“Great, Karin, you’re a life saver. Now you know how to get here, right, or do you need—”
She assured him she knew the way, hung up, dumped the flowers in the weed pile at the side of the house, changed clothes, and fired up the pickup. It felt wrong to turn right on Midas instead of left, but she gritted her teeth and did it anyway. Traffic was light on I-80 going toward Sacramento, but Business-80 was another story. A stalled big rig in the center lane slowed things to a crawl just past the Watt exit, so that by the time she turned in to Hondas Forever—Frank waving as he emerged, briefcase in hand, from the showroom—she and a good half of the other drivers had turned their lights on.
Through the plate glass, she could make out a young couple talking to a salesman over paper. He was punching numbers into a calculator and jotting the results down on a yellow legal pad. A second salesman who’d been talking to Frank—overweight, bullet-headed, and looking like he’d kill for a cigar—stood by the door, his hands behind his back, watching Frank walk through the pickup’s headlights and giving Karin an appraising eye.
Frank opened her door. “Scoot over, honey, I’ll drive.”
“That’s okay, I’ll do it,” she said.
He looked arch, then smiled and shook his head. “I brought you out of your way. I admit it and I apologize. The least I can do is to take the brunt of rush hour on my shoulders.”
What the hell, she thought. It was a little thing to give in on. Sure, she’d looked forward to sulking at him from the driver’s seat, but she could do that just as well staring out the passenger side at the backs of malls and into the bubbles of other people’s lives as they whizzed by. “Suit yourself,” she said, unbelting, sliding over. The fat salesman was still mauling her with his eyes.
Frank got in and passed her his briefcase. It was the same one she’d watched him open and close the summer before at the defense table, slightly worn now but sturdy as always, FGT in raised gold beside the tumblers. She remembered his fingers dialing up the combination, the shy smile he gave her every day before the judge came in, the winning way he had of coaxing the truth, her truth, out of even the most hostile witnesses: John Conti, for example, one of Danny’s drinking buddies, who lived down the street still and who, Karin had no doubt, beat up on Viv, though nowhere near as bad as Danny. She set the briefcase down at her feet, leaning it against the door at an angle that ensured it wouldn’t fall back on her legs.
Frank slammed the door and leaned to kiss her before putting on his seat belt. She returned it, as perfunctory as all their kisses had become, and so too their weekend-only sex and their married life in general. “Thanks again for picking me up,” he said, then released her.
“What choice did I have?” she replied and gave him a look which made him laugh, but not before the barb caught him beneath the skin. She could see that happen, and she regretted it and felt pleased.
The ride home was uneventful. She was subliminally aware of the same old shitty super-highway macadam-scape skimming by as the night closed in and Frank babbled on and on about his latest series of cases and she gave out with the expected grunts and mutters and even one or two brief phrases that had all the conviction behind them of cold wet noodles. She even drifted back for a moment to assess the drama of Frank and the tailgater, size it up, and dismiss it from her thoughts. Her mind dwelt on the night, how that same light-leeching thief was closing bit by bit around her dead lover’s grave and the strewn dying flowers scattered over it and the Karin-shaped space next to it and the soft-spoken Mister Romano, whom she pictured absurdly as still on his porch, lacking the trigger of her visit to raise him out of his rocking chair and impel him into the house. She shouldn’t have missed her visit. She needed to be there, needed to talk with Danny, to beg his forgiveness, to feel the thick green grass and caress the blossoms she laid upon him.
By the time Frank pulled into the garage, doused the lights, and killed the motor, he’d caught on clear enough and lapsed into silence. They sat in the dark, listening to the engine tick down into silence. Karin felt hollowed out and filled with sadness.
Frank softly said, “We should have sold this fucking house.” His voice had no power in it, no hint that this idea expressed anything more than regret. He had made his bed. Weak, will-less, a little boy lost, that’s who she’d ended up marrying the second time around.
