by David Six
He tilted his head, and she stood at the top of the ravine, hands on her hips. She had always been beautiful, and if he’d been more of a man, he might have noticed that she flaunted herself to other men, even when he was with her. But a man smitten is a man blinded.
“I told you to come back to the car, wimp,” she continued, now waving her slender, Pilates-muscled arms at him. “Or do you want me to tell Katy that her father abandoned her mother as well as his daughter?”
He said nothing. When she wound up to full battering mode, he had learned not to respond; it was like pouring gasoline on a tire fire.
She took a step down the slope. “You are just lying there like the worthless fool that you are.” She hooked her arm around the trunk of a sapling as her Manolo Blahnik heels slid on the slippery leaves, and caught herself. “My mother was right—you are worthless piss of shit.” She imitated her mother’s thick Polish accent.
She let her arm slide against the trunk of the sapling, snagging the sleeve of her cashmere cardigan and pulling loose a ragged loop of wool yarn.
“Now look at what you have done,” she screeched. “That was my favorite cardie!” She shook her fist at him, forgetting it was the one that had been holding onto the tree.
Her dark eyes went wide as she lost her balance in her heels, at first backpedaling as she tried to regain her footing. Her left shoe flew off her perfect foot, the red heel with the encrusted jeweled thing on the toe turning end over end in the air and landing upslope behind his head.
But she did not. Scrabbling her feet like a cat in the cartoons that Katy loved, she first fell onto her shapely rear as he had done, but her downhill momentum carried her torso forward, the heavy breasts she had made him buy her toppling her until she was somersaulting down the hill faster and faster.
She screamed, the sound a wayuh-wayuh-WAYUH as she spun and spun. He leaped to his feet, scrambling up the slope to slow her tumble, but as he crouched to catch her, her round body hit a small boulder partially submerged in the leaves like an iceberg in the ocean, and she launched over his head.
“Wayuh-wayuh-WAYUH!” he heard as she passed above him.
He jerked around, losing his own footing and falling again, just in time to see her strike the branch of an oak that was outstretched like an arm to receive her.
“Wayuh-wayuh-WA—” The sound cut off as the branch speared through her chest, stopping her fall at last.
He shouted something like, “No!”, and just stared as she hung fifteen feet above him, impaled through her proud chest. Blood—a lot of blood—dripped down her left arm and splattered like rain on the leaves below.
He stared for several moments, but she did not move. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the cellphone that would be deactivated in three days due to nonpayment, and dialed nine-one-one.
When the dispatcher answered, he said, “There’s been an accident.”
I Love Him
“He doesn’t want to see you,” her father said.
“His parents called us,” her mother said.
“I love him,” she said. “He wants to be with me.”
“You are only fifteen,” her mother said. “He doesn’t want to see you.”
“You slept with him, and now you are pregnant,” her father said.
“I love him,” she said. “We are having a baby.”
“You are too young!” her mother said.
“He is too young,” her father said. “He doesn’t want to see you.”
“I love him,” she said. “We will be very happy.”
“My poor baby,” her mother sobbed.
“Go to your room,” her father said. “You will never see him again.”
She went to her room. Later, she apologized to her parents and offered to make dinner so that they could be one happy family again.
“We are sorry this has happened to you,” her mother said.
“But of course we must take you to the clinic to terminate your pregnancy,” her father said.
She brought her parents each a glass of wine and bid them relax while she cooked. When dinner was ready, she called them to the table and served them the lasagna casserole she had made.
“This is delicious,” her mother said, taking a bite.
“We are sorry you cannot see him anymore, but you will find someone else,” her father said, gobbling the lasagna on his plate and getting seconds and then thirds. Even her mother had a second helping.
Later, she watched while her parents staggered and fell to the floor, confusion in their eyes as their bodies became paralyzed, their breathing labored.
She stood over them, looking down at them as their hearts fluttered and rattled in their chests, their lips turning blue, their eyes filled now with fear.
“I love him,” she said to them. “He loves me. He loves our baby. We will be together.”
As her parents lay dying on the wood floor next to the dinner table, she went to the kitchen and carefully wrapped in foil the second lasagna casserole she had cooked. She stepped over her parents and went out the front door with the covered dish.
She would go to his house. She would say sorry to his parents as she had to her own, and then she would offer them the special apology dinner she had made, just for them.
She would be together with him and their baby.
She loved him.
Laugh Dance
When I came in the front door from work, I found my five-year-old daughter hopping and gyrating around the living room like she was covered in fire ants.
“What are you doing, sweetheart?” I asked, tossing my briefcase onto the coffee table.
“I’m doing a laugh dance, Daddy,” she shrilled, out of breath as she leaped up on the sofa and off the end, making me cringe that she’d smack her little head on the fieldstone fireplace hearth.
“That’s nice… Wait. What did you say you were doing?”
“A laugh dance,” she giggled, bouncing over in front of me and jumping in the air.
I frowned. “Where did you hear… uh, laugh dance?”
“From Tommy,” she panted, now tumbling across the carpet like a forty-inch acrobat.
“Tommy Archer, next door?” I was still trying to process “laugh” dance.
