Avery's wife Lynn was just as flamboyant, and the poor thing was blind as a bat. She wore a canary yellow pantsuit with a matching surgical mask and Elton John-style oversized glasses and white shoes. She had a beautiful head of flame-red hair, and her complexion, though very light, was free of the freckles that redheads usually have.
They were quite a pair, but for all the jokes that Billy and I told at their expense, you'd never catch me saying anything bad about them. Or at least anything that I intended seriously. When we first met them, they were both in their late 50s. They had never had children of their own, but it was obvious from the first time they saw Connie that a great injustice had been done there. The two of them loved children, and would have made wonderful parents. In all the time we'd known them, argued with them about politics, laughed about their ridiculous clothes, they had never been anything less than guardian angels to our daughter, and for Billy and me, that qualified them for sainthood.
Of course, Chunk lacked that point of view. He stared at the two of them during the introductions like they had just stepped off a space ship and asked him if he were interested in an anal probe.
Avery shook Chunk's hand so delicately he almost looked like he expected Chunk to kiss the back of it.
Lynn, however, grabbed Chunk's hand and pumped it fiercely. She did everything that way, in an urgent, overly friendly kind of way.
“My, but you are a big one, aren't you?” she said to Chunk. “Have you ever modeled for a photographer? My Avery is a photographer you know. He does landscapes mostly, but I think you would make a lovely subject for his camera. So many muscles.” Lynn turned to Avery and said, “What do you think, dear? Would Mr. Dempsey here do well as a model?”
Avery considered Chunk head to toe. “Maybe so,” he said. “He's very dark. I'd like to use some hard lighting to bring out the texture of his skin, but all in all a very impressively built man.”
Lynn put a confidential hand on Chunk's massive bicep. “Avery is actually very good with live models. We've been married for forty years, and in that time he's photographed me exactly three hundred and eight-one times.” Then she flashed her mischievous eyes at Chunk and said, without lowering her voice a bit, “Eight of those times were in the nude.”
Poor Chunk. It looked like his face was about to crack. He gave me a look. For God's sake, save me from this crazy lady, it said.
But I didn't have to, for just then, there was another knock on the door and Connie exploded through the room to answer it.
“That's her friend June,” I said. “She hasn't gotten a chance to play with anybody her own age since, well, you know.”
Everybody nodded, suddenly a little sad as they remembered that children weren't supposed to play together in the plague city.
I followed Connie to the door, my hands instinctively close to her as she opened the door. “Not too close, honey,” I said.
“Mommy.” She gave me a look of her own. God, Mom. Would you relax, please?
Six years old going on 30.
Connie opened the door and let in Gloria Webb and her daughter June. June held a used soccer ball with a red ribbon tied around it. June handed it to Connie.
“Cool,” Connie said. “Come on.”
Before either Gloria or I could stop them, the two girls ran for the living room. June was a year older than Connie and a true tomboy. She wore jeans and a red t-shirt with a standard white face mask. She ran naturally, her short, bobbed hair cut barely moving.
She made quite a contrast to Connie, who in her white and pink party dress and long, curly brown hair, was the very image of a girly girl. Still, it was good to hear her laugh, and June did that for her, made her laugh.
Gloria and I followed them into the living room, each of us gently guiding our girls away from the other just a little. It was pathetically transparent, and there was an uncomfortable moment between Gloria and me, neither wanting to give the impression we thought the other's daughter was dirty somehow, contaminated, but neither of us willing to take the chance either.
I tried to cover my embarrassment with a compliment. Gloria had highlighted her hair, a purely amateur home job that made her look like a can of blonde paint had dripped onto her chestnut hair, but I told her I liked it.
“Thanks,” she said, trying to look like she wasn't clamping her hands down on her squirming daughter. “Do you like it? Really? It's gotten so hard to find enough to do the job in one shopping trip. I usually have to buy a little each week until I have enough.”
“It looks great,” I said.
Connie was slipping out of my grip. “Honey,” I said, “why don't you and June go out back and kick the soccer ball back and forth?”
“That's a good idea, June,” said Gloria. “You two could stand on opposite sides of the yard there and really kick it hard.”
June gave Gloria a look, and I realized that they must teach all six through eight year olds that look.
Gloria and I let go of our daughters at the same time, and it was like watching two greyhounds bolt out of the lists. I never knew Connie could run that fast. We watched them go nervously, both of us making furtive little grabbing motions at the window that looked out over the backyard every time the girls got too close.
“Hey,” said Billy, “you guys coming in with the rest of us or not?”
“Coming,” I said. Then, to Gloria, “Shall we?”
“Okay. I can't wait to tell you about the tomatoes I'm growing. You know I've killed so many since all this dreariness started, but I think I've finally found the knack. I have three great big green ones. I can't wait to bring you some.”
“Fantastic,” I said, and led her into the kitchen.
Back when I first met Gloria, she had been a product marketing specialist for one of the big department stores in the Rivercenter Mall downtown. She was an impressively driven and well-organized woman, the kind who excelled as team mother for a girl's soccer team or Girl Scout den mother and still managed to look fabulously put together.
Then, in late May, shortly after the first cases of H2N2 were reported, she lost her husband Steve to the flu. She managed to keep her youthful face and figure, and her smile that makes every man in the room focus on her, but the rest of her fell apart. It was like the driven, purposeful part of her mind just stopped working. She lost all trace of seriousness, and became hopelessly flighty, vain, and distracted. She was, in a way, a living train wreck, the saddest kind of memorial to the way things used to be.
I introduced her to Chunk, who was eager to have someone to talk to who didn't want him to pose nude with a white bear skin rug draped over his manly parts.
Gloria giggled as she shook Chunk's hand.
“Wow,” she said. “Oh wow.”
“Hi,” Chunk said, smiling uncomfortably, probably thinking, Christ, out of the frying pan and into the fire.
“You're a police detective, aren't you?” Gloria asked him. “Lily, this is your partner, right?”
“That's right,” I said.
Gloria's eyes walked all over Chunk's biceps and shoulders. “Wow.”
Chunk was trying to get his hand back from Gloria, but not succeeding.
“So tell me,” Gloria said, “do you really investigate murders? That sounds so dangerous to me.”
“Well,” Chunk said, but didn't get a chance to say anything more about it.
“I just couldn't do that. And I bet you see so many frightening things, don't you?”
“Well, most of the time-”
“Look,” Gloria said, suddenly breaking contact with Chunk's hand and sticking her hand into the middle of our little huddle, “I broke a nail today.”
We all looked at her broken nail.
“I couldn't believe it. There's so much to do around the house, you know? And you just can't call somebody like you used to.” She put her hands on Chunk's bicep. “And with no man around the house… well, you know how
