The Big Dirt Nap (6 page)

Ten

I was channeling Cher and mumbling the words to “Believe” under my breath. Five beefy guys on four bikes followed me to my car. Whatever it was the Michelin Man had in mind, he was no match for my new best friends, and we left him and Ravi, and whoever was in that second car, scratching their heads in the service station minimarket.

Charlie seemed to be the big dog. The biggest physically, he had the biggest bike, two-thirds as wide as the Jeep and encrusted with pipes and grilles that did who-the-hell-knew-what but made the bike look like a small spaceship. He stayed on my left, tossing me the occasional smile or thumbs-up, and the others trailed us, playing leapfrog until we got to the diner.

By the time we’d pulled into the Paradise parking lot, I’d convinced myself that Charlie and his friends had saved me from worse than death, and as they dismounted, I gave them bear hugs and back slaps as if we’d just ridden cross-country together instead of twenty minutes on a tree-lined suburban road.

“Party of two . . . three . . .
six?
” Babe asked, as we tumbled into the near-empty diner. Charlie’s arm was still around my shoulders. “Any more coming?” She craned her neck to look into the parking lot.

Wanda “Babe” Chinnery owned the Paradise. Although she is one, I hesitate to call her a retired rocker because she still rocks, she just doesn’t do it onstage anymore alongside a metal band and in front of thousands of screaming kids. She waved the guys over to the corner booth in the back and pointed to some menus stacked by the window.

“How old is that decaf?” I asked, joining her at the counter.

“Not that old,” she said, pouring me a cup. “You know, I’m the last to throw stones, but when I said you should get out more,” she whispered, “this wasn’t exactly what I had in mind.” Babe had been playing matchmaker for me for the last year, with zero results, so she was surprised to see me come to the diner with five guys in tow.

“So who are your friends, and why are you sitting over here? This isn’t some weird initiation rite, is it?”

“I couldn’t decide between them. I brought them all here so you could help me choose.” She squinted at the unlikely assortment of suitors. For a minute I think she believed me.

“I’m joking. They got me out of a sticky situation on the Merritt,” I said.

“Did they?”

I told her what had happened, or nearly happened, at the gas station.

“So you thought two guys were following you and decided it was better to have five guys following you? That makes sense.”

Put that way, I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake and whether tomorrow’s
Bulletin
headline would read “Local Business-woman and Customer Found Raped and Murdered.”

I looked back at my escorts. Charlie was well over six feet tall, with one earring, no weird insignia on his leathers. I wasn’t up on my bandanna symbolism but his was black and partly covered thick snowy hair. He smiled at us through his close-cropped beard and revealed a puckish gap between his front teeth. Santa, or his evil twin? The others were all permutations of the same guy . . . a little thinner, a little taller, two mustaches, one soul patch. They all wore black leather chaps, like hundreds of helmetless bikers you can find on the Merritt any day of the week, but especially on Sundays, when they all seemed to converge on Norwalk, just south of the service station where I’d met these guys.

“Safety in numbers?” I wondered aloud. The bikers called Babe over.

Watching Babe walk, when she’s working it, is a thing of beauty. I can only imagine what she was like twenty years ago, shaking her tambourine and just about everything else for the Jimmy Collins Band. They’d traveled all over the United States and Europe and Babe had the stories and the scars to prove it.

She wore sleeveless tops twelve months out of the year to show off her well-defined arms and sported a collection of tats that would have impressed an NBA player. Her black apron was tied low and tight around her narrow hips, and she employed her no-fail
Yeah, I’m sexy, and I know where to kick you if you mess with me
walk. It had its usual intended effect. Two were in love, two were in lust, all were in awe. Including me.

She took their orders and I tried not to stare. Instead I sucked up my coffee and absentmindedly gazed out the window, looking for the two clowns we’d left at the service station and profoundly happy they were nowhere in sight.

The Paradise was across the road from a typical suburban retail strip—liquor store, karate school, nail salon, Dunkin’ Donuts—and somewhat less typically a police substation. A few years back these outposts were common in suburban Connecticut and may have even helped keep the petty crime rate down, but budget cuts and benign neglect had forced many of the substations to close, and the rest, like this one, to be virtually abandoned for most of the day. A faint light shone from behind the blinds, but there were no other signs of life.

