Going for Kona (6 page)

My parents were already there, as were the Hansons. When had they moved? I’d lost time again. Ten minutes, according to my Garmin. I grabbed Sam’s hand and headed toward my family. We stood beside Papa, who patted my cheek with a hand worn rough by years working as a large-animal veterinarian. I felt a presence and realized Annabelle had moved in beside me. I slipped my other arm around her.

What came next was a blur. Adrian wasn’t there, and that summed it up for me. I kept my eyes forward, and I tried to look like I was hanging on every word of the service, but I wasn’t. All I could think about was how badly I wanted out of that church, the church where the minister believed in second chances and didn’t take attendance. I wanted to hug the urn of Adrian’s ashes to my chest and go back to our bed whose sheets were still unwashed, to pile all his clothes on top of me, to sleep. Permanently.

Instead, I stared straight ahead, numb, and willed the time to pass quickly.

Afterwards, I stood outside the church between my stepdaughter and my son and said thank you hundreds of times by rote. I offered my cheek for kisses I didn’t feel. Hand after hand gripped mine and shook, until fingers darker than mine wrapped around my palm. Detective Young.

“My condolences,” he said, his voice a rumble.

“Thank you. I’m not sure I understand why. I mean, you don’t know us.” I grappled with my words. “Why are you here?”

He leaned down and in. “I want to learn more about your husband from the people who show up.”

My skin prickled. “Do you think the person who killed him is here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. It’s worth checking to see. Again, I’m very sorry for your loss. I’ll be in touch soon.”

I stared after his broad back as he squeezed past some runners. He was a big man, and he dwarfed them like he did me. The body-to-body contact brushed his jacket back and I caught a glimpse of a handgun holstered at his side. Guns and police at Adrian’s funeral. Adrian at his own funeral. It was all so wrong. I found myself slipping into blue nothingness again.

When a strange electricity shot through my body, I jolted back to reality. I’d lost more time. Something had registered through my haze, though. What was it? I looked around the exterior of the church, my eyes sweeping from one end of the parking area to the other.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” Sam’s eyes bore into me from under his lock of hair.

I mustn’t scare the children, I thought.“Nothing, sweetheart.”

I tried to act like whatever normal was, but I couldn’t remember how. My eyes darted around, searching, searching. And then it hit me. I sank to my knees and whispered, “Oh, Adrian.”

Sam and Annabelle fell to the ground on either side of me. Their fingers pressed into the flesh of my arms and I could hear an upward lilt like the ringing of a bell at the end of their unintelligible sentences. I drifted away from their voices and didn’t comprehend what they were saying. I looked at Annabelle’s pale face, swung my own toward Sam. His lips moved in slow motion.

But I didn’t really
see
them, because I’d just seen an old white Taurus driving out of the parking lot of the church. At first, I couldn’t process why it rocked me so, but then I realized it was like the one from Beaver’s, like the car I had seen everywhere in the twenty-four hours before Adrian’s death, even in front of our house. I struggled to remember what Adrian said about that car. It had only been a few days since we talked about it, but I wasn’t the same woman anymore, and the new version of me was teetering dangerously close to non compos mentis. Slowly it came back to me. He’d called the owner “a tad off” and said he wanted to talk to me about it. Only he never had the chance.

“What, Mom?” Sam shook me.

This time I heard him. But I didn’t answer. I realized my lips had been moving, and maybe sound had leaked out, and that it was possible Detective Young was right. This car and its owner, they could be the ones, the ones that killed Adrian. It could be someone we knew.

I heard an engine rev and I looked up again, to see if I recognized the driver or could read the plates, if I recognized anything. I expected to see a platinum head of hair and a flash of hot pink, but the car had pulled away and I saw nothing. I closed my eyes, gulped a breath, opened my eyes, and looked again. No car. Just a memory of standing outside Beaver’s and feeling my husband’s sweaty lips on mine, tasting their saltiness, and saying goodbye for the last time.

