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“It isn’t here.” Blankenship yanked on the shoulder harness. “I took a cab so I wouldn’t blow your surveillance.”
Well, well. That hiked Jack’s previous estimation a few notches. Not enough to hire him, but maybe the kid had a brighter future than he thought. Wheeling around the motel’s east side, he said, “Where to?”
“1010 West Danbury.”
Jack gripped the steering wheel tighter—1010 West Danbury was his office address.
“I can’t wait to show you what I can do with a computer. The background check on you? Just a warm-up.” Blankenship played an air-piano solo. “Finger exercise.”
Jack reconsidered a long-held supposition about predestination. To wit, days that started off swell were fated to free-fall into the toilet. Conversely, days beginning with a cosmic swirly would inevitably improve—though the increments ranged from microscopic to worthy of a parade with lots of tubas, bass drums and scantily clad majorettes.
So far, this one was a crapper with an automatic flush.
He didn’t need a computer geek. A trusted subcontractor provided information above and beyond Jack’s expertise or time constraints. Much as he sort of admired Blankenship’s chutzpah, he’d sabotaged his fledging career from the get-go. Ditto, no doubt, at every other agency in town. Giving him the hows and whys wasn’t Jack’s purview, but if the kid listened, he might wise up.
“You’d do about anything to score an apprenticeship,” he said.
“Yes, sir.” Blankenship grinned. “As long as it’s legal.” The latter inferred illegal activities weren’t off the table, depending on the likelihood of police involvement.
“Then make a list of everything you’ve done to impress me, then do the opposite when you apply somewhere else.” Jack braked for a traffic light. “Starting with your wardrobe.”
Blankenship looked down, thoroughly bewildered. “I paid a bundle for this shirt at a Sister Hazel concert. It’s a collector’s item.”
“Frame it and hang it on the wall. The grungy jeans and tennis shoes? Garbage.” Jack adjusted his tie, a maroon silk with understated silver threads. “You want to be a professional, dress like one. Buy a razor and get a haircut. Want to work at a car wash? You’re all set.”
“Easy for you to say. Got any idea how much clothes cost when you’re my size?”
“So drop a hundred pounds.” Jack reassessed the belly garroted by the lap belt. “Make it a hundred and a quarter. Big as you are, one foot pursuit and you’re DOA from a massive coronary.”
Blankenship’s face flushed beet red. “Sure, I’m a little overweight, but I was born with a really slow metabolism and—”
Jack plucked two sesame seeds from his chin whiskers. “How many Big Macs did you slam for lunch?”
“Three, but—”
“Large fries?”
“Yeah, but—”
“Here’s a guess. You chased it down with a diet soda.”
A horn honked behind them. Jack accelerated a half block, then joined the queue in the left-turn lane. “This is America, kid. Eat whatever you want, whenever you want, but find a desk job. Investigating’s too physical for a guy your size.”
He hooked a right off First Street onto West Danbury. “Voice of experience. I stacked on seventy, eighty pounds driving a truck. Losing it was a bitch, but eating half as much, half as often did the trick. To put some distance between you and the fridge, sign up for some college courses—psychology, criminology, basic photography, Finance 101. Computers are fantastic, but not the be-all, end-all.”
Another stoplight allowed a sidelong look. Blankenship glared out the windshield, as if picturing Jack’s entrails smeared like a dead june bug’s.
“You think I’m an asshole,” Jack said. “Fair enough. I’ll stake tomorrow’s lunch money that I’m also the first one who’s taken the time to tell you what you’re doing wrong. Which is just about everything.”
He ignored the tacit “Go fuck yourself” radiating from the passenger’s seat. “Don’t ambush a prospective employer when he’s working. Don’t background-check him, either. It screams zero scruples about running anybody and everybody through the mill just because you can.”
The seat belt latch clicked open. Blankenship pushed himself through the door with considerably more grace and speed than he’d entered.
Jack called, “Hey, I’m just trying to—” a slam juddered the window glass, then reverberated through the chassis “—help,” he finished, watching Blankenship jaywalk around an adjacent delivery truck.
Gee, that went well, he thought. Evidently honesty really wasn’t always the best policy. It had, however, shored up the contention that mentoring wasn’t one of his specialties.
On the other hand, the kid’s eight-block hoof to his car wouldn’t hurt him. Maybe allow pause for thought, not to mention counteract his six-thousand-calorie lunch. Or would, if Blankenship didn’t salve a wounded ego with a banana split at the diner next door to Jack’s office.