Babe came back and handed the bikers’ orders to Pete, the diner’s cook. There was always a chance that a cigarette ash might make its way into the food, but that aside, dining at the Paradise had gotten a whole lot better since Pete discovered the Food Network, and the captivating trio of Sara, Rachael, and Giada. Pete routinely threatened to leave this Babe to go chop vegetables for one of those babes, but smart money says he won’t.

“Grilled chicken Caesar, two spinach salads, and two turkey clubs, I think we’re okay,” Babe whispered to me.

I’d heard of people being able to predict criminal behavior by computing a person’s gender, age, youthful exposure to violence, even head shape, but never by what they ordered in a diner. I wanted to believe she was right but what did she expect them to order—Twinkies with chocolate sauce? But, Babe wasn’t finished. She had more anecdotal evidence.

“And furthermore,” she said, “they’re riding Harleys. It’s the rice-burners you have to watch out for. They ride for speed not comfort. I prefer a man who doesn’t go too fast.” According to Babe, men on Japanese bikes were nine times out of ten more likely to be thugs than men riding Harleys. I don’t know where she got her statistics but since I had zero information on the subject, I believed her.

My biker friends considered dessert, but decided against it after a lengthy debate on how much further they’d ride that night, and whether or not the sugar overload of one of Pete’s four-story desserts would cause them to crash, nutritionally speaking. Despite Babe’s confidence in her culinary assessment of my escorts, I wasn’t comfortable leaving her alone with them so I stuck around after finishing my coffee.

“You boys have a good ride?” Babe asked.

“Coming back from Marcus Dairy. Just went for the day,” one of them said.

Marcus Dairy was actually a working dairy but better known as a hangout for bikers all over the East Coast. One of the guys had had a breakdown and had to leave his bike there for a couple of days. As Charlie and the boys left, they promised to stop in again on their return trip. From the way Charlie was looking at Babe, it was a sure thing.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been here this late,” I said, helping Babe pull the shades down. She opened the register, counted out some cash, and put it in a zippered bank bag. She put a hundred dollars back in the drawer and left it open. “So the robbers don’t feel like they’ve wasted their time and trash the place.”

“Are you ever nervous,” I asked, “all by yourself?” I followed Babe out and she yanked the front door shut.

“I don’t scare easy. Besides . . .” She seemed on the verge of telling me something, then pulled back. “It doesn’t happen that often. I close when I feel like it, and Neil usually picks me up after work. He’s just away for a few weeks. His mother’s sick.”

“That’s a drag.”

Neil MacLeod was Babe’s . . . what? Hookup? Lover? Boyfriend? Can you have a
boyfriend
after the age of thirty? Whatever she called him, he was handsome, young, Scottish, and visiting home, where his parents owned a small pub and inn in Cardhu, on the Malt Whisky Trail.

“Is it serious?” I asked.

“Don’t know. But it was time he went back. He hasn’t been home for ten years. Listen, if you’re planning to meet up with those guys, go for Charlie,” she said, putting the receipt tape in her bag. “That gap between the teeth presents possibilities,” she added, always looking on the bright side.

“Please. They served a purpose and are now, conveniently, out of the picture.”

Babe climbed into her car and I climbed into mine. How long had it been since
I’d
been home? And where was home anyway? New York City, where all my friends were? Brooklyn, where my eighty-five-year-old aunt still lived in the house where she and my father were born? Boca Raton, where my mother inexplicably moved after my father died? Or was it finally Springfield? The small house and big garden that the bank and I owned, but only I lived in?

In A.D. 93, the Roman poet Horace wrote:
This is what I prayed for! A piece of land not so very large, with a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a bit of woodland.
That’s exactly what I had. And that’s where I was going.

