The People Next Door (28 page)

Her husband had spent the past three days skulking around the house, beaten and bruised. He’d come home late last night looking
like shit again. Maybe he had been with Vince. Maybe he was out carousing, drowning his sorrows as a failed businessman. Either
way, she had indulged his wound-licking too long. When he finished mowing the lawn, Amy would sit him down for the most important
State of the Union address the Nash administration had ever faced.

She was watching him now, through the kitchen window. Bouncing around the yard on his John Deere, a can of beer hanging in
the nifty cup-holder he had mounted to the mower’s dash. Trundling around out there in his Forrest Gump state of rectangular
idiocy, punishing himself, she couldn’t help thinking of desert beetles, mining slaves, some kind of life form feeding the
soil of its own miserable existence.

Finally he buzzed the last strip and steered the mower back to the garage. His eyes under the brim of his baseball cap were
small and black, like a skink’s. He disappeared into the garage and the mower’s engine
sputtered off. She took her seat at the breakfast table. Five minutes later he came through the laundry room and paused at
the second fridge. A bottle cap tinkled on the floor. He entered the kitchen, stopped, stared at her. He used his T-shirt
to wipe his armpits, then lobbed it back into the laundry room. He sat across from her, holding his beer with both hands.

‘Okay,’ he said, and waited for her to begin.

The contents of Amy’s speech appeared like a PowerPoint presentation in her mind. In all the squares were their finances,
expenses, savings, everything down to the water bill. She had mental flow charts designed to help him see the big picture.
She had the web addresses of several job sites printed for him. She had an outline of their options, pros and cons. She had
her closing arguments rehearsed. And watching him stare at her dumbly, with one eye still blackened, his hands smelling of
gasoline and grass and the swine sweat of two days without a shower – all of this carefully prepared material dissolved as
if it had been written in disappearing ink.

‘I want you to move out,’ Amy said.

Mick did not respond. She positioned Tami Larson’s medical bill so that he could read the sum ($17,566.22) at the bottom.
He blinked at the figure but said nothing.

‘To the pool house,’ she said. ‘You can use that as an apartment until the end of the summer. When the kids go back to school.
You’ll need to come up with the money to pay for Tami Larson’s emergency room visit – no, the homeowner’s policy doesn’t cover
it, because you let it lapse, just like you did with the health insurance.
I’ll take care of the regular bills and worry about handling the kids. In the meantime, I suggest you take this opportunity
to come up with a new plan. I don’t really care what it is. But I’m not giving up this house or this land.’

He opened his mouth in protest.

Amy cut him off. ‘Trust me, it’s better this way.’

Mick looked past her, out the window facing the pool, to the Render house. He closed his eyes and a small smile appeared at
the corner of his mouth. He was in his own dreamland again and she wondered if he might fall from his chair.

‘You have no idea,’ he said softly. ‘You are in the worst form of denial about what’s happened to us. I saw this coming years
ago. I knew we could never sustain it, but you, you act like nothing’s changed. You understand nothing about who we have become.’

‘I understand you closed the restaurant without consulting me. You need to decide what role you would like to play in this
family, and I need some space. You’re hiding things and I can’t live with this anger. Or do you want to tell me what happened
the other night? Want to tell me about Myra Blaylock?’

This got to him. His eyes widened, but he said nothing.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘I don’t care where you eat or spend the days, but I can’t sleep with you creeping in and out of the bedroom
at all hours. I hope you understand, you did this to yourself, Mick. For the first time in our lives, you quit. I married
a lot of things when I married you,
but a quitter wasn’t one of them.’ She could see that this wounded him, and she almost regretted saying it.

He went to the sink, filled a glass with water, but instead of drinking it he poured it down the drain.

He said, ‘Ten years I brought home an average annual income of two hundred thousand dollars while you hid in the sweet little
fairytale world of your classroom. What’s your paycheck going to be this year, Amy? Thirty-two-five? Forty with the knuckleheads
at Vo-Tech?’

‘You’re the reason I had to take the Vo-Tech job, Mick. The restaurant hasn’t turned a profit in almost three years. We’re
surviving on fumes.’

‘You have a bad day when Scooter doesn’t return a playground ball at the end of recess. When your budget can’t cover nine
months’ worth of chalk. Do you want to hear about my bad days, Amy? Do you want to know what I face every day?’

‘I’ve heard it all before.’

