Popped Off (4 page)

Authors: Jeffrey Allen

BOOK: Popped Off

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Julianne was out of bed before I was Monday morning, and I woke alone, tangled in the sheets, her black lace bra draped strategically across my forehead.

My wife. Lawyer. Mother. Seductress.

She and Carly were both in the kitchen when I wandered downstairs. Carly smiled at me as she worked on a piece of toast. Julianne stared into her oatmeal, perplexed.

“Daddy’s up!” Carly yelled. “Lazy pants!”

“Easy.” I ruffled the top of her head. “Your mom kept me up late last night.”

I looked for a reaction from Julianne, but she continued eyeing her oatmeal.

“I have swimming today, Daddy.”

“I know.”

“I’m gonna do a cannonball. Okay?”

“Absolutely,” I said, sliding into the chair between them. I nudged Julianne. “Good morning.”

She set her spoon down next to her bowl and folded her arms across her chest. “I’m not pregnant.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I know.”

I lowered my voice. “We just had sex last night. How can you possibly know?”

She looked at me, annoyed. “A woman knows these things.”

I knew better than to argue. “All right.”

“Why is it taking so long?”

“I kinda like that it’s taking a while.”

Her lips puckered. “Didn’t take this long before.”

I could see her thoughts developing, and it sent chills up my spine. She was about to embrace her own special tunnel vision with regard to getting pregnant. I tried to stave it off.

“We haven’t been trying that long, Jules,” I said. “Really.”

“I think we need to get serious about this.”

I swallowed. “Get serious?”

She leveled her eyes with mine. “Yes.”

Julianne was a lot of things, and nearly all of them were fantastic. Better than I deserved. But she was also a perfectionist, and she didn’t tolerate failure. Ever. I beat her at Scrabble one time. She wouldn’t play with me again for a month. Then she suggested we play.

She won by 271 points. Because she’d spent the month reading the Scrabble dictionary.

She didn’t lose and she didn’t fail.

“What’s pregnant, Daddy?” Carly asked, stacking her bread crusts on her plate.

“It’s when you have a baby,” I said.

“Mommy’s gonna have a baby?” she said, grinning. “Yay!”

Julianne stood, took her bowl to the sink, then turned back to face me. Her expression was a mixture of resolve and grim determination, similar to what I imagined the leader of SEAL Team Six’s looked like right before they stormed bin Laden’s hideout. “Yeah. Mommy’s gonna have a baby.”

It was time to get serious.

Carly cannonballed straight into the pool for her swimming lessons, soaking the instructor and her classmates and earning a stern talking-to from the now doused instructor. She snuck a look back at me through the window to the waiting room where I sat to see if she was in trouble.

I winked and gave her a quick thumbs-up.

I had forty-five minutes to kill while she learned the finer points of swimming like a human rather than a puppy dog. As usual, I was the only male in the room, the rest of the waiting parents being moms who were either just coming from or on their way to spinning class or a tennis match or whatever else the moms of Rose Petal did during the day. I was an anomaly in Rose Petal—a father who stayed at home—and was regularly viewed with a raised eyebrow whenever I ventured somewhere new during a time of the day when most other dads were at a desk.

But I’d been a regular at the swim school now for a while, and the staff and the parents were used to seeing me sit and watch and make polite chitchat. So they left me alone and didn’t feel the need to call the police and alert them that a pedophile might be on the loose.

I was scrolling through e-mails on my phone when the door to the waiting room opened. Victor Anthony Doolittle strode through it, acting like he owned the place. He eyed several of the women, then settled on me and found his way over.

“You take your kid to an indoor pool? In Texas?” he asked.

“Yes. Because one hundred and twelve degrees is not a comfortable temperature to learn in.”

“Sissy.”

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Looking for you,” he said, dragging a chair up next to mine and climbing up into it.

“I hope the front desk didn’t think you were late for class.”

“You’re so funny, I forgot to laugh.”

“No one says that anymore.”

“I just did, ya moron.”

I shook my head. “What do you want? And how did you know I was here?”

He made a face as if I’d peed on his shoes. “Please. I know your schedule better than you do. I can find you anytime I need to.”

“Lucky me.”

“I know your wife’s, too,” he said, raising an eyebrow and grinning.

I reached over and tilted the chair back, threatening to let it go to the floor. He fell back in the seat and braced himself with his hands. “What the—”

“Do not talk about Julianne,” I said. “You know the rules. You ogle my wife, I will hang you from a nail somewhere.”

“All right, all right,” he said, still bracing himself. “Set the chair back down, and calm down.”

I set it down.

