He picked away at more of the loose grout with the knife. I felt a responsibility to make conversation.
“So you work for Valley Forest?” I said.
Rick slowly turned so he could look at me over his shoulder. “You figured that out, huh?”
I went downstairs. I saw Trixie approaching the front door and opened it before she had a chance to knock.
“Hey,” she said.
“I’ve got one of Valley Forest’s finest upstairs looking at the shower. I’m hoping he won’t run off with Sarah’s flowered soap collection.”
We went into the kitchen and I got out two cups.
“Sorry I dropped by unexpectedly,” I said. “I would have called, but I didn’t have your number, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I don’t even know your last name.”
Trixie smiled. “Snelling.”
I tried to recall all the names I’d scanned under accountants in the phone book. I couldn’t recall seeing Snelling. So I mentioned it.
“I’m not in the book yet,” Trixie said. “Should be in the next one.”
I put Trixie’s coffee in front of her, then some more of those Peek Freans. “I guess your next appointment showed up just as I was leaving.”
“Yeah, he was a bit early.”
“I was trying to think whether I knew him from anywhere,” I said. “Or whether he knew me.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Because he looked at me and winked.”
Trixie blew on her coffee, grabbed a cookie. “Really.”
“It just struck me as odd.”
Trixie seemed not to care. She chewed on her cookie. “So what were you coming over for? Unless it was to invite me over for coffee, which is a good enough reason.”
“First of all, I was going to ask you, officially, if you’d do my tax stuff. Figure out my deductions, file my return, you know.”
“Sure. No problem.”
“But not for free. I don’t want to take advantage. Just charge me whatever your going rate is.” I paused. “What is the going rate?”
And there was that twinkle in Trixie’s eye again. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I can probably do it in no time, I’ve got the program on my computer.”
“If you’re not going to charge me, I’ll find someone else.”
She took a sip of her coffee. “Fine. I’ll bill you. Will that make you happy?”
I sat down across from her and grabbed a cookie. “The neighborhood’s been kind of funny lately, don’t you think?” I said.
Trixie cocked her head slightly. “What do you mean?”
“Odd things going on. Like what happened down at the creek. That guy, who wanted to preserve Willow Creek, who got killed?”
“I heard about that. A real shame.”
I told her my role.
“God,” she said. “I never found a dead person.”
“I saw him a few days earlier, at the sales office. He got in this big argument with Greenway, you know, the hot shit who’s in charge of the development.”
Trixie nodded knowingly, like maybe she knew this Greenway character. I didn’t ask.
“I had been over there, asking about getting someone to fix that hole.” I pointed up by the pot lights. “And fix the shower, where the water was leaking from, and this Spender comes in and they start yelling at each other.” I gave Trixie a few more details, how Spender said he couldn’t be bought, about Greenway ordering him out.
“And then there’s Earl,” I said. I waited to see whether Trixie would pick up on my opening.
“What about Earl?” she asked.
“Have you noticed anything, I don’t know, out of the ordinary at Earl’s place?”
Trixie studied me, bit softly into her lower lip. She seemed to be sizing me up, deciding what I might or might not know, and what she might be willing to let on that she knew. Finally, she said, “You mean the fact that Earl has a huge pot business in his basement? Is that what you’re referring to?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That would be it.”
“Look,” Trixie said. “You know me. I don’t judge. Live and let live. Take what I do.” She paused. “People tell me their secrets, their financial secrets, and it takes a lot for people to open up enough, to trust you enough, to tell you what’s going on with their lives. So you learn to be accepting. Earl’s never caused me any trouble. Take you, for example. When you moved in here, and I found out you were a writer, I thought, I’m okay with that.”
I was taken aback. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
“Well, writers can be kind of weird, but like I said, I try not to judge.”
Trixie finished her coffee. “You said you wanted my phone number.”
I handed her my list, said she could write it on there. But first she read what I had written.
“If you get around to sticking that dynamite up Greenway’s ass, give me a call before you light the fuse. That would be something to see.”
I blushed. “I guess I better throw that out. Write your number at the bottom and I’ll tear it off.”
When Trixie left, I slipped the sheet of paper with the phone number on it into the front cover of my address book. Then I heard Rick coming down the stairs.
“All fixed?” I said cheerily.
“I dug out the grouting,” he said, buttoning up his jacket.
“And regrouted?”
“Nope. I’ll have to come back to do that.”
“You don’t have that stuff with you?”
“Like I said, I’ll be back.”
“Like, later today?”
“No. Sometime.”
“Tomorrow? Because, you know, we can’t take a shower there the way it is now.”
“You got other bathrooms, right? Use a bathtub.”
And he left without saying anything else.
I went up to the bathroom to see what he’d accomplished. Crumbs of grouting were littered across the floor of the shower and the bathroom, mixed in with small chunks of mud that had come off Rick’s boots. I shook my head, was about to go look for the vacuum, and something caught my eye.
Actually, it was the absence of something that caught my eye. The brass candlestick that should have been on the vanity was gone.