Dios mío, I needed my mind back. To focus, to think. Had I even seen the car here? Or had I just imagined it? Either way, I had to tell Detective Young about it, and about Rhonda. I tried to get up. Maybe I could still catch him.

Papa held me in place. “Whoa, let’s not get in a hurry. Are you okay?” he asked as he looked into my eyes. My vet father has a lot of practice calming scared, hurt animals, and I’d seen him do it throughout my childhood. I leaned into him.

I saw another car leave the lot, saw the large African-American man driving it. Young. “I’m sorry. I, well, I guess I got lightheaded. It’s all a little much.” A white lie by omission, but also true. “I need to go home.”

Papa shook his silver head. His dark eyes clouded, and I could see myself in his face. My relationship with my mother wasn’t always the best. With Papa? I was his Itzpa. He was my quietly solid hero, a silvery draft horse who never tipped the wagon. My mother joined him, the top of her head level with his. She peered at me anxiously, looking around her, gauging the reactions of other people to me. I knew she was right. I needed to pull it together. I couldn’t act like this at my husband’s funeral, for Pete’s sake. The Taurus was gone. I could call Detective Young later. I stood up, and so did my family.

Annabelle’s improbably yellow curls fell over my shoulder. “You’re sure you’re all right, Michele?”

“I am, thank you.”

Before the words left my mouth, she shouted, “Grandmother!”

Grandmother?

Annabelle launched herself at a well-preserved woman in sling-back emerald stilettos. A dull ache grew in the back of my head. It never crossed my mind that Diane would show up at Adrian’s funeral. Her look shouted money, head to toe, and mine mumbled tears, no sleep, and practicality. Jealousy stung me, but not just because Annabelle loved her. I wanted to be put-together like that, if only for a moment. I reached for Sam’s hand and saw his open mouth from the corner of my eye. I heard Papa whisper to my mother, but I couldn’t make out his words.

Annabelle and her grandmother talked in soft, excited voices for a few moments. Then the woman stepped toward me with her hand out. Her perfume reached me first, Shalimar, and I took her hand. Soft, limp.

“I’m Diane Pritchett, Annabelle’s grandmother.”

I told myself to play nice, for Annabelle. “Michele Lopez Hanson.”

“Is there a place we can talk for a few moments, about my plans for Annabelle?”

Bless her heart, this was my mother’s forte. She stepped in front of me and took over. “So nice to meet you, Diane. I’m Michele’s mother, Cindy Lopez. We just finished with Adrian’s service. It was lovely, but difficult, of course. We’re taking Michele back to the house for some rest. Are you staying somewhere near? I could contact you when Michele has had a chance to get herself back together. And Belle—”

“I’m going to go out to dinner with Grandmother.” Annabelle lowered her voice. “Is that all right with you, Michele?” Her eyes cut back and forth between us, round, wet, and revealing. The push-pull made my head hurt worse, but her green eyes won.

“Of course, Belle. Let’s just stay in touch by text.”

She gave me a quick hug as a consolation prize and walked off with her grandmother. I watched her go, watched her clamber through a door held open by a driver into the back seat of a black Lincoln Town Car. She looked at me through the rear window and crinkled her fingers in a little wave.

I slumped. This I hadn’t seen coming.

Mom deposited the latest edible tribute on the kitchen counter: barbecue, according to my nose and the brown paper Goode Company Barbecue bag.

“I can’t believe no one cooks their own food anymore,” she said. My mother always brings homemade chicken and dumplings to the bereaved, a recipe from the Mississippi side of her family. “Shoo, cat.” She swatted at Precious, who had jumped up to inspect the package. The cat didn’t move. Mom rotated, surveying our kitchen with a thin raised brow. Precious surveyed my mother in much the same way, tail twitching.

An endless procession of well-meaning souls—from Juniper, the neighborhood, my old law firm, and even friends from my law school and college days—had dropped off grocery platters of cheeses, store-bought desserts, deli containers of macaroni salad and coleslaw, and even boxes of Popeye’s fried chicken. The triathlon crowd knew Adrian and me better, and had opted for things like training-friendly fruit and veggie trays. Mom exaggerated, though; homemade casseroles stood two-deep on the counter as well.