He ran his tiny hands over his shirt and rolled his eyes at me. “Can’t take a joke at all anymore.”

“Why are you here?”

“Got a little bit on your missing soccer coach.”

“He’s not a coach. He’s the president”

“Whatever. Soccer is for Euro pansies, anyway.”

I sighed and watched Carly dive into the pool. Her arms chopped through the water like windmills, and she was first to the opposite side.

“So this Huber,” Victor said. “I got into his e-mail.”

“Already?”

He waved a hand. “Getting into someone’s e-mail is child’s play.”

“No wonder it’s so easy for you.”

“Har, har. I got into his e-mail. I figured you might wanna take a look.”

“You see anything in it?”

“No. Because I didn’t look. That’s your job.”

“Okay.”

He produced a stapled packet of papers. “I printed them all out. If there’s an address that isn’t familiar, shoot it back to me. I’ll figure out who it belongs to.”

I took the stack of paper and fanned the pages. There looked to be about thirty pages worth of material.

“Your kid can swim,” Victor said.

I glanced up. They were now racing the length of the pool, and Carly was ahead by about three body lengths.

“She’s pretty good,” I admitted.

“Probably your wife’s genes.”

He was trying to get a rise out of me, and I wasn’t going to give him the pleasure. “Probably.”

He waited for me to say something else, but I stayed quiet. He fidgeted in his seat for a moment, looking uncomfortable and irritable. Though you could argue that was how he always looked.

“She a good sleeper?” he asked. “Your daughter?”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

“What about when she was a baby?”

“Oh, hell no. She was awful.”

“What did you do?”

I started to respond, then caught myself. “Are you asking for my help?”

He scowled but kept his mouth shut.

“Baby not sleeping, Victor?”

He put his head in his hands. “I swear to God, if he doesn’t sleep tonight, I’m taking him back to the hospital and getting a kitten or something. Kid hasn’t slept in a week. And neither have we!”

Victor and his wife had a three-month-old, Victor Junior. He hadn’t said much about the baby since he was born, and I hadn’t pried. It wasn’t like we hung out together and babysat each other’s kids, so I didn’t know much about Junior.

“Say it,” I said.

“Say what?”

“Say you need my help,” I said, smiling.

His cheeks flushed as he remembered our conversation from two nights ago He mumbled something under his breath, then coughed. “Fine. I need your help.”

I let his words settle between us for a moment, relishing the feeling of a petty and juvenile victory. Still, it felt good.

“Do you swaddle him?” I asked.

“What him?”

“Swaddle. Wrap him up in a blanket.”

“No. She’s afraid it’ll freak him out or something.”

“Do it. Wrap him up. Tight.”

He stared at me for a minute, attempting to decipher whether or not I was being honest with him.

“I’m not kidding, Victor,” I assured him. “And I may like to give you a hard time, but I wouldn’t tell you to do anything that would harm your son.”

His expression softened, and I could make out faint dark circles beneath his eyes. The badges of honor for new parents.

“Lay him on the blanket,” I explained. “Get his arms flat to his sides, and pull the blanket over him. Tuck the blanket around him, like a burrito. And you can’t do it too tight.”

“What if he can’t breathe?”

“Promise you, he’ll be able to breathe.”

He pursed his lips. “I don’t think it’ll work.”

“I’ll bet you a case of beer it does.”

He hopped out of the chair. “Deal. I like Shiner.”

“And I’ll take Stella,” I said. “Bottles, not cans.” I grinned. “It’ll work.”

He lifted his chin in my direction. “The e-mails. Check the e-mails.”

“Why?”

“You may find some things.”

“I thought you said you didn’t look at them.”

He headed for the door. “I say a lot of things, Stilts.”

Before I could skim the e-mails, Carly bounced out of the pool area, needing a towel and dry clothes. I supplied both, and we were out the door in less than ten minutes, as I didn’t feel the need to stand there and brush out her hair and make her pageant ready, like the other parents did with their children.

“Daddy, we’re going to camp now, right?” Carly asked, chomping on a bagful of Cheez-Its I’d brought along for quick nourishment.

“Yep.”

“At that church, right?”

“Yep. At that church.”

“That church” was one of the mega-sized churches that seemed to pop up daily in the Dallas suburbs. I was pretty sure the only thing people in Texas liked more than barbecue was going to church. Julianne and I were indifferent to them—except when they created traffic and we were trying to go out to breakfast on a Sunday morning—but Carly hadn’t stopped talking about going to that church since Audrey invited her to attend vacation Bible school.

