10:22.
No time to go to the market. Perhaps pork chops à la moutarde instead? She swung open the freezer door, eyeballing a lone package of center-cut beauties. Once a pig, squealing with all its fleshy might, now six slabs of dead meat carved without pity. Dead, dead, dead. She became overwhelmed by the existential futility of life. Hope rang as hollow as a bad joke with no punch line.
Worst of all her ex-husband showed no remorse for his sins. He lived like a king with his new queen in the home that should have been hers.
So what are you going to do?
JJ kicked the freezer door shut and attacked the broken wastebasket, trying once again to correct its failure. But no. No go. Her throat tightened, her eyes glistened, her gut churned.
So what are you going to do? Nora demanded again.
JJ emptied the Simplehuman of its spoiled contents and dropped the family utility knife inside for future use.
11:13.
She maneuvered her brother’s precertified Prius with the WAR IS NOT THE ANSWER bumper sticker into a handicapped parking place on Marengo Avenue. After a quick check in the rearview mirror, she reapplied her seashell-pink lipstick, yanked the recalcitrant wastebasket from the back seat and embarked on a mission of restitution.
The Container Store of Old Pasadena, just a stone’s throw from the police station, welcomed her with open arms. Cheerful signs proclaiming the SUPER THANKSGIVING SALE were plastered across the windows. Fierce and feisty, JJ darted between the customers trotting out of the store with their overstuffed bags. She had come to get hers and she meant business. This time she would not, could not, fail. Other wronged women were depending on her.
JJ marched in to Customer Service and made her case. The twenty-something clerk, a pretty gatekeeper with luminous dark hair worn in the exact style as JJ’s former secretary, denied her request.
“This model was phased out, ma’am.”
“That’s hard to believe.” JJ’s eyes narrowed. The bitch was playing her.
“Lack of customer interest.”
JJ demanded to see the manager.
Ordered, yes, ordered to wait, without so much as a please or thank you, JJ cast an iron glare toward the man in charge. When the manager did not return her mano a mano greeting, she was struck by his strong physical resemblance to her ex-husband.
Planting herself in plain sight against the counter, JJ rocked the wastebasket like a newborn, the clanging utility knife sliding to and fro inside. Then she leaned closer to study the clerk’s smooth, unscarred brow.
“Can you move aside?” the unnerved clerk asked. “We have other customers to serve.”
“How much longer do you expect me to wait?”
“Maybe you’d like to do some shopping until he’s free?”
“Tell him JJ Underwood has his number. If he’s not here in five minutes, I’m calling the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to file a complaint.”
The clerk reacted, making eye contact with her boss.
JJ powered down the aisles looking for comfort. There were poor substitutes, lined up like relatives offering tuna casseroles at a funeral, and she ripped through them all. Three-bin laundry sorters. Heavy-duty triple-storage pails. Dual-purpose dish racks. Soft-tip bottle brushes. Collapsible strainers. Closet organizers with matching shoeboxes. All featured in the Thanksgiving Sale along with the Snapware collection. But Snapware was not dishwasher safe. She had learned this, like so much in her life, the hard way.
“Ma’am, may I help you?”
A young box boy yammered in her ear, but JJ refused to pay him any mind. Wasn’t it obvious she didn’t need any help? Before perhaps, when she had entered the store. Or seven years ago when the shit hit the fan. That would have been the time to offer a scrap of compassion. But nobody was listening then, were they? No. Nobody was listening despite her Herculean effort to expose the truth and make wrong right. So she took matters into her own hands with the guidance of dear, dear Nora.
“Ma’am, please?”
JJ flipped the kid off, then hustled back to the Customer Service counter and thumped the manager on his cold shoulder. Irritated and impatient, the man finally faced her. JJ noted he did not apologize for his inexcusable behavior. When she demanded restitution for his store’s shoddy merchandise, he waved her off, suggesting that she just buy a new one.
