Rigby came home for lunch for once, his shaky demeanor from the night before considerably smoother. “Don’t worry about it, baby. It’s under control.”
“We could lose the house, Rigby. That’s a disaster for anybody, but for a real estate agent . . . Jesus, I don’t even want to think about it.”
“Baby, did I just say I’ve got it under control or didn’t I?” He was squirting sriracha sauce onto a plate of cottage cheese.
“You did, and as usual you left out the important details. All the details, in fact. And also the broad strokes.”
He took in a mouthful before he started to speak. “No point in telling you at this stage, see?”
“Don’t blow smoke up my ass. How much trouble are we really in?”
He shrugged and made a face, eating fast and talking with his mouth full of pinkish, mushy curds. “Look, we’re not out of it yet, but I’ve got a plan. We’re going to be fine. Now, all I need is for you to stop worrying.” He finished the cottage cheese and dropped the plate in the sink. “I’ll be home late tonight. Heading for Santa Barbara, going to have dinner with Glenn.”
Right, and then he was going to come back to Ventura and fuck Beth. Sometimes it got to her, how stupid he took her to be. As soon as he was out the garage door, she got on the phone.
A couple of hours later her eyes were closed, concentrating on the elusive promise of an orgasm as young Keith lapped away below. His noisy slurps were distracting, but a fair trade-off, she supposed, for the gusto he brought to the task. She arched her back, turned her head to the left toward the bedroom door, craned her neck, and just as she felt the thing starting to rise up through her nervous system, she opened her eyes just a sliver. There in the doorway was Stanley, a mangy, smelly, slightly damp sheepdog, his giant pink-and-black tongue lolling rhythmically and more or less in time with Keith’s, and she let out a loud snort of a laugh that coincided with the orgasm and outlasted it. It returned intermittently while he fucked her, which didn’t appear to bother him.
“Two afternoons in a row,” Keith said afterward, lying naked on the top sheet, staring up at the ceiling with a simple, happy grin. “First time.”
“Don’t get any ideas. We still have to be careful as hell.” Telling him her woes the day before had had its cathartic element, but there was a troubling change in his demeanor now that he knew a few secrets, as though listening to a few of her intimate troubles had earned him some kind of emotional intimacy. She’d assumed that sleeping with someone horny and young would allow her to steer clear of any kind of emotional involvement, but here was Keith, avid and puppyish and wanting her to be crazy about him in return.
As it happened, Keith knew the story of the murder house well, located as it was two short blocks from his grandfather’s house. One of the murderer’s grandsons had been in school a year ahead of Keith, probably the one who’d ordered the demolition of the shed, and children whispered then, as children will, about the long-ago disappearance of the boy’s grandmother. “I followed it pretty close in the paper after they knocked down the shed and found that skeleton,” he said. “I bet you could take a backhoe to that property and find a few more.”
“I shouldn’t care, should I? I should be happy to be rid of them and happy for my friend getting the house off her hands. But I swear to God, I can’t stand the idea of those idiots buying it. Why is that, you think?”
“I don’t know,” Keith said. “Just think about the money. And you won’t have to deal with them anymore.”
Keith didn’t think in complicated terms, one of the reasons she liked being around him. Her only other sounding board was Rigby, and half the time the son of a bitch didn’t listen to what she was saying. “Maybe it’s this,” she said. “The husband, he’s got this pointy black beard. I think he dyes it, and the wife is always making this creepy noise with her sinuses that sounds kind of like a snicker. They seem like Satanists or something.”
“Satanists have to live somewhere, I guess.”
“I mean, they almost seemed excited by the idea that the house was the site of a suicide and probably at least one murder way back.”
“So you think they’re going to commit more just because the house has such a good murder vibe?”
She started laughing again, partly because she found the phrase funny and partly because he’d nailed the source of her unfounded anxiety. The juxtaposition of the murder house and the Handys’ creepiness had led her to construct for them an entirely new identity as a pair of perverted, murderous psychopaths instead of the socially awkward dullards they almost certainly were.
As Keith basked in the glory of having made her laugh, which seemed to please him more than having made her come, she started getting dressed. They’d been making use of his fellow pro Mickey’s house for almost two weeks while Keith house-sat, feeding the dogs and watering the plants in return for a fuckpad that was relatively nice when you considered that its usual occupant was a single twenty-seven-year-old ex-frat rat of an assistant golf pro. “I wish your friend weren’t coming back, this has been nice.”
“I could clean my place up, make it nice.”
