driving home from the accident, Harry found himself gripped by a sudden, intense yearning for his mother. Monica Odell (Harry’s real last name) had been a terrible parent by every conventional mea sure. Half the year they had no phone service. Electricity was iffy. Sometimes she forgot to pick him up at school and she was forever bringing home different men. Harry’s earliest memory was being woken one night by her voice whispering, “Ssshhh, you’ll wake the baby.” At first, Harry thought she had brought a baby home with her. When he realized she was referring to him, all he could feel was indignation. He was not a baby! He was almost six years old! But for all her faults, she had done her son the great favor of liking him. He could feel it every time they spoke.
“Harry!” she’d sing, whenever he called, “tell me every thing, tell me now and start at the beginning.” He would, too. Work problems, money problems, girlfriends, sex. He held nothing back from Monica. Because she’d never treated him like a child, it wasn’t hard for him to treat her like an older, benign friend. It seemed a common thing, a parent who liked you, but the older Harry got, the more he realized how rare it was. Catherine’s parents might have given her every thing she wanted, but Harry could never escape the feeling that they didn’t much like the child they had created.
In return for her affection, Harry had forgiven Monica every thing. When he was very young, he used to watch while she slept off her hangovers, just to make sure she wasn’t dead.
“What are you doing?” she’d ask, when she woke to find him staring at her.
“Nothing,” Harry would mutter, going back to the television, convinced he’d saved his mother’s life.
It was Harry’s biggest regret that his mother died at fifty-eight, five years before his success. When the county hospital diagnosed stage-four lung cancer, Monica seemed almost happy, as if she had been waiting for it.
“It’s God’s will,” she told Harry over the phone. Harry got on a Greyhound bus to Searchlight, Nevada, that night. Three weeks later, she died in a county hospice, a morphine drip dangling over her head like an exclamation point in a cartoon conversation bubble. When he tried to pack up the trailer, Spartacus, her little black poodle, growled and snapped at Harry whenever he went near it, as if it blamed him for her death. Harry gave it to the animal shelter with the understanding that it would be “put to sleep” within forty-eight hours if nobody adopted it.
“What are the chances somebody will take her?” he asked the man who did the paperwork.
“Zero,” the man answered, “nobody wants an old dog.”
When Harry tried to sell her mobile home he discovered that Monica had been living for the last five years on a complex scheme of revolving credit-card debt. Each time she maxed out on one credit card, she’d apply for another, paying the minimum possible until the principal ballooned to two, three times the original balance. It was a precarious pyramid scheme on the verge of collapse. No wonder she’d sounded happy at the prospect of an early exit out of her troubles.
Rounding the corner of his block, Harry was surprised to see television vans lining the street in front of his house. “Harry! Harry!” Beauty-pageant blondes turned entertainment reporters crowded around his car, phallic microphones in hand. Behind them, their cameramen silently recorded every thing. Harry shook his head as if he were sorry to let them down but even without Fields’s advice, it would have been easy to say no.
Through a back window, Harry could see his wife in the kitchen, her hair tied up in a red bandanna and a line of worry bisecting the area between her eyebrows. He knew he ought to go inside and talk to her but instead he circled the house to the pool, where the gardener, José, was pruning the jacaranda blossoms. Earlier in the week, Harry had complained that too many were falling into the pool. Already, José had cut back half of the tree. Seeing the tree shorn, Harry realized he’d made a mistake. He missed the purple roof of flowers.
“José,” Harry said, “you can stop cutting now.”
José looked at the lopsided tree and frowned. “It’s no even,” he said.
“It’s okay,” Harry told him.
José shrugged unhappily and began gathering the cut limbs. Harry had noticed this before. José hated leaving anything half done.
In the pool house, a dank two-room structure that smelled vaguely of mildew, Harry began to undress. Halfway through taking off his pants, he heard his wife’s voice.
“Harry? Is that you?”
He recognized certain aspects of her tone—wounded irritation mixed with something he’d never heard before. Was it fear? Reluctantly, Harry began to dress again. Catherine opened the door and threw herself against him. Harry felt an unfamiliar vibration in her body, as if she were freezing and burning up at the same time.
“Harry!” she wailed. “How awful.” He thought he smelled bananas.
“Let’s go inside,” he said. It embarrassed him to talk to his wife in front of José. Unlike Catherine, who’d been raised by professionals, Harry had never gotten used to having employees around the house. He couldn’t get over the idea that they were watching him, taking note of his weaknesses, laughing about him behind his back. He imagined how he and Catherine must look to them—pampered, childless adults who couldn’t or wouldn’t clean their own clothes.
The house smelled of banana bread. “It’s what we do in our family when something goes wrong,” Catherine explained.
“Good idea. Maybe the reporters will want some.”
“Harry, don’t be flip. Not now.”
“If not now, when?”
“We need to come up with a plan.”
“What kind of a plan?” he asked.
“Something to protect our interests in this matter.”
From the little moonstones in her ear to her chamomile hair and goose-berry eyes, people met Catherine and thought pushover, but Harry had lived with her long enough to know better. She craved success and material comfort no less than any other woman he had known. Maybe more. The difference was subtlety. Catherine had it.
“I don’t know what you mean by my ‘interests,’” he answered. “It was an accident. Nobody thinks it was my fault.”
“Exactly,” Catherine answered, her breath coming a little quicker now, “and if something terrible should happen, you shouldn’t have to suffer.”
“What do you mean?” Harry asked.
“You know,” she answered, “sometimes people get spooked when something bad happens. Like when there’s been a murder in a house—nobody wants to live there—even if it’s great in every other way.”
“A man is dead and a girl is lying in the hospital fighting for her life.” There were moments in Harry’s life when the words that came out of his mouth sounded suspiciously similar to the lines he’d spoken when he worked on the soap opera.
“It’s terrible, yes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. There is, however, something we can do about our future.”
“What’s that smell?”
“Goddamn it.” Catherine opened the oven door. The smell of burned sugar filled the room.