Things did not turn out as she’d expected.
“Oh shit,” she said. “I was sure I’d left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Then they have to be in the car.” She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn’t see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.
“Zack,” she said. Not screaming. More tentative. “Zack, Angie’s not home yet, is she?”
“No,” I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her. “Listen,” I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. “I should tell you-”
“Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It’s all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!”
She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand. “I’m going to have to call the police.”
“Sarah.” I didn’t want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.
“The car’s been stolen,” she confessed to me. “Shit, I can’t believe this. I don’t even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and-”
“Don’t call,” I said.
“-not that that’s very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals-”
“Put the phone down,” I said. But she wasn’t listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where she could see them.
She stared at them a moment, not comprehending. If her car had been stolen, how could I have the keys?
“It’s around the corner,” I said, softly.
“I don’t understand,” Sarah said. “You were using the car?”
“It’s around the corner,” I repeated, whispering. “I moved it. Everything’s fine.”
Sarah replaced the receiver, her face red, her breathing rapid and shallow. “Why did you move my car around the corner? And why have you got my keys?”
“Okay, you see, what happened is… you know how you thought you’d left your keys in the door?”
Sarah nodded.
“And you know how I’ve mentioned that to you before?”
Sarah nodded again, a bit more slowly this time.
“Anyway, when I came home, a couple of minutes after you…”
“I’d just come in with the groceries,” Sarah said slowly. “I stopped for them on my way home, even though I had a totally crappy day at the office, did five extra hours because Kozlowski booked off sick and we had the variety store thing, and picked up some things so we could have dinner.”
This was not good. Sarah was developing a tone. That meant she was already ahead of me. She knew where this story was going and how it was going to end. But I decided to tell the rest of it anyway. “So when I came up the driveway, I saw that your keys were hanging from the door, you know, where anyone could find them. This is the thing. You know, it’s lucky for you, really, when you think about it, lucky for you that it was me coming up the driveway then, and not some, you know, crazy axe murderer or car thief or something instead, because that’s what could have happened. You know I’ve mentioned this before, about you leaving your keys in the lock, and all I was trying to do was make a point, you see, to help you, so that you wouldn’t do this sort of thing again and expose us to any, I guess you could say, unnecessary risk.”
Sarah was breathing much more slowly now. And just staring at me.
“So, you see, that’s why I did what I did.”
“Which was what, exactly?”
“I moved the car, just, you know, just a little ways down the street. Like, around the corner.”
“Where I wouldn’t be able to see it.”
“Yes. That, that was the plan.”
“And when I went to look for the keys, I wouldn’t be able to find them, and then when I saw that the car was missing, I’d think it was stolen, and would have a
“It was never my intention to give you a heart attack or anything. It was merely intended as a, well, as a lesson.”
“A lesson.”
I swallowed. “Yes.”
“I’m finished with school, Zack. I graduated. I have a university degree. I’m an adult now, and the last person I need to take lessons from is you.”
“I just felt that this might help you remember in the future.”
“You know what else might have helped me remember in the future? You could have taken my keys out of the door, walked up to me, and said something like ‘Here, honey, you left your keys in the door.’ And I would have been grateful, and said, ‘Thank you very much, next time I’ll try to be more careful.’”
“Well, in fact, the first time you did it, that’s exactly what I-”
“And here’s the part that really gets me. I’m running around this house, trying to find my keys, so I can race over to the drugstore, to get you some fucking ointment so you can put it on your stupid hand where you burned it because you dropped a lit match into a gas-filled barbecue, which, if memory serves me, I have told you before never to do!”
Paul had been standing at the door to the kitchen the whole time, and now that there was a brief pause in the screaming, he decided it was safe to navigate his way between us so he could get to the fridge. “Nice going, Dad,” he said. “It’s the backpack thing all over again.”
Before sending me out to fetch her car, Sarah said to me, “God, you are such an asshole.”
You see what I mean. You’re not the only one.
3
DESPITE THE PRIORITY I’VE ALWAYS PUT on security, it’s not like I always dreamed of making a life for ourselves in the suburbs. We liked living in the city on Crandall. It was a neighborhood rich in history and character. Most of the houses dated back to at least the 1940s, and there were always renovators’ vans parked out front of someone’s place, bringing a house up to code, tearing out old wiring and replacing it with new, blowing out an attic to make a guest room or den or plant-filled sunroom, gutting a first floor to put in a new kitchen, living and dining room. Narrow lanes separated one house from the other, and garages, often too small to house sport utility vehicles or too full of junk to park even a reasonably sized import, were tucked around back. You could walk to just about everything. The elementary school Paul and Angie attended was five blocks away, and when they moved on to high school they had a ten-block hike that didn’t take them any more than fifteen minutes. At the end of our street, which intersected with a main thoroughfare, there was a deli, a used-book store and, a block away, a bookshop that sold nothing but SF (that’s “science fiction” to non-regulars), a great Chinese place where Paul always had three of their egg rolls with the paper-thin batter just for starters, a Thai restaurant (nice to have nearby, but too spicy for me), and an Italian bakery where Sarah would often pick up those cannolis on the way home plus a loaf of the best bread I’ve ever eaten. There was also a diner that didn’t appear to have changed in fifty years, with narrow booths, counter stools that spun, and cracked black-and-white-square linoleum. You could get a breakfast of three eggs, sausage, home fries, and toast for $4.99. There was a secondhand dress shop, a tattoo joint, a head shop, an independent pizza place, and a video store that was sure to have the latest titles directed by Woody Allen or John Sayles or John Waters or Edward Burns. There was Angelo’s Fruit Market,
