Life After Life (27 page)

She has always been able to do that, always been proud of how foolish some men look when she saunters by, a swish of her hips at just the right time. She once even sawed the heel off one shoe just a fraction like Marilyn Monroe had famously done and it really does work. Kendra can also still wear things that cling, thanks to Pilates and a good genetic composition. She loves that most of the women she gets put with on various committees and things at Abby’s school are so much younger than she is and still there is not a single one of them that can compete with her. Of course, they really can’t hold her interest either, but very few people can in this shitty town. The work she does would make a lot of money in a big city where people are interested in art but around here the best you can do is an occasional craft fair where no one knows anything. People will buy doorstops that are nothing more than a brick wrapped in felt, but no one wants to see her display of miniature sushis, carefully shaped and baked and painted, fragile and delicate and no two the same. If only she lived elsewhere, but she lives here in Shitville with a husband who is as ambitious as a newt. He’s smart enough to do so much, but just to spite her he doesn’t. Ever since he said
I do
he’s been saying
I don’t. I don’t like that, I don’t want that,
and she knows it is out of pure spite. Well, he will see who is the best at being spiteful. When Andy watches her walk by, he all but licks his lips and she does everything she can to keep him on the line, closer and closer each time.

“Shake it, don’t break it,” he whispered the other day when she ran by his office on the pretense of collecting for a charity and got two seconds alone with him in a hallway. She could feel the heat coming out of him, especially when she told him how if she broke it, then she’d need to come to him to fix it. “Isn’t that what you do?” she asked. “Fix people?”

“I cure the heart,” he said, and laughed, though by then he was backing away from her, his neck a little flushed.

“Exactly,” she said, and pushed past him so he could get a good look as she walked. She knew if he weren’t so turned on, he would have been mad that she crossed the line of his workplace. She would have to make a point of telling his wife she had seen him. “Your husband works so hard,” she will say. “I think you need to take him on a little vacation.”

“What about he takes me?” his wife says in this version. “I deserve that.” And Kendra smiles and pours the idiot some more wine. “Of course you do, dear. Bless your heart.”

Kendra tried and tried to get Abby interested in some of the new looks that girls her age are wearing, but she said the only thing she wanted for her birthday was a phone and
now
all she wants is for Dollbaby to come home. “Honey,” she said, and handed her some jeans. “Just try on a few things. You need some new clothes.” Abby needed an eight in the same jeans Kendra got in a four and she had to spend the whole ride home reassuring her that most girls do have a little plump phase, that once she starts her period and starts growing breasts it will all get much better.

“Stop!” Abby screamed so loud Kendra almost wrecked the car. “I hate when you talk about all of that. I hate you,” she screamed again when they stopped in the driveway. She jumped from the car, and instead of running up on the porch where Ben was working on that stupid disappearing chamber, she went tearing off toward the cemetery and the old folks’ home where she spends way too much time.

“Why can’t you just take her shopping?” Ben asked later when he came into their room where she was trying on her new things. “Why can’t it ever just be about her? Buy something for her and for once leave yourself out. She is the kid, after all.” Oh, how insightful. He has had just enough therapy to start to notice a few things, now.

“It is about her,” she screamed. “Just because I happen to find something for myself, too, does not mean I am not a good mother. I am a good mother. I am a great goddamned mother!”

“That’s what you keep saying.”

“I am!” She kicked that big red rubber toy that Dollbaby used to leave in the middle of the room all dirty and slimy. No matter how many times she collects all those things and puts them on the back porch, Abby goes and gets them and scatters them back around all the different rooms, like it might bring Dollbaby back. “But she might come back,” Abby had said, Ben of course agreeing with her, and Kendra wanted to scream and stomp and say
impossible.

Ben leaned down and picked up the toy where it had bounced against the wall and set it back on the beach towel Abby had left in the corner, under a photo she had taped to the wall. Dollbaby with angel halo and wings, the first Halloween they had her.

“Just be a good mother,” he said, and looked at her with those tired red eyes. Was he crying? Was he stoned? Did she give a damn? “Just do something just for her.”

“This party is just for her,” she said. “I am about to throw the best birthday party that any girl in her class has ever had. I can guarantee you that every mother in town will be calling me up afterward to try to get answers and copy it.”

“I rest my case,” he said, and she bit back what was the true and best thing to say to someone who said he was going to be a lawyer and then never got there.

What a loser. Kendra does not want a situation of till death do us part alimony. She might if there was more to get, which once upon a time she was led to believe there was. It would mean she wouldn’t ever be able to get a real job (fine with her) but also that she couldn’t have a live-in lover, not that she isn’t crafty enough to figure all that out and get away with it—she certainly is!—but all it would take would be for Mr. Sleight of Hand to hire the right lawyer who might hire an investigator and then that would be embarrassing.

Till death do us part alimony is a great way to stick it to someone for sure, but given she’s the one who is having an affair, it might be hard to do. And this is a topic that will divide a room full of women in a hurry. She heard one woman saying how such an agreement is a step back for women everywhere. That a smart woman should just get a chunk of something right up front and not live as a dependent. Well, Kendra has never been into all that feminist bullshit although she likes to appear that she is. Truth is that she is perfectly happy to be totally dependent on a man and never work at all and she is sure many women share this. Of course, they are also probably the boring housewife types she would never want anything to do with, but still.

