The People Next Door (10 page)

This is not my daughter. It’s an alien life form. A minion of Satan.

‘Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy! I want my
Daaaaaaaaa-ddeeeEEE!
’

If it was her daughter, she would know how to make it stop screaming.

‘Lemme go! Lemme go! Daddy, you have to bring Daddy home now!’

Amy’s body was being used as an ultimate fighting ring for B, who was shaking, slapping, kicking and burning hot with the
fire of her shrieking. For the past ten minutes, she had been using her Soothing Mommy voice, but if this went on much longer
she thought she might be justified in breaking out her Thermonuclear Mommy voice, and quite possibly the soft end of the pink
leather belt laced through her daughter’s Gap Kids skinny jeans. But the mere thought of hitting Briela made Amy feel sick,
so goddamn her husband for putting her in this position.

‘Daddy’s on his way home, sweetie. Listen,
listen
to Mommy, Briela stop, stop it,
would you please stop
. He’ll be here soon.’

‘No-no-nunh-nunh-nunh,’ Briela said, the argument grinding out from her belly. Her stringy blonde hair whirling, blue eyes
rolling, spittle flying. ‘He’s not, he’s not coming home! You have to make him, makedaddycomehomenow!’

‘I’m trying!’

Briela’s patent leather Mary-Janes – the ones with heels like sharpened hockey pucks – began chorus-line popping up at Amy’s
chin, so close she could see the surprisingly thick sweep of blonde hairs on the fleshy caps. A heel stamped down on Amy’s
shin, the plastic edge biting into the bevel of tibia and muscle before scraping out and continuing down with a knife-like
swipe.

She howled and lost control, jerking away. She meant only to release her daughter as she hopped to her feet, but wound up
knocking Briela back. The girl snagged a heel on the thick carpet and slumped into a wailing pile of defeat.

‘Goddamn it, B, you hurt Mommy
bad
. Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you!’

Amy barely recognized her own voice, and this scared her. She limped a few paces and rolled Briela over, checking her for
welts or scrapes just in case, but there were none. Briela jerked away, downshifting into a quieter series of sobs and soon
would be empty chuffing herself into sleep.

Enough. Enough for now. She had to deal with her leg. She couldn’t talk any more, even if she thought talking might help.
But after fits of this magnitude, Briela never remembered much of what had triggered
them, let alone the softer cooings that brought the proceedings to a close. Amy hobbled to the door and looked back.

‘I don’t give a shit how upset you are. Daddy working late is no excuse for this behavior. It’s not okay to lash out at Mommy.
Never, ever …’ At which point she hated the petulant, playground inflection in her voice and left.

In the kids’ bathroom, she dragged the small first-aid kit from under the sink and sat on the toilet, resting the leg along
the edge of the tub. She rolled up her pant cuff and gritted her teeth. The gash was less than an inch from end to end, but
deep, not so much a cut as a disturbing dent that had probably bruised the bone. She rubbed it weakly, bandaged it.

First she imagines a wolf-boy and throws a fit at the ice-cream shop. Now she’s in a state because her father – who almost
drowned yesterday – is working late. That had to be it. Briela was processing her father’s accident, and his old work habits
were no longer acceptable. Well, that makes two of us who are fed up with it.

She stood over the sink and dumped three ibuprofen into her palm, but did not swallow them. She was numb, she realized, and
she almost wished she could feel the pain. She dropped the pills in the trash and stared at herself in the mirror. Her mascara
had run, her face was pale, blotchy and bloated, and Pillsbury orange cinnamon roll frosting – tonight they had tried baking
together, but when the rolls were finished Briela spat hers out and said it tasted like toothpaste – was smeared
into her hair like highlights from the Special Moms Only salon.

She limped into the hall and poked her head in Briela’s bedroom. The girl had fallen into a deep sleep. Amy scooped her daughter
up and set her on the bed, blanketing her to the shoulders.

