at Blackjack—had made and sold me that pizza that, piece by piece, Mo and I had lifted out of the box and eaten. Chaos was coming, and it would drive us both so deeply into the maze that we’d wander among the corpses, lost to each other for years. Yet there Maureen was on that long-ago night, up in our bed, waiting for me.
Get up those stairs! I want to scream to my clueless April-seventeenth-of-nineteen-ninety-nine self. Hold her! Make her feel safe! Because time was running out. Their first shots were eighty hours away.
Chapter Two
ON SATURDAY MORNING, I AWOKE to the sound of whimpering. Eyes closed, I groped. Felt, on my left, Maureen’s hipbone. On my right, fur. I’d swum up from sleep on my back, the sheet knotted around my ankles, a hard-on tent-poling the front of my boxers. I cracked open my eyes and looked into the eyes of the perp. The whimperer: Sophie. Her muzzle rested against the mattress. Her face was a foot from mine. I blinked; she blinked. I sighed; she sighed. The plea in her eyes was readable: Get up. Feed me. Love me the most.
Sophie was the needier of our two mutts—mother and son golden retrievers we’d brought with us from Connecticut. Soph had gotten neurotic as she aged—whiny, fixated on food, and, out of nowhere, possessive of me. I’d grab Maureen by the kitchen sink or in the bathroom, give her a smooch, and Sophie would appear at our feet, head-butting her away. It was funny but creepy, too, like living with a canine version of what’s-her-name in Fatal Attraction. Not Meryl Streep. The other one. Cruella De Vil.
Maureen’s arm swung back. “Mmph,” she said. Her hand found me, her fingertips skidding across my throat. I rolled toward her and hitched my chin over her shoulder. Placed my stiffness against her. “Hey, toots,” I whispered.
“Bad breath,” she mumbled back, stuffing her pillow between us. Sophie’s whimper became a guttural grunt. Yoo hoo. Remember me?
The clock radio said 7:06. The wineglasses on the wicker tray by the window said I’d failed Maureen the night before. Sophie’s wet nose poked my wrist. “Yeah, yeah, wait a minute,” I muttered. Swung my feet to the floor and padded toward the bathroom, Sophie following. Chet groaned and stretched, wagged his tail, and joined the pissing party. You almost never saw that dog without a grin on his face.
Mid-leak, Maureen came in, a wineglass stem in each fist. She dumped the dregs with so much determination that wine spattered on the wall.
“Hey,” I said. “What do you say I give the dogs a quick run, then we go someplace for breakfast?”
She rinsed the glasses, kept me waiting. “Can’t,” she finally said.
“You can’t, or you’d rather not eat eggs with a shithead like me?”
No forgiving smile. No look in my direction. She grabbed a washcloth, wiped the glasses so hard they squeaked. “I’m taking Velvet to breakfast.”
I stood there, nodding. Touché.
In that system of signals Mo and I had worked out with Dr. Patel, there was no shorthand for “I’m sorry.” You were obliged to speak those two words. But the mention of Maureen’s breakfast buddy short-circuited any contrition I’d been generating.
Mo’s field was gerontology, but after we moved out West and she took the school nurse’s job, she found she enjoyed working with the high school kids. She liked the needy ones, particularly. “Just give them an aspirin and send them back to class,” I kept advising her. Instead, she’d help them with their math, counsel them on their love lives, give them rides and lunch money. I’d warned Mo to observe boundaries with Velvet, especially. Velvet Hoon was like a Cape Cod undertow: if you weren’t careful, she’d pull you in deeper than you meant to go. I spoke from experience.
I pulled on my sweats, laced up my running shoes. If she wanted to spend her weekend morning with a dysfunctional sixteen-year-old instead of with her husband, then fine. Fuck it. Maybe I’d leave the dogs home, do a long run—the eight-miler out to Bear Creek Lake and back. I was halfway out the door when she said something about a rain check.
I stopped. Our eyes met for a nanosecond. “Yeah, whatever,” I said. Bounding past me down the stairs, the dogs almost sent me tumbling.
Outside, it was see-your-breath cold. Flurries possible tomorrow, they said. Goddamn thin Colorado air. It was different back in Connecticut. By mid-April, the sea breezes began to cut you some slack. Aunt Lolly had probably gotten her garden rototilled by now, I figured. She may have even put her peas in the ground. When she called on Sunday, I’d be sure to get the weekly farm and weather reports, along with a complaint or two about her hired man, Ulysses—“Useless,” she called him—and an update on the latest shenanigans being pulled by “those goddamned toy soldiers down the road.” Lolly had it in for the paramilitary regime that now ran the maximum-security version of what she still stubbornly referred to as “Grandma’s prison.” Like her paternal grandmother, who had served as superintendent of the Bride Lake State Farm for Women from 1913 to 1953, Aunt Lolly, too, had been a Bride Lake long-timer, albeit a rank-and-filer. For forty of her sixty-seven years, she’d been a second-shift custody officer—a CO. “Of course, that was back when they let us treat the gals like human beings instead of cockroaches,” she’d say. “Nowadays they’ve got all those captains and majors and lieutenants strutting around like it’s May Day in Moscow, and they don’t know shit from Shinola about how to run a ladies’ jail.”
Out in the backyard, I was doing my stretches and deliberating about whether or not to go back in for a cap and gloves when I heard leaves crackling in the woods behind our place. The dogs heard it, too. They stood rigid, staring at the clearing, Chet emitting a low, throaty growl. Deer, I figured. Too heavy-footed for squirrels. “Easy, boy,” I told Chet, and the three of us stood there, listening to the silence. A few seconds later, the crackling recommenced and she emerged from the woods in all her chaotic glory: Velvet Hoon.
Remembering that our dogs freaked her out, I grabbed them by their collars. “Got ’em!” I called. The phrase “all bark, no bite” could have been coined for our mutts; couple of wimps, those two. But to tell you the truth, it was a relief to see Velvet afraid of something. Eyeing my hold, she entered the yard in full freak regalia: halter top, exposed flab, hacked-off tuxedo pants, and those Bozo-sized men’s workboots of hers, spray-painted silver. Her shaved head had grown out in the months I hadn’t seen her. Now she was sporting a butch cut, dyed bread-mold blue. Watching her make a beeline for the picnic table, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. Short and squat, she moved like R2-D2. She climbed from the bench to the tabletop and fumbled for a cigarette. Having secured higher ground and sucked in a little nicotine, her cocky stance returned.
“Maureen home?” she called.
“Mrs. Quirk, you mean?” I nodded. Watched a shiver pass through her. What did she expect, exposing that much belly in weather where you could see your breath? “I’ll tell her you’re out here.” I’d be damned if I was going to let her back in the house. “You need a jacket?”
Instead of answering me, she screamed at the barking dogs. “Peace out! Shut the fuck up!” Her shouting made them nuts.
Back inside, I called up the stairs. “Cinderella’s here!”
“Already? I told her nine o’clock.”
“Must have been a hell of a shortcut. She arrived through the woods.”
No response.
“I’m heading out now. Gonna run out to Bear Creek and back.”
