So that was it; he was doomed to spend the next fifty years hanging out with married couples and going to dinner parties at other people’s houses and talking about the cost of gutter replacements and the best way to seed a lawn. Some of the people he met when he was forced to go to a dinner party and reexamine his lost youth were younger than him. One cheerful neighbor named Hank, in his early twenties and dressed in khakis and a sweater (which was almost as bad as going to a PTA meeting), had suggested that Kevin needed to aerate his lawn and spent a full half hour giving him horticulture tips. While Hank had been rambling, Kevin had decided that a little horticulture might not be a bad idea.
He had sat down at the computer the next day and bought lights and seeds online, built a partition in the basement, and told Linda that he was setting up a “workshop” for himself. Rather than buy a padlock to keep her out, he had decided to make her think that whatever he was doing in there was just so boring that she wouldn’t care to enter. She wanted him to have hobbies, so he picked the most boring hobby he could think of-sculpting-and ran with it. The space behind the partition became his “sculpting room.” Linda never asked why a sculpting room required ten kilowatts of power a day, nearly doubling their energy bill, nor why it emitted an eerie glow visible under the panels of the partition at all hours of the night, nor why fans could be heard constantly running in the sculpting room, nor why he never produced any sculptures. His lack of sculpting output could always be blamed on sculptor’s block. But finally, when he had felt it was time for him to produce something, anything, he had gone to the Asian market and bought a raw wood sculpture of an Easter Island-style mongoloid with a huge head. Linda’s comment when he showed it to her had been, “Yeah, I saw that at the Asian market.”
It had gone on that way for months. Linda never asked questions. She must have known all along what he was up to. Must have. He went to dinner parties (when forced to by Linda) and the conversation one night had turned to basement remodeling. I’m going to hook up a high-def sound system in mine; I’m going to get a weight room set up; I’m going to get a sports room/pool room/guys-only room with a bar and a Beer Meister, blah blah blah. They were all talking about brand-name appliances and how great it was going to be when their basements were all finished and how everyone was invited over, and Kevin had only one thought: you guys are never coming over to my basement, unless you want to sample some Afghan sativa hybrid under 320-watt sodium lights. The thought had made him smile to himself, which the other guys had ignored, because they were used to him smiling to himself and never saying much and they didn’t really like him anyway.
On the way home, Kevin had repeated some of the conversation to Linda, holding it up as an example of why these parties were a form of torture for him. Linda had missed the point. “Why don’t you bring them over and show them your sculpting room?” she had asked. But Kevin had detected a trace of irony in her voice, disguised as innocence. She knew. She had known along. But, he thought as he drove through the wooded, windy roads back to Wilton, she had let him do it without bothering him.
And he suddenly realized why. She had let him do it because it must have seemed to her that it was the only thing that made him happy. That’s what a miserable prick he had been. And that’s what a good wife she had been. But things had changed, Kevin knew. Linda just wasn’t that worried about his happiness anymore.
“What are you thinking about, dude?” Doug asked him. “You’re looking all deep and shit.”
“Nothing.”
“No, seriously. What are you thinking about?”
Kevin looked out the window at the fields of blue spruce, snow hanging from their drooping branches, as he took another turn at an uncomfortable speed on the icy road. Doug and Mitch said nothing, having resigned themselves to helplessness. “I’m thinking about Linda,” he said.
Doug froze. He had wanted a nice, personal conversation, something to kill the time on the ride, but he certainly didn’t want to talk about Linda. Not with Kevin. In fact, not with anyone.
Kevin misinterpreted his silence as an opening to keep talking. “I think I’ve been a shitty husband,” he said. “I wonder if it’s too late.”
Doug was staring through the windshield, eyes wide, mouth clenched shut. Kevin looked over at him and figured the expression was due to his driving.
“Dude, I’m not driving that fast. I know these roads.”
Everyone in the truck was silent. No one said another word until they reached Wilton.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, Mitch walked Jeffrey the pit bull and when he got back to the client’s house, he found himself tempted by the safe. He knew how much Doug loved pills and he figured that, if there were some loose pills in there, he might grab a handful for him. Fuck it, he thought, let the guy have some pills. He’d had a shitty week, getting laid off and all. Only he’d have to make up a story about where he got the pills so Doug wouldn’t bug the crap out of him for more.
Mitch took off his shoes, stepped over the dog gate, and tiptoed carefully back into the den. The adrenaline rush from the illicit action made his hearing alert and sensitive, aware now of the steady hum of the huge house’s central heating and even the noise of his heart thumping as his unsteady fingers pulled the gilded frame of the painting forward. He looked out the window at the snow-covered front lawn, nearly a hundred yards of pristine whiteness between him and the street. Even if the doctor came home early, Mitch figured he would have plenty of time to slam the painting shut, run back to the kitchen, and put his shoes back on before the guy made it into the house.