People made quite a run on the food after the service, but twenty-four hours later the mouths to feed had dwindled and the food had not. By Monday afternoon, we still had enough to feed Sam’s baseball team. And whatever my mother’s opinion about whether fast-food fried chicken is appropriate for a grieving household, I knew the Popeye’s would disappear as soon as Annabelle and Sam got home.

At the thought of Annabelle, I snuck a glance at my phone. She had spent the night with her grandmother at Hotel ZaZa in the Museum District. I couldn’t afford that on an editor’s salary. Whatever, though. Diane could try to buy her granddaughter’s affection if she wanted. I hoped I had earned it by being there for Annabelle in the last four-plus years.

Annabelle texted from the Bella Vita suite all morning:
“Wow this place is wow wow wow.
J
.”
Then
“R U OK? I am sad. I want to come home,”
followed by
“Grandmother got us facials & pedicures! You won’t recognize me. Ha ha,”
and the last one:
“Where’s Sam? He hasn’t texted me back. What r u guys doing?”

No new messages.

My mother was still yammering on about the food. “Edward, we need more coolers and ice. Can you run to Walmart?”

Papa squeezed my shoulder. “Need anything else?”

“A kiddie pool for all these Jell-O molds. I don’t think they’re going to make it.” I couldn’t care less, but it was easier to go through the motions.

My mother tsked. Cindy Lopez does not waste food. Papa laughed louder than he needed to as he walked out of the kitchen. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears, but instead, I removed the ponytail holder from my wrist and scraped my hair up into it.

“I hope I can get you to take some of this with you, Mom.”

I had foisted bursting sack lunches on Adrian’s parents that morning when I drove them to the airport, but their packages were grains of sand plucked from an endless beach. I wanted to lay my face on the granite countertop and sleep. I doubted I would ever care about food again.

Mom grabbed a rag and some Clorox spray. “Don’t worry. We don’t have plans to leave anytime soon.” She sprayed the bare spots on the counter she had just cleared and started wiping them down. I dry-swallowed the lump of a thousand useless things I wanted to say. She had stayed two weeks after Sam was born, and I’d thought I had postpartum depression until she left.

My phone rang. Annabelle? No. HPD. I went outside to take the call away from my mother’s ears and censure.

I like our backyard better from inside. It’s lush with elephant ears and birds of paradise around the ponds, but the neighbors have too many dogs and we get their stink and spillover flies. I slapped at a mosquito and walked across a narrow rock bridge to the deck. I turned back to the ponds. They were low on water, and the pump made a futile sucking noise.

“Detective Young?”

“Good guess. Hello, Michele. You left me a message to call you back.”

As I turned the water on for the pond at the faucet behind the deck, a strange feeling bubbled up and burst in my chest. I didn’t want to let go of being Adrian’s wife. I didn’t want to become just Michele. “Mrs. Hanson, please. Yes, thank you. I wanted to tell you that I think I saw the car that hit Adrian, at the funeral after you left.” I stood up at eye level with our empty birdfeeder. I’d deal with it later.

“Really? What makes you think that?”

I had expected him to sound thrilled, and instead he sounded almost blasé. It rubbed me the wrong way, but I sat on it. Maybe he’d perk up. “In the twenty-four hours before my husband died, I kept seeing white Ford Tauruses. Maybe the same one. When I asked him about it, he said the owner was a nut job and we needed to talk about it later. And then you came to my office, and of course later never came. Well, I saw another white Taurus at the funeral.”

“What’s the license plate number?”

I jiggled the empty propane tank that fueled the mosquito trap. “I don’t know.”

“Do you know the name of the owner?”

“No. But Adrian did, I think. And there’s something else. There was a woman that was kind of stalking Adrian, and I think she might drive a car like that.”

“Kind of stalking?”

