Around one o’clock the next day, I made myself a tuna melt, put on a Mets cap, and grabbed a can of lime-flavored seltzer. I stuck my phone into my back pocket, a book—Quantum Physics for Poets—under my arm, and went outside. Reading mostly fiction for a living overburdened me with imagined worlds and lives. For pleasure, I found myself reading more and more nonfiction. History, politics, biographies, and intelligently written, dumbed-down science. Knowledge for knowledge’s sake.
I liked trying on other lives in my imagination. Maybe I got that from my mom. While I read Charles Dickens: A Life, I was teaching Victorian literature in my head. I became an archaeologist digging up ancient China while reading The Eternal Army: The Terracotta Soldiers of the First Emperor. I’d always been drawn to these temporary jobs since I’d never had any one single grand passion of my own.
Like I hadn’t chosen Arabic; it had chosen me.
I was pretty good with languages. No one mistook me for a native speaker, but I was good enough so that from my Spanish I could often get the gist of an overheard conversation in Portuguese, sometimes even Italian. But another romance language? The idea of two semesters of Je m’appelle Corie Schottland at Queens College didn’t exactly give me a frisson.
I decided on Russian: I wanted to read Gogol, watch depressing movies without having to read the subtitles, go to all those vodka-soaked nightclubs in Brighton Beach. Except Elementary Russian was filled and I needed a three- or four-credit course, though who knew back then that Russian would once again turn into such a marketable skill? Since I was already primed to try a non-Latin alphabet, I chose Arabic 101 almost arbitrarily, figuring (wrongly) that my bat mitzvah Hebrew would help me master all those curlicues.
Despite its difficulty, I did fall in love with the language—its golden age literature, especially—so I wound up majoring in it. I got a travel grant and spent a summer living with a family in Jordan. Later, I spent the second semester of my junior year at the American University of Beirut studying maqāma, a form of rhymed prose—mostly on scholarship, but partially funded by my entire bank account, plus help from my parents. So I could definitely manage a meaningful conversation in Arabic. Of course, by that point, I’d already started and dropped majors in theater and political science. Who knew if I’d stick with it beyond college?
But then came 9/11. Overnight, I put aside all thoughts of role-playing and became my dad’s daughter. I would serve my country. Get the bad guys. The only question became whether I could be good enough to be truly useful.
Now, here I was in yet another life. My big dreams of marriage and a family had never been this grand. They’d been more on the split-level level: spending nights in a queen size with a pleasant, relatively solvent, and intelligent husband who didn’t fart in his sleep. Along with all his other pluses, Josh’s gastrointestinal tract was serene.
Sitting in the backyard, I had to admit real fresh air smelled better than a clothes-dryer sheet. Our dog, Lulu, kept me company while I had lunch on the bench beside Dawn’s rose garden. It was late May, but the bushes were already filling out with pink and red blooms. A few yellow ones had opened, but though they were beautiful, their heads hung low. Probably missing Dawn. I’d given them some rose food, but they weren’t responding well. Still, nature was nice.
I took a big glug of soda, which was when Jillian King called back. Lulu leaped off my lap. “Found your guy,” Jillian said. I covered the mic so she wouldn’t hear me choking on sparkling water. “But there was nothing to find. Never worked for any government, federal or local. Never in the military. No arrests, no nothing. A blessed bore.” I thanked her profusely and promised that when I was downtown, I’d stop in and say hi.
So now I knew that all Pete’s quirks—from his sitting where he could always watch his car to his switching cell phones—weren’t the behaviors of a former feeb or postal inspector. He appeared to be just a blah suburbanite. Okay, not quite blah since he had an ugly streak of vindictiveness and odd behavior that was worth investigating.
Well, that’s what my dad had suggested. Like a lot of cops, he was a major mystery fan. I assumed he’d read some Sherlock Holmes (even though Arthur Conan Doyle was on his lengthy list of anti-Semites who didn’t kill Jews but they should go fuck themselves anyway). My guess was he’d read the Sherlockian maxim: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” Except his version was: “Once you exclude everything else, what you got is probably the truth, but just in case, don’t toss your notes.”
Trailed by Lulu, I went up to my office to type up my many random thoughts about Pete. Between that and looking at images of the Google results for “good packaging design,” I almost forgot to pick up Eliza after her dance lesson.
Chance t’ Dance was annoying not only for its ridiculous apostrophe, but because classes could run anywhere from five minutes to twenty minutes late, leaving parents in their cars to call their friends who were a quarter mile away waiting for their kids to emerge from the music school, Bach & Roll. Or they could stare through their windshields at the rear entrances of a bakery, a bicycle store, a real estate office; there was also a shop catering to late elementary and lower middle schoolers where Eliza had bought her collection of tiny tubs of lip gloss in revoltingly sweet scents, like decomposing watermelon or fetid peach.
