Deadly Housewives (v5) (epub)

by Marcia Muller

  From the street, Annie finger-waved and blew a kiss at the red-brick bungalow next door. The front windows’ homespun flax curtains hung as creased and droopy as a thrift-store linen suit. Bagworms festooned the evergreens and yellow jackets circled above them. Both thrived on the earth-friendly insecticide Barbara Amos spritzed on the boughs with a recycled glass-cleaner bottle.

  About now she was preparing a snack for her three-year-old daughter, Isla, and Annie’s son, Tyler. The towheaded epicure said Barb’s wheat-germ cookies and soy milk tasted “icky-nassy.” They probably did, but drizzle on enough honey and the kid would eat baked gravel.

  Aside from their same-age children, Annie and Barb orbited different planets. But her neighbor wouldn’t tell Buddha himself that Tyler was there, what time Annie left, where she went, or how long she’d be gone.

  “If you ever want to knock off your mother-in-law,” Barb said, when Annie had smuggled Tyler through her back door, “no jury in the world would convict you.”

  She was joking, of course, and it was an old saw, at that. The woman was such a pacifist, she couldn’t snap bagworms off her bushes and roast them in a coffee can, like the guy at the hardware store advised. Barb had just tossed off the remark, as people do to commiserate, coax a smile, or better yet, a chuckle.

  Chances were, she assumed Annie’s complaints about Thalia were exaggerated. Barb knew the Cadillac commandeered Annie’s driveway two or three times a day and cruised past the house at all hours, but “Didn’t you say Lars’s dad died a few months before you got married? Well, my guess is, Thalia’s lonely. Losing her husband, then sort-of her son…”

  Annie’s fingers tightened on the Beemer’s steering wheel. “Yeah, and I’ll bet Lars DeArmond Senior’s first words to Saint Peter were, ‘What the hell took you so long?’”

  Lonely was your parents and younger brother dying in a freak interstate pileup when you’re a freshman in college. Lonely was quitting a dream job rather than take maternity leave because your husband loathed day care and insisted his perfect mother was willing, able, and eager to babysit for free.

  “Over my dead body,” Annie told him then, and repeated now to the dashboard. “Want to know what lonely is? It’s sneaking out of your own freakin’ house and taking the truck route through town for a doctor’s appointment so the monster-in-law won’t spot your car and tail you.”

  Miracle of miracles, today’s getaway had been clean. Except staying off the main drags fostered conspicuousness of a different stripe.

  A population migration and subsequent business relocation to Haupberg’s south side hadn’t been kind to its historic commercial district. Every decade or two, an influx of federal grant money kindled a sort-of municipal CPR to resuscitate what the fifties urban-renewal projects hadn’t demolished and paved over. Preservation was a lovely idea, residents agreed, but who had time to drive downtown to shop, when the mall was an exit-ramp away?

  The plywood-clad storefronts and ware houses Annie passed seemed more ominous than desolate. So did the human derelicts staring from doorways and weedy lots strewn with garbage and God knew what else.

  Zagging around potholes, jouncing over railroad tracks, she regretted the false economy of buying regular tires, not run-flats. Focused on a traffic signal several blocks ahead, she wished something heavy metal and anarchist—Led Zeppelin, or Slayer—would kick up on her mental jukebox to drown out Sesame Street’s singsongy, One of these things is not like the others; one of these things doesn’t belong.

  The roads less traveled and leaving early to compensate for a long-cut put her at the Medical Arts Center with lots of time to spare. She hurried across the parking lot, eager to speed-read waiting-room copies of Metropolitan Home, Vanity Fair, Town & Country, and Time. The “Sexiest Man Alive” issue of People she’d seen on the supermarket rack would be snuck into the exam room to distract her from the strip down to a paper gown and gynecological body-cavity search.

  Magazine subscriptions were slashed from their postnuptial bud get when the two-can-live-as-cheaply-as-one adage became the world’s third biggest lie. Particularly for her and Lars, who’d literally bought into the Y generation’s “live for today, pay the minimum balance due, tomorrow.”

  All she’d had to show for four years of busting her chops at an ad agency were two closetsful of clothes, some excellent furniture, thousands of accrued airline miles, a brushed chrome Jura Capresso machine, the loan on the BMW, and nine platinum credit cards.