The pedestrian crossing light flashed “Hurry up or die.” Blankenship materialized in the intersection, seemingly oblivious to the warning and the vehicle cranking a last-minute turn on yellow. The car’s tires whinnied on the pavement; its driver saluted Blankenship with an extended middle finger.
The kid didn’t notice. Didn’t flinch when the car gunned past him, fortunate the side mirror didn’t pick his pocket as it roared by. Still walking, closing the distance to the curb, Blankenship’s eyes locked on Jack. His head turned, then tipped slightly forward when his neck craned too far for comfort.
His unblinking stare didn’t project anger, defiance, disdain or the type of pity bestowed on those who’ve cast aside a golden opportunity.
Stone-cold hate, Jack said to himself. And a promise to make good on it. He looked away, confused and a little unnerved by its intensity. Keeping his own expression impassive, he glided forward with traffic.
He put a block, then another behind him. And couldn’t shake the feeling that Brett Dean Blankenship still had him in the crosshairs.
2
Dina Wexler dropped the box of macaroni and cheese on the counter and shut the cupboard door. She stepped down from the wooden stool, then side-kicked it in front of the refrigerator.
Someday she’d have a kitchen where all the food, especially junk food, lived on her level. For her, using drawers as ladder rungs to reach the cereal and a bowl to put it in was a climbing stage you never outgrew. Not when you’d stopped at four feet ten.
Count your blessings, she reminded herself. Like the man who complained about having no shoes, until he met the man who had no…
The TV in the living room went mute. “Di-na,” her mother called. “When you get a minute, would you bring me the TV Guide? I left it in the bedroom and there’s a show on at four o’clock I want to watch. For the life of me, I can’t remember what channel it’s on.”
Dina grabbed the potato chip bag off the top of the fridge. The crackling cellophane mocked her frazzled nerves. She rested her forehead on the freezer door’s cool metal face. It was only one-thirty, for God’s sake. Lunch was a half hour late, as were her mother’s medications that must be taken with meals.
In the hallway, a fabric mountain of laundry banked the utility closet’s bifold doors. The yard needed mowing. Both bathrooms were a mess. The kitchen floor hadn’t been mopped in recent memory.
Breathe in, Dina thought, breathe out. Make yourself one with the refrigerator. Better yet, be the refrigerator and chill the hell out.
The mental image of herself standing on a kid’s alphabet step stool getting Zen with a major appliance brought a whisper of a smile. No wonder Peanuts had always been her favorite comic strip. Charlie Brown refocused his chi with his head against the wall. She bonded with freezer compartments.
“Sweetheart?” her mother called, concern in her voice. “Are you all right?”
“Sure, Mom.” Dina sighed and stepped down on the ugly starburst linoleum. “Everything’s fine.”
A Park City car dealer’s commercial now wending from the living room reinforced their unspoken bargain. Harriet Wexler could keep pretending that her daughter was a human Rock of Gibraltar; Dina wouldn’t let her mother see it was a prop made of chicken wire and papier-mâché.
She put a saucepan of water on to boil, then spread some diet saltines with sugar-free peanut butter. Laying them on a saucer, she sidled past the early-American dinette set and into the living room.
The vacant midcentury modern duplex had seemed open and airy when Dina toured it with the landlord. The narrow galley kitchen dead-ended at a window painted shut a couple of decades ago, but the dining area’s merger with the living room gave an illusion of spaciousness. Off the hallway was a full bath, a small bedroom and the larger master with a private three-quarter bath.
A security deposit and two months’ rent had been scraped together in advance, and then there’d been furniture. Truckloads of Harriet’s dog-ugly, alleged heirlooms that Dina and her younger brother wouldn’t wish on a homeless shelter. Their mother’s insistence that her circa-1978 pine-and-Herculon-plaid home furnishings would go retro any day was attributed to the side effects of digitalis.
Dina pushed back the tide of prescription bottles, moistening swabs, tissues and assorted medical paraphernalia to make room for the saucer on the metal TV tray beside Harriet’s glider rocker. On the opposite side, another tray table held a cordless phone, paperbacks, a water glass, a dish of sugarless candy, the current crochet project and the queen’s scepter, otherwise known as the remote.
The cushioned ottoman supporting Harriet’s feet was surrounded by a paper trash sack, a tripod cane, bags of yarn, her purse, a discarded pillow and a mismatched pair of terrycloth slippers.
“Gosh, Your Majesty,” Dina teased. “The throne’s getting kinda crowded, isn’t it?”
Harriet made a face, then pointed at the crackers. “I thought you bought bread at the store yesterday.”
