some control over the booze.
Staring at her with bloodshot blue eyes, Angie suddenly said, “Jake popped you one again, didn’t he.” Not a question, a statement. One combat veteran to another. Angie knew the signs.
“No, it was an accident. He was talking and flung his elbow out and caught me in the eye.”
“Bullshit, Mary.” Now Angie was grinning. “I know how it is. Oh, just how it is. We both know your late father sometimes lost his temper with me.”
“And with me,” Mary said, remembering the flushed face, the huge hands that trembled before they flew out of control and struck. She recalled most of all her father’s hands, the crescents of grit beneath the fingernails. Duke had driven a truck and was always tinkering with it, or adjusting something under the hood of the family’s old Dodge in the driveway, as if he might somehow fine-tune the mechanical trappings of his life and so make everything else perfect.
“Every time Duke spanked you, it was because you had it coming,” Angie said defensively. “That was childhood discipline.” After all these years, she still stood up for him. Her wifely duty.
“He broke my nose once, Angie.” Not to mention more intimate and serious transgressions.
“That was an accident.”
“Like my eye.”
Angie was quiet. She sipped Pepsi through her straw, staring down at the cup. Its dark level of liquid was visible as a curved shadow.
“Jake staying with you?” she asked after a while.
“He was,” Mary said. “He won’t be there tonight. I’ll get phone calls from him, maybe even flowers, but I won’t see him for three or four days. That’s the way it always is afterward.”
“Sure. He’s sorry about the eye?”
“Yeah.” And the ribs. For a second Mary thought of Mel Holt, elegant and gentle Mel. She couldn’t imagine him striking anyone.
“I don’t give a shit how sorry or ashamed he is,” Angie said, “he won’t change.”
“I know. This time I’m not letting him come back.”
“That’s good, Mary, because there’s something about Jake. Something that goes beyond how Duke could be sometimes.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter now. It’s over.”
“That’s how it has to be. They won’t seek help, Mary. And even if they do, it don’t work.” Angie took another bite of hamburger and chewed very methodically, as if there might be a tiny hard object hidden in her food.
Mary said, “Fred doesn’t always treat you so well.” Fred was Fred Wellinger, the semiretired bricklayer who sometimes spent time with Angie. He’d been a friend of Duke’s and known her for years.
“Fred never in his life hit a woman.”
“Maybe not, but he talks to you like you were his dog.”
“Only sometimes, and not very often. The Lord never made a perfect man, Mary. Nor a woman. Fred’s got his points.” Angie dropped her half-eaten hamburger onto the table.
“So what’s the matter?” Mary asked.
“I ain’t hungry, that’s all.” She finished her Pepsi, making a slurping sound with the straw, then absently pushed the cup away.
Mary sighed. “Okay, let’s not fight. God knows I’ve had enough of that for a while.”
She wasn’t hungry anymore, either. She stood up and cleared the table, stuffing everything back into its white paper sack and cramming it noisily into the wastebasket. Angie wiped crumbs off the table with a damp red dishrag, then rinsed and wrung out the rag at the old white porcelain sink. She folded it over the edge of the sink to dry, letting the tap water run and flicking a wall switch. The Disposall went chunka! chunka! chunka! and whined and gurgled busily until she flicked the switch again and turned off the water.
Mary stood watching her mother’s kitchen ritual; the familiarity was there no matter what kitchen Angie was in, the same posture as she moved toward the sink, the same outthrust hip and elbow as she leaned forward and wrung out the dishrag, the same air of finality as she stopped the flow of water and turned away from the sink. Rhythms and images of childhood that would never leave Mary. The child always lived somewhere in the adult.
She smiled at her mother, but Angie didn’t notice.
Mary followed her into the living room, where Angie switched on the table model TV and they watched yet another “Let’s Make a Deal” rerun, dreams bearing fruit between commercials. Afterward they talked of everything and nothing until Mary was ready to leave.
As she stood up, she noticed on the floor alongside the sofa the newspaper Helen had shown her at the studio. It was folded so the item about the New Orleans murder, with the photo of the dead woman, happened to be visible. The victim, dark hair, sparkling eyes, vividly alive in two dimensions, was smiling up from the floor with an expression that seemed to strike some sort of chord in Mary now, though the woman herself still didn’t look familiar.
Mary said, “I didn’t think you took the paper.”
“I don’t,” Angie told her, still slouched in the threadbare wing chair. She wriggled her toes. “Don’t usually buy one, neither. Fred brought that one by earlier.”
“Well,” Mary said, “I’m gonna get going. I’ll call you later.”
Angie braced with her brown-spotted hands on the chair arms and levered herself to her feet. “You take care of yourself, Mary. I mean, with Jake and all.”
“Sure, Angie.”
As she moved toward the door, Mary found herself glancing back at the folded newspaper. It pulled at her gaze, making it an effort to look away.
She was oddly drawn to it and wasn’t sure why, intrigued by the photo of the woman who had danced and was now dead.
6
Mary’s apartment was on Utah, an upscale street in a part of town that changed personality block by block. Though her building was one of a row of rehabbed prewar apartments, some of them boasting ornamental stonework too expensive to create now, just a few blocks away the brick apartment buildings were crumbling with decay and peeling paint.
Her building was a slate-roofed brick structure with green wood trim and with regal stone lions flanking the front steps. The smell in the vestibule was exactly like that in the building where Angie lived, though the floor was veined marble and the mailboxes polished brass.
The stairway, however, was wooden. Mary trudged up the creaking steps to her second-floor unit, noticing that the bulb on the landing was burned out again. She’d have to call the landlord, or have Jake (Jake?) replace it.
Then she saw the flowers. They were lying like a cat’s offering on the black rubber welcome mat in front of her door. Roses again, this time with the delicate flower known as baby’s breath setting off their deep red blossoms. She bent and picked them up, then squinted to read the square white card in the faint light: “Sorry, sorry, sorry! Love, Jake.”
Cradling the tissue-wrapped bouquet as if it were an infant, Mary keyed the lock to let herself in.
That was when she noticed the marks on the doorjamb near the knob. They were slashes, and shallow notches that appeared to have been made by a large knife as someone butchered the wood while trying to pry open the door enough to force the lock.
The marks on the wood were apparently ineffectual; if someone had tried to get in, they didn’t seem to have succeeded.
Not daring to look around her in the dim hall, she entered the apartment quickly. After closing the door, she stood motionless for a moment. The air was still and stale, but it felt like home. Security. She was alone here, sheltered for a while.
She pictured someone working on her door with a knife and shivered. Jake? Maybe he’d forgotten his key and
