How to Disappear(43)
“You want me to do this? I can’t drive a red shitmobile with no muffler.”
“You decide to do something, you get my permission!”
“Will you listen? I got in a fight. I had to lose a car.” I’m thinking this is something Don could relate to, but I’m thinking wrong.
“You got in a fight? What, the checker at Rite Aid overcharged you for gum so you bitch-slapped the bitch?”
“It was a drunk guy in a parking lot.”
“Shit. Were you drunk?”
“No.”
“Figures. Anyone see you?”
“Besides the guy? Maybe. I don’t think so.”
“Straight-A moron, aren’t you? Did I tell you to get in a fight or did I tell you to get your hands on her?”
Maybe I am a straight-A moron, but I’m not letting him do this.
“Answer me!”
I don’t. But the playground rule that if you ignore the bully, eventually he’ll forget what he was taunting you about and go away doesn’t apply to Don.
“Do you have her or don’t you? And the answer better be yes.”
There’s no answer from me for maybe a second too long.
“Jesus,” he says. “You found her and you took her drinking, didn’t you? You found her, and you’re playing with her.”
“No!”
“What’s wrong with you? Fuck her after you off her—just finish this thing!”
“What kind of perverted shit is that? What’s wrong with you?”
“You don’t have the balls for this, do you? You’re gonna take her to the movies and ask her to prom.”
“No!”
“Where are you keeping her?”
“I told you, I don’t have her!” Even to myself, I sound like a liar. “Nobody wants this over more than I do.”
There are a couple of minutes of listening to Don’s uneven breathing and static. Finally he says, “You need to get your butt back up here.”
“No.”
“Jackass,” Don says. “This is real. Bad things are going to happen. Get in my car and get back up here and convince me to believe you.”
“I told you, the shitmobile is history.”
In a voice I remember from childhood, from when he was cornered with no way out, short of scratching a hole under his feet with his toenails, he says, “You need to be here. Right now. If these guys don’t think I have you under control, Mom’s the carrot and the stick. You’re disposable, and so am I. Get back here.”
I want it not to be true. I want this to be Don offering up the same self-serving lies he tells regularly without blinking. I want this to be his effort to manipulate me like the little bitch he says I am. But I believe him, or close to enough to tell Nicolette a fairy tale to keep her at Mrs. Podolski’s while I drive to Nevada.
I believe him, and I need him to know that so he won’t do some angry, stupid thing to show me how serious he is, and get us all killed.
I say, “Yes, sirrrr,” in the exaggerated slur we used to use when we were sassing our dad behind his back.
Don says, “Don’t you sass me, boy,” imitating the voice I haven’t heard for four years but that still gets me going—along with the guilt that I closed it down.
46
Cat
I’m hunkered down with Mrs. P. Curtains drawn. Getting groceries delivered to the welcome mat. Watching TV and baking.
I’m not waiting for him.
I’m hiding out.
Not feeling a tenth of the way safe.
The Home Shopping Network doesn’t have news. Every time Mrs. P nods off, I grab the remote and hit up the local news on channel nine.
Nothing.
No armed assaults. No barroom brawls. No murders.
I mean, somebody thought she saw a bear cub in a tree. That was news. They interviewed her for five minutes.
If we killed the guy, it would have to be news.
Where is J ditching the car anyway? Peru?
I think he’s coming back.
Maybe.
I grill Mrs. Podolski lamp chops (into the yard for mint leaves, back in under ten seconds, world record) and return to the Home Shopping Network for an ongoing sale of loose gems. Mrs. P’s birthstone is the opal. Cat’s is aquamarine. My real one ought to be rubies.
I keep coming back to bloodred.
The brightest thing I wear now is beige, but bloodred is my signature color.
Mrs. Podolski says, “The price of a good woman is above rubies. That’s a proverb for you, Cathy.”
This might explain one or two things.
By Thursday, Mrs. P is so sick of pastries, I have to stop rolling dough. When she grabs my hand with her little, liver-spotted fingers, I can’t believe her grip.
“I’m going to read your palm, Ruby,” she says.
For a second, I’m terrified she’s going to figure out who I am and why I’m in her living room by tracing the lines of my hand. Until I remember that nobody can do that. There are no real fortune-tellers or real witches or real bogeymen.
Maybe bogeymen.
I let her massage my palm with the tips of her fingers.
Meet a dark stranger. Check.
Go on a long journey. Check.
She gets distracted by a mound of cubic zirconia on TV before she gets to long life.