Moira the cake maker had a broken toe, and Caitlin Lee was recovering from an appendectomy, so Janet recruited her daughter, Blair, and Blair’s boyfriend, Steven, to help her load the Subaru wagon with trays of food, serving implements, and enormous bunches of peonies from her garden, along with a pile of nice tablecloths and some sparkly stars to scatter here and there, and oh, how many times had people’s corkscrews broken during a party? As well as the one in her Swiss Army knife, she put in a Cuisinart corkscrew that her clients always fell in love with once they’d used it and—really last-minute—dipped in to the bucket on the front porch and took out a handful of shells, carefully rinsed by Blair and Steven, because those might be nice, too.
It had been a rainy summer in Maine, but finally it was almost July and sunny. Everything was very green; Janet had to duck to get under the wisteria growing on the arbor at the end of the walkway, amazed at the amount of lavender petals scattered prettily over the path. No doubt some would be in her hair. “Get a move on,” she called back toward the house. The only response was from the cat, who darted up the stairs and went through the cat door into the house.
Blair opened the door, holding the cat in her arms. Blair had just graduated as a journalism major from Northwestern, and she was entirely too skinny and pale. She needed some meals instead of snacks, and to be out in the sun soaking up vitamin D. It hadn’t helped that she’d gotten sick in Mexico, even though she’d drunk only bottled water and brushed her teeth with it, too.
“Mom, Grandpa Gerald just called, but I didn’t pick up because I knew you had to get going.”
Janet hated caller ID, which had simply materialized after she’d had to replace the old phone. To her dismay, after living alone for almost twenty years, she’d developed the habit of running for the phone only to look sadly at the phone even if she was happy to get the call, because seeing the caller’s name made it seem as if they’d already spoken: The name signified an end rather than a beginning.
“I guess that’s the right thing to have done,” she said. “Where is Steven?”
“He’s doing what you told him and putting the cake frosting in a plastic container.”
“We have fifteen minutes to get there, and there might be construction on the bridge again,” Janet said.
Her daughter lowered the cat to the porch. It ran through its door. Steven came out of the house carrying one of her vinyl bags that seemed handbag-small in his big hands, wearing a white linen shirt, linen Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops, looking harried, as he always did. He had given up smoking for the second time in three months, found that the nicotine patch made him woozy, after which he’d adopted the motions of smoking without a cigarette in his hand. The hand not carrying the bag gripped an imaginary cigarette between the first and second fingers.
“We’re all packed. Flowers, yes; tablecloths; decorations; extra corkscrew. Okay. You can just put that bag with the cake stuff on the floor, Steven. Ready to roll?”
Janet’s cell phone rang. She pulled it out of her pants pocket: black linen pants with a sharp crease—her catering pants, with the deep pockets so hard to find in women’s clothes these days. “Hello,” she said without looking at who was calling. Of course it was her father; he had just tried the house phone and moved on to plan B. “Honey,” he said, “I want you to take a deep breath and listen to what I have to say, because I can only say it once.”
“What’s the matter, Dad?” she said.
“Law and order got in the way,” he said. “I guess that’s the best way to say it. I was going to Kmart to get your mother’s prescription, and three kids with a bucket came up and wanted to wash my car—why, there was no rinse water there in the middle of the parking lot. But one of ’em wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I put out my arm and told him when I saw a hose, then maybe we could talk, but then the other one, one of the other ones, started dumping sudsy water on the hood of the Chevy, and I saw red. I don’t know exactly what happened, but I grabbed the bucket outta his hand and threw it at him, then sure enough, his father or some adult showed up, and before you know it, there I was in a police cruiser, my car still unlocked, and don’t think those three boys weren’t inside it the second the cops pulled away, but it took a minute to get the police to listen to me, and then they said, ‘Well, we can’t go back now, we’ll get somebody over there to lock your car.’ The handle scraped this kid’s wrist when I grabbed the bucket. What do we need now? Security guards to protect customers going into Kmart to pick up a prescription? If they’d wanted to cut my hair, should I have sat on the hood and let ’em do that, too? So I’m going to have to tell my story to the judge, but right now your mother’s got Doris Miller coming to pick me up and the policeman gave me a cell phone and a doughnut and a mug of coffee, and says his father fought in the Pacific during the war. If your mother calls you, I don’t want you misunderstanding the situation, because as you know, your mother never could keep a story straight, so I only gave her the basic outline.”
“Dad, no—this is awful. Were you hurt?”