Karin unclasped her seatbelt and threw open the door. Frank, looking forlorn in the cold glow of the roof light, followed her lead. The fragrance of the house opened to embrace her as she unlocked the door separating the garage from the laundry room and went in. Frank was slower than usual in getting out so she didn’t bother holding the door for him, just went through the house turning on lights and adjusting the heat, giving kind words and caresses to her houseplants as she passed them.
In the kitchen, Karin closed the blinds at the south window and over the sliding glass doors to the east. In doing so, she skirted around the table she and Danny had once eaten all their meals at. Since Danny’s death, and especially since Frank had moved in, houseplants had taken over all but a small patch of the table. From there, they had come to spread throughout the house, something which Danny would not have tolerated—if he’d ever felt the urge to use the backyard, and thank God he hadn’t, she doubted she could have had even the comfort of her garden during those years—but which Frank seemed quite pleased about. During their initial months together here, he had delighted in learning the names of all of her plants, trading Latin phrases, one for one, with her, a legal term in trade for something out of Linnaeus. That game, however, as so much of what they shared initially, had fallen off in the past six months; she left the tags sticking up out of the soil for each new plant she bought, but she doubted that Frank paid any attention to them any more.
She was inspecting the underleaves of a Joseph’s Coat for red spider mite, pleased to find no sign of their tiny webs, when Frank, still in his three-piece suit, came over to the sill that separated kitchen from TV room. Lifting the key off the wallhook, he said, “I’ll go get the mail.” Then he was out the front door, which closed behind him with a solid ka-thunk.
***
Nona couldn’t remember being so fucking horny in her entire life. Until a year ago when he’d gone permanently soft on her, she’d had her big-dicked if butt-ugly spouse to fill in the gaps between lovers. Paunchy old Jimmy, a fast tongue to drive her wild and then the ramming of his huge tool to top her off. Add a comical always-on side to him, a willingness to look the other way when it came to her affairs, and he’d seemed the perfect mate.
But now her fields lay totally fallow. Art Crumley, who’d lived a block over on Pyrite Lane and whom she’d met two years before at Hank and Sarah Buntz’s Fourth of July block party, had been forced to relocate to Arizona when his company collapsed their Sacramento and Phoenix sales offices into one. Dave Meisner, quick delivery in and out and then a dash to his truck—even kept his genuine U.S. Post Office pith helmet on if she asked him to—had been switched last month to a new route on the other side of town, and he’d been too chickenshit (or maybe the skinny bastard just didn’t care a whizz about her—sometimes she thought he liked the idea of shtupping her more than actually doing it) to arrange anything special, some shit about a wife with the eyes of a ferret and an overbite to match. And then there was Danny Daniels, fucking studbuns with a torso that made her weak just to think about, laid low by a shiv in the heart. Sure he beat the bitch that stuck it to him (she’d heard that shit transpiring once or twice when he forgot to shut the windows), but he loved to get real submissive with her, take orders, lick where she told him to, let her take him over her naked lap and tug off his sweatpants so she could feel his firm hot rod at her pussy and pressed into her thighs, its tip drooling, as the whack of her hairbrush brought a rosy blush to his butt.
Danny’s loss had been a real tragedy.
Then, not long after, Jimmy’d gone limp. Just like that. Nothing she could do, he neither, to get a rise out
of him. Dead dangle of salami. Took the zing out of his tongue too, those rare times she forgot what a frustration it was not to be able to follow through, and let him feast on her, closing her eyes because she could only get off by remembering how good he used to be. On top of that, his back operation had laid him low for two solid weeks last month, forcing her to play nursemaid to an invalid, giving her a taste of what it would be like if she grew old with the impotent son-of-a-bitch.
She took a drag on her mentholated Camel—Fuck the pristine lungs of all anti-smokers!—leaning against the wall and looking out into the night. Lovely Rocklin, two-bit burg, no coherence at all, former quarry town, bedroom community for those who hadn’t a clue about what bedrooms were for. She’d been born in Roseville thirty-six years ago, split to L.A. in ’75 after squeaking out of Oakmont High with a C minus, two abortions, and the shattered ruins of her biology teacher’s career sizzling in the local paper for a while, then came back and played prodigal daughter after Tinsel Town—all take and no give to the young and fuckable—started stroking her flesh with one beguiling hand while scooping the life out of her with the other. Saw a friend go down and die; pulled out of that shit in time to come crying home to mama. But now, it sure felt like time to cut loose again, get out of this dead end of a nothing town, and see the world. Atlanta was supposed to be nice, Seattle maybe, or Nashville—any place but Rocklin or Roseville. Get her head together, figure out what was worth doing in this lousy world.