“Are you telling me you’re refusing to give me the replacement I deserve?”
JJ’s gaze riveted on the display just over the manager’s right shoulder. Stainless steel ice buckets with matching tongs. Ice picks, too.
“Excuse me.” His dismissal was withering. “I have other guests waiting.”
“ ‘Guests’?”
That ridiculous corporate euphemism would not work, no sir. Her face hardening into a brittle bruise, JJ edified the manager about the just and proper thing to do. In exchange for the money spent on this very wastebasket only six months ago (she remembered the exact date because it was the first Tuesday afternoon she’d met with her probation officer), The Container Store needed to replace the damaged item.
“Give me a break. It’s not the store’s fault that you broke the wastebasket.”
She did not break it. Ask her brother, a medical professional incapable of lying, unlike her father and husband. She simply wanted her Simplehuman wastebasket with the pop-up top to work the way it was designed.
“Butterfly pop-up top,” the condescending manager corrected her. “Model X 118. The company discontinued that line in April, so we couldn’t replace this item even if it was our responsibility, which it isn’t. Next guest!”
A snaking line of customers behind JJ muttered and moaned.
“Move it, lady! What the hell’s wrong with you?”
JJ spun around. Wrong? With her? He was the asshole! Her thoughts raced. When the going gets tough, the tough get going, no use crying over spilled milk, where there is a will, there is a way.
I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope that you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there.
Her partner’s words were coming faster now. Stronger and louder.
JJ pulled out the unsharpened utility knife and slammed the broken wastebasket against a HOLIDAY HELPMATES FOR THE HOSTESS display. Her weapon of defense held high, she raced toward the terrified manager. Yelling for help, he ran in the opposite direction, knocking down a stack of Snapware as he skidded ’round the corner.
“Buyer beware!” she screamed. “Buyer be aware!”
Fish-eyed customers dashed out of her way. JJ worried for an instant that her seashell-pink lipstick, the same perfect shade worn on her wedding day, might be smeared. No matter. She vaulted down the next aisle with a new surge of energy. This was no place for a moment of vanity. Insanity, perhaps, but not vanity. She snickered at her clever wordplay. Ignored, insulted, and inconvenienced, she could still access a sturdy sense of humor. Wouldn’t Nora be amused?
And then JJ froze at the vision in her path.
A Simplehuman display mounted on a giant red triangle next to the service elevator!
Tears of gratitude stung JJ’s eyes. She did not hear the police sirens wailing in the distance. Her handy utility knife at the ready, she rushed over to slash open one cardboard box after another, looking for just the right Simplehuman to take home. Industrial strength staples shredded her cuticles but for the first time she could remember, she felt no pain. JJ moved forward with passion and purpose, leaving no box unopened.
“God, please, no!”
The hyperventilating manager, now exposed from his hiding place behind the giant red triangle, collapsed to his knees.
In a rage of righteousness JJ pointed to the display. “You lied to me.”
“No.”
“Yes, you did.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sor
ry, I’m so sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Yes, yes, I swear! Please don’t kill me.”
Why would she? The man apologized.
Above all, be the heroine in your own life, not the victim.
Her right hand still holding the knife, JJ extended her left to the repentant manager. He recoiled, still terrified. She wiggled her fingers, motioning him toward her.
“I won’t hurt you.”
“You won’t?”
JJ shook her head, her fingers spread wide. Beckoning him closer.
The manager stumbled up, his knees shaking.
Just as he stood, a nervous security guard advanced behind them. His revolver was drawn and aimed at the weapon-wielding crazy woman.
The guard did not see the cardboard debris in his path. He tripped. His gun discharged. The bullet tore into the manager’s belly.
The wounded man fell forward onto JJ. Red pumped through his shirt, his blood saturating them both.
JJ dropped her knife and lowered his body to the floor. She cradled his head in her waiting lap.
“It’s not too late, is it?”