“I’m not hurt, I’m a six-foot man, or maybe I’m a raging bull, I don’t know, but the only one hurt was the aggressor, even though you and I know that’s not going to make him change his ways.”
“That’s terrible, just terrible. It’s hard to believe. I really wish you lived closer.”
“Even with the class of people we’ve got here, it’s a better place to live than that climate you live in, where it’s winter except for three months a year. It would kill your mother.”
“So, Dad, you’re okay, and you’re having coffee, and everything’s going to work out?”
“Nothing’s easy. Going on a five-minute errand’s not easy. It makes me so mad, when I get out of here, I’m going to go sit at that new sports bar and watch the game and have a beer, and the hell with everything.”
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Blair said.
The cat had come out of the house again and pounced successfully on a field mouse. “Eww,” Blair squealed, seeing it, too. One of Steven’s big hands covered her face, giving her peek room between the fingers. Janet’s phone beeped to signal a low battery.
“Dad, I’m on my way to a job, but just as soon as I get home, I’m going to call you. Are you sure you’re okay?”
“Next I’m going to read the sports section. One of the officers has been very accommodating, bringing me the coffee and the sports pages. If I was one of those kids, I would have taken the coffee and thrown it in his face and scalded him. I guess it’s clear I’m not that class of person.”
“Okay, and Mom is okay? This was just routine, your filling—”
“They think she’s got a headache because she’s going to have to have a root canal, but there’s worry about that because of the heart situation she had the other time, you know? So the doctor phoned in a pain pill prescription, and on Monday this’ll all get sorted out with the cardiologist or the dentist and so forth.”
“She’s in bed without medicine?”
“I see Doris now, coming through the door. She looks plenty glad to see me. Well, we’ll get that prescription from somewhere other than Kmart. I’m sure they can switch it over to someplace where you don’t take your life in your hands going to get it.”
“Dad, I’m glad you’re okay. This will all work out. We’ll talk as soon as—”
The phone beeped again and she snapped it shut, letting him think they’d been cut off. “Why has Steven gone back in the house?” Janet said to Blair.
“To pee.”
“Well, please go get him. We’re supposed to be there now, not standing in the driveway.”
“I hardly think I should tell him to hurry up. He’s just peeing.”
“Steven!” Janet called loudly. While Blair looked at her as if she’d turned into Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, Janet loudly closed the trunk. In a couple of minutes Steven sauntered out of the house, eating a Fudgsicle.
* * *
This client was the second wife of some stockbroker disgraced by the SEC, now in “early retirement.” Both of them had had plastic surgery, which, instead of making them look youthful, made their faces look rosy, with high unlined foreheads that seemed oddly blank, like a street sign not imprinted with a word or an image. He was the difficult one; she was only neurotic. He thought Costco frozen appetizers cooked and smothered in expensive and recognizable Stonewall Kitchen sauces were perfectly fine. He put out bottles of homemade seltzer because “everyone wants to cut down on drinking.” (Which he told the guests repeatedly as he circulated among them.) This was the third occasion Janet had catered for them and would probably be the last, since Jeff, the husband, had called after her bedtime to say that they had plenty of toothpicks and plastic glasses. Her food did not need toothpicks, and she had explained to his wife that she did not provide plates, glasses, or flatware—information that was also written in bold type inside the folder she’d left with them.
The occasion of the party was the next day’s sentencing of Bernie Madoff. As they pulled in, Janet saw a Madoff dartboard leaning on an easel in the yard and their dog peeing against a horseshoe stand that had been altered by the insertion of a short pole with a magazine cover photo of Madoff atop it.
“Don’t eat anything we’re bringing, even if they offer. Say no to seltzer. Absolutely nothing but ‘No, thank you,’ and we leave the minute we’ve finished setting up, is that clear? We are not their guests, and we are providing the food, we are not circulating.”
“You’re unbelievable,” Blair said. “Why don’t you lighten up?”
“Because these people would suck us all into their vortex, where we would stay, answering questions and trying to calm them until the first guests showed up, and then we’d be blocked in and never get out of their driveway.”
Blair snorted a little laugh. Steven tried to stay out of it, but Janet could see from his expression that he was surprised by the Madoff effigies.
Dee Dee, the blank-faced, surgery-enhanced wife, came toward Janet, wearing a bizarre costume that looked more like a fancy hat than a dress, with the shoulders squared and crinkly pieces of plastic shooting out beneath the waist like damaged chopsticks. Manolos, what else? “I am frantic!” she said. “The oven won’t turn on. We can’t heat anything. This is going to be a disaster. Do you have a lot of crackers? Maybe we could put some of the hors d’oeuvres in the blender and eat them room-temperature on crackers? Why the fuck won’t the oven heat up?”
