He got back to Hangtree, found a pay phone, and called Mimi. She answered on the tenth ring and shrieked, 'What!'
'It's me,' Crease said.
'Why is it you call here and never your own house?'
'You know why.'
'I know you shouldn't be afraid of your own wife and son. Is that how you go through your day, worried that you might have to talk to your wife and kid?'
'Ex-wife.'
'Only because it's the way you wanted it. And Stevie'snot your ex-son, in case you're confused about that.'
The kids were yelling in the background and Mimi turned away from the phone to scream.
'How is she?' Crease asked. 'How's Joan?'
'Doing her best. Stevie got in trouble at school again. Fighting. He's a bully. He storms around the lunchroom and terrorizes the other kids, even ones who are two, three grades ahead of him. The principal wants to speak to you. He says Stevie would benefit from a father's direct influence. You know what that means? He's talking about the belt. A kid like that, eight years old and punching other kids in the face, he needs a good belting.' A dog started to bark. Crease didn't know Mimi had a dog. It sounded small and yippy, the kind that made neighbors go berserk and kill whole families. 'I'd like you to talk to Joseph too, when you come around again, if you come around again. He could use a little guidance, a firm lecture. He doesn't listen to me.'
'Who?'
'Who what?'
'Who's Joseph? The dog?'
'Joseph, my oldest!' she yelled. 'You don't remember? Thirteen, he's got sandy hair, beady eyes. The dog's name is Freddy.' Another voice rose, shouting that his eyes weren't beady, they were smoky. Girls at school called them smoky. Mimi shouted back, 'Use condoms, always use condoms. They teach you that in sex education yet?'
Crease remembered a beady-eyed little kid, but Christ, now Joey was thirteen, being called Joseph, getting sweet-talked by schoolgirls. Crease shook his head, knowing his old life was further away than maybe it had ever been before.
'She misses you,' Mimi said. 'I don't know what's been going on with you these last couple of years, or why you're calling me so much, but if it means you're going through a mid-life crisis, then I hope you get over it soon and get the hell back on track. You know what I'm saying?'
He was twenty-seven. If this was a mid-life crisis it didn't say much for his longevity. Still fifty-four was longer than his own father had made it.
'You listening to me, Crease?'
'Yes.'
'You've done better by me than my sister. I appreciate it and.. . shut up in there! I appreciate it, but you need to think of Joan now. Call her. Deal with your son too. He's only got one father no matter what happens.'
Mimi hung up before Crease could say anything else. He stood there with the phone buzzing in his ear, a couple kids riding by on bicycles, a young couple pushing a baby girl in a stroller. If this was any other town, he might think this was a nice place to live.
He looked in the trunk. The steaks were still frozen. He gunned it to Reb's place.
~* ~
Not much got to him, but he had to admit, watching Reb burn the hell out of the sirloins really started taking its toll. He sat there at her kitchen table, drinking wine, occasionally taking a forkful of salad, but the smoke was making his nose itch. Reb didn't seem to notice the gray haze rising up from the pan while the grease spattered all over. He craned his neck to look into the kitchen.
She flipped the steaks and flipped them again, with the flame up way too high and the meat turning black. He wondered where her head was at, what it is that she was seeing, because she just wasn't picking up on the fact that in about ten more seconds they were going to be eating cereal for dinner instead.
She glanced at him and saw his face and immediately forked the sirloins into two plates. There were some chopped up carrots on the plates alongside potatoes that she'd baked until they were shrunken and wrinkled. It no longer surprised him that she was so skinny.
She put his food in front of him and handed him butter and salt like she knew he was going to need a lot of it to kill the taste. She smiled at him in a pleasant, Isn't this a nice way to spend the evening kind of way.
She didn't know how it was done. Joan used to give him the real thing, every night, the perfect homemaker, loving and kind, sweeter with him than he deserved, but somebody he always had to put a front on for. She loved him through all his cynical silence and blamed only herself when he asked for a divorce. It showed him just how off the mark he'd gone. Any other man would be thankful to have a wife like that.
'You aren't eating,' Reb said. 'Too well-done for you?'
'No,' he said, and started cutting into the charred meat.
She sipped her wine and stepped over to the sideboard, got out two candlesticks, placed them on the table, and lit the candles. She sat and began eating and he couldn't figure out why she was trying to get at him this way, acting the part of a lover, attempting to be a spouse, doing things to make her man cozy. He knew he hadn't given her that impression.
'You're going to go to the Burkes' house next, aren't you?' she asked.
'Soon.'
'You remember those people?'
'Yes,' he said. He'd never spoken to Mary's parents, but he knew their faces. They'd stare at him in town and he'd stare back, his father's iniquity marking him. He knew that no matter how he approached them or what he said, it was bound to be an awful scene. But he couldn't see any way around it.
'You'll never find out what happened,' Reb told him. His own thoughts tossed back at him. 'Digging it up now will only cause more trouble.'
'Maybe not,' he said. Suddenly the burned steak didn't taste so bad anymore. It had no taste at all. He finished the meal very quickly and opened a second bottle of wine. It was old cheap stuff, the kind somebody who doesn't really like you gives you for a present over the holidays. It didn't make a difference.
He felt like he was on a stage, being watched by an audience interested in farce, all of them out in the darkness waiting for him to say something funny, to snap off a well-written piece of dialogue.
This was parody. This was burlesque.
'What happens if you find the money?' she asked. 'What do you mean?'
'Who gets it? Who are you supposed to turn it in to? Do the Burkes get it again? I mean, can they prove it's theirs? If you just find a stash?'
He tried to picture Reb laid back across the leather sofa in Tucco's penthouse, with the coke and H spread out on the glass-top table, the wads of cash stacked all over the place. Guys heating spoons and hitting the spike side by side on the U-shaped sectional, watching the Jets on the HD plasma. If she was ever dropped into the middle of that kind of life she'd be dead inside of three months.
Truth was, he didn't know what would happen to the money. If he turned it in, Edwards would probably march off with it. He looked at Reb and saw her mind twirling with the wanting of the fifteen grand. The pulse in her throat was pounding so hard he thought it might break the thin, silver necklace she wore tonight. He wondered what it might be like to care that much about money. About anything.
'I don't know,' he said.
That got her dreaming up more ideas. The fire was growing within her. He didn't have the heart to tell her that fifteen k just isn't that much. Why didn't she already know that?
He sat there holding the glass of wine, sipping it and trying to figure what her next move would be. She was already trying to show him that she knew him better than anybody else, that she was inside his head, dirty and sharp as he was. That they were two of a kind.
Maybe it didn't have everything to do with the lost ransom. Maybe she had something else brewing. He tried to picture what it might be, and saw her unfolding a piece of paper across the dining room table and showing him