Back in the kitchen, she searched for the magnum of pinot she was sure she had stashed in the Sub Zero, but it was not on
the bottom shelf. Or on any of the shelves. The crisper. The door.

‘Damn it!’ Amy slammed the fridge. She thought of running to the liquor store in Gunbarrel, which was only five minutes away, but she
looked like hell and it was late. She grabbed her car keys, halted, set them back on the counter.

She looked at the tray of cinnamon rolls on top of the Wolf range. She moved to them. Inserted her pointer finger into the
center of the spiral. Still warm. She really shouldn’t. But before she realized what she was doing, the finger was in her
mouth, the orange-flavored sugar crackling on her tongue. She closed her eyes and swayed. Pushed her tongue against the roof
of her mouth, smearing the glaze around, biting into another piece of the stiff-edged dough. Oh.
Oooooh
.

Mick, she decided, was going to pay for this night in a novel way. He was putting his health in danger and by extension putting
them all in danger. What would be his excuse? The usual.
Had to cover a shift, babe. It’s a restaurant. What do you think my job is, anyway? I fill the holes
.

Question was, why were there so many holes? He’d
spent half his life in the Straw and still didn’t know how to be a manager, let alone hire one. He was too nice, too soft
on his staff. And, though it gave her no pleasure to think so, her husband was a shitty businessman. He had no sense of numbers,
spreadsheets, budgets. Worse, he seemed to know this and yet he never changed, never sought to improve his skill set. He was
still the carefree boy who had been born into a flourishing family business. But, once his parents gave him the keys, was
he content to stick to what had worked for twenty-seven years? No, he had to remake the Straw in his lost jock-stud image.
Out with the family buffet, in with the raucous sports bar. Obscene portions, wall-to-wall hi-def displays, the trend of the
new millennium.

Well, the millennium was a little too excited for its own good. After all this time, he still didn’t grasp that owning a restaurant
was Darwinian bloodsport, not a place to park your ass in a corner booth with the sports pages and a bottle of scotch as you
regaled college students with tales of your glorious youth.

True, after his father died in ’04, he’d finally knocked off the two a.m. benders, folding the Straw’s softball team and other
sponsorships in favor of college savings accounts for the kids. But how much had he really changed? Amy knew his friends too
well, the other Rogers in town, fortysomethings twice divorced and still hustling ass fresh out of grad school. Boulder was
a utopia, a place you went to college or retired to. A fantasy playground of ski bums, trustafarian students, and cashed-out
tech wealth. Mick bitched about working
late, but he didn’t want to let go of the bar life. As long as he was in it, he was still Mickey Mouse, Fun Mickey, Mick the
Swinging Dick.

Her husband, her oldest son.

She took another bite of the cinnamon roll. God, the orange frosting
was
a little like toothpaste, but the artificial flavoring only made it better, like some kind of new chemical substance, a Pillsbury
anxiety pill: now available in chewable, lickable, nom-nom-nom-able.

She stared at the window over the sink, across the long lawn of the backyard, considering the guest house on the other side
of the pool. It was a ramshackle shed of a cabana they used mostly for garden storage, but it had possibilities. Two rooms
plus a loft, the suggestion of an apartment.

Apart. Ment.

Apart
.

The thought came to her like an unexpected kiss.
Once he gets better, Mick could move in there
. She stared at the guest house, imaging the first step to something new. Not freedom. She wasn’t that naive and wouldn’t
give up her children. She would always need Mick … in some capacity. But something new was out there. Starting with that pool-guest-house-apartment.

Amy turned away from the window. She stared at the baking sheet, pressing the back of her hand to her smeared lips. There
was only one roll left. A few minutes ago there had been eight of them. A quiet moan of disgust escaped her. No, no way. She
remembered chewing one of them, savoring every crumb. She had not gone
hog wild, devouring them like one of those Japanese kids in the hot-dog-eating contests. She couldn’t believe that, refused
to believe that. And yet: Briela was sleeping, Kyle was out for the night to stay with his friends, so who else could it have
been?