“Yuh-huh,” she answered, twirling around my lounger.
“And where did Tommy hear that?”
“Dunno. Oh, his Daddy said he likes laugh dances to old Mister Figgins, when Tommy was helping him cut the grass.” She tried doing a backbend, but collapsed on the floor, laughing until she started to cough.
I helped her up and hugged her. Bob Archer, Tommy’s dad, was about to get an earful from me.
I hollered into the kitchen, “Going next door, hon. Back in a few.”
Though I could hear my wife clattering the pots and pans as she prepared dinner, she didn’t answer—which was more and more the norm these days.
I took off my suit jacket and tossed it over the back of my lounger, then went out into the late July afternoon heat. I crossed my lawn and cut through the gap in the hedgerow I shared with Bob, across his drive, and up to his door.
He answered after the first knock.
“Hey, Rog,” he said. “Just getting home? What can I do you for? Want a beer?”
“Uh, Bob, maybe you want to come outside a minute,” I said.
He did, his eyes narrowing a little. “What’s up? You look like somebody kicked your puppy.”
“Bob, did you talk to old man Figgins about getting lap dances?”
“I might have. Why?”
“Because Janey’s over there doing a ‘laugh’ dance she says she heard about from Tommy.”
His eyes widened a second as he took in the look on my face. “Aw, hell, Rog. I’m sorrier’n shit for that. Tommy must’ve been listening.”
“They’re kids, Bob. They’re always listening when we don’t want them to.”
He blinked. “Yo
u said Janey’s doing a… uh, dance?”
“She doesn’t know what she’s doing. She’s just hopping around the living room.”
He let out a breath. “I really am sorry, Rog.”
“Just try to keep your extracurricular activities away from the kids.” I turned to go.
“Hey, Rog…”
I turned back. He was looking at me with his head cocked sideways, like he wanted to say something, but wasn’t sure he really wanted to. After a moment he gave a little nod, as if he’d decided. He came down onto his walkway and lowered his voice.
“You know Mel and I have been having our troubles, right?” he said. “I mean, you can’t help but hear us when we’re fighting about something.” He tried to make it a joke, but the laugh came out like a stepped-on squeezebox.
“Welcome to the club,” I said. “It’s not just you and Melanie.”
“You and Sally too?” He lifted his brows. “I had no idea.”
“Guess we just fight more quietly,” I said.
“Well, I sure am sorry to hear that.”
I waved my hand. “What can you do?”
“Bill Carlson said he and his gal are having their troubles too,” Bob went on.
I began to feel uncomfortable; I wasn’t one to get into the neighbors’ business, which was sometimes difficult to avoid on a cul-de-sac like ours—the circle of two-story houses hulking like a curved wall at the dead end acted like the Hollywood Bowl for sound.
“I should probably get home for dinner,” I said, making a move to go.
He put his hand on my arm. “Hold up, Rog. I want to show you something.”
The last time Bob wanted to show me something, it was his new eighty-inch flat screen. “What do you want me to see?”
“Come on.” He led the way to his garage and through the open door.
I followed him to the front of Mel’s red Mercedes GLE, where he kept his workbench. I saw him glance at the door to the interior of the house, and I did too, not knowing why we did that. He bent down and opened the cabinet beneath his bench and pulled out an orange Home Depot bucket filled with rags. After another glance at the house door—he was beginning to annoy me with the cloak-and-dagger—he pulled off the top layer of rags and held out the bucket.
“What?” I said. “Rags?”
“Look in the bucket.” He had a funny look on his face.
I looked. “A big rag covered in paint?”
“Look closer.”
I was getting hungry for dinner, so to hurry this along I took the bucket from him and moved away from the dark area in front of the Mercedes to the open garage doorway. I felt Bob cringing and looking at the house door as he followed me.
“Red paint,” I said, once I got the bucket into the light. He shook his head just as something registered in my brain. I looked again.
“Blood?”
He got a look that was part vindicated smile and part thumbtack-in-the-shoe.
I reached into the bucket, but he grabbed my wrist.
“Better not,” he said.
“Bob,” I said, handing the bucket back to him, “what am I looking at? That’s a lot of blood on that rag.”
“It’s a bath towel from the master bathroom,” he said. “I found it in the hamper this morning.”
I got a jolt. “Is Mel okay? Tommy?”
He was nodding up and down like a bobblehead. “Everybody’s fine.”
I peered in the bucket again. A metallic smell rose from it; the blood wasn’t quite dry. “Then where did it come from?” I said.
“I don’t know.”
“What did Mel say when you asked her?”
He looked at the floor.
“You didn’t ask her,” I said. “Why not?”
He shrugged.
I frowned. “Bob, are you thinking that Mel did something—”
He threw up his hands. “I don’t know what to think.”
“So what do you want from me?”
He ran his hand back through his thinning hair. It plastered to his head from the sweat prickling his scalp. “I don’t know. I just wanted someone to see this, tell me I’m not imagining things.” He looked at the blood-soaked towel in the bucket. “That’s way too much blood even if she gave herself a good cut shaving her legs.”
“No shit,” I said. “That’s more blood than if all the women in this cul-de-sac cut themselves shaving. That looks like a quart, at least.”