Suddenly I realized I hadn’t been paying attention to whether Eliza had emerged from the studio. The longer I lived in Shorehaven, the more susceptible I became to helicopter parent syndrome and all its terrors: if not constantly monitored, a child could be abducted or bitten by a Global South mosquito.
Eliza wasn’t naturally aggressive, but she was strong enough. She’d learned some smart self-defense maneuvers from the Shorehaven Academy of Martial Arts. Plus I’d coached her to become an effective screamer: it was so inbred in women to avoid causing offense that most barely raised their voices when met with some objectionable or even appalling act. I didn’t want her being the sort of girl who would genteelly murmur: Please don’t do that. I wanted her to be capable of roaring No! Eliza, after much encouragement, developed a sonic boom of a voice, almost as loud as mine.
I had my head down pondering in what era cuticle maintenance became a thing women were supposed to do when someone said, “Hey, Corie.” An instant later, she added, “Ooh,” as if she thought she’d wakened me.
Iris Kubel, owner of the Movable Garden and Wednesday lunch group regular, took an apologetic step back from my car window. “It’s okay,” I assured her. “I was here, but my mind took a hike and my eyes closed.” I got out of the car. “What class is …?” Naturally, I couldn’t remember her kid’s name.
Before I could say “your daughter,” she said “Annie.” Then she added, “Jazz. Whatever that is. They throw their arms up into the air a lot, then walk and wiggle, then change direction and do the same thing. And your …?” Her hesitation was over not only the name, but whether Eliza was my daughter or stepdaughter.
“Daughter. I adopted Eliza the year after I married Josh. She’s in hip-hop. Every week after class, she insists on teaching me the moves and humoring me, like: ‘Hey, you’re killing it!’”
Iris shook her head like: No hip-hop moves for me, ever. Well, she didn’t look any more like a dancer than I did. She wasn’t a beach ball, but she was more spherical than not. It worked for her. Roundness is childlike and lovable, like the creatures in cartoons, R2-D2 and BB-8 in Star Wars. Even her broad and freckled upturned nose appeared plump. Her adorableness, however, was slightly at odds with her personality: pleasantly direct but definitely uncute.
We were at that awkward moment of deciding whether to keep chatting or do the hyperanimated Great seeing you business, when it occurred to me that Iris had been the one who told me about having seen Pete in a T-shirt at the school car wash fund-raiser: “Like his muscles had muscles,” she’d said one Wednesday as we spotted Pete across the street while we waited for the light to change. “And you’d never know it to look at him on a regular day.” I figured it would be weird if I launched into Pete Delaney’s pecs right away, so I asked, “How’s the sowing and reaping business this week?”
“Really amazing,” she said. I noticed then that she was wearing English gardener clothes, that messy gentry style I remembered from old BBC sagas I used to watch with my mom when my dad had the night shift. Iris had on a washed-out black T-shirt, an old multipocketed khaki vest, jeans, and those high green rubber boots that had yellowed from years of sun and mud. “In fact, I just came from my wholesaler with a ton of heuchera,” she continued. “Oh my God, May is always a killer month for me. Everyone is still totally in love with heuchera now. It does great in shade so I’m mixing it in a lot of pots.” Obviously I blinked because she added: “They’re perennials, an evergreen genus. The leaves come in a gazillion colors. I’ll show you. You should see what I’ve got in the back of my van.”
Iris may have looked as if she’d plod slowly across the parking lot, but she was definitely jet propelled. She got to her van before I did. As she opened the back doors, I was prepped to ooh and aah at her plants politely, but it turned out they really were gorgeous. All sorts of reds, oranges, greens, and purples from mauve to the darkest shade of wine.
“Wow!” I said. “Too bad it’s not Wednesday. After lunch you could take us outside and use these for your show-and-tell.” She smiled—not just good manners but genuinely pleased I was so enthusiastic.
Chance t’ Dance classes were blessedly still in session, so before the kids started pouring out, gyrating or pliéing, I said, “You were the one who really got the Wednesday group started, weren’t you?”
“I was. During the recession.”
“What an awful time,” I said. “One day you’re rushing to get to work, you belong in some hierarchy with workplace relationships you look forward to, or not. But the next day, you’re suddenly on your own.”
She nodded. A strand of light brown hair escaped from the giant tortoiseshell clip on top of her head and hung down on her cheek. “Absolutely. And with no one to talk to. I mean, out of the blue, I would have company when I was potting lantana because people were working from home, and they were so glad to be with someone else. So I came up with the idea of a lunch group. Network, exchange ideas for running a business from home, a little gossip about what’s going on around town.”
