The first time I heard Phoebe Kelly’s name I told her that it had a happy sound. That had been in the Registry of Deeds office, where she worked. She laughed. At Cobblestones, Phoebe was sitting at a table over drinks with three other women as they chattered away beneath a hanging Tiffany lamp. Monday Night Football wasn’t on yet; the big TVs were tuned to some kind of music awards show. Seeing me, Phoebe waved, and I joined them. “Alex, you know my coworkers—Kathy, Janelle, Roxanne.”
We exchanged hellos. I’d met them all briefly before, in the busy office pool. There was a close-knit group of half a dozen or so who socialized together. Jennifer, the woman whose retirement dinner it had been, was gone. I saw no sign of the boss. On one of the TVs behind the horseshoe bar, a relic of the seventies glam rock scene was reading a teleprompter, trying to balance on six-inch platform soles and not put too many wrinkles in his latest face job as he presented a lifetime achievement prize to someone half his age. “I thought the music awards were on last month,” I said.
“And next month,” Kathy said, “and the one after that. Everybody gives them these days.”
“Yeah, you’re up for one in the running-your-mouth category,” Roxanne gibed.
Kathy made a cat hiss and clawed the air. Even money said the boss had picked up the tab and beat a retreat for home, eager to escape the estrogen wars.
“Do you want the game?” Phoebe asked me. “We can get the bartender to switch channels.”
“I can wait till nine,” I said.
“I thought maybe you’d want the pregame stuff.”
“Jock foreplay,” Roxanne said. “Guys are wham bam in the bedroom, but they sure can delay pleasure when it comes to sports. You notice that?”
“The Super Bowl,” said Kathy, “my boyfriend starts watching the day before.”
“Same here, and believe me, it isn’t because he’s hoping to catch some witch flashing her titty.”
All eyes went to me, as if I were being asked for a rebuttal. I shrugged. “What can I say? It’s the NFL Kama Sutra.”
Topics changed, and pretty soon one of the women asked, “Are you really working for that killer from the carnival?”
“Well, he’s the suspect.”
“I guess it’s a job, huh?” Kathy said sympathetically. “Boy, I don’t envy you.”
“They should throw away the key.”
“Why don’t we have the death penalty anymore?”
“Because it’s ‘inhumane,’” Roxanne said and rolled her eyes.
“Life is inhumane,” said Janelle, speaking for the first time. “Our job is to make the best of it.” She was the spiritual one in the office, Phoebe had told me, always reading books by the guru of the month and going on meditation retreats. (“For her, going to ‘club med’ means sitting in a full lotus for six hours at a whack.”)
“Forget that. People like this guy they caught aren’t human. I say fry him.”
When the others had left, Phoebe looked chagrined. “I didn’t plan on that. I’d told them about our date last night, how nice it had been and
everything, and then … that. They had a million questions. I mentioned you’d been hired. Was that okay?”
“I didn’t take it personally. And I wasn’t really planning to watch the game. I just wasn’t man enough to admit it publicly.”
She took my hand. “Is it tough on you, though? Working for a lawyer who wants to get that guy out of jail?”
“Let me put it in perspective. At the Registry of Deeds, you charge a filing fee, right? When someone closes on a property?”
“Sure. A hundred seventy-five dollars. To record the deed. The state requires it.”
I nodded. “And some of the people are going to run into difficulty at some point—maybe for reasons they can’t help—and when they miss payments, the bank can foreclose.”
“Well, yeah, but that’s the system.”
“Yep. Like the right to representation and a fair trial. No?”
She nodded slowly. “I guess.”
“Anyway,” I said, “he won’t be getting out on bail. But enough shop talk. We’re both off the clock. How about dessert?”
“You go ahead, I’m stuffed.”
I ordered Black Forest cake, which came in a piece the size of a cuckoo clock, and the waitress was savvy enough to bring two forks, though Phoebe resisted until there was only one bite left on the plate. “Waste not, want not,” she said and speared it. “Appearing soon on a panty line near you.”
“How soon? How near?”
“Shut up, you. I’ve got a black-and-blue on my ass where that crazy clown pinched me. Maybe he should be in jail.”
Afterward, we sat in my car in the parking lot, sharing tidbits about our respective days. “That really freaked me out last night, Alex. Seeing that woman. I mean, being there and … I just never …” She pushed down the door lock.
