God knew they could have used a date night, but getting ready felt like more hassle than it was worth. Alex hated every outfit she tried on for a concert Nick was more excited about attending than she was—some nineties band trying to revisit their glory days.
A glass of wine on the couch was the only date she needed. She’d spent the day in a grueling mediation session between a divorcing couple who used their money and time to bash each other rather than agree on a vacation schedule. She’d always been inured to her clients’ marital strife, but now she seemed to be taking her work home in the worst possible way. The conflicts that played out in her office were somehow skewing her perspective, making it hard to tell the difference between reality and a projection of fears and anxieties for her own marriage.
At least the house was quiet. Alex busied herself getting ready for the evening. Nick wasn’t home from work yet. She assumed Lettie was in her room, where she’d been spending most of her time while grounded.
To this day, Alex regretted compromising with Nick on Lettie’s punishment. It was too much, and she wanted to rethink the whole damn thing. She’d address it with Nick later, try to get her daughter’s sentence reduced for good behavior. Let him accuse me of being too soft a parent, she thought. It’s not like he has all the answers.
It was a bit early for a drink, but Alex found herself opening a bottle of wine and filling a glass to the very top. Although Nick enjoyed a cocktail here and there, she was glad he wasn’t home to watch her imbibe. She didn’t want to throw out the “it’s five o’clock somewhere” line again unless absolutely necessary. The world was divided into twenty-four different time zones, and there was a good chance she’d used that excuse often enough to cover every one of them.
At the expected hour, Alex heard Nick’s car pulling into the driveway as she was pouring herself a refill. She took a long drink, then another, and rather than try to finish it all, poured the rest of her glass down the sink. She rinsed the glass clean, aware she was getting rid of evidence, not sure why she was taking such measures to hide a drink—or two.
Moments later, Nick strode into the kitchen through the side entrance, followed close behind by Emily.
Alex always welcomed her sister’s pop-in visits, but this was one she could do without. It had been a few days since she’d seen Ken traipsing through the woods behind the Kumars’ house. She’d had ample opportunities to share what she saw, but Alex feared it would do more harm than good.
She was hoping Emily would preempt any conversation by offering some grand explanation, a crazy story about Ken having to race over to the Kumars’ place to help put out a grease fire or something—anything—but no such luck.
As far as Alex was concerned, revealing what she’d witnessed might start an avalanche of accusations that could be the undoing of Emily and Ken. The weight of that responsibility felt too much to bear, so Alex was counting on time to take care of the issue for her.
“Hey, sweetheart,” Alex said, giving Nick a kiss on the cheek to lessen the chance he’d smell wine on her breath. “Are you excited for the show?”
“Very!” Nick said with kid-like glee.
“Who are you seeing?” asked Emily.
“I don’t know,” said Alex, “the Wiggles or something.”
Nick shot Alex an incredulous look. “Weezer,” he corrected. “We’re seeing Weezer tonight. Not the Wiggles. Good god, did I waste this ticket on you?”
“Whatever. I don’t care about the band.” She said this lightly, even though she meant it. “But I certainly hope you don’t think taking your wife out on a date is a waste of anything.”
“No, of course not,” said Nick. He placed an arm around her shoulder to give her a half hug. “I should get ready. It’s getting late, and we’ll hit traffic.”
Nick worried about these sorts of things—traffic, parking, gas (he never let a car get below a quarter of a tank)—while Alex was more fly by the seat of her pants. His stress frequently became Alex’s, which always added a little anxiety to their date nights.
After Nick left the room, Alex turned her attention to Emily. “So what brings you here, Sis?”
Instead of answering, Emily leaned forward, prying apart the lapels of her silk blouse to reveal a stunning emerald pendant dangling from a platinum chain. “Thought you’d like to see this,” said Emily, whose radiant smile was worthy of any red carpet.
Alex’s breath caught. “It’s gorgeous.”
“It’s from Ken,” said Emily, who did a little shake/shimmy dance to express her delight. “I know you’ve been worried about me, so I wanted to make sure you know everything is okay at home now.”