Then she heard the neighbors’ door open and shut. In the moonlight, she saw Frank Tanner strut down the walkway to the sidewalk. He looked refreshing and rich, compared to Jimmy anyway, in that killer suit of his. Then she saw the mailbox key in his hand and before she had a chance to formulate it, the plan sprang full-blown into her head and made her turn abruptly from the window. The suddenness of her movement made Queenie’s ears perk up where she sat on the rug near the front door. She barked once, then again, lifting her melt-brown collie eyes to Nona. Jimmy looked up from his evening paper: “What’s up, sugar pie?”
“Nothin’,” she said. With one hand she grabbed the mailbox key out of the tin on the kitchen counter. With the other she tossed her cigarette into a sinkful of suds, heard it hiss. Stepping into her clogs by the door and snapping her fingers to command Queenie to sit—which she immediately, if forlornly, did—Nona smoothed her shorts over the perfect curves of her butt. The clogs’ bright red straps matched her toenail polish. A quick primp of her nipples through the tube top to make sure they showed against the cloth and she was out the door, clocking on the pavement, putting an extra sway into her hips against the moment Frank Tanner was sure to turn around.
He was past the Ryders’ driveway when he glanced back at her. Didn’t break stride. Just gave a little wave and kept on to the blocky stand of mailboxes stacked four high and two wide, two bins for larger packages on a stand next to them. By the time she reached him, Frank had a hefty stack of mail in his left hand and the key to one of the package bins in his right.
“Evening, Nona. How’s it going?” He had that sharp lawyer look she liked. The cut of his clothes went right up his chiseled face into his eyes, made them glint in the moonlight like gold coins. She liked that.
“Fine, Frank,” she said, making a show of running her fingers along the silver edge of the mailbox and inserting her key. “Looks like you hit the jackpot.”
“Usual bills and junk mail,” he said, smiling.
She laughed, then leaned forward to reach into her box, her full breasts straining outward as she arched her back, bending one long smooth leg slightly at the knee so that her clog dangled. “Nothing for poor Nona tonight, I guess, and I was so looking forward to finding something long and white and stiff in my box.”
“Um, expecting an important piece of mail?”
“Yes, Frank,” she said, “the most important piece I can think of.” Her clog clattered to the sidewalk. She slowly straightened. “Oh, how stupid of me.”
“Here, Nona, I’ll get that.” In a flash he had set his mail on the sidewalk and retrieved the clog. She steadied herself on the mailbox stand and lifted her foot, feeling the heat of Frank’s hand on her ankle and heel. His gaze flickered up the smooth expanse of her leg, right straight up one inner thigh to the creased prize she kept between both of them, then back down to the clog he slipped onto her foot.
“Nice tight fit,” she joked. “Don’t bother wrapping them. I’ll wear them out of the store.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, that sexy smile still on his lips. “Come back often. And bring your friends.”
“I’d love that.” Her voice turned soft and serious now. “But I’ll leave my friends out of it. All but one silky smooth one. She likes to be licked. And fed.”
Frank retrieved his mail and rose. She moved closer to him. The smile was gone from his lips. “I’ve got to get back home, Nona.”
“Would you like to feed my friend?”
“I’m sorry, Nona.”
“I think you would.”
“I can’t give you what you want.”
“I think you have something nice and hard for her to suck on.” She was getting to him, she could sense it, but this one was going to take some work, that much was clear. Faithful husbands. She’d run up against a few of those in her time, very few, but she’d never met one that succeeded in resisting her, once she set her sights on him.
