First Class Killing (31 page)

“I’m in kindergarten.” He stared at his feet until a thought came to him, one of his very own, and then looked up with great excitement. “I’m in a new school, but I don’t have a new best friend yet.”

“New schools can be tough,” I said. “I went to a lot of new schools growing up. So did your daddy.

“Why did he?”

“We moved around a lot.”

“I went to Hartsfield Day School before, and…and…I had…” His eyebrows drew together, and I could almost see the complex process that turns thought into language at work in his head. “I had eight friends there.”

“That’s a lot of friends. Who was your best friend?”

“Zachary Zalinsky.”

“Wow. What a long name he has. Did you call him Zach for short?”

“No.” He said it with absolute conviction. “His name is Zachary.”

“I see. What did you like about Zachary?”

His face brightened even more. “He was funny.”

“Did he make you laugh?”

“Yeah.” The giggles that rolled out seemed to lift him up. They lightened the space around me, too.

“Hey, Sean, do you like Spider-Man?”

“Spider-Man was bitten by a spider, and it was this
magic
spider, and it had
thirteen legs,
and it had
special powers,
and it made him
sick
until Peter Parker became Spider-Man. That’s why he’s Spider-Man.”

I reached into my bag of tricks and pulled out the blue and red Spider-Man T-shirt I’d found at the mall. The gum-snapping saleswoman with the heart tattooed on her wrist had assured me it was all the rage for five-year-old boys. I was relieved to see Sean’s eyes lock onto it when I shook it open for him to see.

“Is it mine?”

“It’s yours.”

He snatched it and raced to show Gina his prize. “Mommy, can I put it on?”

“Did you say thank you?”

He scooted back over—“Thank you for the new Spider-Man shirt”—then bounced back to his mother. “Can I put it on?”

She slipped his soccer jersey over his head and dropped the T-shirt on, seemingly all in one motion. The shirt came down to his knees. “Can I watch my Spider-Man DVD? Can I, please?”

Gina pondered that. “You can watch until Daddy comes home. Then we’re having dinner, and you and Daddy are doing your homework.”

Before she had even finished the sentence, he was gone. I watched him whip past and wondered what it was I had been doing that was so much more important than being part of this, even if it was a small part.

Gina brought the flowers to the table and set them in the one spot not scattered with spider parts. “I love hanging out with them,” she said.

“Jamie told me you’d left your job,” I said. “How long ago?”

“Six months.” She settled in and handed me a couple of crackers and a handful of pretzels.

“Why did you leave?”

“Because kids change everything. I wanted to be with them.”

One of the things I had always liked about Gina was her ability to take a complicated issue and make it accessible and understandable. It’s what had made her a good lawyer. It also made her good for Jamie. He and I both had perfected the opposite trait, which is to take something that should be simple and complicate it to the point where it makes your head explode.

“What about you?” she asked. “Jamie says you’ve made some career choices of your own.” She tucked her hand under her chin and settled in, ready to be absorbed. “I want to hear all about it.”

“There’s not that much to tell.”

“Are you kidding? You’re talking to someone whose longest trip of the day is down to the Grand Union in the minivan. Where was your last flight?”

“Chicago.” I automatically reached up to touch my throat. The bruises had faded, but it was still my conditioned response to thinking about the trip from hell.

She shook her head and smiled as she graced one of the spiders with its two raisin eyes.

“What?”

“I just…I admire you.”

“You do?”

“I always have. What I did, making the choice to leave my job, I never would have had the guts to do it without the kids. But you did it for yourself. How cool is that?”

As I worked on my spider assemblage, I had the strongest urge to tell Gina about the case. For the first time in a long time, I felt that I had made the right choices, that things would work out for me. I wanted to share that, but not with Gina and without Jamie. I could tell them together later.

The sound of the front door closing floated through the house.

“Where is everyone?” Jamie’s voice echoed ahead of him.

A smaller voice chirped down the front stairs. “
Daddy, Daaaaaaddy.
”

Jamie came through the kitchen door with Madeline in his arms, her face close to his. In the briefest of glances, I could see in his eyes that something was wrong. He reminded me of the baby titan on my flight to Chicago, the phone flipper who had been almost in tears. “Za, you made it. Any problems with directions?”