Nora’s rom-coms always ended with a kiss. Not a slap. Not a slash. Not a vengeful accusation.
“Sweetheart?”
JJ pressed her mouth to his, shooting her tongue between his fleshy lips. Into a warm wet vise of memory…
Witnesses to the shooting at The Container Store gave conflicting reports to police officers. Several customers said a disturbed woman tried to knife the manager after a price dispute. Others credit her as the Good Samaritan who gave the critically injured man mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and saved his life….
—Pasadena Independent, November 28, 2017
Hector’s Bees
AMANDA WITT
A moment of forgetfulness saved Estelle’s life. That, and a penchant for margaritas.
She lived in a small cabin built by her husband on a gated gravel road that curved up the eastern side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Hector was six months dead, but alive he had been a gifted craftsman, in great demand among locals and summer tourists alike. The locals hired him for skilled carpentry, for bookshelves and cedar chests, baby cradles and rocking chairs. The tourists hired him to lay bridges across streams, assemble benches in picturesque spots, and build enormous structures they called, without irony, “cabins.” They then labeled Hector’s creations with kitschy wooden signs: NINA’S NOOK, MIKE’S MEDITATION, KAREN’S KABIN, BAILEY’S BLESSING.
Thinking of it, Estelle rolled her eyes.
No one saw her. She lived alone, the nearest house a quarter of a mile away, well hidden by pines and the contour of the land. And besides, she was in the bath.
It was an inviolable part of her new-widow routine. Each day she rose before dawn and briskly set about tending their five acres, cleaning their cabin—theirs truly was a cabin—and replenishing her stock of Authentic Handmade Mexican Jewelry. She worked hard, because Hector would have frowned to see her bow before the black depression that stalked her day by day. She worked hard because sweat staved off despair.
But at five o’clock, Estelle mourned. She mixed a pitcher of margaritas, stripped off her clothes, and slid into a warm unscented bath, where she remained throughout the long mountain dusk, until night fell and she could prepare a small supper, conclude the day’s chores, and tumble into night’s oblivion. It was, she thought, as good a routine as any for salving a broken heart.
Especially the margaritas.
Above her head, the curtains on the window fluttered in a breeze replete with the distinctive scent of the New Mexico mountains—pine, dust, sunbaked ancient rock. From the amplified iPhone charging dock on the windowsill, Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee” blasted on repeat, a grim whimsy, the soaring and dipping violins evoking the honeybee’s clumsy cousin. And Estelle after five o’clock, bumbling through her evenings half drunk.
The bath, the breeze, the margaritas, the music. And beneath the music, unheard but always humming in her bones, ran the hypnotic buzz of Hector’s bees.
Hector. His teeth flashing white when he laughed, his hands firm and sure with hammer and chisel, saw and lathe. His body, broken and bleeding in the creek at the bottom of a rocky 30-foot drop.
Estelle flinched. The water in the tub eddied around her body, much as the water in the creek had eddied around his.
Thus ran her thoughts. Once, she might have lain in the bath studying her smooth legs, the slight rise of her belly, the swell of her breasts, trying to see herself through Hector’s eyes. Now she was forty-five years old, too young to be a widow, perhaps too old to attract another man or to want him if she did. She wanted only Hector, and he was gone. Murdered.
The sheriff and the neighbors disagreed. They avoided her eyes when they ran into her at the postal boxes down at the base of the mountain; they mumbled greetings, their faces averted in embarrassment. They blamed Hector. They blamed Blue Canyon Road.
It was a bad road, one lane that curved, rose, fell. Trees bent over it, underbrush crawled into it, giant boulders marked its every zig and zag. People drove too quickly, took blind turns fast because they took them every day. But there were safety precautions. Locals and summer people alike knew to keep their windows rolled down, their radios off; to tap their horns before descending Red Flag Hill; and, if walking, to step off the road at the faintest distant growl of an engine.
As Hector must have done; as Hector always did.
