The Pocket Wife (7 page)

I
t's nearly two when Dana tosses her apron into the washer along with several place mats and a dish towel. She wanders into the living room, where Peter's snores ripple loudly through the house, eclipsing the music from the CD player near the foyer. Did anyone even hear it, she wonders—the eclectic mix of seventies and eighties music she'd so carefully chosen, the dribs and drabs of ancient blues and modern jazz? Peter hadn't picked out anything. In fact, except for his announcement in the kitchen doorway and his presence during the first few minutes, she has no idea where he even
was
during most of the brunch. For all Dana knows, he was in the backyard, squatted near the picnic table with his phone.

She yawns. Someone's left the front door slightly open, and she tugs on the doorknob. She grabs her latest novel from the desk just inside the door in the entryway, and when she opens the book, a piece of paper falls out—a shopping list, she thinks at first, or an old deposit slip, something she's used as a bookmark. But there's writing on it, tiny writing she can barely make out.
“Fair eats, but your little brunch doesn't begin to pay the piper. Better watch your back.”

Fear rips through her, surrounds her—a strangling, suffocating fear. She clutches the tiny piece of paper and closes her book, setting it on the coffee table as if a sound, a movement made too quickly, anything at all might set off an explosive, fatal retribution. She eases herself off the chair and over to Peter, snoring on the couch. She reaches out and touches him, a light, silent touch. The snoring stops for several seconds before it resumes.

“Peter?” She calls his name softly. She glances around the room in case whoever wrote the note is still inside, sunk into a corner. “Peter!” she says, louder. This time the snoring stops. His eyes pop open.

“What?”

“Someone was here!”

“Many were here.”

“No—” Her voice breaks. “No,” she says again. “Someone else was here, someone angry with me.”

“We basically tossed them out,” Peter says, sitting up with an exaggerated groan. “They'll get over it.” His eyes are droopy; his perfect hair is one big cowlick.

“No,” she says. She shakes his arm and holds the scrap of paper up in front of his face. “Read it!”

“
Read
it? I can't even see it! Where are my—”

“Here,” she says, and she hands him her reading glasses.

“‘Fat ears—'”

“No,” she says. “God.” She sticks on her glasses. “‘Fair eats, but your little brunch doesn't begin to pay the piper. Better watch your back.'”

Peter yawns. “What the hell does that mean?”

“It means—” Dana stops. She doesn't know, actually, but clearly she was right: Someone's watching her, threatening her, hating her. She chews on her cuticle. “It
means,
Peter, that someone's
stalking me, planning to
kill
me for all I know. It means I'm scared shitless!”

“I meant, did you offend someone? Hit a garbage can? Play your car radio too loud?”

“Well, yes. I mean, obviously I have. Offended someone. In fact, maybe whoever I offended is crouched somewhere inside the house.”

“Why
would
they be?” He yawns again.

“Why would someone kill
Celia?
”

After a minute or two, Peter gets up and shuffles from room to room.

“You have to really look,” Dana says, kicking at the drapes. She checks all the coats in the hall closet and behind the shower curtains in both bathrooms. She can hear Peter thumping around their bedroom, and when she hears him trip over an amp cord, she knows he's checking Jamie's room.

“Nothing,” Peter says, back on the couch. “Do you mind if I finish my nap?”

“No,” she says. “Well, yes. Actually, I do. We have to figure out who left that note,” she says, but the only answer is a rumble of far-off thunder and an indecipherable murmur from her husband. She rereads the message, checking the paper for other writing, a label, a number—anything that might provide a window into the world of whoever wrote it and left it for her. There are some fragments of numbers—a receipt, too ripped for her to tell where it came from. She thinks about Ronald at the Root Seller, the odd way he acted, trapping her there in the aisle. She thinks about the neighbors milling here and there, with faces she has never seen. She thinks about how guilt tugs at her, wakens her from fitful, insufficient sleep, and then she thinks about the hooded figure staring at her through her kitchen window from the backyard, the scraping sound she thought was the althea plant beneath the bedroom window—how she scrutinized the yard to no avail, but still
she knew—still she felt the eyes just somewhere underneath the surface of things, watching. Waiting. Hating.