“No. I came right here.”

I wanted to ask what was wrong but wasn’t sure it was my place. He crossed the kitchen to give his wife a light kiss on the lips. She smiled at him. He didn’t smile back. He turned abruptly and grabbed a cracker.

Gina was also picking up a strange vibe. I could see it in her face. “How was your trip?” She reached up to straighten the tiny tiara Madeline wore on her head. It went with the miniature pink chiffon prom gown.

“I have to go in early tomorrow.” Jamie looked at Madeline. “Where’s your brother, Princess Magpie?”

“Watching Spider-Man.”

Jamie walked over and looked down at the table. “What are you doing?”

I proudly displayed one of my completed units. “Making spiders.”

“There’s a spider theme around here tonight.” He scooped up a handful of pretzel sticks and headed for the door. “Let’s go find your brother, Magpie.”

She thought that was a good idea, but not so the eating of spider legs, a fact that she commented on all the way up the stairs.

“Mr. Grumpy Guy.” Gina found a big mitt and opened the oven door to check on whatever was in there. It smelled like pot roast. “Jamie’s really missed you this past year,” she said. “In case he doesn’t remember to tell you.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. “Yeah, I’m sorry…about all that. About—”

“I hope,” she said, gently interrupting, “that we see more of you. I really want my kids to know their aunt Alex.”

Chapter

35

I
T WAS A SWEET AND POWERFUL BONDING EXPERIENCE
to be standing at the sink, handing dripping plates to Jamie again. Many a night when we were growing up, we had stood side by side washing dishes in the kitchen of the old house on Rivalin Road. It was always after my father had shuffled off without comment to his well-worn spot in front of the TV.

My place, since I was older, was always at the sink, washing, rinsing, and directing the operation. Jamie cleared, stacked, and dried, never fast enough to match my pace. He would stack each piece of silverware in the dishwasher one by one, asking me things I didn’t know. Who was faster, the Flash or the Green Hornet? What would happen if the earth started spinning the opposite way? What caused emphysema? Why was everyone smarter than he was? Sometimes I got frustrated with him and just did the job myself. Later we found out his disability made it hard for him to focus on specific tasks.

“You can let that soak,” he said, standing next to me in the kitchen of his brand-new mansion. He had worked ahead and was waiting for me to finish scrubbing the pot roast pan. It was the last, the biggest, and the most obstinate.

I used the nonsudsy back of my hand to push the hair off my forehead. The humidity from the hot water and the exertion of trying to scour the pan had moistened everything above the collar of my shirt.

“I will not be defeated by a crusty pan. Never.” With one last furious effort, I scraped the last of the crust, rinsed, and handed it off in triumph.

Jamie dried it quickly and began searching his new kitchen to find the place where it lived, opening and closing cabinet doors high and low and mumbling to himself. He gave up and set it across two of the six gas burners. Then he turned and searched the countertops. “Where’s my cup?”

“I washed it.”

“I wasn’t finished.”

“It was on the counter. Fair game.”

He dried his hands with the dishtowel. “Still as obsessive-compulsive as ever.” He was kidding, but there was an edge to his tone.

He opened a cabinet, took down another mug, and filled it with what was left of the coffee Gina had brewed.

A scattering of crumbs still littered the surface when we went back to the table to sit, mostly where Sean had been sitting. I brushed the offending specks into one of the napkins. Oh, for one of those nifty crumb sweepers possessed by waiters at fine restaurants everywhere.

Jamie looked almost prayerful as he sat with his arms extended in front of him. He could be praying. Jamie still went to church. I could feel sadness in him, something pressing hard. It made me anxious.

“Are you all right?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Sure.”

He wasn’t. He knew I knew, and the silence that followed was awkward. In the quiet, I could hear Maddie and Sean’s sweet voices floating down from upstairs, where they were getting ready for bed.

“Maddie looks like Mom,” I said. “She does that thing with her mouth, where it pulls down at the corners as if she’s about to tell you a secret or a joke or…” I rummaged around for the words to capture my mother’s face, but I didn’t need the words. He already knew.