Eleven

I hauled myself up the stairs, dumped my things in the living room, and dropped the mail on the kitchen table. Despite the decaf, I was wired. Maybe I shouldn’t have cleaned out the mailbox at the foot of the driveway. It was mostly junk anyway—catalogs, campaign literature, and flyers from cleaning services and house painters. I always wondered if they targeted
my
house.
Good grief, that hovel needs a coat of paint
.

My house is the most modest in the neighborhood. Wetlands restrictions and the nearby bird sanctuary saved my little bungalow from spec contractors who’d cock it up with fake dormers and stone facing and then try to flip it to some middle manager who’d sweat the mortgage until he thought he could palm it off on someone else. I told myself the neighbors silently thanked me for maintaining the character of the place, but couldn’t be sure since I didn’t know any of the neighbors, so I never had the opportunity to ask.

On my left was a formerly noisy guy who’d either grown up, gotten married, or died; I hadn’t seen or heard him all winter. That’s the way it was in the suburbs if you had no PTA or country-club connections. You could be almost as anonymous as you were in a big city.

I trashed the solicitations and the mailings from grinning office seekers with jackets not so casually thrown over their shoulders. Problem was, I couldn’t toss the bills. Dirty Business was doing okay, but I was still getting used to the challenge of being flush for half the year and rolling change the other half. I wasn’t eating cat food, but it had been a long time since I’d treated myself to a splurge. That was the real reason for my trip to Titans. But that plan had backfired when Lucy didn’t show and a dead guy did instead.

I checked my cell messages again. Nothing from Lucy. I wasn’t worried about her, just curious. And maybe a little jealous. I hadn’t been in a relationship for over a year, and if anyone had asked I would have said that was okay, I had my hands full running a business. But I hadn’t had an adventure for even longer—and I was due.

There was just one call from Anna, my sometime assistant. I left Lucy another message, then checked my home phone just to make sure she hadn’t tried to reach me on that number. Zip.

It was midnight. Fatigue was setting in; bills were staring me in the face. I thought of opening them, but . . .
Screw it, they’d be here tomorrow
. The article for the
Bulletin
would bring in a few bucks, and more important, maybe a client or two. Hector and Bernie were right about that, publicity was key. And first thing in the morning I’d call on Caroline Sturgis, my rich suburban matron.

I meant to wake up at six and get a run in before driving to Caroline’s. Instead, I slept in until after eight when I heard a key in the front door and Anna Jurado sang out my name, “Meez Pohlah!”

March through October is garden season in my part of Connecticut. For those eight months the newlywed team of Anna and Hugo Jurado worked for Dirty Business. I couldn’t afford to pay them the rest of the year, and they generally returned to Mexico anyway, but for those months we were a real company, not just a woman with stationery and business cards who still felt a little like a fake. Hugo was a master in the garden and helped me hire temporary workers when I was lucky enough to need them. Anna made appointments and kept the books.

I ran my fingers through my hair, pulled on a sweatshirt over my pajamas, and went into the kitchen to greet Anna. She was resplendent in a tomato-red track suit with white jeweled stripes down the sides puckering and threatening to give in to fabric fatigue.

“¿Qué tal?”
I asked, starting to make coffee.

“I am very well, thank you very much. And how are you today?” Anna and I played this little game practicing our language skills on each other. If we’d been keeping score, she’d have been killing me.

She and Hugo were married less than a year ago in a ceremony that made the local paper, not because they were members of Springfield’s elite, but because they, and I, had been players in the biggest news story to hit the town since the hurricane of 1938.

I willed the coffeemaker to speed up. My appointment with Caroline was for nine o’clock and I had a twenty-minute drive to the Sturgis home. I didn’t want to be late. Anna saw me eyeing the clock and shooed me out of the kitchen.

“Get dressed. And fix your hair. I will bring you the coffee when it’s ready.”

It says something about my current grooming habits when the cleaning lady is giving me beauty tips. I hadn’t totally gone to seed. I still worked out religiously—that part hadn’t changed since my move from New York—but I had to admit my hair was getting a little shaggy. It was just easier to pull it into a ponytail and put on a baseball hat. And like most gardeners I had perennially grubby hands.

