Forty-One

I stood in the front yard, trembling, stranded in a suburban wasteland. My mind cranked in a continuous loop, playing and replaying the transition from a pleasant domestic scene of pasta and gravy to a nightmare of knives and screaming.

I didn’t want to upset her any further, so I got off her front lawn and stood in the street. Cars and trucks thrummed on the nearby Mass Pike. Trees hid the highway; without the sound, you’d never know it was there.

The neighborhood had no sidewalks here, but it had no traffic, either. The one lane led to a larger cross street after five driveways. I found the cross street and stood on the corner under a street lamp where Jael would see me. I pushed the memory of my knife-­wielding mother out of my mind and opened the manila folder. It was the only piece of information that I had been able to wrest from the black hole that was her house.

The folder had twelve slips of paper in it. Pay stubs from the year before my father died. I angled the papers in the street lamp’s light to read the numbers. Like other engineers at GDS, my father made a comfortable upper-middle class income, hovering somewhere around six figures.

The income on all the pay stubs was identical. Apparently GDS gave their cost-of-living raises at the beginning of the year. The money was divided among taxes, a 401k, Medicare, Social Security, and my parents’ checking account. All the money went into that one checking account, and my mother paid all the bills. There was no way that my father was slipping money out of his pay to cover the expenses of a second family in Pittsfield. This had been a waste of time.

I looked up and down the street. Jael wasn’t due for half an hour. I opened my Droid and searched for Lucy’s phone number. The picture I took of her at Fenway smiled out at me. That day seemed like it was years ago.

I realized that I hadn’t spoken to Lucy today. Funny that she hadn’t gotten back to me. I called her cell. She answered immediately.

“How’s the face?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Thank you for helping me out last night.”

“It didn’t seem right to say, ‘Oh look, my date got beat up. Time to go!’ ”

“Still, it was good of you get me back to my bed.”

“Was your other friend still there when you woke up?”

“What, Jael? Oh yeah. We’ve been busy today.”

“She’s beautiful in an exotic sort of way.”

Doh! It finally occurred to me why Lucy hadn’t called.

I said, “Jael and I aren’t dating or anything.”

Lucy said, “It’s really none of my business.”

“No. Seriously. She’s a friend of mine who’s—well—”

“Yes?”

“Who’s really good with a gun.”

“You have a friend who’s really good with a gun?” Lucy sounded skeptical.

“You don’t?”

“No.”

“I highly recommend it.”

Lucy was silent for a moment, and I let the silence linger. I was happy to be talking with Lucy. The conversation was pushing my mother further and further out of my mind.

Finally Lucy spoke. “How are you feeling tonight?”

I said, “I feel good. The stitches don’t hurt much.”

“Would you like to come over to my house for a visit?”

My stomach flipped. Imagined images of Lucy’s naked body flooded my brain. I took a deep breath and said, “Boy, that sounds great.”

“So you’ll come over?”

“Sorry, but I can’t. I have to be somewhere tonight. I won’t get home till late.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

I’m meeting a mysterious defense contractor engineer in the woods in Western Mass next to a white dot on the satellite picture. Jael’s getting her sniper rifle. It’ll be great.

I said, “You don’t want to know.”

Lucy asked, “Are you going to get beat up again?”

I said, “I doubt it. How about dinner tomorrow? We could go into Cambridge.”

“Sure!”

We made plans. As I hung up, Jael’s Acura MDX glided down the street. Bobby Miller sat in the passenger seat. I opened the back door and climbed in.