Mallory Hollinger. Your husband and I were just talking about the similarities between the Catholic and Episcopal churches.”
“Except that people are dressed better than usual, I couldn’t tell the difference,” I said.
“Hardly any difference, darling,” Mallory said, turning toward me and lowering her voice into intimacy that excluded Carlo. “We’re just Catholic Light—more money, less pope.”
And then we were friends. Click. Never having had a friend before outside of the Bureau, I hadn’t realized it happens so quickly.
Essentially, we shared the same wicked humor, a distaste for piousness, and a taste for luxuries large and small. Mallory was me, minus the occasional angst.
Mallory had kept our two dogs while we were in Florida and was at the house to greet us with Indian food, my favorite. The Pugs jumped me and I fell to the floor, indulging them with lavish rubbings and kissings, then calming one of them down from a seizure of delight that made him snock uncontrollably.
“Who’s your mommy, you ugly dogs?” Mallory said to them, while kissing Carlo on both cheeks. It’s the kind of thing I would have found pretentious in practically anyone but this woman, who brought off the gesture like she had been born to it.
“How’s Owen?” I asked. Owen was her husband, as beloved to her as Carlo was to me, who had been paralyzed in an accident six months before I met them. That’s a whole other story for later.
“So-so. Annette’s with him.” Never one for self-pity, she changed the subject back to the Pugs. “They’ve been totally abject, but you should have seen them when they heard the garage door go up. And who is this delightful child?”
I introduced Gemma-Kate to Mallory and watched to see if she responded to Mallory’s flirtation the way everyone else did.
“Hello, Gemma-Kate! I’m Mallory!” Mallory said, flinging her arms wide. She caught my glance. “Overdoing it?” she asked.
Neither of us had had much experience with young people. “You could maybe pull back a little on the Auntie Mame shtick,” I said.
She brought it down a notch and asked, “How was your flight?”
“It was just amazing,” Gemma-Kate said, her eyes widening at the memory.
“This was actually Gemma-Kate’s first plane ride,” I said.
Even Mallory was momentarily struck dumb, understandable for someone who has taken a chopper ride so low over Mount Kilauea she could feel the heat. Then, “How wonderful to have a brand-new experience,” she said, making it sound envious rather than condescending.
Gemma-Kate just then noticed the Pugs had turned from me to sniff her ankles. She watched them for a moment as if she wasn’t sure what you were supposed to do with pugs. Then, grinning, she dropped to the floor beside me and patted them one at a time, actually went pat pat pat on top of their heads. She had never had a pet.
“They’re so cute! What are their names?” she asked.
“They don’t have names,” Mallory said, rolling her eyes. “Brigid just calls them the Pugs.”
Gemma-Kate looked up at the three of us watching her and pursed her rosebud lips. It made me notice how rounded everything about her was; big eyes, button nose, even her earlobes were little pillows.
“Maybe you’ll name them,” I said, to show that Mallory wasn’t teasing her.
Gemma-Kate smiled.
The Pugs didn’t care much for the pat pat pat technique, or maybe found it insincere. They abandoned Gemma-Kate, wandered to the door leading into the backyard, and sat there until Carlo opened it to let them out.
“Now relax,” Mallory said, as Carlo took our bag into our room and Gemma-Kate’s to the guest room. “The wine has been breathing far longer than it deserves. Gemma-Kate, are you allowed to have a glass of wine?”
Gemma-Kate and I got up off the floor and came into the kitchen area, she looking at me in case I objected, and when I did not, she nodded with a nice dash of shyness. Mallory opened the right cupboard to extract four wineglasses while I picked up the bottle.
“Brunello di Montalcino,” I read. “This isn’t ours.” I gestured at a small rack over the refrigerator. “Did you see we had some here you could have opened?”
Mallory pulled her lips back against her teeth like someone was trying to dose her with Castor oil and took the bottle from me. “Yes, I know.”
“Go to hell, Hollinger. I know what’s good, I just can’t afford it.”
She poured and handed Gemma-Kate and me a glass. Gemma-Kate took hers into the living room, where Carlo was, while I sniffed and sipped. “Oh my God,” I said. “I haven’t had anything this good since—” I stopped, knowing that I couldn’t tell her about the man who ran human traffic from Guatemala to Las Vegas.
“Ever?” she said.