Vacation Bible schools were a tradition in the South, and they were less about the Bible than they were about being summer camps. Swimming, games, sports, and crafts, all sprinkled with a generous dusting of Jesus. And they were usually dirt cheap. So as long as Carly wasn’t being brainwashed by some sort of religious cult, I didn’t mind her spending a few hours at a VBS.

I pulled the minivan into the massive parking lot of New Spirit Fellowship Church. When I say massive, I mean the size of about three football fields. The church itself was more of a campus, with numerous buildings, fountains, athletic fields, and the massive main church, all metal and glass with high-angled rooflines. It was an impressive structure, and I was pretty sure that, like Cowboys Stadium, it was large enough for God to spot from Heaven.

We walked into the mammoth vestibule. A long table was set up, with a bevy of smiling faces behind it, beckoning us in. We stepped up to a lady wearing a giant smile and a pink baseball cap with a bejeweled cross on it.

“Well, good morning!” she greeted us. “How are we today?”

“We are fine,” Carly announced.

Pink Cross Hat directed her energy at Carly. “And are we ready for camp?”

“Yes, we are.”

“And are we ready to have a fantastic time?”

Carly turned to me. “Daddy, why does she keep saying ‘we’? I don’t even know her.”

I wanted to tell her because people thought using the first person was a cute way to build camaraderie, but that it just made people sound silly. I refrained.

“Probably because she’s part of the camp,” I told her. I looked at the woman. “Last name is Winters.”

Her smile did not fade at Carly’s interrupting her cavalcade of we’s, and she pressed on. “Well, of course you are.” She scanned the list and her finger stopped. “There we are. Miss Carly Winters.”

Carly beamed.

“And is Audrey Risberg here yet?” I asked. “They’re buddies, and Audrey invited her to come this week.”

She scanned the list, then shook her head. “No, it doesn’t appear as if she’s here yet. But I’m sure the Lord will have her here any moment!”

I pictured the Lord pulling up in a minivan. I wondered if the Son of God would prefer a foreign or domestic model.

The woman handed Carly a name tag and a bright red T-shirt that exclaimed
SUPER SUMMER FUN TIME
! The letter
T
was in the shape of a cross. I felt my skepticism rising at being surrounded by all this religion but managed to keep my mouth closed.

She pointed in the direction of Carly’s group leader, and we weaved our way through the crowd of parents and children. The leader’s name was Elizabeth, and she was an older teenager sporting the same T-shirt Carly had just been handed. She welcomed Carly like she’d known her forever. She shook my hand, told me where the pickup location was, and returned her attention to the kids clamoring around her. Carly gave me a quick kiss good-bye and began chattering with the other kids.

I worked my way back through the crowd, toward the table and Pink Cross Hat. She was making notations on the list.

“Excuse me,” I said. “I’m sorry to bother you again.”

She lit up with a megawatt smile. “It’s never a bother when you’re serving the Lord. And that’s exactly what I’m doing with all these wonderful little people!”

“Right, absolutely,” I said, biting my tongue and swallowing the thirty-seven sarcastic answers that formed in my narrow-minded brain. “Was wondering if you might be able to help me find someone who works here at the church.”

The smile grew impossibly larger. “Sir, I know everyone that works here. Would you like to speak to someone in ministry? There is always someone here to speak with regarding ministry or finding the Lord.”

“No, no,” I said, holding her off before she had me baptized. “Someone specific.”

“Who?”

“Moises Huber.”

Her smile flickered. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I might have missed it. But the name surprised her, and the reaction wasn’t a positive one.

She shuffled the papers on the table and stood. “Let me see what I can do. I’ll be right back. Mr. Winters, correct?”

I nodded.

She whispered something to one of the women at the table next to hers, and the woman nodded and slid over to take over Pink Cross Hat’s chair and check-in duties. She smiled at me but said nothing.

I stepped to the side and watched families roll in and out for a few minutes. If the day camp was any indicator, the church’s membership was thriving. At a time when many religious communities were struggling to survive, this one seemed to be doing just fine. People knew one another, hugged, shook hands, seemed happy to see one another. If they were all showing up on weekends and dropping money in the baskets, New Spirit was more than flush.

Pink Cross Hat returned, the bright smile back on her face. The momentary tick that I’d seen before she left was nowhere to be found.

“Mr. Winters,” she said, clapping her hands together. “You are in for such a special treat.”

For a moment, I thought I’d hit the jackpot. “Mr. Huber is here?”

“Better!” she said.

“Better?”

“If you’ll follow me, please.”

“Where are we going?”

She smiled and clapped her hands again. “You’ll see.”