  Lars’s financial situation was similar, excluding the wardrobe, furniture, and cool kitchenware. And on his debit side was forty-some grand in student loans.

  In a panic, Annie demanded they live on his salary and devote hers to digging out of the money pit. They’d rented the cheap, crappy house in Maple Heights, frozen one emergency credit card in a former orange juice carton, closed the others, and pared expenditures to bare essentials.

  Within months of rededicating her income to saving for a house, the baby boy who would be Tyler John DeArmond, not Lars Prescott DeArmond the Third, became the oral contraceptive’s tenth-of-one-percenter.

  Now entering the medical center’s windowless lobby, Annie was temporarily blinded by the eclipse from sunlight to the windowless gloom. A shiver slithered from nape to belt line. The interior’s meat-locker chill had less to do with the thermostat setting as the blouse glued in the swale between her shoulder blades.

  It brought to mind Tyler’s cute little bubble butt wreathed in the toilet paper her mother-in-law slipcovered the seat with, whenever he needed to “do a number two.”

  Fine for public restrooms, Annie allowed, though studies showed doorknobs were germier than the commodes and catching an STD from a toilet seat was an old wives’ tale. But Thalia didn’t layer just public facilities with yards of commercial-grade-one ply before her grandson ascended the throne.

  “She damn near gift wraps our toilet,” Annie fumed at her husband. “But hers? Uh-uhhh. Tyler goes bare-ass commando at her house.”

  “He’s her first grandchild,” Lars said, in that be-reasonable tone Annie had come to despise. “You can’t blame Mom for being overly cautious.”

  Men were from Mars. Women were from Venus. Lars sometimes acted like he was from Pluto. And levelheaded, fiercely in dependent orphan Annie McGruder fell for him before the cop called to the scene of their fender bender finished writing Lars a ticket for following too close.

  Kismet, their friends called it, ignoring the fact that Lars was an insurance agent’s nightmare: an entry-level engineer prone to build castles in the air and neglect to register the significance of mundane objects, such as stop signs and glowing taillights.

  “Aw, give the guy a break,” she muttered, twisting the doorknob to Dr. Blaine’s office. There’d been strides. He hadn’t caved anybody’s bumper since Tyler was born. Most days, his socks matched his slacks and each other. He wasn’t exceptionally ambitious, but worked hard and without complaint. Bit by scrounged bit, their savings account was growing again. If an alien abduction could be arranged for his mother, life would almost be lemonade.

  In the meantime, she thought, get the Pap smear over with, otherwise known as the annual gynecological extortion paid for pharmaceutical birth control. Then splurge and take the only man you’ve ever loved to lunch.

  Come to think of it, wasn’t Tuesday buy-one-boiled-shrimp-basket-get-one-free day at the Crab Shack? If they ordered ice water instead of sodas, they could stuff themselves for under ten bucks.

  Special-schmecial. Live a little. By default, the kitschy seafood joint was the only restaurant in town that had stayed exclusively and sentimentally theirs. One whiff of crab boil and Thalia broke out in hives and clutched at her throat, wheezing and gasping for air. Poor dear.

  A definite cheerful lilt inflected Annie’s voice as she gave her name to Wilma, Dr. Blaine’s receptionist. A fat-barreled highlighter rambled well down the appointment schedule before it fluoresced Ann DeArmond.

  Glancing at h
er desk clock, Wilma said, “You might oughta check your watch, hon. Seems it’s running a mite fast.” Disinclined to reveal her magazine addiction, Annie said, “I used to fly standby a lot.” Wilma’s blank expression prompted, “You know, get your name on the list for an earlier flight, then if a passenger is late…”

  Business-class road warrior evidently wasn’t part of Wilma’s work history. Annie motioned fuhgeddaboutit and headed for the longer leg of the L-shaped room.

  An unspoken physicians’-and dental-office-waiting-room protocol clustered most patients in chairs the farthest distance from the corridor leading to the treatment rooms. Nurses weren’t fond of tracking down and flushing out their quarries, but the arrangement was a boon to Annie. Periodicals in what she dubbed the Ix-nay Zone were always current, undog-eared, and nobody’d ripped out an article’s last page to pocket a coupon for a quarter off a tub of margarine or a roll of paper towels.