Mitch twirled the knob to each number in the combination. On the final number, his nervousness made him turn the dial several digits too far and when he cranked the small lever, the safe didn’t open. He cursed, took a deep breath, and started over, then froze as a car turned the corner at the top of the street and drove past. Shit. He took another deep breath and started a third time. Hadn’t Kevin opened the safe? How hard could it be? This time, when he cranked the lever he heard a hydraulic hiss and the door came loose. He swung it open.
Inside were about a dozen small mailer boxes and what looked like several thousand dollars in cash. The cash was stacked in piles about six inches high. Kevin hadn’t mentioned the cash. Was the cash new or had Kevin just not mentioned it? If he asked Kevin about the cash, then he would have to admit to Kevin that he had opened the safe. Which was OK, Mitch decided, because Kevin had opened the safe. And besides, he wasn’t really stealing; he was doing a good deed for Doug. He grabbed one of the stacks of cash and looked at it. It appeared to be all twenties, not hundreds, as he had assumed. Still, it was quite a sum. Then he grabbed a mailer box and flipped it open.
It was filled with loose pills, all the same, white and round. He grabbed twenty or so and shoved them into his pocket. As he was doing this, one of the pills fell on the hardwood floor and bounced onto the rug. He looked down and didn’t see it. Shit, he thought. It had rolled under the desk. He shut the mailer box, put it back, and closed the safe. Then he carefully let the painting swing back in place over it and got down on his hands and knees to look around under the desk. There it was. He picked it up and stared at it, clean and white and pure and shiny, and without thinking, he popped it into his mouth and swallowed. Let’s see what Doug is always talking about, he told himself.
Mitch stood up, looked around the room to make sure nothing had been visibly disturbed, and as he was backing out of the room, he noticed two obvious impressions in the dust on the hardwood floor where his knees had been when he had knelt down to get the pill. He tiptoed back over and swirled the dust around with his sock. Then when he backed up, he saw the dust from his sock tracked on the rug. He picked up some dust lint with his hands and mussed the carpet, and this time noticed the streak marks he had left in the carpet while mussing it. Then he decided he was just being stupid; nobody examined their carpet when they came into a room. He turned and left.
Mitch ran back into the kitchen, put his shoes on, and locked the kitchen door on his way out. He waved goodbye to Jeffrey, who was huddled, freezing, in his doghouse, half-frozen snot dangling from his nose. Jeffrey stared at him forlornly as he peeled out of the driveway.
MITCH DROPPED TWO of the pills on the table in front of Doug, who was watching TV while cleaning a bong. The effect on Doug was electric, as if awakening him from slumber with a gunshot. He sat up, instantly alert, as he took the pills and examined them.
“Dude, what’re these?”
“I don’t know. You tell me.”
Eyes focused and expert, Doug turned a pill in his hand and then held it up to the light coming through the window into their dingy living room. “Hydrocodone,” he said, as if pronouncing a discovery. “These are the good ones. Seven-point-five milligrams.” He looked at Mitch beseechingly. “Can I… eat it?”
“Yeah, man. It’s yours.”
Before Mitch had finished uttering the short sentence, the pill was in Doug’s stomach. “Thanks, dude. Where’d you get it?”
“Never mind.”
“Do you have more?”
Oh, for god’s sake. He had created a monster. He was about to empty his pockets, dump the twenty or so pills he had all over the coffee table, but then had an evil impulse. Doug was suddenly like a trainable dog, begging for treats. Mitch was aware of an almost total power.
“That’s it,” Mitch said. “I took one myself and saved two for you. All I’m feeling is itchy, like I’ve got fucking ants in my shorts.”
Doug laughed. “They make you itchy,” he said. “But you get a little high and a little speedy.”
Which was true. Within minutes of popping the pill, Mitch had suddenly found he had energy and a real interest in dog-walking. He could see how these things could be addictive, until the ants in the shorts effect had started, and by the time he was walking Duffy, his last dog of the day, he was scratching himself raw. Still, the extra energy might be nice if he was going to spend the evening sitting behind a bush in the freezing woods dressed in a business suit.
“Are you ready to go steal a Ferrari?” Doug asked. “Kevin just called. He said he’d be over in a little bit.”
“I guess we have to go put on suits.”
“I guess.”
“I think the suits are a stupid idea.”
“Kevin says we should wear suits,” Doug said, as if reminding him of the teachings of their cult leader. Mitch picked up on something in the tone of his voice. Over the last two days, he had noticed that Doug had been particularly reverential toward Kevin, careful to not interrupt him or disagree with him. Nothing specific, just a vague change in attitude. It was definitely a change from his regular behavior. Two weeks ago, Mitch remembered Doug cursing Kevin for failing to return a CD he had lent him, and before that, mentioning that Kevin might be a little too enthusiastic about the idea of stealing the television and that perhaps they should spend less time with him because he seemed to be turning into a criminal. But this week every word that fell from Kevin’s lips had to be stringently adhered to.
“Dude, what’s going on with you guys?”
Doug stared at the television, not saying anything, and Mitch leaned over him, slowly putting his head between Doug and the TV set, which was showing a
