I find it in the downstairs bathroom along with a little plastic packet containing two quilted cotton pads that Amy must have taken from a fancy hotel. I think that Betti will like how neat and individually wrapped they are. She sits on the lower step of the porch and I sit on the higher one, leafing through her hair. She’s released it from its ponytail.
“I don’t even want to tell you how it happened. It’s stupid, fucking stupid, and it’s going to make me mad all over again.”
But of course she tells me. She tells me that the little man came back. He startled her when she was wiping something off the kitchen floor and she stood up too quickly and banged her head on the corner of an open cabinet door.
“Really hard,” she says. “I could practically see the stars and tweetie birds flying around. I did that concussion test, the one where you close your eyes and touch your nose. I’m okay in that regard.”
I can’t find a scratch anywhere. Just pale, clean scalp and the dark roots of her hair. I can see where she hit it, because the skin is pinker there and cold from the ice. But no blood. I split open the plastic packet and unscrew the cap from the bottle of peroxide. When I touch the wet pad to her head, Betti sighs with pleasure.
“Oh boy. I feel like I’m in the nurse’s office at school. She used to go through our hair checking for lice. Every week, with her rubber gloves and a cotton ball soaked in alcohol.” She laughs. “See? I told you I’m from the ghetto. That’s what Catholic school was like in the Bronx. Back in the day!”
I love her so much. I don’t even bother to ask if she has Manuel’s number. I’m just going to call him myself, like I did when her sprinklers were flooding the sidewalk. Done: no more bottle-pickers breezing through her broken gate.
“Is it bad?” she asks soberly. “Is it deep?”
“It’s nothing to worry about,” I say, and smooth my hands over her shining hair.
“Thank you, bunny,” she says, placing her ice pack back on her head, but now at an angle, like a beret. “It’s hard living alone sometimes.”
I know how she feels, even though technically I’m not living alone. Betti and her husband, Rick, split up six months ago. He’s a contractor, with a show on a cable network where he rescues people from home improvement projects that have gone terribly wrong. It’s called DIY Undone. It’s funny because DIY used to mean something positive to me; it meant publishing your own magazine or starting a record label or making documentaries on borrowed cameras about homeless LGBT teenagers living in Morningside Park. Now DIY just makes me think of Rick and the look of relief on homeowners’ faces when he pulls up in his vintage pickup truck. On the show he is heroically competent, but I’ve noticed that a lot of things at Betti’s house don’t work as well as they should, like the gate. He redid the whole house himself as a wedding present to her.
“You want to come inside?” I ask. “Everything’s a mess.”
Betti stands and studies Hank through the picture window, as if calculating how many dog hairs are going to attach themselves to her navy dress. “I’ve got a meeting. A big one, maybe. In Santa Monica.”
I knock my knuckles against the nearest porch column. “I think this is wood.”
“Speaking of which,” Betti says, “has Amy said anything to you? I feel like I’m stalking her.”
“Not yet.” I wasn’t expecting this, and now I have to pretend to sort through the contents of our mailbox. “She’s super busy. Even more than normal. She hasn’t even had time to do her laundry.” Which doesn’t sound very convincing, so I hear myself adding: “There’s a huge pile of unwashed clothes stinking up the back of the closet.”
I don’t know why I offer this detail; why, in my panicked effort to make another person feel better, I always end up exposing Amy in an exaggerated and totally unnecessary way. The sickness I feel afterward somehow doesn’t stop me from witlessly doing it again. Her adult ADD, her iffy eating habits, her dirty clothes …
Betti looks away, embarrassed—for Amy? for me? “She’s seen my work, right?” Oh! For herself. It makes me want to hold her hand. “You think I should tell my agent to send over some DVDs?”
“No! Don’t. We’re really big fans.” My voice gets a little throaty from the relief of finally saying it. And it doesn’t seem wrong in the moment to say we, even though I’m actually just speaking for myself. “We love you. We’ve loved you forever.”
“Seriously?” Betti asks. She smiles, her face opening. Everything about her softens a little. “You guys. You kill me.”
“Like, forever.”
We grin at each other. I want to tell her that she’s the reason I moved to New York.
“So you get why this is such a good idea,” she says, before I have my chance. She removes the ice pack from her head and leans in as if she’s telling me something new. “It’s a no-brainer. It’s my retirement fund.”
For a while she’s been wanting to pitch a kids’ show to Amy, because that’s what Amy makes: half-hour television shows for kids. And that’s how we get to live in this house! To be clear, Amy’s show is not the educational kind, it’s more like the kind that parents complain about, but the writing is smart and these kids are lovely to watch, bright-eyed and funny and quick. Real actors, grown up now, with serious careers, have gotten their start on this kind of show. What I’m trying to say is that it’s not dreck, and Amy turns out to be very talented at it, even though it’s given her