“Yes, she came to our book launch party and was all over him, then she showed up at the Juniper offices the next day and followed him to a GNC.” I sat down at the deck table and watched a blue jay splash water on its back and shake its wings. A hummingbird darted into the feeder, and I eyed the container, expecting it to be empty, like me and everything else, but the sun shone through its bulb of red nectar. Papa.

“Why did she come to your office?”

“She said we’d advertised a job on Craigslist, but we hadn’t. I think she was looking for Adrian.”

“He doesn’t work there, does he?”

I slapped at another mosquito and missed. “No, but some people assume he does, because Juniper publishes his writing.” Detective Young didn’t say anything, so I added, “Her name is Rhonda Dale.”

Still the detective didn’t speak.

“Don’t you believe me, Detective?”

“I believe you’ve seen this car, and I believe you’ve seen a woman named Rhonda Dale. You don’t have the information to identify the car, or anything to tie the car or the woman to Adrian’s death, though.”

“But—”

“I have new information for you. An eyewitness came forward this morning. We have a statement with a description of the incident and the vehicle. And it isn’t a Taurus, or even a woman.”

My mouth fell open.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes.” It came out as a croak, so I tried again. “Yes.”

“I planned to call you today anyway to tell you, and see if it helped you remember anything else that we could use to find the person who killed your husband.”

“Okay.”

“The witness said the car was a white Ford F150 pickup, a few years old, and that the driver was a man in his late teens or early twenties.”

“Okay.”

“The paint we found on Adrian’s bicycle is consistent with a white Ford.”

“What happens next?” My voice rasped like a file against a horse’s hoof, a low and thin sound.

“We’re investigating the lead. Do you know anyone with a car like that?”

I shuffled through my mental files. It sounded like half the vehicles on the road. “I don’t know anyone who drives a white Ford F150 of any year.”

“All right. We’ve put out a BOLO for it, a Be On The Lookout. I’ll call you if I have more questions.”

I pressed end, but kept the phone in my hand. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had nothing to worry about. Who better to figure this out than the police, right? But my gut resisted. I walked back into the house.

My mother looked up when I came in. “You need to donate this food to a Christian homeless shelter before it spoils.”

My hackles went up. I didn’t like being told what to do in my own kitchen, especially her implication that our help should go only to shelters run by and for Christians. I guess Mom would let the heathens eat cake? Still, it was a good idea. “I’ll get Sam and Belle to do it.”

I checked my phone again. No messages. I wanted Annabelle home, and to know about these “plans” of her grandmother’s. Adrian and I had never talked about what would happen with our kids if either of us died. I had no idea what to do. Whatever was best for Annabelle, I supposed, but what was best for her? She was about to start her senior year and her friends and her swim team were here. She’d been with us for the last four years. She had stability here. I didn’t know what she’d want if she had a choice, though—to stay with us or go with her elegant grandparents to a swank New York apartment near Central Park?

Who was I kidding?

“Get Sam and Belle to do what?” Sam ambled into the kitchen and dropped his dirty baseball glove on the island. He had taken off work for a week, but he insisted on going to practice.

I wasn’t sure whether I was smelling Sam, his glove, or both of them, but it wasn’t good, no matter what. Then again, I have a bionic nose, which isn’t a good thing, and was most of the reason I didn’t follow Papa into veterinary medicine. “Glove to your room or in your gear bag.” He rolled his eyes but grabbed the glove. “All this food—it’s too much. It’s going to spoil. Gigi hoped you and Belle would take it to a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter.”

Sam raised his eyebrows. “Not the fried chicken, though, right?”

I answered before my mother could. “We’re keeping the chicken.”

“Good, because, since it
is
my sixteenth birthday week and all, I get dibs on food choices all week, don’t I?” His voice dwindled off, and he looked sideways at me, catching a completely blank look on my face.

I felt almost as guilty about my lack of guile as I did about the undeniable fact that I had forgotten about my own child’s birthday week. Not just any birthday, but his sixteenth birthday. His “how soon can we go get my driver’s license” birthday.