I took a quick shower and pulled on jeans, a boy’s thermal T-shirt, and the hoodie I wore the previous night. Back in the kitchen I twisted my wet hair into a knot and fastened it with a big clip. Then I took a fistful of bangs and distributed them evenly across my forehead.

“That’s a very attractive look,” Anna said, handing me a mug. “You look like you are going to deliver newspapers on your bicycle.”

“Gracias.”

It was the kind of crack I expected from a woman in full war paint and rhinestones at breakfast. And Anna wore her plus size regally; where I neurotically counted every calorie that passed my lips, Anna happily indulged in whatever culinary delicacy struck her fancy, with no shameful morning-after guilt, no slavish adherence to slimming black.
More to love,
she’d say. I was trying hard to adopt her philosophy.

“Kids don’t do that anymore,” I said, shaking some cereal into my coffee, “deliver newspapers. Nowadays, they have Internet consulting gigs. I met a ten-year-old last week who had classier business cards than I do. Ivory laid stock—looked like Crane’s, for crying out loud. She was leaving a stack of them at the Paradise Diner in a little metal holder near the real estate booklets. Eerie.” I poured more coffee over my cereal.

“That’s disgusting. You should eat something more substantial than that.”

“I’m multitasking.” I spooned the concoction into my mouth. “I had a big breakfast yesterday; I have to be in Greenwich by nine,” I said, checking my watch. I took a last spoonful of cereal, grabbed my backpack, and bolted down the stairs. “I’m outta here.”

“Are you going to see Mrs. Sturgis? Make sure you get one-third upfront,” she said as I flew out the door. Always looking out for me. “
Usted nunca . . .
” she started to yell, “you never remember.”

I’d try. But Caroline Sturgis was one of those women who didn’t think much about money because apparently she’d always had it. She always paid, but she always paid late. Last year Anna had suggested we start charging her one percent interest; we did, and she still paid late. Bills were minor annoyances to her.

Caroline lived one town over, where the house numbers were harder to see because the front doors were so far from the road, and the mailman could listen to an entire pop song in between deliveries because the mailboxes were that far apart.

The Sturgis home had been designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright—poor guy, he was probably ninety years old and still referred to as a student. Caroline’s place was magnificent—lots of levels, built-ins, and fireplaces—and all natural materials: stone, wood, and slate.

The long, wooded driveway led to the side of her house and the deck, which faced a private pond. To the right of the house was a small garden and a shallow reflecting pool. Beyond that were Caroline’s tennis court and a large barn renovated to serve as a guesthouse. On the fringes of the property was the town’s arboretum.

It cried out for Prairie or Asian garden themes, but Caroline wouldn’t hear of it, preferring annuals and a cottage look more suitable to a New England saltbox. It killed me. And if the “student” was still alive it’d probably kill him, too.

Last year she’d let me test one perennial grass in a container near her tennis court, so I had my fingers crossed I’d get to push the envelope again this year and go beyond mere petunias and alyssum. It could be a notable addition to my résumé, the way the Peacock house had been last year.

I pulled into the Sturgises’ driveway through two stone pillars topped by Mission-style light fixtures. Following the drive around to the left, I continued about a hundred yards to a separate three-car garage. As I was getting out, the garage door opened; the driver was just as startled as I was. He leaned out of the car, with a stunned expression on his face, and backed out a little too fast, kicking up pea gravel and spinning his tires. He put the car into drive and pulled out, crushing some snowdrops at the side of the driveway.

Inside, Caroline heard the tires squeal and came to the screen door to see what was up.

“Hi, Paula,” she said, shielding her eyes and watching as the car pulled onto the road. “I don’t know why he has to drive like that. He can’t be late; he’s been reading the paper for the last forty minutes. C’mon inside.”

He
was Grant Sturgis, Caroline’s husband. I just caught a glimpse of him, but he looked slightly familiar. Caroline thought we might have met at the opening ceremony for a garden I restored, but with his bland features and sandy hair, Grant could be mistaken for almost any slight, not unattractive, thirty-to forty-year-old man. Generic, both-hands-in-their-pockets guys who could be found in every restaurant, mall, and private club in the country.