He took the orange bucket and replaced the rags on top of the bloody towel, then put the bucket back in the cabinet.
“Why are you keeping that?” I said. “Just toss it in the garbage. Or let Mel clean it—she was obviously planning to.”
He shrugged again. “It’s too late now. She emptied the hamper earlier when she did laundry—she knows the towel is gone.”
“I’d suggest talking to her.”
“Right,” he snorted. “Because you and Sally are such great communicators, you can teach us lowly mortals.”
“All right, Bob,” I said, feeling my neck heat. “I’m going for dinner now. Thanks for the Halloween show.”
I went back through the hedge, feeling pissed, but also uneasy without knowing why.
Sally and I did our usual thing at dinner, which was focus on Janey and the joys and tribulations of her little world, instead of on each other. After, Sally did the cleanup while I retired to the living room to watch a game. Maybe “retreated” would be a better word—long gone were the days when I used to dry the dishes as Sally washed them, the two of us laughing at something silly. Now, she wanted me nowhere near the kitchen. My wife was unhappy, had been for a long time, and I had no clue what to do to fix it.
I tucked Janey into bed after her bath, smoothing her soft blond hair against her warm little head and giving her the three kisses she demanded each night: forehead, right cheek, left cheek. I added a raspberry blow on her tummy for good measure, which made her giggle hysterically like it always did.
The rest of the week went as it usually did—work, home, work, home. I don’t think Sally and I exchanged ten words the entire week.
On the weekend I got to feeling guilty about how I’d left things with Bob, so I took our usual six-pack of Pilsner Urquell over and knocked on the door. Mel answered, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
“Hi, Mel,” I said. “How are you?”
“Fine, Roger.” Melanie Archer always called me Roger, instead of Rog, like everyone else.
“Bob around?”
“He’s out of town on business,” she said. “He didn’t tell you he was going?”
“Didn’t say a word.”
She smiled. “Well, I’m sure you boys can drink your beer when he gets home.” She stepped back and closed the door.
That was a bit odd. Mel had never been the friendliest to me—in fact, I’d always found both her demeanor and voice a bit cold—but she had never shut the door in my face before. I took my beer and went home.
Later that night, I woke from a sound sleep. The glowing blue numbers on the clock by the bed said “2:37 AM”. Sally was breathing softly next to me. I didn’t have to pee all that urgently, so I stared at the ceiling fan spinning slowly and wondered what had woken me up.
I figured as long as I was awake I might as well hit the bathroom, so I got up and took care of that. On the way back to bed, I heard a sharp scraping noise coming through the window I insisted we keep open for fresh air. I paused and looked out.
I saw, in the light of the half-moon, a dark slender shape in the back yard next door—no, two shapes. People. I rubbed the grit from my eyes. Both were female, and after a second I recognized one as Melanie—I’d know her curves anywhere. The other… I could swear it was Bill Carlson’s wife, Edie.
What were they doing?
Whatever it was, it looked like they’d just finished, because Mel let go of what she was holding—maybe a shovel? It hit the dirt with a muted thud. They g
iggled, and Edie said, “Shh!” Then the two of them laughed again and put their arms around each other’s waists, danced themselves in a circle, and walked back to Mel’s house.
They must have been drunk. Lots of times the neighborhood wives kept each other company overnight when their husbands went out of town on business. Edie must have come to hang out with Melanie while Bob was gone, and the two of them had gotten into the merlot, big-time. Still, what were they doing in the back yard in the wee hours?
I went back to bed, but sleep was a long time coming.
Tuesday night I came home to tears—some from Sally, but mostly from Mel. My wife and next door neighbor were sitting in the kitchen, drinking Chablis and sobbing. Melanie’s face was a delta of mascara rivers, and Sally’s wasn’t far behind.
“Girls?” I said, coming into the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”
They turned on me like two pissed-off cats. “Bob left Mel!” Sally spat. “Why didn’t you tell her he was planning to leave?”
“Bastard,” Mel said to me, dabbing at her eyes with Sally’s good cloth napkins and taking a sip of wine.
I spread my hands. “I had no idea,” I said. “Really!”
Mel frowned. “So Bob didn’t tell you he’d been going to see strippers and getting lap dances?”
I winced, looking around instinctively for Janey, but I could hear her upstairs talking to her dolls.
“Well…uh,” I said.
“Yeah, thanks a lot, Roger,” Mel said in a voice that could freeze vodka, running the napkin beneath her eyes and giving me a fatal knife wound with her look.
“The asshole ran off with one of his chippies,” Sally said, glowering at me.
Who says “chippie”? “I honestly had no idea,” I said. They were looking at me like I was the one who’d abandoned them.
“Sure you didn’t,” they both said, like a chorus.
“Just go,” Sally said. “Take Janey to McDonald’s. I’m going to stay with Mel.”
“Okay, sure,” I said, backing out of the kitchen as if I expected flying shrapnel.
When I got home from getting Janey burgers and a shake, the house was quiet. Sally must have gone to Mel’s to continue the consoling, but no way was I walking over there into that buzz saw to find out. I put Janey to bed and went myself soon after.
