Isabella Moon (16 page)

“Go fuck yourself,” Charlie said.

When he thought back on it later, Paxton considered that it had been more reflex than intention that had made him push the cherry of the joint into the back of Charlie’s hand, crushing it so that it dug into the flesh so deeply that it seemed to stand there of its own accord for a few seconds before Charlie flung it off with a monstrous groan.

Paxton followed the bright arc of the tiny light and saw it land in the weed-shot gravel a few feet away.

“You sick fuck!” Charlie shouted at him as he stumbled around like a drunk, gripping the wrist of his burned hand.

Even in the darkness, Paxton could see that Charlie was fighting back tears. But Charlie had to be put in his place. He shouldn’t have to take crap from two-bit operators like Charlie. He remembered using words like
partners
and
good faith
with Charlie, but the circumstances were distant and unclear to him now, like a movie he’d watched long ago.

Charlie continued to scream at him, but Paxton wasn’t listening to what he was saying. As he headed to his car, Charlie’s voice was just more noise filling his head, like the constant caw of the imaginary crows out in the blueberry orchard. Were they ever real? he wondered. Where were those birds now? Dead? Their cries trapped forever in the speaker wires running along the orchard fence?

“I’ll bring some money by tomorrow,” Paxton shouted cheerfully over his shoulder. He didn’t know if Charlie heard him, but figured it didn’t matter. Business was business and they would carry on. He had the Browning .380 that had belonged to his father in the glove box if Charlie were to come after him, but from the way Charlie was doubled over, he thought it was unlikely.

When he started up the Mercedes, he could hear nothing more of Charlie. Steely Dan flowed out of the CD player, and to Paxton it was music like fine old wine. Those two guys who were Steely Dan would understand what he had to deal with. He felt as though he were living one of their songs. They obviously knew the pleasures of wine and women and good cocaine. Surely they would even be a little proud of him. He suspected that even as rich and sophisticated as they were now, they probably weren’t above taking care of business directly, as he’d needed to.
They would definitely understand.

As he pulled onto the ill-defined gravel road leading out to the highway, Paxton saw Hanna Moon, Charlie’s—what was she, wife, girlfriend, concubine?—whatever, throw open the kitchen door of the old house and hurry down the steps. But instead of staying at the edge of the road in the grass, she stumbled blindly into the sweep of the Mercedes’s lights and onto the gravel.

Paxton had never run over a person before. Dogs, yes, and all manner of opossums, raccoons, squirrels, and cats. But the
bump
they made under his tires was never quite satisfying and usually resulted only in globs of crap and fur that he had to wash off the underside of his car. He found himself drifting toward the woman, who was waving her long, pale arms in front of her as though she would stop him.

Later, after the haze of the joint he’d smoked with Charlie cleared out of his head, he knew that what had happened next was the result of some hallucination brought on by the weed. He didn’t believe in ghosts, and he sure as hell knew he wasn’t crazy.

He was only thirty or so feet away and headed right for Hanna Moon, smiling to think that he would at least give her a good scare. But when he realized that he wasn’t alone in the car, that there was a young girl with long black hair knitted into a braid that hung over her left shoulder staring solemnly at him from the front passenger seat, he swerved away from Hanna Moon and into the sparse grass at the road’s edge.

15

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Chenoweth.” The funeral director in whose office Mary-Katie sat held out the telephone to her. “There seems to be some problem with your credit card. I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding. But they would like to speak with you.”

Mary-Katie closed her eyes for just a moment. This couldn’t be happening. She opened her eyes and smiled at the ever-patient man, whose name was Ralph. When she took the phone from him, he slipped out of the room, his footsteps silenced by the deep-pile gold carpeting.

As Mary-Katie studied the fleur-de-lis pattern of the hideous mauve-and-gold-flocked wallpaper, the woman on the other end explained that she was very sorry, particularly given the nature of her purchase, but that the account would have to be made current before they could cover the three-thousand-dollar deposit for funeral expenses. The account was ninety days overdue, and there was no arguing with her. Mortified, Mary-Katie hung up and called Miles, who told her to write a check.

“Will it be covered?” she whispered into the phone.

“It will be before it gets to the bank,” he said. “I’ll call the credit card people and get them straightened out. There’s nothing to get all freaked out about.”

Ralph came back into the office a decorous minute after she’d hung up.

“I’ll write you a check,” Mary-Katie said, pulling her checkbook out of her purse. As she wrote it, she could feel him watching her. She was nervous and had to void the first check because she wrote it out for three hundred instead of three thousand. Flustered, she felt herself getting warmer and more agitated under his gaze. As she handed the check to him, she wondered if he spent a lot of time wondering how people would look when they were dead.

It wasn’t the first time Mary-Katie had been embarrassed by having a credit card declined. Every six months or so since she’d married Miles, she found herself standing red-faced at the counter of some boutique or another as a shop girl told her in the most sympathetic of tones that there was “a problem with the card.” As though the piece of plastic were responsible and had managed some neat trick in her billfold to make itself useless. Worse than the sympathetic tone was the knowing smile that seemed to play at the glossy lips of the bearers of the bad news.

When she got home that afternoon, she turned off the car’s engine and rested her head against the steering wheel. What would she do without her grandmother? She already missed her grandmother’s gentle gossip about the neighbors she had known all her life and her yearly plans for her garden. Mary-Katie’s own yard was filled with familiar plants from her grandmother’s yard. She tried to imagine making new friends, replacing her grandmother’s companionship with that of the wives or lovers (sometimes she had trouble remembering who was the wife and who was the lover, when it came to certain men) of Miles’s business associates, loud, brittle women who made only small talk, and that only about fashion and traveling to Atlanta or New York to shop.