“I did.” Dina peered into the plastic drinking glass—half full. “I’m working on lunch, but you need to take your pills.”
“I can wait.”
Dina knuckled a hip. “So can I.” The water began to bubble on the stove. She pondered the tardy renter’s insurance premium and what effect a semi-accidental kitchen fire might have on their coverage.
Harriet nibbled a corner off a cracker. Nose wrinkling, she plinked it back on the saucer. “It’s stale.”
Petulance was as wasted as the coral lipstick she swiped on to disguise her mouth’s bluish tinge. “No, it isn’t,” Dina said. “I just opened a fresh box.”
She hadn’t, but it wouldn’t matter if elves had just carted them over from the magic bakery tree. The issue was that her mother couldn’t be trusted to take her meds unsupervised. Harriet’s newest shell game was removing the pills from their bottles and stashing them in her bra, the way Dina had palmed brussels sprouts at the dinner table and hidden them in her socks.
Harriet Wexler wasn’t senile. A bizarre sense of empowerment derived from outfoxing a caregiver she’d given birth to thirty-two years ago. On some levels, Dina understood and sympathized. On most, the pharmaceutical roulette drove her nuts.
Her mother glowered up at her, snapped a cracker in half, then shoved the whole thing into her mouth. “There,” she mumbled around it. “Are you happy now?”
“One more, and I will be.” Dina shook the appropriate pills from their amber bottles. The cost of each equaled a month’s rent and utilities. “Clean your plate and I’ll applaud.”
Sips of water, fake choking, a bit of breast-beating and voilà, the medicine went down. “I hope you’re proud of yourself, Dina Jeanne. You’re nothing but a bully.”
Dina recited in unison, “Thank heaven your father isn’t alive to see how you treat your poor old sick mother.” Leaning over, she kissed a prematurely white head that smelled of waterless shampoo and hairspray. “Daddy’s definitely rolling in his grave knowing I’ll bring your lunch, test your blood sugar, hook up the nebulizer, change your sheets, tuck you in for a nap, do the laundry, fix a snack, give you a shot, poke down three more pills, walk you twenty-five laps up and down the hall, then start dinner.”
As she straightened, her mother’s never warm fingers circled her wrist. “Oh, sweetheart, I’m so sorry.” Tears glistened in eyes once as blue as a summer sky. “I don’t know why I say such awful things to you.”
Because now I’m the parent and you’re the child and you hate needing the snot-nosed kid you potty-trained to help you to and from the bathroom sometimes.
“It’s okay, Mom.” Dina swallowed audibly, then cleared her throat to mask it. Aged ears dulled to soap opera dialogue and the radio remain subsonically attuned to the slightest emotional nuance. “Besides—” she forced out a chuckle “—when have I ever listened to a word you say?”
“Humph. If you ever did, you never let on.” Harriet plucked at the sheet draping her legs, as though the air conditioner was set at sixty-two instead of eighty-two. “I thought Earl Wexler was the stubbornnest critter that ever walked on two legs. You bested him from the day you were born.”
Dina tapped her toe, waiting for the upshot. It came right on cue. “I don’t know what I’d have done if Randy hadn’t been such a happy, sweet-natured little fella. Hasn’t changed a bit, either, in spite of all the disappointment and heartache he’s suffered.”
“Uh-huh.” Dina turned and started for the kitchen. “Life doesn’t get any tougher than playing drums for a wanna-be rock band for ten freakin’ years.”
Her younger brother was everything she wasn’t: tall, blond, charming, funny, gifted and as irresponsible as a golden retriever puppy. Harriet outwardly adored the child who’d needed it more, thinking the daughter who denied being anything like her would be stronger for being pushed away. Earl Wexler had spoiled Dina, loved Randy inwardly and didn’t notice which child never laughed at his joke about the hospital switching Randy with his real son.
Politics isn’t just local or exclusive to public office. Before children can feed themselves, instinct discerns the balance of power and how to work it. The Wexlers’ parental duopoly should have triggered sibling rivalry on a biblical scale. Rather than fight each other, Dina and Randy had joined forces to sandbag the adults.
And the little shit still is, she thought. Except now I’m the adult, I’m flying solo and it sucks. Drummer Boy’s sporadic twenty-five or fifty-dollar money orders mailed from towns Dina had to squint to locate in an atlas were so not like being here.
The doorbell rang, startling her. The prodigal’s return? Dina glanced around, as though a Lifetime channel camera crew might have sneaked in when she wasn’t looking. Torn between water spitting on the stove burners and rescue fantasies, Dina threw open the door. “Randy, oh my—”
The two men on the stoop recoiled. The shorter one retreated to the concrete walk. Feeling her face flush scarlet, Dina stammered, “Th-thanks anyway, but we don’t need to be saved. We’re Jewish. Orthodox.”