He pulled away, fumbled the key into the package bin lock. “I’ll say this much for you, Nona,” he said. “You are a lovely lady. But I’ve seen first hand what happens when husbands and wives cheat on each other, and I’d just as soon not start down that road.”
She smiled. “That’s okay, Frank.” He pulled out a small brown parcel, some book club thing, and tucked it in his left hand with the sheaf of mail. His right hand fell free and she took it, feeling only a tremor of resistance. “Just remember this.” She brought the back of his hand to her shorts, pressed it in and up so that she felt herself open slightly against him, then released him, turned away, and sauntered off, smiling with the certainty that Mister Frank Tanner would soon be hers.
***
Jimmy set his paper down and watched Nona’s long legs in perfect strut turn the sidewalk into a runway. What a lovely supercharged animal he’d by some miracle managed to marry. So now she was after his foxy neighbor’s second husband. He wondered what had taken her so long.
Scrabbling on the tile before the front door, Queenie barked happily when the door opened and Nona came in. She bent to Queenie and chucked her under the chin. “You bad dog,” she mock-scolded. “Are you a bad dog? Yes you are, you Lassie dog, you!” Then she snapped her fingers, said “Come on, girl!” and Queenie dashed after her, Nona’s body blessing the air she moved through. She let Queenie out the sliding door in the kitchen, then lit up a cigarette and returned to the living room.
It had always pleased Jimmy to run his eyes along the sleek contours of her body. But that pleasure had dimmed since the onset of impotence (“erectile dysfunction” was what Doctor Briggs liked to call it)—more precisely it’d been too mixed with bitterness for him to dwell very long on the delights of Nona’s body. But in recent weeks, as he ticked off the days in his head, the old excitement had returned and grown near to bursting; if anything, he found himself more excited than he could remember, excited about having back what he thought he’d lost forever, and excited about surprising Nona with his new gift.
“You are one hell of a sexy lady, Nona.”
She glared at him, kicked off her clogs, flumped down in her armchair, and tucked her legs under her, releasing a smoke ring from the O of her carmine lips. “Fat lot of good it does me in this house,” she said, staring out into the night. Her eyes followed Frank Tanner, and Jimmy too watched him pass by the picture window.
“Six weeks.”
“Mmmm?”
“The operation was six weeks ago tomorrow.”
“Yeah? So?” she challenged. Then, a hint of caring in
her voice: “Fancy back specialist think everything’s okay? Or does he want to soak us for more money?”
“Everything’s fine.” The agony from his visit three weeks before, when Briggs had first pumped him up, spiked back into memory; it had felt like being hit in the balls with a hockey puck. But today’s visit had turned anxiety to elation as first the doctor, then Jimmy himself, put a hand to his scrotum and squeezed the pump implanted there ten or twelve times to get him hard, then hit the release valve to deflate him. No pain. Just this giddy sensation in his head at how odd it was to be erect without stroking himself or thinking lusty thoughts, and the beginnings of the Nona-anticipation he was feeling now. “In fact,” said Jimmy, “I have a confession to make.”
“So go see a priest.”
“It wasn’t exactly my back that was fixed.”
Nona perked up. She’d caught the leer in his voice, the old lure he hadn’t thrown out in quite a while. “What exactly are you saying?”
“I think you know.”
“You’re not a limp noodle any more?”
“All I’m saying is don’t go making plans for tomorrow night, all right?”
Nona set her cigarette down in the crimped groove of her golden ashtray and rose from her chair. She slinked toward him in a way that would have instantly hardened his penis in the old days. There was a rush of blood to his head but nowhere else. Fine. He’d show her tomorrow the permanency of his love for her, his new staying power in bed. Perhaps she’d stray no more.
She knelt by his chair, put her hand on his thigh and her mouth to his ear. He could smell the tempting tobacco on her breath. “And just what,” her fingers moved on his thigh, “did you have in mind for tomorrow, lover boy?”
“Well, I—” He tried to squirm away before she could grab him, but her hand was too eager. “Don’t, baby. Wait until tomorrow.” Her nails squished into softness beneath his fly. She squeezed him once, then let go, like she was tossing down a dishrag, and stood up.
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