“Sexbar?”
“Oh, right,” I said. I quickly clicked over to my calendar-yep, there it was. “I got it.”
“OK,” Freddy said, looking over my shoulder at an Asian man with the most amazing green eyes.
“What’s for dessert?”
I left Freddy at Foodboys and headed home.
Although it was 10:45 when I got there, my mother was sitting on the couch, purse in hand. She was wearing her black boots, a black sweatshirt, and, bizarrely, a black ski mask.
It was ninety-seven degrees out. This didn’t look good.
“Don’t sit down!” she cal ed as I walked through the door. “We’re going back out.”
I had, as they say, a very bad feeling about this.
CHAPTER 13
“Tell me again,” I asked, yawning in the couch-like seat of the Lincoln Continental my mother was driving, badly, down the Long Island Expressway,
“why are we doing this?”
“Your father hasn’t answered the phone al evening. Why do you think that is?”
“He’s sleeping?” I asked.
“He’s with that bitch Dottie Kubacki,” my mother hissed.
“Mom, there is no way that daddy is fu-fooling around with Dottie Kubacki.” But even as I said it, I saw my mother’s already death-like grip on the steering wheel tighten.
“Don’t say that name to me!”
“You just said it,” I reminded her.
“Wel, yes, but I was careful to cal her ‘that bitch’
Dottie Kubacki. If you say the whole thing like that, it takes the sting out.”
“Fine,” I said, exasperated. “There’s no way daddy’s seeing ‘that bitch’ Dottie Kubacki. For one thing, isn’t she kind of heavy?”
“She’s a pig!” my mother screamed, looking at me. The ear splitting horn of a tractor trailer in the lane into which she was carelessly drifting forced her to turn back to the road. “A heifer! She puts ice cream on her hamburgers!”
“Then how could you possibly be threatened by her?”
“Who knows what men like? I’d found magazines in your father’s drawers-not just naked people like that pornography you have…”
“Mom!” I cried.
“But real y dirty stuff, like two women posing together, or ladies with breasts so huge that they almost qualified for their own zip codes.”
“That’s hardly the equal to doing Dot…”
“Watch it,” my mother said.
“Sorry. ‘That bitch’ Dottie Kubacki.”
“He could be a ‘chubby chaser.’” she replied. “I saw about them on The View.”
We exited the Expressway and drove the five local blocks to our street. But instead of pul ing up to our home, my mother turned off the engine and let the car quietly drift down the street until it stopped right in front of Dottie Kubacki’s house.
“I learned that from reading detective novels,” she said.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, you go out and peek in her windows.”
“What?”
“Just go up to the house and look in windows and see what they’re up to.” She reached into her handbag and brought out one of those cardboard disposable cameras you buy at the drugstore. “Take this. I want evidence.”
“Listen, you’re on your own here, Jessica Fletcher.
There is no way I’m going out there to spy on my own father.”
My mother looked at me cool y. “Do you know what an episiotomy is? When you were born, the doctors had to give me five stitches because you tore up my…”
“OK!” I said, “I’l go.”
“It’l be fun,” my mother said. “Haven’t you ever wanted to play detective?”
If you only knew, I thought.
Just as I started to open my door, we saw a light come on in one of Dottie’s second-floor windows.
“Her bedroom,” my mother hissed. “Get up there.”
“What?”
“There’s a tree right over there. Climb up and get the picture. Do I have to think of everything?”
When my mother gets like this, you can either argue or give in. In either case, you’re going to lose. I was in no mood to fight.
I got out of the car, put the camera in my back pocket, and approached the tree. I grabbed hold of the lowest branch and pul ed myself up.
Years of gymnastics made the climbing part easy.
I ascended from limb to limb until I got near Dottie’s window. I had already decided that no matter what happened, even in the inconceivable event that my father was in there, I’d tel my mother that al I saw was Dottie, sorry, “that bitch” Dottie, getting ready for bed.
The tree got me high enough that I was looking directly into Dottie’s bedroom. Which, luckily, was empty. I couldn’t hear anything through the quarter-open window, either.
I looked down and saw my mother, expectant and angry, standing at the bottom of the tree. “Wel?” she stage-whispered.
I put my hands together in prayer position and rested my head on them in the universal sign for sleep.
“Hmmm!” my mother observed.
I was just about to climb back down when a change in the light made me look up. There, at the window, stood Dottie Kubacki.
Nude.
I had always known that Dottie Kubacki was overweight, but to see her in the al — too-real flesh was to know the true awesomeness of nature. The Himalayas would be humbled.
She was Jabba the Hutt with pubic hair.
In fact, so impressive was the sight that I gasped.
Loudly.
Dottie raised the window ful y open. “Who’s out there?” she asked.
Shit, I thought. The tree was thick with branches and leaves. Maybe if I stood very stil, she wouldn’t see me.
Dottie leaned out the window, her pendulous breasts reaching almost to the ground. Wel, not real y, but you get the picture. I tried to make myself invisible.
“Huh,” she said, turning away.
If the front view of a naked Dottie Kubacki was indelible, you can only imagine how her backside seared itself into my consciousness. Her ass could have had its own zip code.
I looked down at my mother and motioned wildly for her to go back to the car. I was just beginning to climb down when Dottie’s presence back at the window made me look up.
The only worse thing than seeing Dottie Kubacki standing naked at the window, I learned, was seeing Dottie Kubacki standing naked with a handgun at the window.