The theft left me rattled. At first I thought maybe I’d been mistaken, that I hadn’t seen the candlestick only moments before in the bathroom. But I knew it had been there. It wasn’t as though someone had broken in and made off with all our appliances. The candlestick was a small thing, something Sarah had picked up at a flea market for under twenty bucks, but that didn’t make me feel any less angry. It was the gall, the nerve, that shook me. That Rick the Grout Flinger, that useless son of a bitch, would think he could just pick up something of ours and walk out of the house with it, it seemed unthinkable.
I wanted to get on the phone, get Don Greenway on the line, and tell him he better send Rick right back here, not just to fix our fucking shower, but to return our fucking candlestick. But I knew how that would go. The last part, anyway. Assuming Greenway even bothered to ask Rick about it, Rick would deny it. And then where would I be? Would Detective Flint put aside his murder investigation to find the notorious Walker residence candlestick thief?
So this was life in the middle of the boring burbs. Our developer was sending thieves to deal with our leaky shower, there was a basement marijuana farm across the street, and I’d found a murdered environmentalist in the creek.
Maybe that lovely house on Driftwood Drive with the fountain out front was the new headquarters for the Mob? Were the Hells Angels opening their latest chapter on Lilac Lane? Were Al Qaeda terrorists planning their next attack from that new house on Coventry Garden Circle where sod was being laid yesterday?
When Paul came home from school, and later Angie, I told them I wanted to talk to them, with their mother, that evening. When Sarah arrived, I told her there was something I’d been waiting to discuss with the entire family. I gathered everyone in the kitchen. S
arah took a seat, Paul leaned up against the fridge, Angie stood in the doorway so she could make a fast getaway. I took up a position by the dishwasher.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ve tried to ease up a bit lately on the safety stuff. Not hound people about keys and locking doors and all that kind of thing, but I’m just a bit worried that people are going to become complacent without some friendly reminders.”
No one said anything.
“There are bad things going on in this neighborhood. Just because this isn’t the city doesn’t mean people out here can’t be up to no good. I mean, it was good, moving out here, and while there’ve been the odd rough spots, that you”-I spoke to Angie-“don’t care much for your school, and I know there’s a bit of a commute for your mom”-Sarah just stared at me-“and if anyone seems to be adjusting out here, it’s Paul, but the point I’m trying to make is, we have to be on guard, we have to be watching over our shoulder, we have to keep our eyes peeled for anything unusual.”
Still no one said anything, although I noticed the three of them exchanging glances.
“So we’re agreed? We remain on alert, we watch ourselves, we don’t do anything foolish? No purses left on the front seat of the car, no keys in the front door, no leaving the door unlocked when we go to bed at night. Just general commonsense rules is all I’m asking for here.”
Angie cleared her throat. It appeared that she was going to be the first to weigh in with some useful suggestions as to how we could live our lives more safely.
“Is anyone else concerned about the fact that Dad has turned into this paranoid freakout crazy person?”
10
This might be a good time to revisit what I would call the Asshole Issue.
Maybe you’ve already reached a conclusion. Let’s say you’ve voted in the yes column. Zack Walker is an asshole. No doubt about it. Made up your mind during The Backpack Incident, haven’t looked back. If that’s how you feel now, I don’t see you changing your mind anytime soon.
But maybe you’ve been less quick to judge. Maybe you’re on the fence. You understand how a man’s concern for his family could lead him to behave a bit irrationally at times. You’ve been there. Well, we’re coming to the part that will reinforce your convictions, one way or the other.
A day or so after my safety lecture, Sarah and I had gone over to Mindy’s Market to pick up a few items. Despite my rant, I was trying to be less fanatical in my approach to family safety, and part of that included being more relaxed generally about things. So when Sarah arrived home and said she wanted to go and pick up some groceries, I offered to come along. I’d been in my office, making pencil notations on some pages I’d just printed out, and met her at the front door after she changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater. We each grabbed light jackets because, even though we were well into spring, there was a cool wind blowing in from the north.
There was lots to talk about. At least lots for Sarah to talk about. It had been a busy day at The Metropolitan.
“So I tell Leanne, you know Leanne?”
I said yes.
“I want her to go down to the waterfront, where there’s a press conference being called by Alderman Winsted, about all this garbage that’s piling up by the yacht club, but it’s raining out, and she says she can’t go because the ground’s going to be soft and mushy, and she’s wearing this new Donna Karan thing, and these nice shoes, because she thought she was going up to cover the Wang trial-”
“The which?”
“Wang. The guy who cut up his girlfriend and dropped her body parts all over five counties.”
“Okay.”
I was struggling to release a cart, which was jammed into the next one.
“Except the Wang thing has been put off a day, and Walters called in sick-”
“Again?”