She used to tell roving God squads they were Catholic, but some well-meaning missionaries took it as a challenge. While Dina’s knowledge of Judaism was gleaned from Seinfeld reruns, the tack had effectively decimated any hope of conversion.
“Are you Mrs. Wexler?” the taller man inquired. He consulted the clipboard in the crook of his arm. “Mrs. Harriet Wexler?”
Dina eyed the medical-supply-company insignia above his shirt pocket. The doctor-prescribed oxygen machine was scheduled for delivery on Monday, July 11, between 8:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. This, however, was Sunday. The tenth. She was absolutely almost certain of it.
Thinking back to the previous evening for confirmation, she realized that it had been Sunday, therefore this was Monday and a good chunk of it was gone. Small comfort, knowing time warps were the purview of mothers with young children and the housebound by choice.
Behind her, Harriet inquired, “Is that the Avon lady? Get me a bottle of that lotion I like. A big one. That skimpy thing you bought before didn’t last a month.”
The deliverymen—both named Bob, by their lanyards’ photo IDs—gave Dina the tight smiles she’d dubbed “Oh, but for the grace of God go I.” They probably had sisters to tend the sick, too.
Dina let them in, then excused herself to ward off a kitchen disaster. Leaving the nearly dry saucepan in the sink to cool, she wiped peanut butter across a few more crackers, poured her mother a glass of milk and grabbed a banana.
A diabetic diet’s food exchanges and substitutions weren’t that complicated. Meal timing was as crucial as the menu. The object was balancing calories and carbs to maintain blood-sugar levels. Lunch included a vegetable serving, as well, but it’d be a miracle if Harriet ate a bite of anything.
Dina returned to the living room as her mother was saying, “Y’ all go on about your business and leave me be. I signed a paper way back saying I don’t want a machine breathing for me.”
“That’s a ventilator, Mom.” Dina’s elbow evicted the tissue box to make room for the milk and fruit on the tray table. “They brought the oxygen machine Dr. Greenspan ordered to lessen the strain on your heart.”
The cardiologist had also scripted a portable tank to trundle along when Harriet left the house. Which she didn’t, other than for doctors’ appointments and lab tests. Harriet had nodded amiably during Greenspan’s treatise on blood oxygenation, simultaneously blocking out parts she chose not to hear.
“But there’s nothing wrong with my heart.” Her mother stuck out a bony wrist. “Feel that pulse. Strong as an ox, I tell you.”
Everything was wrong with her heart, but Dina replied, “And the doctor wants you on oxygen full-time to keep it that way.” She waved the men toward the hallway. “So while you finish lunch, Bob and Bob and I will move enough furniture in here to make room for the machine.”
“Oh, no you won’t.”
The Bobs halted midstride.
“I’ll go to a nursing home before you’ll shut me up back there all by my lonesome.”
“Mom, please. Don’t fight me on—”
“What in Sam Hill am I s’posed to do all day? Time and again, I asked you for a cable gizmo in my room.” Harriet grabbed the remote and clasped it to her bosom. “Stick that machine on the roof for all I care. I ain’t budgin’ from this chair till the undertaker peels me out of it.”
Dina scrunched her hair in a wad, battling the urge to scream. To run out the goddamn door. To call the constant bluff and pack her demanding brat of a mother off to whatever nursing home would have her.
She hadn’t given the TV a second thought. Why, she couldn’t fathom, other than life-sustaining oxygen taking priority over Golden Girls reruns. The excuse for a single cable outlet was that Harriet needed rest and wouldn’t, with a TV blaring in her room all night. In truth, Dina couldn’t afford the extra installation fee or monthly charges.
“Uh, ma’am?” Taller Bob said. “We can—”
“It’s not a problem, really.” Dina’s arm dropped to her side. “Don’t worry, Mom. You’ll have your TV. Everybody just relax and give me a minute to think.”
She crossed to the patio door on the far side of the room and looked back to the dining area. Taking stock and mental measurements, she said, “Okay. What we’ll do is shove the couch around over there, then move Mom’s bed in here. The oxygen machine can go between it and her chair. Easy access, whether she’s lying down or sitting up.”
Tall Bob and Other Bob exchanged weary, all-in-a-day’s-work looks. Like carpet cleaners, home-health-care equipment employees’ job descriptions entailed a lot of heavy lifting.
