Parrish and India didn’t wake up until nine the following morning, God bless them.
I strapped both girls into their booster seats for breakfast, feeling more rested than I had in weeks. Or months, probably. Sleep deprivation tended to blur my retrospective time lines. And everything else.
Dean still hadn’t called home from Japan, but even that couldn’t piss me off. It was Saturday, it was gorgeous out, and I had something concrete with which to occupy myself over the course of the day to come.
Fucking awesome. All around.
I dialed Cary while the girls chowed down on their whole wheat toaster waffles, leaning against the laundry room door frame so I could check out last night’s map work.
The phone rang eight times before his machine picked up.
“This is Cary. I’m not at home right now, so please leave a message and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Have a great day!”
I asked him if he maybe felt like going for a walk later, and hung up.
Probably out biking or jogging or whatever already. Typical Boulderite.
“Well, my darlings,” I said to my children, “how would you like to join your mother on a wagon tour of arson sites around our fair city?”
I figured I could type up my notes on Rainer’s talk later on. The article wasn’t due until Monday, and I had the whole weekend to myself.
The girls had finished breakfast. I cleaned them up and gave them each a fresh diaper, realizing I only had four more left in the Pampers package—which meant I’d have to buy more sometime today. Like, soon.
I packed two into my kid-care travel kit along with the usual complement of sippy cups, butt-wipes, and Cheese Nips.
The fifty bucks to Setsuko had put a serious dent into my cash liquidity, so I grabbed my Amex card before loading the girls into the wagon. Fuck it, Dean could hardly give me shit for buying diapers—even on credit.
But then I figured I should check that month’s bill before we headed out. I remembered having put it in the pile of mail on Dean’s desk.
I didn’t usually read through the monthly statement, but I wanted to make sure I could charge the Pampers—and a couple of gallons of milk—without leaving him stranded somewhere in the Western Pacific with no money for a bowl of ramen or whatever.
The bill was addressed to me, since his card had started out as a subsidiary of mine once upon a time back in Syracuse.
As far as I remembered we had a monthly limit of a thousand bucks or something—or maybe it was up to twelve hundred between the two of us?
I tried not to be crazy with the plastic, but it wasn’t like Dean gave me a formal household allowance or anything so sometimes I’d buy the girls a couple of dresses at Target. Or, hey, treat myself to a burrito—with tip for delivery—when he’d been on the road for a tiresome stretch and I was sick of toddler-food remnants for my own makeshift dinner.
Remarkable how tempting the latter option became on the nights when he’d call home from wherever to regale me with details about some fabulous expense-account dinner with clients. He knew I loved hearing about the foodie shit, especially from Asia. In the old days he’d amuse me with scathing descriptions of Midwestern-airport-layover pizza (“catsup on a matzoh”) or Poulet Frit de Kentucky in the rural paper-mill hamlets of French Canada.
When home was an apartment in Manhattan before the girls were born, I’d delighted in teasing him over the phone with lavish riffs about how I couldn’t decide between Korean barbecue or Shanghainese soup dumplings, West Indian curried-goat roti from our corner deli or chunks of Cuban roast pork basted with garlic-spiked lemon juice and browned to a crisp.
Culinary foreplay was something at which we both excelled.
He’d come up in the world since then, and relished getting to pay me back at long last with food-porn of his own from hotel rooms in Bangkok or Taipei, Bangalore or Seoul.
Even his description, once, of getting taken out to this Beijing restaurant specializing in snake-meat cuisine had been exquisite torture, not least since I’d just eaten cold leathery mac-and-cheese scraps out of the pot with a wooden spoon.
“Twelve courses,” he’d said, describing each one.
“You are such an asshole,” I’d replied.
“But wait, Bunny… I haven’t told you about the deer-penis liqueur they brought out with dessert.”
“I hope it was hideous.”
“Surprisingly smooth,” he said.
“This sounds like a major case of Hey dudes, let’s fuck with the giant blond gweilo!”
He laughed. “Obviously.”
“Over which you of course totally prevailed, twisting circumstances to your own nefarious anthropology-major advantage.”
“Doesn’t pay to fuck with this particular gweilo,” he said. “I may not be able to spit snake bones on the floor with suave native rapidity, but I’m bigger and I can drink way more.”