“Ever,” I agreed. “Thanks for
watching the dogs and coming over like this.”
“It’s a nice place. You have good taste,” she smiled, meaning her own. Mallory had helped me when I went through a brief redecorating phase.
We took our glasses into the living room area, where Carlo was pointing out to Gemma-Kate the mountains to the east of our property, he using words like “metamorphic” and she looking politely rapt.
I sat next to Carlo on the camelback couch that Mallory had advised me to keep. After answering just enough of Mallory’s respectful questions about the funeral and the state of the survivors, we moved on and she made us laugh with stories about the Pugs’ sleepover. They had curled up beside Owen on the bed, she said, and he seemed to like that even if he couldn’t say so.
The Pugs had come back in the house and were nestled up against me, one glued to my thigh and one of them half-draped around my neck and half-reclining on the back of the couch, his breath hot and smelly. They reminded me of Mallory’s invitation extended at least a month before the funeral. “Are we still on for that fund-raiser?” I asked.
“Which one?”
“Only you could say that. You said you bought a table for the Humane Society thing.”
Mallory said, “You know, I might disinvite you. It could be awful.”
“You, the hospitality queen, having an awful evening? How’s that?”
“I didn’t want to bring it up with your sister-in-law’s death and all. Remember those people I told you about a while ago, whose son drowned and they left the church because they were pissed at everyone? Just before you joined?”
“Kind of. The woman who went a little crazy.”
“That’s the one. She blamed everyone. The church, the other kids in the youth group, the rector’s wife. The thing is, her husband is Owen’s doctor and he’s really good. So I sort of want to patch things up, and I thought enough time has gone by, this will be neutral territory, and maybe she’s not insane anymore. They agreed to come. But like I said, it could be awful.”
“Oh, come on. Don’t make me miss a chance to watch you flounder socially. It would be a first.”
Mallory backed down then. “Gemma-Kate would be welcome,” she said. “We can make room.”
“That’s really nice of you,” I said, and turned to get Gemma-Kate’s agreement.
She had gotten up from where she’d been sitting by Carlo and gone into the kitchen to refill her glass, which I noted with a little interest. After swigging a bit of it, she had been circling around the room for the past several minutes, like a fish that would die if it stopped swimming. At the moment I asked if she’d like to come to the fund-raiser, she had finally paused, her back to the room, at one of the back windows looking out at the life-sized statue of St. Francis in the backyard. Was she actually staring out the window or was she staring at her reflection? In it I was the only one who could see she wasn’t smiling now. I wondered, for her sake, not mine, whether it had been the best idea to pull her away from her father and grandparents so soon after her mother’s death.
Right now Carlo and Mallory had begun watching her as closely as I was. “Gemma-Kate?” I said, to get her attention.
“I’ll be okay,” she said. “I like it here.” She turned back to us, or rather, to Carlo, her smile reconnected. “I was just thinking. Should I call you Uncle Carlo, Father Carlo, or just Carlo?”
Somehow I could feel the three of us breathe again, and I was aware that we all had been a little on edge, watching Gemma-Kate without letting on to the others that we were doing so. We were all concerned for her, I thought.
Carlo smiled back and said, “No one has called me Father Carlo in a long, long time, Gemma-Kate. Rather than make a formal decision, why don’t we just wait to see what comes up at the moment?”
“All right,” she said.
Just then the Pug draped around my shoulder tried to french my nose, and I swatted him away.
“The Pugs adore Brigid,” Carlo said, his attention swaying back to me. He put his hand over mine and left it there.
I’m sure I was the only one who noticed Gemma-Kate watching Carlo’s hand on mine and the way she stiffened a bit.
She said, “Dad says animals don’t have feelings. Dad says if Aunt Brigid died and they were locked in the house with her without any other food they’d start eating her in a couple of days. First they’d eat whatever wasn’t clothed, like her hands and her face.”
Now, some out there might find a statement like that inappropriate, maybe even a little perverse. But to me it was just Quinn dinner conversation over the Hamburger Helper, Dad playing Make the Kids Gag. Carlo and Mallory were both stunned momentarily, though; you don’t say shit like that out of the blue in front of civilians. I felt sorry for Gemma-Kate because I’d stopped a conversation once or twice myself.
“Who wants some chicken tikka?” I said into the silence.