She’d been there once and only once, and knew for a fact that nothing short of a bulldozer could turn Keith’s skanky bachelor pad into a place she’d be willing to have sexual intercourse in, but she phrased her response carefully. “Your front door’s visible from the street. Unlike your friend’s.”
“So?”
“So my face is on bus benches in this town. People know who I am, I can’t be seen going in and out of some guy’s apartment.”
“You sure I couldn’t clean it up?”
“It’ll be fine, sweetie, we’ll go back to empty houses. It’ll be fun.” She had a sudden desire for a cigarette. “Mickey doesn’t smoke, does he?”
Keith looked as though she’d asked whether Mickey had sex with animals. “No,” he said.
“Would he mind if I smoked in here?”
“You smoke?”
He looked so disappointed in her she was sorry she’d said anything. “Not really for years. Just sometimes I want one, and I can’t smoke at home because Rigby’d freak, and it’s Southern California so I can’t ever have one in public. I don’t have a pack, anyway. Rigby goes through my purse when he needs cash.”
“Sorry. None of my beeswax.”
She fixed her gaze on a pattern in the popcorn ceiling. “Am I prettier horizontal than vertical?”
“Beg pardon?”
“When you hit a certain age and you lie down on your back, you get kind of a gravitational face-lift. I was just wondering how much better I look that way.”
“You look good either way.”
“Hm. Well, every so often I look at myself and wonder if it isn’t getting to be time.”
“Time for what?”
“A face-lift.”
“You’re just fishing for compliments now.”
“I’m serious.”
“That’s crazy. Those things don’t look right. You know one of my clients who had one? Kathleen Fullerton. Look at her, eyes popping out of her sockets. And she wasn’t half bad looking before that.”
“Right, Rigby calls her ‘Our Lady of Perpetual Surprise.’ I’d certainly want a better surgeon than hers.”
They retreated into silence while they dressed, and when the sheepdog came panting back into the room she felt a little sad.
Danny slurped his soup—tomato, canned—and the girls giggled. Paula didn’t so much as bother glaring at him. Grilled cheese sandwiches and soup made for the laziest dinner she could remember serving in a long time, but when she got home and realized she hadn’t stopped for groceries, she thought to herself, Fuck it, they won’t even notice. Rigby would have bitched about it, but he wasn’t here, was he?
Isolde started on the second half of her sandwich, having taken only two bites out of the first, and Fiona scowled. “Mom, she’s doing it again.”
“I don’t care,” Paula said. The girls both got along fine with their brother, but they worked hard to drive each other crazy, and they knew one another’s weak points intimately.
“I’m going to eat both halves,” Isolde said. “Why do you care what order I do it in?”
“That’s it, I’m done.” Fiona stood, her dinner unfinished. She seemed to be waiting for Paula to order her to sit back down, and it took a good twenty seconds before she took her plate to the kitchen counter. Then she started eating her sandwich again, over the sink. Her sister continued to chew, managing to smirk at the same time.
“Can I have a hundred dollars?” Danny asked.
“What for?”
“I want to see Lil Bohunk at Hollywood Forever in two weeks.”
“Who?”
“Lil Bohunk. He’s a rapper.”
“Is he dead?”
“I wouldn’t be paying a hundred dollars to see him if he was dead, Mom.”
“I thought Hollywood Forever was a cemetery.”
“They also have concerts,” he said with such forbearance that she decided to give him the hundred. Why not? A hundred dollars more or less wasn’t going to save them from ruin.
“How are you getting down there?”
“Jonah’s driving.”
“I don’t know how I feel about you riding with Jonah.”
“If I had my own car, like literally every single one of my friends—”
She held up her hand. “All right, we’ll talk about this another time. You can have the hundred.”
After dinner, she sat down and figured out what her income was likely to be over the next three months if every single one of her listings sold for the asking price and every single one of her clients bought a house for more or less what they’d decided they could afford. It was a wildly optimistic scenario, even childishly so. Then she figured out what they owed and made a similarly optimistic stab at how long the bank was likely to let the mortgage situation slide. The house was so far underwater there wasn’t any point in putting it on the market and downsizing.
She saw no way around losing it. They had six months, max. Foreclosure was bad news for anybody, but for a realtor at her level, it could be a career-ender. She didn’t know what had really happened with Rigby and Haskill’s supposedly stolen money, though she suspected the whole thing existed as a fantasy in her husband’s mind, but his reassurances that he had a follow-up plan didn’t comfort her. Time, maybe, to start thinking seriously about talking to a divorce lawyer and saving whatever assets could still be saved.