“I just hope you weren’t expected to eat the deer penis. Like the worm in the tequila bottle or whatever.”
“No,” he’d replied. “And thank God, because I would’ve been an utter pussy had it come to that.”
“Probably one of those things where you’re actually expected to refuse, insisting it’s an honor you couldn’t possibly deprive your host of, being yourself so pathetically unworthy.”
I heard him snort in agreement, laughing.
And I knew Dean was still grateful to me for what had undoubtedly been my finest moment as a junior-corporate wife: insisting he read Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice before his first business trip to Japan.
I figured a quick run-through of Tiger Tanaka’s training regimen to help Bond pass as a deaf coal miner from Hokkaido couldn’t hurt, considering. And I’d been right.
When Dean’s host the first night asked him to please squeeze some lemon juice over the platter of lobster sashimi (served sliced in situ, with only the upper half of the shell removed), my Intrepid Spouse hadn’t batted an eye.
Poor Bond, of course, lost major face by leaping to his feet and shouting a British obscenity when his own unfortunate crustacean scuttled rapidly off the platter and across the table, desperate to escape the acidic juice.
Because a lobster served as sashimi is, of course, still very much alive.
Dean had been well prepared for this eventuality, thanks to me and Ian Fleming.
I grinned to myself, remembering that as I slit open the Amex bill with a paring knife at the kitchen table.
The total was just under seven hundred bucks: charges from Dean’s trips to Texas and Louisiana, mostly.
I’d had two rolls of film developed and bought the girls some really cheap sneakers. Granted, those purchases weren’t exactly necessities, but I figured I was still well under the limit of spousal chastisement, whenever Dean finally came home and read through these pages himself.
I packed the girls into the wagon after writing STOP AT 7-11 on my hand, hoping they’d have a pack of age-appropriate Pampers in stock so I wouldn’t have to slog all the way out to King Soopers by way of the Creek Path. Especially since King Soopers was nowhere near the crime scenes I wanted to check out in the meantime.
Twenty minutes later I was standing at the 7-Eleven checkout counter, royally pissed.
“What do you mean, my card’s been declined?” I said.
The dude behind the register wasn’t exactly sympathetic. He pushed my Amex back toward me with the tip of his index finger, one corner of his lip curled up like he was all worried I’d infect him with food-stamp cooties.
“Dude,” I said, “I just read through the bill for this month. I should have at least five hundred more bucks on that thing.”
He stared at me, unimpressed.
“Run it again,” I said.
“I’m sure you have some other form of payment?”
“No I do not have some other form of payment. Besides which I’m only trying to buy diapers and milk. Run it again.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but it won’t change anything. The card’s been declined. And there are customers behind you.”
I leaned toward him, my hands flat on the countertop between the big jar of Slim Jims and the seriously tacky vase filled with long-stemmed artificial roses, the buds of which were apparently wadded-up pairs of women’s underwear in various insipid pastel shades.
“Dude,” I said, “give me a break. It’s a fucking Gold Card, for chrissake.”
He winced and turned red, Adam’s apple bobbing wildly in his long pale throat, fat as a baby’s fist. “Please, ma’am. Language.”
I’d missed the clip-on tie attached to the thick polyester collar of his uniform.
Oh, great, a Mormon.
I snatched my card back up. “Fine. Whatever.”
He crossed his pale weaselly arms, lip curled farther up.
“And when my kids are reduced to shitting on the kitchen floor,” I said, “I’ll be sure to thank you personally in my prayers to our heavenly father, you candy-ass little schmuck.”
With that, I stormed back out into the parking lot.
Okay, not that one can actually “storm” through a swinging glass 7-Eleven exit door with a four-foot-long Radio Flyer wagon in tow. But I sure as fuck stormed in spirit, despite the dopy little automatic bell chiming in my wake.
Thirty-seven bucks in cash to last me until Dean gets home… I should’ve let Setsuko give me that money back.
Madeline, you are so royally hosed.
And Setsuko was probably on a chairlift in Aspen right now, wearing some fluffy angora ski suit while she crocheted a goddamn overcoat or bassinet or whatever, for whomever.
I called the Amex 800-number the minute we got home. I’d considered dialing from the pay phone on the 7-Eleven’s exterior wall, but feared my flouncingly irate exit had been flawed enough as it was.