“You’re the only other person who could see that.”

“I saw it at dinner,” I said. It had reminded me of her voice. My mother’s voice that used to tease me for being so serious.

Gina came down the stairs and scoped out the clean kitchen. “You two are awesome. You can wash dishes in my house anytime.”

“Just don’t let Jamie near the gravy boat,” I said.

“Gravy boat?” She gave her husband a cunning glance, and I sensed an opportunity.

“Jamie, you never told her about the gravy boat?”

“No.” His voice was dull, and he didn’t look as if he wanted to tell her now, but Gina hustled over and settled in with us, pulling one foot up on the chair with her.

“Tell me,” she said. “I never get to hear the family stories.”

I leaned in. “It was Christmas night after we’d had this big dinner. Jamie and I were helping Mom wash the dishes,” I said. “How old were you?”

“Five.”

“He was five, so I was ten. We’d had people over for this big extravaganza. They were members of my father’s family whom we didn’t really know. Now, my mother was wonderful, but she wasn’t the greatest cook. She could never get organized, and she was really nervous about this dinner. She wanted so much to make a good impression, so she pulled out the one and only gravy boat from her set of good china. It was a wedding gift.”

“From someone at the dinner,” Jamie said.

“Is that true?” I hadn’t remembered that.

“Aunt Bobbie. She was married to the guy who wore the sweater vest and smelled like cigars, so I guess she was technically a cousin, or cousin-in-law, but she wanted us to call her Aunt Bobbie.”

“Right, right.” I thought back on the evening, trying to see the house in my mind. It was one that we didn’t live in for long, so I had to reach for the details. “So, everyone is lolling around in the living room, gorged and half in the bag from drinking wine all afternoon. Everything is quiet, until Jamie reaches up to put something on the counter and bumps the gravy boat. I was across the kitchen,” I said, “but I saw the whole thing. It teetered on the brink just for a second, before it went over. Everything switched into slow motion. It was like a John Woo film. There should have been doves flying.”

Gina was delighted. “And long coats flapping.”

“Exactly. It’s important to appreciate that the floor in that kitchen was tile. It was like a gravy bomb had gone off. There was gravy on the cabinets, on the walls, on my mother’s dress, on my new shoes.” I felt an ancient twinge of regret, remembering how I’d had to throw those gravy-drenched shoes away. “We were finding gravy boat pieces well after Easter dinner, at which, of course, we couldn’t have any gravy, because, well…”

Gina laid her head against her knee and peeked around it at Jamie. “Someone broke the gravy boat.”

He shook his head. “Everyone came running in. Dad was yelling and screaming about why was I in there to begin with. I’m standing in the middle of all this mess, crying, thinking…I ruined everything.” He looked down into his coffee cup. He reached up and rubbed his thumb across his eyebrow. “Mommy got down on the floor with me, right down in the gravy, and gave me that look like…” He nodded to me. “Like the one you were talking about on Maddie. She told me to take five deep breaths, and she would tell me a secret.”

He paused, and I remembered him standing there when he was five years old, trying so hard to stop crying when he felt so bad, and my mother with her hands on his shoulders.

“Then she whispered so I would have to stop crying to hear. She said she never liked that gravy boat anyway and that my help was worth more to her than a hundred gravy boats.”

Gina reached over and grabbed hold of his thumb. “I wish I’d known your mom,” she said. “She sounds cool.”

I stared down at the tablecloth, where a renegade crumb had managed to remain on the loose. “She was,” I said. “Our mom was very cool.”

Gina kissed Jamie on the forehead. She came around the table and gave me a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.” Then she went back upstairs to the kids, leaving Jamie and me alone again.

“Are you sure you’re—”

“I’m fine.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and checked his watch, which prompted me to check mine. It was only seven forty-five, but it seemed later because it was already dark outside. I was thinking of going out to the car to get my overnight bag, when I heard the muted call of my cell phone. It was in my backpack, which was in the other room at the bottom of the stairs. I got to it before it rolled to voice mail. The spy window said it was from an out-of-area caller.