“More than okay, I’d say,” Alex said. “So what’s the occasion?” Emily’s birthday was close to Christmas.
“No special reason, just that he loves me,” said Emily with a sparkling smile. “Guess I should feel a little guilty for thinking the worst,” she added.
“Or trashing the Kumars’ basement,” said Alex.
“Not my finest hour, I admit,” Emily said. “But I’m letting all that go now. It’s in the past. By the way, I saw Lettie heading off with the new boy on the street.”
Alex gave her sister a confused look. “What are you talking about? Lettie is up in her room, or at least I thought she was.”
Nick returned to the kitchen, bending at the knees to pet Zoe.
“Honey, Emily just told me that she saw Lettie driving off with the new neighbor. Is she sneaking out on us?”
Nick cleared his throat. “Oh, I didn’t get a chance to tell you,” he said, “but Lettie begged me to let her go out to a movie with Jay Kumar. I felt like she doesn’t have friends in the neighborhood like she once did, and this would be a good opportunity to fix that.”
A flash of anger turned Alex’s vision momentarily white. “Isn’t that something that maybe you and I should have discussed beforehand?”
Nick’s eyes said yes, even though he’d done the opposite. “She’s been really cooped up lately,” he said.
“It’s called grounded,” Alex snapped. “A punishment you and I agreed on. In fact, didn’t you just the other day criticize me for not being firm enough? And as for an added ‘What were you thinking?’ isn’t Jay Kumar, like, thirty?”
“Twenty,” Emily chimed in.
Alex’s eyes grew fierce. “You sent our grounded daughter out on a date with a twenty-year-old who we hardly know? I’m sorry, Nick—and please feel free to take this the wrong way—but what the hell is wrong with you?”
Nick struck a defensive posture, his back literally up against the kitchen wall. Anger sparked in his eyes but dimmed before Alex’s furious stare. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking and sounding genuinely contrite. “You’re right. I should have consulted you, but you were in a mediation session and couldn’t be reached, and I was just so busy. I made a quick decision.”
“By quick, do you mean without any thought whatsoever?” Alex’s anger was still rising.
This time Nick didn’t back down. “Give me some credit, will you?” he said. “Yeah, maybe I didn’t think it all the way through, but it’s not like I didn’t give it any thought. Lettie is getting older, and sometimes we need to trust her judgment. She’s going to be in college in a year, hanging out with kids of all ages. She’s a smart girl … I guess she and Jay have been talking, and she’s gotten to know him better. She trusts him, and despite some mistakes she’s made, it’s important Lettie knows that we still have faith in her. And besides, you were the one in favor of a lighter punishment. I didn’t think it would be such a big deal. But I am sorry. I should have made more of an effort to reach you. That was wrong of me.”
Alex took a deep breath. This wasn’t the hill she wanted to die on. Given her profession, she was well aware that how couples fought could be the deciding factor in the health of their marriage. She and Nick were hardly a paragon of matrimony, especially these days, but in the end, each always tried to see the other’s point of view.
“Okay, I get it … and thank you for apologizing. Let’s just move on and have a good night out,” Alex offered as an olive branch. “I have an idea,” she said. “How about a drink before we go? Nick, can you pour the wine while I get changed? I don’t like what I have on. I’ll hurry. We won’t be late.”
It was about forty minutes into the concert before Nick embarrassed Alex to the point where she wanted to crawl under her seat. Prior to that, she’d been having a good time—to a degree. The band was loud enough to make her head hurt (or was it cocktail number whatever?) and many of the concertgoers could have been Lettie’s friends, but a number of people from her generation were in attendance as well—including one especially exuberant gentleman in the row behind them decked out in flannel and a Weezer T-shirt, as if grunge were still in fashion.
The guy whooped it up with unabashed enthusiasm at the start of each song. Unfortunately, he didn’t stop whooping until the end of each song. Then he’d swill his beer. Start all over again. “Hell, yeah! Weezer rules! Yeah, Weezer! Rivers! ‘Beverly Hills’! ‘Beverly Hills’!”