  Rounding the corner, she halted, then rocked backward, like a mime simulating a collision with a utility pole. On the vinyl-cushioned settee abutting a lamp table crouched Thalia DeArmond, perusing the eye-candy issue of People Annie had mental dibbies on.

  Her mother-in-law wasn’t one of Dr. Blaine’s patients—the primary reason Annie was. Because Lars told Thalia everything, Annie hadn’t mentioned her appointment, or noted it on the calendar magnetically attached to the refrigerator. The old witch couldn’t have followed her and beat her to the waiting room, unless she’d traded her car for a way-back machine.

  “What are you doing here? Better question—how’d you know I was going to be here?”

  Thalia’s lipless mouth bowed into a smile. “I told you yesterday, Wilma had called to remind you of your appointment while you were out in the yard with my grandson.”

  “No, you didn’t—”

  “Since you didn’t ask me to babysit, I presumed you were bringing him with you.” She crossed her arms at her chest. “Lars agreed, little boys have no business in an examination room with their mothers. I promised I’d come and keep Tyler company out here.”

  Leaning sideward to peer around Annie, she inquired, “He is with you, isn’t he?”

  Before Annie could respond, Thalia jolted upright and shrieked, “Oh my Lord, Annie. You didn’t leave the baby locked in the car, did you?” implying “again,” loud and clear enough to be heard at the Quick-Shop a half block away.

  Trembling, pulse throbbing in her temples, Annie felt a reddish skim veiling her eyes—it was pale where the cone of light projected upward from the lampshade, but a deep, almost scarlet hue washed the mauve wallpaper, the magazine rack, and her mother-in-law’s bottle-black hair and smug, triumphant leer.

  No jury in the world would convict you. No jury in the world would convict you…The litany pounding in sync with Annie’s heartbeat had a strange, hypnotic quality—calming, and gradually congealing into an icy, viscous hatred.

  “Tyler is not in the car. Please, don’t take my word for it. Go see for yourself, then get in yours and go home.”

  For the benefit of the gawkers watching from the room’s far end, the angles and planes of Thalia’s face melted into a whipped-puppy expression. “Why are you always so mean to me? I was only trying to help.”

  A blond lab tech whose name Annie couldn’t have mustered had it been tattooed on her brow shouldered open the door to the office’s inner sanctum. “Oh—hi, Mrs. DeArmond. Wilma told me you were early. Good thing. The doc wants a urine sample and some blood work done, before the exam.”

  Casting a glare at Thalia, Annie followed the tech, waiting for the pneumatic door to reclose, turning a corner into a narrower hallway before asking, “Is there a back way out of here?”

  Rachel, Annie remembered belatedly, chuckled and said, “I’m a wiz at drawing blood. Scout’s honor, you’ll barely feel the needle.”

  “I meant for after I’m finished with Dr. Blaine. Is there another exit, so I don’t have to walk through the waiting room?”

  “Sure.” Rachel pointed a purple envelope file at a door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. “It locks from the inside, though. Forget something, and you’ll have to hoof it all the way around the complex to the main entrance.”

  Forget. Forgive and forget. Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. Annie envisioned a laminated sign her younger brother had bought at a gift shop in Yellowstone National Park and taped to his bedroom door: NO TRESPASSERS. VIOLATORS WILL BE BEATEN, SHOT, STABBED, AND LEFT FOR BUZZARD BAIT.

  Nice sentiment, Annie thought, but one peck at Thalia, the ultimate trespasser, and the birds’d york all over themselves.

  An hour later, she was slumped over in her car, crying into a wad of Burger King napkins, feeling like her head would explode, like she was about to throw up, like she was being persecuted for an unpardonable sin she didn’t remember committing.

  “What are the odds of my birth control failing twice in three years?” she’d raged at Dr. Blaine. “Less than being struck by lightning is what you said after Tyler was born.”

  The gynecologist shook her head. “I think you misheard me, Mrs. DeArmond. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent effective isn’t quite the same—”

  “Ninety-nine, a hundred, ten thousand percent—the numbers don’t matter. Not if my mother-in-law switched them with something else. And that’s exactly what she did—no freakin’ doubt about it. Why else would she be here, camped out in the waiting room?”