She wonders: If she could pull back the too-large hood on the figure in the yard, whose face would be there, hidden in its breeze-blown folds? A wayward teenage gangster looking for an open window or an unlocked car? Celia's killer? Worse, would she have seen Celia's ghostly, anguished face lurking there or, worse still, her own?

Dana tiptoes out to her car while Peter snores on the sofa. Not only does the note terrify her, there's the meeting with the detective on Celia's case the next morning.
Questioning the neighbors,
he'd told her on the phone.
It's
s
tandard.
She wonders, though. Lately nothing in her life is standard; nothing is the way it seems. She hasn't mentioned it to Peter, even though she knows he could come with her; he could act as her lawyer. But would he? Could she find out things about her husband if she meets this cop—this Jack Moss—alone? Things she couldn't learn with Peter there beside her? Storm clouds hover overhead, turning the sunny day into a gray and early evening. She grips the steering wheel and drives toward town, pulling sloppily in to a parking space outside an all-night diner. She sits for a moment in the hot dampness of the front seat. A sign blinks and buzzes overhead, bathing both her dashboard and St. Christopher in slightly blue fluorescence.
JESSIE'S DIN
, it says, the last two letters bashed out by some misguided soul or a wayward baseball from the vacant lot next door.

Over the years she's come to Jessie's when she couldn't sleep, when her insides buzzed and jiggled as if she'd stuck her finger into a wall socket. She's come here for years, times like this when she's run out of friends to call in the middle of the night—and really, who could be expected to listen to her endless babbling at 3:00
A.M.
?—when nudging Peter awake only makes him pull the
covers tight around him and turn toward the wall. She comes to Jessie's when she's feeling manic and wired. It's so much better than a bar, she tells herself—told Peter when he cared enough to ask where she was going—better than drinking herself into a stupor, even though she's done exactly that more times than she can count. It scares her, though, the drinking, the thought of becoming an alcoholic like her father, dead at forty-one, the strange way he died. Baffling, really. He traveled all the time. He often rode that 9:15 from Philly.

It's been almost three years since she's come here, sitting in this same back booth with the cracked red plastic, the table with its ugly speckled pattern, the nicks along the edge, the thankfully bad lighting. She reaches for a napkin, slips a pen out of her bag, vaguely aware of the waitress approaching. She smiles. Glenda is a beacon in a dark night, an island in a soupy sea of humanity—the drunks, the homeless, the misbegotten, the heartbroken and lonely. The crazy. Glenda the Good.

“Hey!” she says. “Dana! Haven't seen you in ages!”

“I know. I've been—”
Sane,
she thinks.
I've been a little too sane for Jessie's.

“What can I get you?” Glenda pockets a tip from the next table and glances back at Dana. “Decaf?”

“Yeah,” Dana says. “Wow. You have a memory like an ele—”

“Got to in this business.”

“My neighbor,” Dana says. “She was murdered.”

“Oh! God! The one on Ashby Street? It's been all over the news.”

“Lane,” Dana says, “but yeah.”

“Be right back.” Glenda sighs, heading toward the cash register, where several customers are lined up in the faulty, greenish lighting of the entrance as Dana clicks her pen open and closed and open again.

“Notes,”
she writes across the napkin top. She draws a line down the center, dividing it in half.
“What I know,”
she writes at
the top of the first half.
“What I don't,”
she scrawls at the top of the second, and she underlines both headings. She has always been organized. When Jamie left for college, it was Dana who helped him pack, setting aside her feelings about his opting for Boston instead of NYU. She was the one who pored through manuals, who researched every school in the Northeast, printing page after page of statistics, leaving them neatly clipped and stacked by state on Jamie's desk. She focused on the minutiae of the thing and closed her eyes to the reality. By the time they drove up with him to college, a sad little caravan, she and Peter chugging along behind their son's Nissan, she was exhausted. At the orientation dinner, a torturous affair, she drank too much and laughed too loud, embarrassing her son with her rambling. When they left, she leaned heavily on Peter's arm, nearly comatose by the time the taxi dropped them off at their hotel near Copley Square, the first good sleep she'd had in weeks.

Under the first heading, she writes
“I was there, I was angry, I was drunk.”
She chews on the end of her pen and adds,
“I don't remember chunks of the afternoon, Ronald has Celia's phone, Peter and Celia together, Peter and the Tart together,”
and, as an afterthought,
“Peter is such a prick!”

