The Better Liar(26)

    I got up and padded over to my duffel bag to get my cigarettes. I thought Leslie probably wouldn’t appreciate me smoking in the room, but I didn’t want to negate the air-conditioning by opening the window, so I went into the closet and hotboxed myself for a couple minutes until my body assured me it had been satisfactorily saturated in nicotine.

After that I went into the adjoining bathroom and sat down on the toilet. Leslie had mini cruelty-free toiletries lined up on the sink. There was a basket behind them, containing folded hand towels and what looked like inflated macaron cookies.

BOMB, the middle one read.

Oh. Perfect. I ran a bath (built-in, with its own set of wooden stairs leading up to the edge) and dropped the macaron into it. It fizzed happily, turning the water into a dense purple mirror flecked with blue and pink stars.

I climbed into the galaxy and stared down.

There was a faint banging. “Mary?”

Don’t you mean Robin? I thought. What if your husband hears from all the way at the firehouse?

“Mary?”

“Come in,” I called.

The bedroom door clicked open, then the door to the bathroom. “Oh!” Leslie backed into the doorframe, as if she had entered the bathroom expecting to see me filing my taxes.

“It’s okay.” I smiled. “Could you hand me the conditioner? Actually, don’t worry about it, I’ll get it.”

I stood up, dripping stars and glitter, and descended the little wooden stairs while Leslie covered her eyes and turned her back.

“Are you—decent?”

I sloshed back into the tub and slouched low enough to cover my chest with stars. “I love your bath products.”

Leslie stared at the glittery puddle on the hardwood floor, then made a visible effort to refocus. Was she angry? “I made an appointment with Albert. The trustee, I mean. He couldn’t get us in today, though.”

    More time for me to spend in Leslie’s luxury bathtub. “That’s too bad,” I said.

“I thought you could come with me to my dad’s place. I’m packing up his stuff.” She waited, adding, when I didn’t respond, “You don’t have to do anything. You just have to hang out there for the day.”

“You don’t want me to be here alone,” I said, half questioning.

There was a silence. “Be downstairs in half an hour,” Leslie said.

“I’m not going to run away or anything,” I said, sliding lower in the water and squeezing my eyes shut. “Is that what you’re worried about?”

But I was talking to nobody. Past the open doorway, I could hear Leslie’s steps echoing on the stairs.





19


    Leslie


“How come you don’t want to take him with us?” Mary asked through a bite of egg-and-cheese biscuit. She had insisted we stop at McDonald’s on the way.

I was unbuckling Eli from his car seat. “Ah. Ah. Ah!” he insisted. I stuck his pacifier in his mouth and hefted him onto my hip.

“I need to focus on getting my dad’s things put away,” I said.

“I could babysit him.” Mary took another bite. “He’s cute,” she said after swallowing, eyes following Eli’s attempt to grab my earring.

“Have you ever taken care of a baby before?” I slammed the car door and lifted the bag of baby items onto my other shoulder.

She leaned over into the driver’s seat, cooing at Eli from the rolled-down window. “Aunt Robin. Come on, baby. Say ‘Aunt Robin.’?”

“That’s not funny.” I tried to control the tremor in my voice.

She was instantly remorseful. “Sorry, Leslie. I was just joking.”

I stared at her, then turned and took Eli into the daycare.

When I came back out, she was licking her fingers, crumpling the tinfoil in her other hand. “I’m really sorry,” she said.

“It’s fine.” I put the car into drive and turned onto Comanche, heading west.

    Mary stared out the window as we pulled into the driveway on Riviera a few minutes later. “This it?” she asked, chewing on her lip.

“Yeah.” It was a single-story adobe in the style popular in the 1920s, with exposed vigas striping the wall over the garage and a painted teal gate standing slightly open. The latch was broken and I hadn’t bothered to fix it yet. There were a few succulents lining the front walk among the multicolored stones that took the place of a lawn, and the neighbor’s desert willow cast rippling shadows over them. I thought, as I always did, how much Albuquerque yards looked like aquariums waiting to be filled with water. I remembered being twelve, lying on the ground outside, covering my ears while above, an airplane passed through the clouds like a far-off nurse shark. I’d watched it, listening to the tidal noise of my own breath passing through my nose.

Mary kept quiet as we passed through the gate and into the front hallway. It smelled musty inside, like all dark houses in the desert, cut with a chemical lemon scent from when I’d scrubbed the tiles a month ago. No one had been here; it hadn’t faded.

I dropped the boxes next to my dad’s La-Z-Boy in the sunken living room and went to hang my purse on the hook by the door. I remembered my mother hanging her purse on this hook years ago, and how elegant I’d thought she looked, lifting it with two fingers just as she left the house. “I thought we’d go through his records and books and give them away,” I said. “There’s a used bookstore not too far down the road.”