Or that I might burst into tears, which would’ve been a deeply hideous and unbearable indignity at that point.
The corporate voice-over-robot lady gave me ridiculously placid guidance through the usual customer-service bullshit: Press “one,” press something else, and then “something-something nueve, para continuar en Español,” which always seemed ridiculous because how would I have gotten that far already, if I didn’t speak English? But it’s not like there was anyone to point this out to.
I punched in the card number and the expiration date. Then it wanted the last four digits of my Social Security number.
After five minutes of dreadful Muzak, a live person finally picked up: Tanya, who wanted to know how she could be of service today—but only after I told her my card number, expiration date, security code, and last four digits of my Social.
“Now, how may I help you today, Ms. Dare?” she asked.
“I’m hoping you might tell me why my card was just declined for a fourteen-dollar-and-thirty-two-cent purchase at my local 7-Eleven here in Boulder, Tanya, when it appears that the current charges on this account are under seven hundred dollars, so we should still have plenty of available credit.”
“I’m so sorry, ma’am,” she said.
“Thank you for your concern, Tanya. My children need diapers and milk and my husband is currently in Tokyo, along with his wallet. This is rather a bummer.”
“Let me just check on that current balance for you, all right, Ms. Dare?”
“Thank you very much. I appreciate your help with this.”
Hey, I’d worked as a customer-service phone chick at a book catalog in New York. Customers who’d gotten pissy about screwups not-of-my-making hadn’t ever inspired me to go the extra mile.
“Just another moment, ma’am. Our system is slow today.”
“That’s fine. Please take all the time you need.”
She didn’t say anything for a minute or so. I could hear the hum of other voices in the room around her, wherever she was.
“All right, Ms. Dare. I think I can explain what happened…”
“I hope we can get it cleared up?”
“Well, I’m afraid that there are some new charges on the account. Made in Tokyo over the last day or so on your husband’s card.”
“And?”
“And the credit limit for the card has been reached, until the existing balance is paid in full.”
“What exactly did he charge?” I knew his hotel room might’ve been expensive, but it was booked through the company travel agent so he shouldn’t have had to pay for that part of the trip.
“Well, ma’am, I’m not supposed to disclose the details of specific charges to the subsidiary card member.”
“Tanya, my husband is the subsidiary card member. This account is in my name.”
“I’m not sure that I can—”
“I’m sure that you can, Tanya. I’m not only asking about this as his spouse, legally, but as the person to whom the account belongs. Please tell me what the new charges are.”
“Well, I don’t know what the charges are actually referring to, ma’am.”
“Well, what exactly is he supposed to have spent five hundred bucks on, Tanya—gold-plated sushi?”
“No, ma’am,” she said. “I mean, it’s not just one charge.”
“And you can’t tell me what the charges are?”
“I could tell you the names of the establishments, but they’re not in English. I mean, they’re spelled in English, but I don’t know if they’re restaurants, or hotels…”
“Oh. All right. I understand.”
Jesus, I had maybe forty bucks cash left, to last until the following week. Maybe I could get McNally to front me some money?
Yeah, great career move…
“Tell you what,” she said. “I think I may be able to add another twenty dollars of credit here, so you can go back to 7-Eleven.”
“Tanya, really? You have no idea how much that would help.”
She laughed. “Hey, I’ve been married. And maybe he bought you a really nice present.”
“Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You’re a total goddess. Thank you.”
She laughed again. “Nobody’s ever called me that before, in seven years at this job. You have a good afternoon now, you hear?”
“Thank you, Tanya. Same to you.”
I decided I’d give Cary another call, see if he was home and up for a walk with me.
I didn’t want to ask him for money, either. Not if he’d had to hit up his father for rent money because Bittler was fucking him over.
And we had plenty of food in the house, it was just milk and diapers we were short on.
I dialed Cary’s home phone but he still didn’t pick up. I left another message, packed up the girls again, and headed for the 7-Eleven out by his apartment. If Cary wasn’t home by then, at least I could leave him a note.
No way I was going to give Mormon boy any satisfaction by shopping again at his establishment. Although if I’d had a deer penis handy, I totally would’ve swung back through the place so I could make him eat the damn thing and then apologize.
Patronizing little petty-bureaucrat fuck.