Evidently, “Beverly Hills” was a reference to one of the band’s hit songs, and Rivers was the band’s lead singer, who most certainly didn’t care what this guy had to say.
Nick, however, did care. He cared a great deal, in fact. After the fourth song with nonstop screaming, Nick whirled around to glare at the much larger, far more physically intimating man behind him.
Alex’s whole body tensed. She’d been in the car with Nick enough times to know when his anger would turn into road rage. Was concert rage a thing?
“Hey, dude,” Nick shouted, pointing his finger at the man, “will you shut the fuck up so we can enjoy the show?” He said it loudly enough that Rivers might have actually heard him.
Applause broke out from most everyone nearby.
The man’s eyes came aglow. The dark hairs of his thick beard twitched as if they’d caught an electric current. A stare-down ensued, Old West style, and Nick showed no signs of backing down.
Alex harbored visions of riding in the ambulance with him, calling his mother to get his blood type.
The bearded man raised his plastic cup, perhaps to toss the contents at Nick. “Whatever, dude,” he grumbled. He put the cup to his lips, and that was the end of it.
Alex should have been proud of her husband for taking a stand. Instead, layers of embarrassment settled inside her. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around again, so she spent the rest of the concert in her seat, with her eyes forward, fearing that at any moment the man Nick had confronted would retaliate. A trip to the concession stand for a glass of wine eased her nerves somewhat. Maybe if she was lucky, she’d forget the evening entirely come morning.
Alex was still revved up on the rainy ride home, while Nick was all smiles and joy. He’d always been this way—calm one second, a tempest the next. She’d grown accustomed to his mercurial tendencies, but that didn’t make them a pleasure to live with.
True to form, Nick streamed a Weezer playlist of the concert they’d just seen. As far as he was concerned, the altercation was a thing of the past. The concert, however, would continue for the duration of the drive home.
“Haven’t you had enough Weezer?” asked Alex.
“Never,” said Nick, turning up the volume when “Beverly Hills” came on.
Alex wanted to shut off the music but didn’t want to spark an argument. Instead, she found a subject that might interest him. She told him about seeing Ken sneaking around the Kumars’ place.
“That’s strange, for sure,” said Nick, “and it’s not the only odd occurrence involving our new neighbors.”
“Oh? What else?”
“I went over to the Kumars’ on Thursday to invite Samir to poker night.”
“When is that again?”
“Next week,” Nick said.
“Is he coming?” asked Alex.
“That’s the thing. At first I thought so. At least he seemed interested. He asked me what games we played, and I told him mostly it’s Texas Hold’em, but we mix it up some.”
“Is Samir okay with gambling?” Alex asked. “I know in some parts of India it’s not acceptable.”
Nick gave a shrug. “I don’t know how long he’s been living in America or what his cultural practices are. But he does know how to play Texas Hold’em, because he asked me about the blinds.”
“You talked about window treatments?” Alex looked confused.
“No, not those blinds,” Nick said with a chuckle. “It’s a poker term for a rule when there’s no ante in a game.”
Alex didn’t quite understand, but she let it go. Poker wasn’t her thing, but she was glad Nick got together with the neighbors to have some fun. As for Nick, it was no surprise to her that he would be welcoming to Samir Kumar and try to include him in their game night.
“So what happened?” she asked.
“Like I said, he seemed interested, but then he asked where we were getting together. Soon as I told him it was at Ken’s place, he got really tense, and then he told me he had plans and had to take a rain check. But he seemed upset. I don’t think he even said thanks for the invite. He basically closed the door in my face, kind of abruptly, and that was that.”
“Which day was this again?”
“Thursday,” said Nick.
“So this was after I saw Ken sneaking away from their home,” Alex said thoughtfully. “Wonder if it’s connected.”
“Could be,” Nick said.
Alex drifted into thought as Weezer sang on. Perhaps the only way to get some answers was to pay a visit to Mandy Kumar. It was a good thing that the neighborhood women had their get-togethers, too.