To realize I was a shitty mother sucked. To have my own mother there to witness it made it worse. I rushed over to Sam, avoiding my mother’s eyes, and reached up to put my hands around his wiry upper arms. “Oh, Sam, oh, I’m so sorry. It’s your birthday, and I can’t believe we forgot—that I forgot—about it.”

Sam looked down at his very large feet in the Nike practice cleats that he wasn’t supposed to wear in the house. “That’s okay, Mom. I understand. It’s kinda tough right now.”

I missed Adrian at that moment more than ever. He excelled at this stuff. I was a triple-zero failure. Adrian loved celebrations and holidays. Life with him had big blow-up Halloween decorations, over-the-top Christmas lights, tulips on Fridays, and birthdays that lasted all week long. I made sure kids did homework and cleaned their rooms. I booked the doctor and dentist appointments. I straightened up the mess when the parties ended. Adrian brought the fun, I brought the order, and right now I couldn’t deliver either.

“So it’s fried chicken for dinner tonight. And we need to finalize the plans for your birthday party.” I wanted to keep speaking, but I had nothing to say. I couldn’t remember squat about our plans for his birthday. I remembered that in another life entirely, Adrian, Sam, and I had talked about it. I tried to bring our conversation back into my frontal lobe. A movie and pizza with friends? A guy/girl party at our house? I would never have said yes to that. Paintball wars with the guys? How the hell should I know? I was a little Hot Wheels car catapulting into the double loop, and I was jumping the tracks. Someone screamed, “I should remember this—I am the kid’s mother!!!” Me. I heard me scream it.

Everyone was staring at me: my mother, Sam, and Annabelle and her grandmother, who had just that moment walked in the door. Precious bolted and Diane followed her, backing up in tiny steps as I crumbled into big, ugly, snotty sobs that would not stop.

Annabelle reached my side first. Her long hair fell against my arm as she pressed her face into my shoulder. Sam took up what was becoming his regular station on my other side and started patting me. My laboring brain tuned in just long enough for me to realize that my children were doing more to take care of me than I was for them. I was committing a motherhood felony crime, and my mother was an eyewitness. To top it all off, a woman was lurking in my house who wanted to—and could—take one of my kids away from me.

I summoned words from the depths of my worthless head. “Paintball, right? You want to go do paintball with your buddies. And then you want dinner at Jax Grill, and to go to the movies.” I looked into Sam’s big brown eyes, wanting so badly to see a flicker of redemption, and my sweet boy made it all right.

“Yes, that’s it, Mom. I understand and you don’t have to—”

I wasn’t going to let him make any more excuses for me. “Perfect, then. You just need to get me your birthday-week meal selections, and we’ll get this in motion.”

My mother chimed in. “Your grandfather can take you and your friends to paintball, and I’d love to make you a cake. I used to bake you cakes in whatever shape you wanted when you were a little boy. Remember the Pokémon cake? And the Simba cake?”

“Yes, Gigi, but—”

“I’ll make you one this year in the shape of your number on the baseball team.”

“Thirty-three.” He grinned.

“I can help, Gigi.” The eagerness in Annabelle’s voice made my heart swell.

“Thank you, Belle, I would love your help. Sam can get us a menu and after I pack up some of this food for you two to drop off at a shelter, I can go to the grocery store.” My mother turned to me. “Is this all right with you, Michele?”

The tightness eased. “Absolutely. It’s perfect, Mom.”

The rhythm of our life restarted, and Sam grabbed a glass from the cabinet and went to the refrigerator for ice. Mother started fussing with the food again. Annabelle leaned her head in to me.

“Grandmother is here.” Mierda. Yes, she certainly was. “Do you have a minute to talk to her, you know, about me and stuff?”

The knot tightened again. I had to get it together. I had to do this well. “Of course.”

“She’s in here,” Annabelle said, and walked into the living room where her grandmother was pacing and talking on the phone. Diane wrapped it up when we entered.