“Let me take a look at it,” Steven said, stepping into her lair, beginning to get sucked in. Suddenly even Blair looked horrified. The back of Dee Dee’s dress was an enormous butterfly, its wings divided by the raised material covering the zipper. Janet did not dare exchange glances with her daughter.
“Almost nothing needs heating. You could use a pan on top of the stove to heat just . . .”
Jeff stood in the kitchen, watching the oven’s digital display register 300, 310, 320.
“You fixed it. You fixed it!” Dee Dee squealed, so excited that her flapping hand knocked Steven’s shoulder and toppled him lightly into her husband, who reached out his own big hand to say, “Whoa! Whoa! Anybody want a slug of seltzer to celebrate?”
“No, thanks,” they murmured in unison.
“Dee Dee,” Janet said decisively, “we are going to set the tables and get out of your way. All I need are a few vases for peonies. You just relax.”
“Vases?” repeated Dee Dee. Janet might as well have said cauldrons or pieces of abstract sculpture. “Vases,” she intoned, looking into the distance and narrowing her eyes, as if the vases might call to her from wherever they were hiding.
“They are very, very pretty no matter what you put them in. Short stems. Long. No stems at all, floating. Shall I delegate this task to my daughter, Dee Dee?”
“How did you fix the oven?” Dee Dee suddenly said to Jeff.
Blair preceded Janet out of the room onto the porch, where the buffet tables were set up. Steven raced past her to help Janet unload the car. “Does she die at midnight?” Steven said as Janet opened the trunk.
“Excuse me?”
“Butterflies. Don’t they only live one day?”
“Don’t make me laugh. Please.”
There were ants moving around the trunk, though she’d left the peonies out overnight and shaken them thoroughly to avoid just that problem. Steven and Janet flicked them away quickly, without comment. Fortunately, the foil on top of the trays was on tightly. Janet picked up the biggest tray and draped the tablecloths over her arm, the small bag containing the corkscrew and other little things dangling from her wrist. Steven followed, a tray in each hand. Blair, they saw through the window, was in the kitchen with Dee Dee, selecting vases. There were probably fifteen or twenty cut-crystal vases, Janet saw as she poked her head in the kitchen. “No,” Dee Dee was murmuring, “no, no.” The currents of air from the ceiling fan flapped her wings behind her. Mercifully, her husband had disappeared. Outside, the dog was trying to break the neck of his neon-green stuffed barbell, while the big blowup of the as yet unpunctured face of Bernie Madoff looked down on them like Dr. T. J. Eckleburg from his billboard.
“They’re really celebrating Madoff going to jail? Did he, like, know the guy?”
“Steven and Blair, please do not talk among yourselves, in case you are overheard. Please get the cake and ask her for a knife to frost it, Blair, and Steven, you could take the cake into the kitchen, please.”
“I feel like I’m six,” Blair said. She held open the screen door. Unpleasant instrumental music—bagpipes?—played quietly somewhere inside the house. Blair pulled a dead leaf off a hanging geranium, then looked nervously at her mother. “It’s not like I’m already in the Peace Corps and I’m doing something to upset the natives,” she said. Silently, she smoothed the tablecloth with Janet. She reached into the little bag, saw the shells, and polished one on the side of her pants leg. She placed it tentatively on the table.
“Please get the peonies,” Janet said.
“Where’d everybody go all of a sudden?”
“Give thanks,” she said quietly. “And if Steven is having any trouble frosting the cake, help him.”
“Mom. He worked in a bakery last summer. He knows how to frost cakes. Cupcakes, at least.”
“Small problem,” Steven said, coming out of the kitchen. “Jeff isn’t feeling good. He wants to see you, Janet.”
“What? Where is he?”
“Lying on the sofa. There’s a sofa thing in the pantry. A futon.”
“Well, where is his wife?”
“I don’t know. He’s sweating.”
“He’s sweating? That’s the problem?” But she was already following Steven into the house, through the kitchen, into a side room where, sitting slumped on a pink futon on a frame with quite a few dog toys at his feet, Jeff stared ahead, clenching his teeth.
“It’s my arm. Pain all up and down my arm.”
“Where’s your wife? Steven, dial 911 and say you think someone’s having a heart attack. Do you know where your wife is?”
“Taking off her dress, putting on another one. Can you just . . . can you help me stand up a bit here?”