“How did you choose who was in the group?”
“It just kind of happened. I knew John Grillo because I volunteered at Old Westbury Gardens and he’d worked there as a landscape architect. But by the end of 2008, he had his own business. Terrain and drainage.”
“Such a nice guy,” I said. “Don’t you love his voice?” I figured I should make some chitchat before I jumped on the Pete wagon. “Soothing, but not the super-soothing manly hum that puts you to sleep.”
“Yes!” Iris said. “And even though he’s so dressed down, he reminds me of those guys in dinner jackets in black-and-white movies, with his white sideburns. So suave. And next came Phoebe. She was always texting me when she got anything that looked like it could hold a flower.”
“And Pete?” Curious but casual. I kept myself from looking at my watch, though I worried that the kids would come flying out any minute.
“I think … oh, John brought him in. Their wives got friendly volunteering at North Shore Hospital, feeding people who couldn’t feed themselves. I’ve got to give them credit. I don’t know that I could do that. Anyway, John heard about Pete losing his job at an ad agency and starting his own business at home.”
“Right. These guys who stay at home? It’s a plus for the community. Weren’t you telling me Pete was working at some car wash fund-raiser at the high school? He looked like a Marvel muscleman?”
“Right!” Iris said. “I cannot get out of my mind that he was in a T-shirt and I was shocked that, you know, like he had a body. Not Marvel quality but ripped.”
“So why does he dress like he does? I can’t get my mind around that he makes a living as a packaging designer.”
“Neither can I. Maybe he’s conservative lifewise or stylewise. But pants belted halfway between his waist and nipples? Ewww! Just plain ugly. Because his designs are good.”
“Right,” I said. A couple of fingers of a gardening glove stuck out of one of her vest pockets in a perky fashion, like a man’s pocket square. I checked her hands. They were manicured, the nails a pearlescent rose. She seemed to need to have everything pretty.
“Remember when it was his turn to talk one week and he brought in that bag of coffee beans that looked like a take-out cup?” Iris asked. “That was cool. Imaginative.” I nodded.
I didn’t have time to go through Pete’s oeuvre: “So he’s doing well with his own business?”
“He must be. I asked if he’d be willing to make up a logo for me. I made it totally, totally clear that I’d insist on paying his usual fee. Okay, it wasn’t the biggest job, but I wanted something better than what I had on the truck and my website: an old Tuscan pot with calibrachoa, coleus, petunias, lantana, and—” She broke off. “You’re not a gardener.”
“No, though I know the word ‘petunia.’”
“That’s a start. Anyway, my sister photoshopped this big pot for me. It looked okay, not too amateurish. But it wasn’t sophisticated enough for the client base I wanted to attract. Anyway, Pete was polite, but weirdly … stiff. He said something like: ‘I appreciate your thinking highly of my work, but I make it a point not to mix business and social relationships.’ Not ‘I’m sorry.’ Not ‘I’d be glad to recommend someone to you or tell you what you should be looking for in a designer.’” Iris shrugged, then suddenly seemed to notice the strand of hair that had escaped from her clip. She caught it and put it back.
“When you say, ‘weirdly stiff,’ was there anything really off about the way he was acting?”
Iris shook her head. “No. Not really off. Just not going along with the usual interpersonal stuff.”
“That’s how he strikes me, too,” I offered encouragingly. “Just a little off. You know, there’s an Islamic proverb. Well, there’s always an Islamic proverb, but this one is so perfect: ‘Feed the poor and pat the head of the orphan.’ It really means to show compassion to people in all sorts of need, whether it’s a physical need or an emotional one.”
I must have missed the door of Chance t’ Dance opening because the girls—and the three boys who had their own hip-hop class—came pouring out. The girls were practically in uniform: black leggings and white shirts, their ponytails dancing up and down as if to the beat of some song they could still hear.
One of the interview techniques I used was getting inquiries to sound like conversation. At least I hoped so, so I quickly asked: “So if he was so definite in his ‘no,’ could you take that as a sign that his business is doing well?”
“I guess so. Actually? Really good, now that I think about it. He doesn’t beat his own drum, does he? But I have a client right around the corner on Greensward and the last time I drove by the Delaneys’ house, I saw they’d put in a new driveway, Belgian block, and did a major landscape overhaul. The landscape design wasn’t up my alley. The kind that’s in such good taste it looks bland. But hey, life has lots of different alleys.” Iris stopped for an instant to wave at her daughter. From twenty feet away, the kid looked pretty, slightly rounded, with petunia-pink bangs. “They did put in a copper beech that I thought was a gorgeous specimen. Must have cost him close to the national debt! So I guess he’s raking it in.”