Dear Wife(39)

Derrick moves closer, his flip-flops slapping against his crusty heels. “I’m just trying to be helpful. Jeez. Why do you always have to be such a dickwad?”

“I don’t know. I guess it runs in the family.”

“I thought maybe we could drive around and look for her or something.”

I toss the fork into the pan and flip off the gas. The eggs are burned, the edges brown and papery. I dump them, pan and all, into the sink. “What, do you think she’s just hanging out on a street corner or something, waiting for a ride?”

“No, but maybe she drove that fancy car of hers into a ditch. Maybe she had a flat tire.”

“Don’t you watch the news, Derrick? They found her car at the Super1. It was abandoned.”

His eyes go wide, and he leans a hip against the granite. “Holy shit, bro. That sounds serious. What do the cops think happened, that somebody took her?”

I yank open the refrigerator, pull out the pizza box from the night Sabine went missing. The crust is hard as dried dirt, the cheese an orange, rubbery blob. I pick up a piece and bite into it, and it tastes as disgusting as it looks.

“I’m pretty sure they think that I took her,” I say around the pizza.

“You? Have they lost their minds? Why would they think you took her?”

I stuff my mouth with another bite in lieu of answering. Answering would mean telling him about the backhand, her affair with the doctor, the missing two hours in my day—none of which I plan to share with my brother, ever. Derrick likes to pocket my shortcomings and failures, store them in his basement-brain like dormant Molotov cocktails. Weeks or months or years from now, when the rest of the world and I have moved on, he’ll toss one into a conversation just to see the fireworks.

“What about Ingrid?” He helps himself to a slice of pizza, which he shoves in the microwave for a minute, and pulls a beer from the fridge.

“What about her?”

“Come on, man. Stop being so difficult. What does she think happened?”

I sigh, sinking onto a counter stool. That heavy, sandbag feeling is back along with a knifepoint throbbing behind my eyes. “I’m pretty sure she thinks the same thing.”

He pops open the beer and tosses the top on the counter. “Well, okay, who cares what that old hag thinks? The cops are the ones you need to convince.”

I roll my eyes, toss the bottle top and the rest of my pizza slice into the trash. “You’re a motherfucking genius, Derrick. You really are. Convince the cops I didn’t do it. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“I’m serious, J. I know a guy who works for Century 21, and he’s always talking about the crazies who wander into his open houses. Mostly people come for the free snacks or to take a dump in the powder room, but just last month, some asshat pulled out a gun. Took my friend’s wallet, his watch, the keys to his car. Sabine’s hot. It’s not unimaginable somebody saw her and got the wrong idea.”

“I know. I’ve been telling her that for ages.”

The microwave dings, and he reaches in for the pizza, then snatches his hand back with a hiss. He rips a paper towel from the roll and tries again. “And what about those gangs over on the east side? All those break-ins on Cherry Street aren’t for nothing, you know. Those little shits are taking over the city. It’s only a matter of time before they move their territory up this way. Maybe it was them.”

“Maybe,” I say, because for once my brother is not wrong. The gangs are taking over the city, and thanks to the soaring unemployment, the poverty, the crappy schools graduating illiterate halfwits without a single marketable skill, there are fewer and fewer people here to stop them. What used to be a hardworking American metropolis now has the dubious honor of being one of the most dangerous cities in America, second only to Detroit. The smart folks have all moved away. Maybe I should join them.

He folds the slice in half, and orange oil spurts onto his hand, dripping down his fingers and onto the floor. “I’m just saying there are a million people it could’ve been. Seems to me the cops are being lazy, focusing only on you. Don’t let yourself be an easy target. Show ’em it’s not always the husband.”

He shoves half the pizza in his mouth in one giant bite. A long strand of melted cheese dangles from his chin like a worm, but for the first time in well, ever, I don’t gripe at him for the mess. My idiot, dickhead brother has a point. I have let myself be the easy target.

I pluck my phone from the countertop, pull up a number I once knew by heart. After two rings, a familiar voice hits my ear. “It’s about time,” she says. “I’ve only been leaving you messages all over town.”

  Amanda Shephard steps through my front door, looking just like she did in high school. Blonde, thin, a complicated sort of pretty—big lashes and acrylic nails and long, heat-curled hair. Her face is caked under a layer of makeup I’ve never seen her without, not even the summer before senior year when our entire class spent every day bobbing in blow-up tubes on the river. All the other girls had shiny cheeks pink from the sun, but Amanda’s makeup was like a mask, flawless and impenetrable.

She pulls me into a perfumed hug. “Oh, Jeffrey, you poor, poor thing.”

Her voice echoes in my foyer, loud and consoling in a way that makes it feel exactly the opposite. It’s her television voice, the one she’s cultivated for her show, Mandy in the Morning, a local daily featuring all things mundane and ridiculous.