‘In the past five years I’ve been sued, robbed at gun-point, embezzled by my accountant. I’ve got five national chain dining
concepts within a quarter mile, in a town with over a hundred bars. I’ve got a negative equity building in the deadest shopping
plaza in Boulder because you were afraid to invest in that space on the mall.’

‘I didn’t want you to lose more money,’ she said. ‘The bank said you didn’t have the brand profile to make it downtown.’

‘My weekly budget is more than your entire annual salary. I am a human resources manager, a bartender,
waiter, janitor, marketing chief, cook and CEO. I’m on my feet sixteen hours a day. I put in eighty-hour weeks to your thirty-five.
You think I work nights because I don’t want to be home for dinner? I work nights so you don’t have to find a real job. You
could be a professor at CU but you don’t want that because reading
Make Way for Ducklings
just drives you to the brink.’

For a moment, Amy could not see. The world was black with her rage. ‘That is beyond unfair, you shit. You wanted me at the
same school as our daughter—’

‘Yes, and you wanted me to work days, nights, and everything else so that we can send Kyle to any college in the country,
so you can shop for a whole new wardrobe every time you gain or lose ten pounds, and keep your Boulder Country Club membership,
even though you haven’t set foot on a golf course or tennis court in six years and have no friends to play with. But that’s
all irrelevant now, because we’ve had a couple bad years and I’m the dead weight. The economy goes into the shitter and I’m
no longer a good provider. I hope you understand how disgusting you’re being right now.’

‘You’re a bastard,’ Amy said. She was crying and she hated him for making her cry. ‘You blew it. You squandered a fortune.’

He was no longer speaking quietly. ‘I squandered it on you! Now, I’m sorry I didn’t share the decision to close the Straw.
But did it ever occur to you I’ve been trying to protect you?’

‘From what? I don’t need protecting. I need a husband!’

‘What do you think this is?’ he said, smiling in a way that frightened her. ‘A setback? A rough week, a bad month? This is
a death match. The country is fucking crumbling into dust and all those people out there – all those poor fuckers on the news?
That’s
us
. We’re
them
now. We are the idiots who refinanced our home up to our tits so you could have a kitchen out of a magazine. We are the idiots
who didn’t save a year’s pay. We’re the idiots that had to have more more more. You want me to make everything better, but
you won’t cut back a god-damn thing. You want me to get out of your way and not come back until I solve all our problems.
Fine, you got it, lady. But while I’m out there in the doghouse, you might want to look into what’s making you so bitter and
fat. It’s not your weight. That’s a symptom. I don’t give a shit about your weight. You’ve given me two beautiful children
and I love you and I don’t care how big your ass is. I
like
big asses. I love you and I want to be your husband. I tried to give you a decent life, but you’re not content with that.
You want that’ – he pointed to the Render house. ‘You want to be perfect, in that top one per cent. Well, guess what? It’s
never going to happen. This is it. We’re in the shit now and all we have is each other.
Had
each other. What will you do when I’m gone? Have you thought of that yet? What will you do with all your hate when I’m gone?’

He was right. She hated him. With every cell in her body.

‘Move out,’ he said, laughing. ‘Yeah, we’ll see what happens at the end of the summer. We’ll talk to a judge
about how much of my parents’ money you’ve flushed down the toilet and he’ll have a good laugh, and then I’ll fucking sell
this place right out from under you and you’ll never see a red cent. “Move out.” That’s the funniest fuckin’ thing I’ve heard
all week.’

He strutted across the kitchen. Amy stood, picked up his beer bottle, and threw it as hard as she could. It spun and shattered
against the back of his skull. She saw blood there immediately and she thought maybe now he would come over and hit her. But
he only turned and stared at her, murderous amusement in his eyes.

‘That’s assault,’ he said. ‘And if you really want to take me out, you’re going to have to do better than that.’ He walked
out.

Amy went to the bedroom and gathered his clothes and shoes from the walk-in closet and began throwing them onto the back lawn.
It crossed her mind – as she was hurling his cigar box of watches and pocket knives onto the flagstone patio – that maybe
she shouldn’t have taken Cassandra Render’s advice so literally.

But this was a fleeting thought, one Amy banished as quickly as it appeared. Because even though she was crying and screaming
hysterically and wished her husband dead, fucking dead in the ground with ants in his eyes,
this felt good
. It felt really good to let it all out. It was an almost sexual release of raw anger, and about that part of it at least,
Cass had been one hundred per cent correct.