  Pushing off from the exam table, Annie paced the room, her feet bare, the flimsy paper gown swishing around her knees. “For all I know, she did it three years ago. The old bitch was obsessed with having a grandchild. Except all the horror stories about day care she told Lars backfired, when I quit my job instead of letting her babysit Tyler like she’d planned.”

  Dr. Blaine said nothing, her gaze lowering to the file open on her lap.

  “Hey, I don’t expect you to believe me. I’m the crazy one, right? Totally bat shit, with a major Hansel and Gretel fixation. It’s just coincidence that both times we started saving for a house, the money ends up paying the maternity deductible on our health insurance.”

  Reliving the scene she’d made set off a fresh wave of tears. Maybe she was crazy to accuse Thalia of tampering with her birth-control pills. Maybe, like Dr. Blaine suggested, the antibiotic the dentist had given her after a wisdom-tooth extraction had inhibited the oral contraceptive’s plasma level—whatever the hell that meant.

  During those three or four agonizing days, she might not have taken the Pill as usual at the consistent stroke of 8 A.M. Not with her jaw so swollen, she had to borrow Tyler’s sippy cup to drink her morning coffee.

  It would also have been the perfect opportunity for Thalia to pull a switcheroo. Grogged out on Vicodin, Annie wouldn’t have noticed if the tablets in the dispenser had Scooby-Doo’s face stamped on them.

  She blew her nose into the now-soggy napkins, sighed, and let her head loll against the Beemer’s leather rest. Dr. Blaine’s verdict hadn’t been a complete surprise. Insisting everything’s fine. That you aren’t a machine, or you are, thus minor malfunctions are givens, and that a deal made with God is a deal, not wishful thinking with religious overtones that don’t always achieve the desired result.

  Instead of the curse friends suffered every month, Annie’s periods seldom escalated above a mild epithet. With the right attitude, spotting can be construed as the real thing, only less, probably because bikini season was on the horizon and she’d stepped up the exercise, the fresh vegetables and fruits, the water intake.

  She was healthy, well-nourished, buff, and pregnant. And no way could they afford two kids on one paycheck. Before long, Mommy would be the frantic woman who raced out the door every morning and shuffled home exhausted around dinnertime. Tyler whining, “But Gammaw said I could” or “Gammaw does it this way, Mommy,” would become a constant irritant, not just a frequent one.

  Mommy. Annie’s palm slid up from her thigh and caressed her belly
. Still as flat as a jillion postpartum sit-ups could make it, yet something swelled inside, and she’d swear she smelled baby powder and lotion and that wondrous, indescribable scent of a newborn asleep in her arms.

  Funny, in the manner her dad described as “hmm, not ha-ha.” Who’d have guessed Ms. Hotshot ad exec would suddenly go marshmallowy at the thought of another baby to love and cuddle and sing lullabies to?

  “Don’t worry, kid,” she whispered. “Your mom’s a pretty smart chick, if she doesn’t say so herself. I’ll think of something.”

  She didn’t take Lars to the Crab Shack for lunch. Not with her eyes buggy and bloodshot from crying. The dude at McDonald’s drive-thru couldn’t have cared less had she sprouted horns and fangs.

  Besides, minutes after she got home, when Lars rushed through the front door in full wild-man furl, he already knew about the baby. Thalia had laid the groundwork for the announcement with her bogus concern about Tyler’s potential front-row peek at a pelvic exam.

  “She had to tell me,” Lars said. “While she was waiting around at Blaine’s office to apologize for the misunderstanding about Tyler, she overheard a couple of nurses talking about how upset you were. Mom asked the lady at the desk if she could go to the exam room—you know, for moral support. They told her you’d already stormed out the back door.

  “Mom looked everywhere for you, then came to my office, thinking that’s where you must have gone.” Gathering Annie in his arms, he buried his face in her hair. “If you’d seen her—Christ, I was terrified the doctor said you had cancer or something. Mom didn’t have any choice but to tell me about the baby. Then when you didn’t answer the phone…I mean, she didn’t come right out and say it, but from what she’d overheard, she was afraid you might—”

  “Might what?” Annie pushed him away. “Haul ass to the nearest abortion clinic?” Her laugh melded bitter with manic. “Encores aren’t usually her style.”