There was a little singsong lilt in his voice; automatically I replied, “Looking for you,” as if he were a customer. I leaned back against the wall, next to him. “You know, I usually don’t go to sleep until three in the morning where I live.”
“How old are you? Twenty-something? I used to be able to do that.”
“Around here?” I made a show of looking around the corner at the quiet driveways.
He chuckled. “The nightlife scene is more in the UNM area, not so much out here.”
“If by nightlife you mean ‘doing exactly what we’re doing now, except with Solo cups,’ sure.”
“Vegas really spoiled you, huh?” Dave said, inhaling. “Too good to climb a mountain and drop acid like a real Burqueña?”
“I hate it here,” I said truthfully. “I don’t know why you live here. I mean, why not at least move to Colorado and smoke whenever you want?”
He tilted his head back and seemed to consider. “My mom is here, for one thing. Eli’s abuelita, she’d be pissed if we moved away. And the food, I always miss it. But mostly it’s because for the last ten years Leslie’s been taking care of her pops.”
He glanced at me. I thought he didn’t intend it as a guilt trip, but he didn’t not intend it either. He was waiting for my reaction. I didn’t give him one.
After a minute of silence, he went on. “He had a home aide, you know, but Leslie was over there all the time. Real sad thing, the way he went.”
“How come you don’t tell Leslie you smoke?” I said abruptly.
“Ah, come on, Robin.” He flicked the end of the joint, examined it, then stepped on it.
“I’m serious,” I said, eyes following him as he deposited the butt behind the rattleweed. “You put the baby to bed and get stoned in your backyard—why should she care?”
He gave me a flat-eyed look, the first negative expression I’d seen cross his face. I felt a small thrill at getting a rise out of him. “You seem real smart,” he said. “You figure it out.”
He started to walk back across the grass. “Night, David,” I called after him.
He looked back at me. The light from the doorway was a bright rectangle behind him, flattening him into silhouette. His black eyelashes flickered in profile as he blinked. “Night.”
22
Mary
Tuesday morning I woke up to a piece of paper on the floor in front of my door.
Appointment is Wednesday 4:30 p.m.
There are leftovers in the fridge.
Please be ready for dinner at 7 tonight!
So I was trapped in their house until they got home. Fuck. I smoked my morning cigarette in the closet, hugging my knees to my chest. Where had Leslie gone? She didn’t have a job—and the baby was at daycare—why had she left me here alone? Had I done something to upset her yesterday? I went back through yesterday’s mental file. I’d been super nice to her, I thought. I’d offered to babysit and I’d helped her pack up real neat. We’d gotten through almost a whole bookshelf together. And I’d wanted to poke around for way longer in the room full of faces, but Leslie had looked like she was gonna throw up, so I’d made sure to head right out and help her calm down.
I could just leave. But I had no car, and what if the door locked behind me? I’d be stuck outside all day.
For a second, sitting there among the extra coats and dry cleaners’ bags, trying not to light anything on fire, I imagined myself getting on a bus, going to LA or Utah with my five hundred fifty in cash. Leslie and Dave had a ton of nice things lying around. I could find something good to pawn. That might buy me the first few nights there, and then…The fantasy fell apart. I put out my cigarette on the baseboard and fumbled for the door.
There had to be a spare key. Everybody had a spare key lying around somewhere. And if Leslie was going to lock me up in her enormous fancy house, I was going to snoop. It was basically my right.
Downstairs first, into the kitchen. I went through all the drawers, looking for the junk drawer, but there was no junk drawer. Each one had its own custom-shaped plastic organizer. Silverware, nicer silverware, spatulas, pizza cutters—it was like looking through Patrick Bateman’s kitchen. So then I went through the cabinets, but those were just as neat, pots and pans grouped by set (she had three separate matching sets of cookware, including one of those shiny copper kinds that I’d only ever seen in magazines). The only messy part of the kitchen was the baby cabinet, which was a shambles of cartoon-printed plastic cups and spoons. I poked through those, mostly just out of surprise that Leslie had allowed a single area of her kitchen to be less than spotless.
In the corner of the kitchen, beside the entrance to the hallway, there was a nook for a desk, with a wine rack and a tiny hanging lamp built into the wall above it. Below, on the desk, the family Mac sat, draped attractively with real ivy from a real ivy plant, which took up one of the wine-bottle nooks above. I jiggled the mouse and the screen woke up, prompting me for a password. flores, I typed. The password box shook itself no. floreshouse. Flores. password. password123. The computer informed me that I had two more tries before it would lock itself. I found the power button on the back of the screen and held it down until the computer shut itself off.
Off to the side of the kitchen was a narrow wood-paneled laundry room, which contained a washer and dryer, a rack for clothes, and a hanging organizer with detergent, dryer sheets, a fabric tape measure, shoe inserts, and a couple of Dave’s baseball caps. The only evidence of mess was a piece of twine shoved into the corner of one of the pockets and a loose silica gel DO NOT EAT packet.
The living room had no place to hide things except in the giant walnut entertainment cabinet. It had two wrought-iron doors beneath the TV that matched the style of the chandelier in the entryway—like, who even knew they sold matching chandeliers and entertainment cabinets? I searched through the shelves on my hands and knees, but it was only wires and a lot of DVDs and video games, along with one of those big yellow phone books and a couple of the baby’s things, a blue plush kitten and a play piano. I sat back, red-faced, then thought, You dummy, and went to the front door.
I kept it carefully propped open as I searched the mat and the little pots containing succulents on either side of the door. The neighbor, a curly-haired mother with her kindergartner, saw me standing on my toes to run my fingers over the doorframe. She waved and I waved back, keeping a smile on my face as my fingers discovered nothing.
I went inside again and hustled over to the rear door. No key there either. It finally hit me what was so strange about my search: there were no hiding places in this house. Everything was so perfectly organized, each surface cleared of stray items, that there was nowhere to stuff any of the little indiscretions that occurred in any normal house—the stash of Ding Dongs, the Christmas-gift receipts. And Leslie and Dave had more than the ordinary number of indiscretions. She was lying to him about their finances, about her sister. He disappeared every few nights around the corner of the house. Where were the corners, the space behind the bookshelves, the lockbox on top of the refrigerator?