Under the second heading, she writes,
“If or when I'll be implicated in C's murder.”
She stops, glancing up at Glenda moving toward her.
“I am on a train to Crazy,”
she adds to the first list, and then, in capital letters,
“I AM THE LAST KNOWN PERSON TO SEE CELIA ALIVE!”

“Here you go.” Glenda sets two cups of coffee between them. “That one's decaf.”

“Don't you have to . . . ? Aren't you . . . ?”

“Taking a break. Everybody needs a break,” she says.

“Even Glenda the Good.”

“I like that. ‘Glenda the Good.'
The Wizard of Oz,
right?”

“It's actually Glinda,” Dana says, but Glenda doesn't answer.

“I'm so glad you're here.” Dana leans forward on her elbows. “I was afraid you might be off.”

“I'm never off,” Glenda says. She takes a sip of coffee. “Why?”

“My neighbor,” Dana says. She looks around the restaurant. “I think I might have killed her.”

Glenda rips a packet open and lets sugar sift into her cup. “Never liked that fake sugar,” she says. “The devil you know is better than the one you—”

“Did you hear what I—”

“You didn't,” Glenda says.

“You don't understand,” Dana says. “I was there. I was— I can't remember half the afternoon.”

Glenda opens a creamer and stirs it into her coffee. “Honey.” She takes a slug of coffee; she leans forward so their noses nearly meet across the faded sparkles of the Formica. “A couple years ago, you thought you were Mary Magdalene.”

Dana considers. “That was different. I was feeling . . . guilty or something.”

“As opposed to now.” Glenda takes another swig of coffee. Dana fiddles with her cup.

“You also thought you were Judas Iscariot come back in female form. There's a theme here.”

“But this time—”

“Listen.” Glenda stands up. She takes one last slug of coffee and straightens her hair, reties her apron. “If there's one thing I know, it's people. And you're no killer.”

“Thanks,” Dana says. “Really. I think I'll just sit here for a while, jot down a few more notes.” She takes a small sip of decaf. Thank God for Glenda. She doesn't judge. She never judges, but she's always here—so much more real than all Dana's other friends, times like this when her brain whirls and snaps, when her girlfriends seem nearly drugged, fiddling and fussing and slugging through their lives. Glenda says only what Dana needs to hear.

She writes down on a second napkin whatever comes to her, things she didn't think she remembered. She writes in a tiny, slanted, barely legible scrawl, very different from her usual neat and careful writing with its closed
o
's and carefully crossed
t
's. She must be channeling, she thinks, accessing some buried part of her subconscious, where things like Celia's heavy makeup wait to be pulled up from the murk of the day she died—the bright gash of crimson lipstick drunkenly applied, making Celia's mouth a large, bright, crooked oblong. There was an odor, too, something vaguely familiar that Dana can't quite place; she jots that down as well. And the vase—a heavy, thick-sided piece. She'd touched it idly, picked it up to see, and even empty it was heavy. A lovely blue, a cobalt blue like the sky deepening into night, and then a memory bulldozes through, disturbing and intense. She stops writing. She drops the pen as if it's on fire. She stares at her hands, folds them on her lap beneath the table as two policemen sit down at the counter and look at her across the diner, a lingering, appraising glance. She hums a vapid, tuneless sound to drown the memory dredged up from the muck of her subconscious.

She carefully folds the napkins and sticks them in her bag, avoiding eye contact with the cops, who have swiveled on their stools to face her. She leaves five dollars on the table and hurries past the officers, waving in the general direction of Glenda at the register. She hums again, more loudly, sliding into the front seat and turning the key. St. Christopher gleams in the light from the broken sign as Dana struggles to forget how she'd stared at the yard-sale vase just before the drinks kicked in. The memories are there, though, clear and cruel, and she thinks of the moths singeing their wings in the yard lights, recalls the moment she stared at the blue vase, the moment it was crystal clear to her exactly why Celia was upset and why she'd captured Peter and the Tart inside her phone. It comes back, too, the anger that encompassed her before the alcohol kicked in, before it fogged her thoughts and
made bald spots inside her mind, how she'd wanted to pick up Celia's lovely hand-thrown vase and bash her over the head.