Yet he died. And the driver did not stop.
Outside the window, the mood of the bees shifted. Even through the haze of warm water, the depths of her grief, the music, Estelle felt their gentle drone sharpen.
Sliding deeper into the water, she closed her eyes.
Bees didn’t like strong odors, so she bathed without scent. They didn’t like dark colors, so her wardrobe leaned to light. They loved flowers, so for them Hector and Estelle had planted lavender, raspberries, fireweed. And then there were the rain barrels—bees preferred slightly stagnant water—and the 8-foot-tall fence, painstakingly built with metal posts set in concrete, 12 inches apart, lined with half-inch 19-gauge chicken wire. The fence discouraged bears, raccoons, skunks, anything that might threaten the hives, and Estelle had planted vines on it, green tendrils dripping with pale blossoms that opened at dusk.
The bees were not ungrateful. They provided ample supplies of golden honey, which Hector and Estelle sold in the square in Santa Fe, along with the jewelry. The bees were their children, Hector’s passion. When Hector died, she had told the bees the bad news and hung their hives with black.
Above her head, a single bee drifted in through the window, drifted back out again.
Hector had loved to articulate the moods of the bees. They’re finding the weather too warm, he’d say when they were lined up at the entrances to their hives, fanning madly with their tiny wings. They’re having a street party meant they were bearding, hanging off the front of the hives in squirming, buzzing curtains. They’re calling the children home—that was Estelle’s favorite—when the bees fanned hard, their little bottoms sticking up in the air to expose their Nasonov glands, releasing pheromones in a lemony scent that acted like a trail of breadcrumbs for their wandering progeny.
Tonight, the bees were angry.
So was she.
The musical bumblebee bumbled in its flight, violins swooping and bobbing from the phone on the windowsill. Eyes still closed, Estelle reached for her margarita, but her hand found only cold porcelain.
She opened her eyes.
She had erred. Her towel lay within easy reach, draped discreetly over her security blanket—Hector’s .357 Magnum—but the frosted glass and full pitcher sat on the vanity cabinet, on the other side of the sink.
Estelle got to her feet, water streaming down her legs. She didn’t
lean or stretch. Better two extra steps and some water on the floor than a slip and a fall. She was alone in the world. If she knocked herself out, she might lie there all night. On the cold tiles, as the temperature dropped, there at 8,000 feet above sea level. With the window open and the front door unlocked. Unconscious, wet, exposed, she could die before morning. And she wasn’t ready yet to die. Not with Hector’s killer still unidentified, still free.
So she stepped out of the tub onto the small worn mat. She was reaching for the margarita, already tasting it on her tongue, salt and lime, already feeling the loosening warmth of tequila trickling through her veins, when a loud pop made her jump and turn.
From the window, a hand withdrew. In the water, the music died in a spray of blue sparks, an angry hissing sizzle. Then, with an echoing bang, the transformer halfway up the mountain blew.
The shock held her motionless for one heartbeat, two. Someone had knocked her phone setup into the tub. Who, she didn’t know. She had caught but a glimpse, the curtains blocking her view. And she couldn’t look out the window—that would require she step into water still swimming with the death spasms of her ruined phone.
So she ran. Opening the bathroom door, she raced for the front of the house, for the exterior door, trailing streams of water as she went, tracking wet footprints across the wooden planks. The bathroom window was inside the fenced-in hive area; the intruder would exit through the apiary gate. She had to get there first.
Snatching her shotgun off its hooks, she shoved open the front door.
The evening air hit her wet body, raising goosebumps. Racking the shotgun, Estelle stepped out onto the raised wooden porch and turned left, toward the apiary gate. It moved gently, swinging shut.
Estelle strode down the three steps, shotgun raised and ready. Her heart pounded in her ears. Hector’s killer had come for her; that was proof. He had been stolen, not lost through random accident or indifferent hap. His death was deliberate, done with design.
Odd Partners Page 23