“I think you should stay seated, don’t exert yourself. Here’s a pillow”—she thought it was a pillow, but it was a dog toy that squeaked when she wedged it under his shoulder—“here’s, okay, you’re fine, but this could be a heart attack, Jeff.”
“Cosmic punishment for trashing Bernie,” he said. “I’m going to be really upset if I die on the dog’s bed. Can you help me stand up?”
“Absolutely not. Move as little as possible. Pain radiating down your arm is a classic symptom of a heart attack, you know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know what she’d do without me. She doesn’t even know how to turn on the oven. Now my jaw is getting numb.”
“Sir, I don’t think there’d be any problem if you took some aspirin, right?” Steven said, but his eyes shot to Janet. He held two white pills in his palm. Blair stood behind him, holding an ornate cut glass vase half filled with water. Everything in the house seemed to be cut glass. “I’m going upstairs to get Dee Dee,” Janet said, “but promise me you won’t stand up. How long did they say, Steven?”
The sirens in the distance answered her question. Jeff said, “You have to push ‘bake’ and ‘cook.’ Maybe that’s confusing. I try not to lord it over her.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Janet said, trying to sound reassuring. “Dee Dee?” she called ahead of her.
She had never been upstairs, but this was where the music was coming from. “Dee Dee, something important,” Janet called. A tiny woman with black hair in a braid and white tennis shoes and a black dress stepped out of a doorway. She looked startled. “No hablo inglés,” she said, averting her eyes.
“Where’s Dee Dee?” Janet asked, gesturing at the many doorways, sweating profusely herself. The sirens were right outside. There was a clunk she feared might mean her car had been hit. The woman in the hallway gestured to a door at the end of the corridor. Inside, Dee Dee sat with earphones clamped to her ears, humming, wearing a fuchsia lace slip and odd gold gladiator sandals that laced up her calves. A boom box on the windowsill was playing music. Dee Dee actually had a huge perfume bottle she was using like a crazed exterminator, spritzing the air. Her life was about to change profoundly, and this was what she was doing. Janet faltered, unable to begin. The tiny woman hovered in the doorway.
“Dee Dee,” she said, stepping forward. “Something has happened. Take off the earphones.”
Dee Dee pulled them off, and they rested like enormous parentheses around her neck. “The house is on fire, isn’t it?” she said. “Isn’t that what it is?”
“No, it’s an ambulance. Jeff was having trouble breathing. He’s probably had a heart attack. You need to come right away.”
Dee Dee scrambled off the green velvet ladies’ chair she was sitting on, stumbling over one of her kicked-off ankle boots. The butterfly dress was facedown on the bed. Frowning deeply, the little brown-skinned woman—could this be an apparition?—opened the closet and walked in, pulling the door shut silently behind her. There was a mirror on the door. Janet looked at herself, stunned: Her hair was wild, bits of wisteria dotting it like confetti in a bride’s hair. From downstairs came sounds of shock and surprise as Dee Dee screamed her husband’s name over and over.
There was not going to be any party. This was also hardly a circumstance in which she could ask the client to pay the bill. How awful even to think such a thing, but there it was, she had thought it. She checked her watch. If anyone in the world was punctual, there would have been a guest at the house, but no doubt there were at least fifteen minutes to go before anyone besides the ambulance pulled into the driveway. How really awful, Janet thought, that it all struck her as business, or as the degraded version of business, going through the motions; Jeff had had a heart attack, and all she could think of was a checkoff list: Well, we called the ambulance, told his wife. She stared at the closet. The door did not open. She thought about gently tapping on it, reassuring the woman inside that whatever the circumstances, she was not . . . what? Going to report her to the police? Not going to get her into any trouble. But it did not seem the woman spoke English, so how . . . The music reached a paradoxically faint climax; it was the part of the dance where people would have been dancing frantically. On the floor Janet saw again the pair of soft leather ankle-high black boots, very fashionable, near the chair where Dee Dee—now wailing downstairs—had been sitting.
She walked over to the chair, stepped out of one clog, unzipped a boot, and slipped her bare foot in. The lining was so soft, it felt like poking into a powder puff. Her size. She did not even need to stand up to know that. She looked and looked at her foot, elegant and riveting, the other one clumsy in its clog. Then she stepped out of the boot, pushed it aside without bothering to rezip it or even to stand it upright. Ashamed, she slipped her foot into her old shoe and went downstairs as quickly as she could.