Four
Happily the chicken tikka was good enough to overcome any squeamishness about postmortem canine scavenging. We finished everything including the sauce, which we wiped up with the naan bread. I looked around the table and continued to marvel that I hadn’t made the food, I hadn’t even set the table, and yet I felt as if I had made this time for us where everyone was in sync somehow, in a family I had created. Look, after a long life lived alone except for the company of low-life criminals, I have a husband and a friend. We’re doing small talk. This is what normal life is like, I thought, the kind I had fought all those years to preserve for other people. And I didn’t even have to worry about arguments flaring the way they did with my family. I marveled at how good it could be, all of us laughing. I remember it so vividly because it was the last time together. Laughing, I mean.
After dinner Mallory said, “You know what would be even more fun than hanging around with a bunch of old people? Come to church. There’s a cute boy your age.”
“Oh, I don’t want to be any trouble,” Gemma-Kate said.
Gemma-Kate’s words sounded smooth, as if they had been practiced. And they didn’t sound like hers. I don’t want to be any trouble was Todd’s voice, something he would have told Gemma-Kate to say to us. I wondered what she would say if she finally spoke for herself.
“That would be good,” I said. “It’s a real small church, but I have seen a couple of kids there. It’s not like you have to join a youth group or anything.”
“Unless she wants to,” Mallory said. Before we knew it she’d arranged to pick up Gemma-Kate the following night for a telescope party at St. Martin’s.
With a my-work-is-done-here attitude, she hugged me and left in one of the few Jags I’ve ever seen in Tucson. Carlo stayed back to wash the plates and throw away the takeout containers while Gemma-Kate helped me give the Pugs their evening walk. We put on sweaters. In March after the sun went down a thick sweater felt good.
The winter rains had been ample, and when we stepped out the front door a chorus of frogs somewhere, crazy to mate after long hibernation, made the neighborhood sound like an amphibian singles bar.
Gemma-Kate didn’t object when I made her put on an LED light with an elastic headband. The beam ensured that if we heard a rattle we’d be able to see where it came from. It also allowed us to see where the Pugs pooped so we could pick it up.
With a warning about snakes—“Keep a tight leash, GK”—we set out, a Pug apiece, the male stopping methodically to mark posts, plants, and patches of gravel.
Gemma-Kate had been subdued, almost withdrawn, during the funeral days, but now she practically skipped down the sidewalk. While I was sure she must mourn the loss of her mother, I could understand how exhilarating it might feel to be liberated from illness and the rest of our family. Plus the wine, and moving in Mallory’s orbit, might have given her a double dose of perk.
She was happy to answer my questions. Yes, she was interested in moving to entirely new surroundings. Yes, she was excited about starting classes at the university. Yes, she wanted to see the Grand Canyon.
Knowing Gemma-Kate had an interest in biology, I pointed out the sparkles on the sidewalk that looked like pieces of glitter until they moved. I had discovered they were spiders, and the LED lights reflected off their eyes. Gemma-Kate counted them out loud as we walked.
I realized this was the first time we had been alone. With just the two of us, and the calm dark, it was a good time to feel her out a bit, get to know this almost stranger.
But Quinns are not known for their subtlety. “So how are you feeling?” I asked.
“How long have you known Mallory?” she asked, almost at the same time.
“About six months.”
“Did you give her a key to your house?”
“No, I told her what the code was for the automatic garage door and I left the door to the garage open.”
“Are you going to change the passcode?”
“No. Gemma-Kate, Mallory is a friend.”
“I wouldn’t let someone I didn’t know that well into my house when I wasn’t there.”
I tore a plastic bag off the roll attached to my Pug’s leash and stooped to pick up some poop. “You didn’t seem to dislike Mallory,” I said.
“Do you like her?”
“She’s the first friend I’ve ever had, after your Aunt Ariel and your mom.”
“I’m just, like, security conscious.”
“Spoken like a true cop’s daughter,” I said, wiping the Pug’s bottom so it wouldn’t make a spot on my new beige carpet.
We walked down to the end of the block, rounded the cul-de-sac, and started back, stopping once to pick up a little more poop next to a cactus that reminded me of the sweet dotted swiss dresses Mom made for me and my sister. Childhood wasn’t all bad. It seldom is.
“How are you feeling?” I tried again, trying to strike a sensitive auntly tone.
Fear the Darkness: A Thriller (Brigid Quinn Series Book 2) Page 3