Caroline, on the other hand, had a spark. True, it was currently hidden under a velvet headband, and the safe suburban armor of flats, slacks, cotton shirt, and sweater tied around her neck, but it was there. And in danger of combusting, if she kept feeding it alcohol.

I’d met her two years ago. She was dropping off and I was furnishing my new house at the Springfield Historical Society’s Thrift Shop. We shared a few laughs over some of the merchandise—long, skinny prints of big-eyed children, crafts projects gone horribly wrong. We also shared a fondness for the two older women who worked there, known affectionately as the Doublemint twins because time and friendship had turned them into carbon copies of each other.

When Caroline found out I had a garden business she squealed that I was just the person she was looking for, although I had a feeling she was lonely, and anyone that day would have fit the bill. We went back to her place and after a brief discussion of the colors she liked we had a handshake deal. I would plant a thousand spring bulbs all around her tennis court. It wasn’t my idea of a beautiful design but clients were hard to come by, especially in September, so I said yes. Each year I encouraged her to be more adventurous.

My entire house could have fit in Caroline’s kitchen, and on the spotless marble countertop was a pitcher that experience had told me was filled with mimosas. Strong ones.

As the client, Caroline Sturgis could get as highly smashed as she wanted to at nine in the morning. Good sense and something my doctor had said to me at my last checkup about “high liver enzyme levels” kept me on the straight and narrow. A big part of my last job had been social networking and that had inevitably involved a certain amount of drinking, but those days were over, especially now that I had a mortgage and two employees counting on me to make payroll. And I couldn’t afford to be fuzzy-headed if there were power tools around.

Caroline poured herself a tall one and me the same despite the fact that I’d waved my hand over the heavy-bottomed tumbler she’d set out. I moved the glass to one side and set up my laptop to bring up the garden rooms I’d envisioned for her property. The screen quickly filled with pictures of small shrub and perennial beds I thought would work for the various spots in her garden. She pretended to pay attention but I could see her mind was elsewhere. Right then it was on her drink, which she downed as if it was straight orange juice.

“Caroline, is this a bad time? I can come back later.”

I didn’t really want to, but I needed her full attention or else she’d revert to impatiens and petunia mode, instead of even considering the more substantial changes I was proposing.

“No, no. Don’t go. This is as good a time as any. You’ve done all this work and here I am daydreaming.”

If it was a daydream, it wasn’t a pleasant one. Caroline’s normally smooth forehead was as wrinkled as a Klingon’s and there were two deep grooves in the shape of the number eleven at the top of her nose.

She let me drone on about ornamental grass, Russian sage, and rudbeckia, but she was lost in thought and it wasn’t from weighing the benefits of miscanthus versus fountain grass. I worried about mixing business with personal stuff but decided to ask her what was the matter.

“I just feel so useless these days,” she said. “Molly’s away at school and Jason will be leaving in January. And Grant’s been traveling so much lately. He just got back from a week in Boston, and now he’s off to Chicago for four days. I guess that means his business is doing well but I thought we’d have more time together now that the children were older, not less.”

When it came to relationship advice my specialty was “Screw him. He doesn’t deserve you.” That worked pretty well for most of my single New York friends. Here in the ’burbs I was in uncharted territory. I didn’t have the first clue as to how to comfort an empty nester.

“I take a few classes . . .” she said, trailing off. “Mostly to get out of the house and see people.”

My laptop went into sleep mode; I pushed it back a few inches. I was antsy to get back to work but it was pointless until Caroline finished unburdening herself.

“What kinds of classes are you taking?” I asked. Part of me really cared.

“What haven’t I taken?” She threw her head back, laughing and rolling her eyes. “Real housewife stuff. You’ll think they’re silly. I guess they are.”

“No I won’t. Tell me.”

“This year, glassblowing and wreath making. I drive to the city for the glassblowing class and take wreath making at Mary Ellen’s Craft Shop in New Canaan.”

“They’re not silly; my mother does a lot of that stuff.” She winced. Wrong move—what woman wants to be compared to her friend’s mother? I regrouped. “That’s impressive. I’m not good with my hands except for digging. So what have you made?”