Her tummy made a swamp sound, a little BP spill down in there in the Gulf of Amy. She felt high, her head spinning from the
sugar.

I’m a beast, I need help
…

She took a glass of water out onto the patio, tottering along the flagstones. She found a ceramic pot and removed her secret
pack of Capris, then used the burner on Mick’s six-thousand-dollar Alfresco grill to light one. The gleaming silver cathedral
to meat seemed to hiss at her, mocking her in some way, and she resented him for spending their money on crap like this, even
if he had gotten it at a restaurant auction for half-price. Tomorrow she would put this monstrosity on Craigslist, and maybe
Blue Thunder too, right next to the boat. Sell the truck right out from under him. He had no business owning a forty thousand
dollar truck in times like these. They needed to hunker down, start squirreling away some nuts.

She settled into one of the padded loungers beside the limestone-ringed firepit. It was a summer darkness, palpable and solicitous.
She smoked greedily, as if the nicotine would curb her appetite for the next month and erase the little hit job she’d just
put on that tray of cinnamon rolls. A hundred feet east stood the palazzo’s perimeter wall, its white flank soft in the open
field. Her
eyes wandered to the pool house, tracing the border between the two properties.

A shadow peeled away from the pool house and
moved across the yard, stirring like a small tree coming to life. It went ten or twelve paces in an animal crouch and stopped
at the property line, between two blue spruce pines as if hiding.

Hiding, or just waiting for her.

Myra Blaylock came into the Straw a few minutes after eleven. She wasn’t there when Mick ducked around the corner to drain
off the last three whiskey sours in the bathroom, but when he returned, she was perched on the barstool, brown hair roped
into its single thick braid around her neck, her S-curving posture and the crossed legs, one sparkly sandal flapping anxiously
from her little tan foot. He stood three or four tables behind her, concocting the nicest possible way to say what needed
to be said, what had already been said, what would likely be said again in the future, none of it doing a lick of good.

Myra waved to him in the bar mirror, better than eyes in the back of her head. Something disturbing about that, like she was
in the walls. Well, it was all disturbing. It was like she knew where he was at all times, not just here, but all around town.
She had a funny way of showing up in grocery lines, in the next lane at the bank’s drive-thru window. That one hair-raising
episode at Briela’s daycare center.

He took a stool to her left, leaving one between them. ‘You looking to buy a bar, Myra?’

She aimed all of herself his way, her big brown eyes horned with mascara and glossy with yesterday’s tears. ‘Oh, it can’t
be that bad.’

‘Worse,’ he said. She sipped at her usual Bombay martini and Mick could almost taste the cigarette they would share after.
‘Come back tomorrow about this time, the lights might not be on.’

‘Poor Mick. You should have sold out years ago and moved to Florida.’ She thumbed a pearl dangling at the center of a silver
spiral earring.

‘Yep.’ Mick looked at his phone, feigning distraction. ‘How’s Henry?’

Myra batted her lashes theatrically.

‘Right,’ Mick said. ‘And the kids?’

She swallowed more of the clouded booze and he wondered who had poured it for her. The rest of the staff had been cut loose
for the night. Business was dead and once again he was the last man working, so maybe Myra just helped herself these days.

‘That good, huh?’ Mick said. ‘Glad to hear it.’

‘Do you really want to know or are you just being polite?’

And there it was, the first thrust with the guilt knife.

‘I asked, didn’t I?’

‘Geoffrey’s with his grandmother in Dallas this week. Caroline’s with the dance company in Chicago for another ten days.’
In other words,
I’m free
. But it was never free. One ride on the Myra-Go-Round cost you a dozen pleading phone calls and one teary-eyed blowout
in the office. Ten, even five years ago, it had been worth it. But he was too tired for such nonsense.

‘I’m sure you’ll find something to keep you entertained,’ Mick said. ‘You want a menu? Carlos makes a mean plate of chili
nachos.’

‘Fuck you.’ Myra swiveled, opting for the bar mirror again.