Even after several years of marriage, Mary-Katie had never been able to bring herself to tell her grandmother how strange and stressful it was to live with a man like Miles, so compulsive and quickly irritated. She hadn’t told her about the volatile money situation or the people who would call—men and women—and ask for Miles at odd times of the day and night, how Miles would tell her he would be going away on business, but she would see him, at a distance, on the island, with people she didn’t know. She hadn’t told her about Miles’s truly disturbing associates, like the man Miles called “Fitz,” the thickly muscled, redheaded man with a trilling laugh and a cauliflower ear, who came to the house occasionally for drinks. One evening, Fitz’s ill-fitting sport coat had fallen open as he leaned forward to take a scotch and water from Miles, to reveal a hidden shoulder holster with a gun sticking out of it.

There had been times, though, when her grandmother seemed to sense that things weren’t quite right and would hold her close, as she had when she was a child. In her grandmother’s arms, Mary-Katie knew she could cry and cry, and that she would never be pressed for details.

Above the garage was the small apartment that should have been her grandmother’s. But Miles had put Mary-Katie off about it, unwilling (or unable) to spend the money to update the plumbing and have the leaking roof fixed in order to make it habitable. As many buildings as (she thought) he owned, she didn’t understand why he couldn’t take care of the place her grandmother belonged. If he had, she thought, her grandmother might have been at their house when she’d had her last stroke, instead of in her kitchen, where she died and lay undiscovered by Mary-Katie for at least twenty-four hours. But as much as she wanted to blame it on Miles, she knew it was her own fault for not insisting that her grandmother move directly into their guest room. She should have at least arranged for her to have live-in help. Whatever the cause, she knew she would have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life.

Mary-Katie knew that she should go over to her grandmother’s house and start looking through her papers to see what needed to be handled, but the thought of going back there alone paralyzed her with sadness. Once, when she was in college, she’d stayed at the house by herself while her grandmother went on a bus tour to Cape Cod with some of her friends. It had been a kind of adventure, a time to temporarily be an adult and pretend the house was hers. Now it would just seem empty.

After going through the day’s mail, Mary-Katie drew herself a bath. The sunken marble tub with its waterfall spigot had made her laugh with wonder when they first looked at the house, but now she treasured it as her own personal retreat. When the water was a few inches from the tub’s edge, she unzipped her dress and let it fall onto the floor. She stepped out of her panties and down into the frothy, lavender-scented water.

There were a hundred things to attend to before the visitation at the funeral home that evening, but she did her best to put them out of her head. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

When Miles woke her, the water had turned tepid and she shivered at his touch.

“Hey, beauty,” he said.

As she stepped out of the tub, he wrapped a warm bath sheet around her. With a slow, tender motion, he pushed aside a wet tendril of hair clinging to her neck and kissed her there. Even in her sorrow, she felt herself responding to the touch of his lips on her skin. But she wasn’t in any sort of mood for sex.

“I brought us some lunch,” he said. “Go in and get dressed and come downstairs.”

She nodded, not ready to speak.

Downstairs, she found a fresh arrangement of flowers on the breakfast nook table and two plates carefully arranged with their favorite assortment of sushi: California maki, spicy tuna, and plenty of yellowtail and salmon. Miles poured her an iced tea and set it on the table.

“Sushi Joe sends his love,” he said.

“That Sushi Joe,” she said wryly. “He knows the way to my heart.”

“I know you’re probably not too hungry, but you need to eat something.”

Miles was in one of his gentle moods, sorry, no doubt, for the trouble she’d had at the funeral home. She was inclined to let him run with it. It was rare enough.

As they ate, he told her again how disappointed he had been that he wasn’t able to come to the funeral home.

“I would’ve straightened out that bastard about the credit card right then,” he said. “He was just being an asshole.”

She had her own idea about who the real asshole was, but she didn’t say. She kept eating the sushi, which was more restorative than she had thought it would be.

“The closing went pretty quickly this morning,” he said. “Really, it was more of a foreclosure. You should’ve seen the look on that sorry bastard’s face. Priceless.” He grinned, then popped a piece of spicy tuna into his mouth.

“Who?” Katie said. She felt as though she’d been dropped into an ongoing conversation about which she knew nothing.

“That guy. Lev Kaplan. You know,” he said with his mouth full.

The name sounded familiar to her, but only vaguely.

“I can’t keep track of all the people you do business with, Miles,” she said, bristling with irritation. Of all the times to be focused on work. Her grandmother was dead. She didn’t know if she could pay for next week’s groceries. Miles’s selfishness knew no bounds. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Hell yes, it matters,” he said, tossing his chopsticks onto the table. “Lev Kaplan stole that race from me, Mary-Katie. You were there. You know that guy was shady. He just came up out of nowhere looking like he never even broke a sweat.”

“The hospital race?” she said.

“I knew you wouldn’t forget it either,” he said. “He was riding pretty fucking high that day, wasn’t he? Now he’s going to have a hard time finding a pot to piss in.”

“That was years ago, Miles,” she said, incredulous. “And you didn’t even know him.”

“I know everything I need to know, now,” he said. “His wife’s left him. She’s a looker, too. His T-shirt business is about a hundred thousand in debt. His car’s been repossessed. The guy’s a loser. Always has been.”

She didn’t like to know the details of Miles’s business dealings. But today she felt so raw, so devoid of anything worthwhile in her life, she felt like she had nothing to lose. She rested her chopsticks across her plate and watched him. He had a spot of soy sauce on his chin, but otherwise he was the picture of a conqueror. He looked smug and, as always, neatly pressed.