“I know, this is like the fourth time in two months, and it’s always his first day back after a couple off, and he always calls from Ottawa, where he’s boffing this chick from the Citizen, and the way I figure it, he just wants a long weekend, right? And then the M.E. wants to know why some fucking moron copy editor rewrote Owen’s story about the guy who was charged with possessing all this kiddie porn, and his defense is artistic freedom, and I say, maybe it’s because Owen wouldn’t know an interesting opening sentence if it came along and bit him on his nose, and he says that may be true, but maybe next time, the copy editor could rewrite it in such a way that she doesn’t switch the names of the accused and the defense lawyer. Anyway, what happened with you today?”
“Nothing.” I had the cart free now and we were trolling past a display of fresh fruit.
“Did you hear from the kids today?” Sarah asked.
Paul had phoned on his cell around noon to ask whether I could check in his room and see whether he’d left a science assignment on top of his dresser. I was on the cordless. “Okay, I’m in your room now, looking at the top of your dresser, and I see no science assignment,” I said.
He paused at the other end of the line. “Pull back my covers and see if it’s in my bed.”
I tried that. “No luck,” I said. “But I have found a Penthouse.”
“Never mind.”
I hadn’t heard anything from Angie, although before leaving in the morning she informed me that I owed her $127. Had I borrowed $127 from her, I asked, because if I had, my memory had been wiped clean of the incident. She sighed and reminded me that we had agreed to reimburse her for half of the cost of her new pants and top, an arrangement about which I knew nothing.
“I told her that,” Sarah said.
“Well then, you owe her $127.”
Sarah said we needed romaine, maybe a couple of steaks, and we were totally out of fabric softener. I expressed concern about how often we were using the barbecue, which, by the way, I still had to get fixed.
“There was a story, in your paper, about how when meat cooks over hot coals, it turns into pure cancer.”
“Don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” she said. As we passed the newsstand, the cover of Time, which was about a new blockbuster science fiction movie, caught my eye.
“I’ll just be a sec,” I said, and Sarah rolled on ahead without me.
I flipped through the Time, glanced at the covers of several other magazines (Oprah had managed to make the cover of her own magazine again, which I thought warranted some sort of inquiry), and quickly scanned my eye over the newly released paperback novels. By the time I decided to rejoin Sarah, she was long gone.
I walked along the front of the store, between the checkouts and the ends of the aisles, peering down each one, looking for a glimpse of her.
I spotted her down the aisle where they kept all the pastas and tomato sauces and twenty-three different kinds of Kraft Dinner. She was about three-quarters of the way down, and about halfway stood a nearly empty shopping cart, purse tucked into the spot where you can place small children. As is usually the case, Sarah had her eyes on the shelves, and not on the cart, or the purse. Fortunately, there was no one else anywhere near the cart, so she wasn’t immediately at risk of having it snatched.
I passed by the only other person in the aisle, a young blonde woman in an off-white suit looking at garbage bags, and as I approached Sarah I waited to see when she might take her eyes off the various spaghetti sauces to check that her purse was still where she’d left it in the cart.
I was doing a slow burn.
It was clear that I was completely wasting my time trying to get anyone in my household to exercise even the most basic level of common sense. I had, I knew, become something of a nag where Sarah and her purse were concerned. There had been stories on the news. That woman with the lottery ticket. That other woman, who’d lost the pictures of her sister’s wedding. There were some things you just didn’t do, and leaving your purse unattended in a busy grocery store was one of them.
It appeared, from where I was standing, that the purse wasn’t even snapped shut at the top. Wasn’t that thou
ghtful. A thief didn’t even have to go to the trouble of running off with her purse, he could just peek inside and help himself to what he wanted.
What was she thinking? You need your hands free when you’re shopping, she’d tell me.
You might think that a woman who spends her day sending journalists to court to write about men who’ve cut their girlfriends up into bits and distributed them like Wal-Mart flyers would be aware that there are a lot of not-nice people out there. People who might walk off with a woman’s purse while she is debating the merits of onion-and-garlic versus three-cheese pasta sauce.
It was only a matter of time before someone walked off with that purse. So I had a choice to make. Would it be a stranger, or would it be me?
Don’t do it, my conscience said. Don’t do it.
The incident over the keys, and my hiding her car, seemed largely forgotten. We were talking to each other, Sarah and I. Things had been fairly remarkable between the sheets the last week or so, and I had performed, if I may say so, spectacularly. There was peace in our time.
And yet.
I could stand by the cart, guard the purse while Sarah perused sauce. But what about next time, when I wasn’t with her? While she had her back turned for only a minute, someone would quietly loop his hand around the strap and tuck that purse inside his jacket.
I had the power to do something instructive. Something helpful.
I sidled past the cart, empty but for a package of low-fat cookies. Was Sarah about to make us all start watching our calories? I came up alongside her and said, “You almost done?”
“I thought it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a couple of extra things. You know how you walk around, you see things you need that you forgot you needed.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, sneaking a look back at the cart. “Look,” I said. “If you don’t mind, since it looks like you’re going to be in here longer than you originally planned, I’m going to go wait for you in the car.”
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