“It was upsetting,” I agreed. “Are you okay now?”
She snuggled into the curve of my arm. “It set all kinds of things running through my head. Who was she? How did she get herself in a situation where that could happen? And the weird, silly stuff, too. How my mother always used to tell us to be sure we were wearing clean underwear
and nylons, because you never know … Not that it matters, I suppose. The clean underwear. I don’t guess there’s a sign in the morgue that says, ‘Your failure to plan ahead is not our responsibility.’”
“I’ve never seen one.”
“And then I got remembering Todd and how he had just phoned me from the airport and said he was on his way home, a drive he’d made so many times, and then … It was probably the one in a thousand cases where wearing a seat belt might’ve cost a life instead of saving one. If he’d been able to get himself out—though the doctor said the heart attack probably had taken him before he even hit the tree.” She broke off. In the reflected gleam of the vapor lamps, her eyes were suddenly very bright. I turned my face into her hair and stroked her shoulder.
She had told me about it on our first date—just to let me know, she said. Wanting me to see where she’d been and what she came with. The one other man she’d dated and had begun to like, she had not told right away. They’d dated a handful of times, and then she’d told him. “In two flips of a fish’s fin, he was history. I never heard from him again. Maybe he thought I was a black widow.” So she’d learned she needed to be right up front about her marriage. When I called her a second time, she sounded surprised, and then explained. Maybe as some show of good faith, I’d told her about Lauren, and that had led to telling about how I’d come to lose my police job—which reminded me why I tended to avoid going into any of it. It was like digging in the ground and reaching to pull up a small root only to discover it was part of a whole underground network of roots that resisted being tugged up but then came, spreading out, stirring up even the ground beneath your feet, which had seemed so solid just a moment before.
Phoebe cleared her throat and went on. “We’d had this life plan. After we both got through college, I’d work, and Todd would study and take the exams—those endless exams—and he’d become an actuary and get a really good job. And we did. We were real penny-saved-penny-earned types. Our house here was a starter. The plan called for Concord or Lincoln, and a family …” She shook her head slowly and blinked, and several tears overflowed. I brushed her cheek with my thumb. “It didn’t work out the way it was supposed to. But mostly …” She cleared her
throat again and drew back to look at me. “Mostly, you know what last night has had me thinking, Alex? About us.”
“You and me?”
“How we’re pretty different. Oh, you’re really hardworking too, I don’t mean that.”
“Let’s not be too hasty.”
“I was thinking that we’re both really dedicated to our jobs, but your work involves you sometimes with bad things that happen, and with the … well—”
“The bad people who do them?”
“I was thinking that, yeah.”
“My job can be dull as dirt. Most of the time, in fact. Don’t tell Atlantic Casualty Insurance I said that, but it is. The people are the thing that makes it worthwhile. The rest is just … work.”
She dabbed at her eyes again. “Well, I’m trying to keep the blinders off and see that all those other plans and dreams were only that—plans. That other lives, other dreams are possible. I’ve just got to get to where I believe it.”
Her cell phone began to sing Beethoven’s Fifth. She answered and listened. “I’m with Alex,” she said, giving me a glance. One of her girlfriends, I gathered. She had the phone programmed to play different songs for different friends. I don’t think I’d been with her yet when someone wasn’t calling. “Yes,” Phoebe said. And “Okay.” And “Yes. Okay. I’ll call you soon.”
Outside, we made plans to see each other on Thursday, three nights away. “The moon will be full that night,” she said. “The corn moon. You know about that? The full moon closest to the autumnal equinox is the harvest moon, but if that moon occurs in October, the September moon is called the corn moon. I think I got that right.”
“It’ll be nice. I’ll turn off my phone if you turn off yours.”
“Deal.”
“No interruptions, it’ll be just us and the corn moon.”
As if to seal a bargain, I kissed her. Her mouth tasted of coconut and chocolate. I tried to make the kiss linger awhile. She drew back first, her eyes finding mine. “Be patient with me, Alex. I’m trying.”
I squeezed her hand. “There isn’t any rush. You be patient with me. I’m trying, too.”
I walked her to her car and watched her drive off; then I went back on the clock.