‘Hey.’ Mick took the opportunity to walk around the bar. He needed some distance from her scent, the combination of that rainwater
perfume and whatever else was just there on its own. No woman had ever smelled like that, or tasted that way. ‘My accountant
just cut off my balls and I’m running exceptionally late, so you picked a bad night to pretend we’re old friends who keep
tabs.’

Myra tilted the rest of her martini back. She set the empty glass on the edge of the bar as if offering him the olive. But
not the branch. Myra never offered the branch. She looked down at her purse for a moment, then up at him with a forced smile.

‘I didn’t mean to bother you,’ she said, gentler now. ‘I’m sorry you’re having a bad night. I worry about you. I’d miss this
place. Lotta memories here, you know. Not all about you, either.’

Mick’s throat filled with remorse. ‘You’re not bothering me, sweetie. You never did that. It’s just, you know …’ He almost
told her he had drowned, but realized that would only force him to tell the story, which would earn her sympathy, and two
drinks later they would be necking in her car.

‘No, I don’t know,’ Myra said. ‘But I’m willing to listen.’

‘We both know where this leads,’ he said, feeling how much of a canned line it was. ‘And it’s never good, for either of us.’

‘It was good for one of us not so long ago.’ Myra stood. She rooted around in her purse, slapped a twenty on the bar. ‘And
I didn’t say I came here to fuck. But it’s nice to know you think I ascribe such importance to your dick.’

Yowza. Strike two, guilt fastball. ‘Come on, you know what I mean. Let me buy you dinner.’

‘Not hungry, thanks.’

‘Myra.’

But she was already walking out, and that was for the best. When the door closed behind her, he took her twenty and stuffed
it in his pocket. Something glimmered beside her glass. She’d left her pearl earring for him. Cute, but not cunning enough
for Myra. Might have been a genuine loss, fallen out while she was playing with it. He picked it up and searched around for
a shot glass. He’d leave it beside the register as a reminder of things not to do, until the next time she appeared, then
hand it over like the thoughtful guy he was. But he couldn’t find a shot glass and when he looked up again she was standing
out on the sidewalk, smoking, pacing, and he realized she was working up the courage to come back. No, no, that’s not necessary.
Let’s just wrap this up.

He went out, cupping the earring in his left hand. She seemed very small there in her jeans and the pink
blouse. Everything in her still firm, a kind of hardness inside her that bounced him back and pulled him in, often through
six or seven of her own greedy little orgasms. Was like she didn’t even need him there, until he had gone.

‘Hey, you forgot something.’

She startled at the sight of him and he held his palm out, a peace offering. Myra Blaylock looked at the pearl. She dropped
her cigarette, took two steps and held his face in both of her hands. She kissed him once on the lips, firmly, and released
him, pushing him away with surprising force.

‘The doctor found a lump in my left breast,’ she said. ‘But that’s not why I dropped by. It’s my birthday. I was hoping you
would be the first one to remember.’

For a moment he was speechless, the memory of telling Amy that Myra had breast cancer coming back to slap him across the face.
But here, tonight, this was news. How had he known? His head was swirling.

‘What was I thinking,’ she said, not really a question.

‘Aw, shit, Myra.’ He reached for her but she spun away.

‘Good luck with the restaurant, Mickey.’

‘Myra, wait.’

‘Tried that.’

Her thin sandals flapped off into the night. He watched her get into her latte-bronze Buick Enclave and drive off jerkily,
the aspirational, I’m-not-a-mini-van, sultry crossover depressing in its melodramatic exit.

The worst part of it occurred to him then. She hadn’t
said she had breast cancer. She said the doctor found a lump. She was scared, and Mick felt certain she had every reason to
be. She was dying. They would do the biopsy and it would come back malignant. He knew it the way he had seen Sapphire’s dirty
hands all over his money. Myra was going to lose her hair from chemo, but it wouldn’t be enough to save her.

‘What in God’s name is happening to me?’ he said to the empty parking lot, in a voice that sounded scared shitless.