Blair, her kind daughter, was embracing Dee Dee, who was crying on her shoulder. Janet saw Jeff on the gurney, being put into the ambulance. Steven—good boy—was signing paperwork, then gesturing to Blair, letting her know that Dee Dee just needed to take the pen and sign in one place. Blair had grown up. She did perfectly fine in any situation. This was her third serious boyfriend, and every one of them had been handsome, liberal, conscientious, smitten.
There was a shower of pink peony petals on the counter, and the cake sat untouched, unfrosted. Without its siren, the ambulance streaked away, with Dee Dee still moaning in Blair’s arms. Did anyone suggest she go in the ambulance? Janet asked Blair with her eyes; Blair let her mother know by her expression that yes, she’d been asked. Janet watched a large black ant—theirs? hers?—move quickly down the kitchen counter and run behind a sponge. An SUV that was waiting for the ambulance to exit came into the driveway, and a man and a woman, both in summer suits, got out and walked quickly toward the house, all the while looking over their shoulders. The dog stood atop the fallen poster board, scratching Bernie Madoff’s face as if digging down to find a little mole.
Her mother and father. Janet had forgotten them. She went into the kitchen and picked up the telephone, dialed their number. Dee Dee left Blair’s arms, and Blair began talking to the woman in the pale-yellow suit as the man embraced Dee Dee. The dog had decided the poster board was carrion and had begun wiggling against it. The dog consistently kept itself amused. “Dad?” Janet said shakily. “You’re home okay? Mom has her medicine?”
“Bottom line, yes, but the pills already made her upchuck, so we’re waiting for the doctor’s call. Everything was stolen out of my car, and that includes my golf bag and clubs, my ESPN jacket, my favorite cap, and approximately ten dollars’ worth of quarters for parking meters, along with your mother’s cashmere shawl so the air-conditioning won’t kill her. So that’s how smart our police are, picking the human scum off the car like barnacles on a ship, then leaving the ship wide open for pirates. What can you do? Hard to blame them. At first they thought I was some old codger who didn’t know what he was talking about, so why listen to him? Your mother—”
“Yes! Is she able to talk on the phone, Dad? Do you think you should get an ambulance if she’s throwing up, and take her to the emergency room?”
“You take care of yourself, my baby,” Janet’s mother said in the faintest voice imaginable. “Everything works out for the best. Daddy is safely home.”
“Mom, do you think—”
The phone dropped. “Mom!” Janet shouted. “Dad, pick up the phone. Dad?”
Steven appeared at Janet’s side and put an arm around her shoulders. “Okay, let’s not involve a lot of people in this situation,” he said. “Big excitement, but things are going to work out and”—he lowered his voice—“not our problem.”
Janet was listening to a dial tone.
Dee Dee suddenly came up behind Steven. She said, “What happened to Jeff was revenge, pure and simple. Why didn’t he just let it go? He blames Madoff for everything, Madoff ruined the country, made fools of everybody, Madoff, Madoff, Madoff. He was going to have a funeral pyre, throw his poster-board artwork on the fire for a grand finale. Now you see where all his anger and bitterness got him.”
“Oh, Dee Dee, I don’t think this happened because of his feelings about Madoff, do you really think that?” the man in the suit said. “Has Jeff been that upset?”
“I think we’ll just leave things as they are and pick up whatever’s left tomorrow,” Blair said. Dee Dee was running her fingers through her hair, looking dazed. The woman in the yellow suit murmured agreement with what Blair had said, shooting the man warning glances that he shouldn’t say anything more. Another car pulled into the drive.
“This isn’t America! It’s not the America I grew up in, it’s a joke,” Dee Dee cried, “it’s a big joke controlled by evildoers, and that’s what they are, whether people want to laugh at George Bush or not, they are evil, and they do want us to be driven into the ground, everybody ruined, let the pirates ride the high seas. I agree with Jeff: I could take Madoff’s head and push it under the water, and then push it under again, and then . . .” Another car bumped up the driveway.
“Okay, tomorrow, be back tomorrow, don’t worry about this—” Steven gestured. His gesture seemed to encompass a lot; it was a very big house.
“Fuck him, fuck him,” Dee Dee said. When she returned to railing against America, it was clear she’d been talking about Madoff, not Jeff.
Everything had happened so quickly. All of it had happened in ten or fifteen minutes. Janet was breathing heavily. It seemed important to go upstairs, on any pretext, to open the closet door and make sure that there was indeed a small person in Dee Dee’s closet. Just that: Open; close; confirm. Then, as smart, sane Steven had said, they’d be off.
