THE DAY THEY RESCHEDULED, Suzanne was going to be out of town, auditioning for this arts and entertainment job at a TV station in the city. They picked that night because they knew Larry’d be working at the restaurant till eight-thirty, nine o’clock. Which gave the boys enough time to get their stuff together, pick up the gun over at my house, drive over to the condo, and get everything set up inside before he got back.
Suzanne was cool as a cucumber that day. She stopped by school just when they were letting us out, to show me the outfit she was wearing to her audition. It was a pantsuit, peach colored. She had this matching peach-colored bag, and mauve shoes, mauve scarf, mauve and peach earrings. I said, “Aren’t you a nervous wreck?”
“Why should I be?” she said. “I always feel relaxed on camera. All I have to do is be myself.”
“I mean about tonight,” I said. “You know. The job. At the condo.”
“Oh that,” she says. “Why should I be? It’s not my problem. Or yours either.”
“I know,” I said. “But I can’t help it. I can’t help thinking about it, wondering if we’re doing the right thing.”
“Blah, blah, blah,” she says. “We’ve talked this thing to death. Who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong? Am I God or something? How are we supposed to know anything for sure? All I know is, you can talk a thing to death. You can go back and forth forever: Should I? Shouldn’t I? And then you know what happens? You’ve wasted your whole time talking, and never accomplished anything. Sometimes a person just has to take action.”
“I know,” I said. But at night when I lay in my bed, I keep seeing his face. I keep remembering that time he dressed up as Cupid, in this big diaper, for Valentine’s Day, and came by her office at the TV station with a giant bunch of balloons. I keep thinking about the way he set the timer on their VCR so even if he wasn’t home he’d always get to look at her weather reports. And then I looked in the car, and there was this present he gave her one time, of these two little dolls, a boy and a girl, with wobbly heads on a spring. He put them in the back window of her car so when you drove along, they kissed.
“I keep asking myself if maybe the two of you should just go to a marriage counselor,” I said. “Maybe have a trial separation.”
“I explained that already,” she said. She was starting to sound mad at me, which was the worst. I guess I started to cry.
So she slapped me. On the cheek. Not hard, just enough to kind of shock me. I mean sometimes it’s the best thing a person can do for another person if they’re falling apart, knock some sense in them. “Get a grip!” she says to me. “If you keep this up you’ll ruin everything.”
“Right,” I said. That got me calmed down. “I don’t know what’s the matter with me. I wish I could be like you.”
“It’s probably just that time of the month,” she said. And as a matter of fact, it was. That hadn’t even occurred to me.
“Look,” she said. “Here’s twenty dollars. Go to the mall, get yourself a cute top. Treat yourself to a frozen yogurt—but make it the low-cal kind, OK? Then go home, tuck yourself in bed early. Everything will look different in the morning. It’s the waiting that’s hardest. Remember how it used to be, when you were a little kid, Christmas Eve? Listening for the sleigh bells and stuff?”
I didn’t tell her it wasn’t exactly like that at our house. “You shouldn’t be giving me this money,” I said.
“Forget it,” she said. “I want to.”
So that’s what I did. Went to Casual Corner, found this Bart Simpson Underachiever shirt, extra large for the baggy look. Got a piña colada frozen yogurt sundae. Went home, watched “MacGyver.” My mom had been giving me a real hard time lately, but for some reason that night she lay off me. At nine o’clock, when I told her I was going to bed, she turned off the TV herself, without even staying up for “Love Connection.” “I guess I’ll call it a night myself,” she said.
So then I just lay in my bed, wondering what was happening, over on Butternut Drive. Think about kittens, I’d tell my brain. Pretend you’re on a date with Bon Jovi. Imagine you could eat all the candy in the world, and none of it had any calories. But none of my usual stuff worked. I kept ending up with this same picture of Larry, opening the door to the condo, and Jimmy standing there, waiting for him, with my uncle’s gun.
When I woke up next morning, my nightgown was covered with blood. There was even blood on my hands, on my face, don’t ask me how. I remembered what happened the night before and I let out this scream. Then I realized, all that happened was I forgot to put in a fresh Tampax before I went to sleep. I was in the bathroom, washing myself off, when I heard the news on the radio. Larry was dead.