Why couldn’t she see that he was trying to protect her? Preserve what was left of their lives? Keep her safe from this dirty
man’s business? There was a time when she trusted him, could tell by glancing at him it was better not to push. But they had
strayed too far from one another. The bond was breaking, or broken. She couldn’t know how much trouble he was in, and so she
hated him for ‘allowing’ their security to fall to pieces. Maybe he would have to tell her the truth eventually but, for now,
let her hate him. Let the kids wonder if Mom and Dad were getting a divorce. It was a horrible thing to stand by and watch,
but it was better than involving them in what was quickly becoming a game of murder by proxy.

Thus exiled, Mick regressed. He embraced the guest house the way a student embraces his first off-campus apartment. He opened
the windows and kicked out the rusted screens. The cardboard boxes seemed to have been waiting for him, dislodging his Boulder
High yearbook (Odaroloc 1987), a Bon Jovi T-shirt, a ratty pair of black Chuck Taylors, a case of Penzoil. The tiny closet
revealed his old Technics hi-fi system, a silver
battleship with huge knobs and an orange needle that moved as if through sludge. He heaved it onto a pair of cinder blocks
and turned up the classic rock station loud enough to blow dust from the cones of the coffin-size speakers.

He got a window fan going but the heat was merciless. He stank of sour sweat and dried blood, a funk that would not wash off
no matter how he tried, and he was beginning to like it. Felt more natural. Went with his shredded Levi’s and the greasy white
T-shirt he had been affecting for the past three days. He moved everything out on the lawn and threw a twelve pack of Coors
in the mini-fridge. He swept, but didn’t mop the floors or scrub the tiny toilet. Upstairs was a loft, the roof slanting low
over the lumpy spring-loaded cot folded up in the corner. It came apart like a giant gray clam and smelled about as fresh.

By dusk Springsteen was singing and there was a Rockies game on the snowy TV and he was feeling a little fucking crazy in
here, in what his life had become. He opened another beer and sifted through the boxes. In the closet he found his weed dragon
blow-torch and six quarts of propane, as well as the backpack he’d fashioned so he could wear the gas like a ’Nam grunt with
a flamethrower while he burned up the lawn. There was a wooden crate of returnable bottles from the Pop Shoppe, a dried-up
Winmau dartboard and his set of tungsten darts with the KISS flights from college, his dad’s .12 gauge pump action, a leather
roll of his father’s chef knives, the set he had won for graduating first in his class
from the culinary institute in Denver. A half-full bottle of Yukon Jack, the complete 1991
Penthouse
his ex-girlfriend Myra had given him for his birthday. Oh, Myra, what happened to us? You’ve got breast cancer and I’m losing
my shit. Maybe they deserved each other, he and Myra. The dying and the dead on his feet. Maybe he’d give her a call. But
probably not.

He didn’t long for sex or new-old romance. He longed for another target. Someone to absorb more of the blows. He re-hyped
on the violence, the feel of the bat in his hands, the power. He stewed, thinking about Render.

What had Render done with the bodies? The guy loads them into his Range Rover like luggage, and then comes home minutes later?
No way did he have time to dump them somewhere. Had he gone back out that night? The next day? Where would you take three
bodies? What would you do with them?

Mick had been following the
Daily Camera
, the
Denver Post
, and even the
Times Call
out of Longmont. He ran Google searches for assaults, disappearances, missing persons, any reports of three boys or young
men who might fit the event in any way. There was nothing. The police did not have anything about it either, or the mess at
Sapphire’s house. If they did, they were keeping it private for now.

The guest house was hot with evening sun, and yet Mick felt cold inside. He was cornered. Render had him. There was nowhere
to run to. Maybe it was time to give up. Find out what the man wanted, and give it to him.

See you at the barbecue. Saturday, two o’clock
.

Tomorrow, then. One way or another, it would all come out tomorrow.

The second floor was still musty and the heat was no longer amusing. He went to the last window he had not opened. It was
a tiny square in a wooden frame, with an old spring-loaded latch, baked shut. He used a screwdriver to pop it free and stuck
his head out to have a look around.

The view over the property was exceptional. The house was dark except for the bedroom, but Amy was probably in there crying
on the phone to her mother, or Melanie Smith. The lawn looked good mowed low, but he’d missed a few spots with the string
trimmer, the weeds around the flagstone. Tomorrow he would bust out the weed dragon, burn baby burn.

There was a naked woman in his swimming pool.