No one said a thing as Janet turned and walked quickly upstairs. This won’t be definitive, she told herself. The little woman easily could have stepped out of the closet; she could be in any of that long row of bedrooms—and even if Janet found her, what would that mean? Some illegal immigrant, someone without a green card, she’d decided. Maybe it would be the wrong thing to do, to open the door and frighten her, if she’d stayed inside the closet.
Instead Janet stood in the darkening room. The woman must have closed the curtains because Janet remembered the windows being open when she’d first entered the room. She decided that the woman was waiting in her hiding place, immobile, as if about to go onstage, or as if she were in a lineup and had been told to stand where she was: Show us your profile; take two steps forward. The woman had done both things earlier, excruciatingly slowly, fear in her eyes. Janet dropped her eyes, ashamed, and on the rug she saw her Swiss Army knife and quickly snatched it up. There! She’d had every reason to sense the need to return, subconsciously registering the loss of something. She dropped the knife in her pocket and turned when she sensed she was being watched.
The woman stood in the doorway, holding out a slightly lumpy package, neatly wrapped in brown paper. The woman said, “Por favor,” then gestured for Janet to shove it down her waistband.
Which she did, numb. The dark-skinned woman was most certainly real, and although it was upsetting that the person was probably Dee Dee’s frightened servant, Janet wanted to communicate that she meant no harm. Janet knew her hair was frenzied, and she was panting like a beast while the woman standing across from her barely breathed. Janet smiled and nodded, seeing flower petals fall in her peripheral vision, gestured to the closet, pointing to her heart, shaking her head. The little woman watched; then, moving gently across the floor, she passed by and walked into the closet, once again pulling the door closed soundlessly behind her.
* * *
Janet was talking to herself, muttering consolations, reassurances, whatever it was she was saying, until she’d moved through the gathering crowd—another car was driving in, passing her Subaru halfway down the drive. She ran to get into her car. Steven was sitting behind the wheel. “You holler for me when I take three minutes to pee?” he said. “Let’s get outta here.”
“I have this horrible feeling something bad is happening with Dad and Mom,” Janet said, raising her hand to smooth her hair. “They say a parent always knows when a child is in trouble, but it goes the other way, too: A child knows when a parent—when a parent might not make it.”
“That’s what’s been going on long-distance?” Steven said.
“What if she dies? I don’t think I convinced him to call an ambulance, and she’s in pain, vomiting. They’re hundreds of miles away. This is horrible. Horrible.”
“Take it easy, Mom,” Blair said from the front seat. “They’re old, and there are bound to be a lot of false alarms. We’ll go home and call the neighbor, make her call an ambulance. She loves Grandmom—she’d be over there anyway if she was sick, wouldn’t she?”
It was just what Janet wanted to believe. The answer was yes. Yes, she would. Someone would be taking control.
“I sort of can’t believe what just happened,” Steven said. “Not even getting in the ambulance. I mean, the bottom line has to be that she doesn’t care very much about the guy.”
Blair looked over her shoulder and peered into the backseat. “Do you have a stomachache?” she asked.
“No. Just—” Janet didn’t want to say she was clutching something tightly under her tunic and didn’t even know what it was. She’d been weird enough with them; they’d done a good job of being mature, while she’d pretty much run away like a child.
* * *
That night she opened the package, the ends of the brown paper bag folded at the corners and neatly taped, paper towel padding inside, to find the black boots she’d tried on in the bedroom. There were two possibilities: that the woman had instinctually known what was going on in the room, or that there’d been a tiny crack between the door and the frame or some other peephole through which she’d seen Janet trying on the boot. There was, however, only one explanation of why the woman had done it: to buy Janet’s silence. There’d been no long-term thinking about any question that might have arisen regarding where the boots were. The woman had done it because it was exactly the thing to do in the moment, and that knowledge had overwhelmed her, made what she did absolutely necessary.
Janet put on the boots and walked through the house, her daughter and her boyfriend asleep in Blair’s old bedroom. She walked onto the porch, then out the door and down the steps, standing in the dewy grass, under starlight, imagining the rest of herself coordinated with the beautiful, audacious boots. Instead of the stretched-out, oversize T-shirt, she’d be wearing clingy satin lingerie. Then what did she think? That she’d be a bride again, Blair’s age, but because of the magic boots, her husband would love her forever and not leave her for another woman? Or that whatever happened in her life, she’d still be standing ramrod-straight, the sexy boots making her tall, powerful, risky?
At her feet lay the corpse of a half-eaten field mouse. Though the proud cat had not dropped it at her feet, she had found her way to the gift.