She pretends to be a feminist just like she pretends to be compassionate when someone is struggling with her weight or blood pressure or bad permanent even though she really doesn’t give a damn. But why not lie? She does it all the time. Why not lie and create a whole new history for yourself, especially if no one ever takes the time to investigate and catch the lies. She has told that she once designed a costume for Bernadette Peters and that she once had dinner with one of the Bee Gees—she can’t remember which one—who insisted she stopped waitressing and join their table. He propositioned her and then sent her postcards for years that said he couldn’t forget her. It is amazing what people will believe. She has told that she is a descendent of both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses Grant.
I embody the whole Civil War right here in my own little body,
she has said numerous times to great reaction and applause.

“Where are the postcards from the Bee Gee?” that awful Linda Blackmon asked. Linda is the one who copies everything Kendra ever buys and wears, and then Benjamin said “good question” and looked at her with hands up and eyebrows raised as if to say,
Well?

“Burned, of course,” she said without batting an eye. “Why tarnish his image with what was really kind of pathetic?”

“That is so considerate.” Ben clapped his hands. “That’s my wife, the most generous and compassionate human walking the planet.”

Ben Palmer will deserve whatever he gets. He has practically ruined her life. He is the reason she has migraines and low blood sugar and likely what is called fibromyalgia. She gave him a baby and she has spent the best years of her life with him and for what? Did he ever take her on that cruise she wanted? How embarrassing was it when this one went to Rome and this one went to Hawaii and this one summers on Martha’s Vineyard and drops celebrity names all the time. Kendra deserves that, too and she is goddamned going to have it. She puts a sticker on the bottom of the big heavy Victorian sofa the woman with the birthmarked daughter left behind and what does she find but another goddamned chew toy. Chew toys and screws from that goddamned box he’s building. It’s all a mess. And she can’t wait to get out of it. She is hoping that she can keep her strength up until it is all behind her. Meanwhile, she is getting sick and tired of all the phone calls.
I think I saw your dog on the playground, but I couldn’t catch her. I think I saw your dog two days ago at the Tastee Freez.
The messages keep coming
. I am so sorry to hear about Dollbaby. I hope you find her soon.

Wouldn’t she love to scream impossible! That is
impossible.
Dollbaby is gone and never to be seen again. Dollbaby took a little nap and never woke up
.
Kendra spent quite a bit of money for that little naptime, including a hefty tip for the long-haired solemn-faced kid who didn’t want to believe her story about why this dog
had
to be put down. “She practically bit a child’s nose off,” she told him. “Twenty stitches and who do you think paid for it all? We’ll be lucky if they don’t sue us for all we own. What do you need, the court order?” She finally convinced him even though the idiot dog was on its back and wagging its tail the whole time. “Appearances are so deceiving,” she told the boy.

Now she has to practice looking sad and work some tears into her eyes, because as soon as Abby walks in she will have to tell her the sad sad news. Someone called from way out in the country—Dollbaby got hit by a car. Oh, if only that fence your father built had not been so easy to get out of. Oh, if only the dear sweet thing had not gotten out and run away from home. If we ever get another dog, we will hire someone who knows what he is doing and can build a real fence. Poor, poor Dollbaby. Let’s try to picture her in heaven with a mountain of bones and beautiful fields to run through. Let’s give her a Persian rug to piss on all day long.

Notes about:
Jeremiah Mason Bass

Born:
August 5, 1932
Died:
June 21, 2007, 4:10 p.m.

Winthrop Nursing Facility Laconia, New Hampshire

Mr. Bass was my last assignment in New Hampshire. Luke had instructed that I leave on a high note and clearly there will not be one higher than this. Luke’s request, other than to throw him a good funeral and make sure all legal issues were in order, was that I leave New Hampshire when I felt healthy and confident and had had a good experience. After Suzanne Sullivan, I feared that I would not be able to keep my word and I told the supervisor this. I had already said that I knew I could not handle children and now I had added anyone dying prematurely. I had dreamed of Suzanne Sullivan many times in the weeks after her death. In the dreams she always had the long blond hair she had in the pictures on the wall of her house and she was always doing other things, unwrapping snacks for her kids or looking up phone numbers. Once she was grooming a horse and she kept telling me that there had been a mistake and she wasn’t supposed to leave at all, that I needed to speak to people and make phone calls and see if I couldn’t get this mistake fixed.

No one can change this,
Luke had said, meaning his own situation.
The world is in motion.

“Can’t change it,” Mr. Bass said the first day I met him. He had been described by several as “colorful” and that would be a gross understatement. He said his whole life had been dictated by his name—Bigmouth Bass they call him. He said he had fished since he was big enough to hold a pole. He fished all over the United States of America and once down in Mexico when his wife won a trip for selling the most cars over at Regal Chevrolet. That was in 1976. He caught a marlin once and loved to tell the tale, what a fight it was—
the pull, the pull
—He was widowed in 1997 and has successfully gotten loose of every hook that almost caught him.
They don’t call me slippery for nothing.

He wore his white hair so slicked you could see the grooves of the fine-toothed comb he kept in his front pocket and he was missing quite a few teeth which he self-consciously hid with one hand cupping his chin and covering his mouth. “I’ve caught nearly everything you can catch,” he said. “Fish, I mean, and people always give me fish things because of my name and my work. Ran a bait-and-tackle shop for years while my wife sold cars. She was something. Now that was my hardest catch of all, took all kinds of lures and tackle to get her to bite—you know, Aqua Velva, which I think stinks, but she liked it quite good, and a luxury automobile and steak dinners and a shiny diamond ring. They called me Bigmouth Bass and they called her the other Bigmouth Bass. Once I called her the Bigmouth Ass and I wished I hadn’t done that ’cause she made me pay. I am not about to tell a decent young woman such as yourself
how
she made me pay, but just trust me that she did.”