would be fun to make some one night with Kelly. Sometime around the start of third grade, she’d actually developed a liking for them herself.
I reached for a box just as someone else-a woman in her late thirties, early forties-decided to do the same. Shopping alongside her was a boy. Dark hair, jeans, and a jean jacket and running shoes with stripes and swirls all over them. I put his age at sixteen or seventeen.
“Excuse me,” I said to the woman when we bumped elbows. “Go ahead.”
Then I looked at her and did a double take. It didn’t take more than half a second to realize who this woman, and the boy with her, were.
Bonnie Wilkinson. Mother of Brandon and husband of Connor.
The two people who died when they crashed into Sheila’s car.
The teenage boy with her had to be her son Corey. His eyes looked dead, as though they’d cried out every tear he’d ever have.
Her blouse and slacks seemed to hang off her, and her face was drawn and gray. Her mouth opened and stayed that way when she realized who I was.
I backed up my cart to wheel it around them. I didn’t need Rice Krispies. Not right now. “Let me get out of your way here,” I said.
Finally, she could speak, although only just barely. “You just wait,” she said.
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
“You’re going to get yours,” she said. “You’re going to get it good.” Her son’s dead eyes bored into me.
I left my half-full cart and walked out of the store.
I picked up what I needed at the Super Stop amp; Shop. And instead of buying Rice Krispies, I bought all the ingredients I thought I’d need to make lasagna. I knew I couldn’t make it as well as Sheila did, but I was going to give it a try.
I took the long way home so I could visit Doug Pinder.
My father had hired him to work at Garber Contracting about the same time I graduated from Bates. At twenty-three, Doug had been a year older. We worked side by side for years, but it was always understood I’d eventually be the guy in charge, even though no one expected it to happen quite so soon.
Dad, overseeing the construction of a ranch house in Bridgeport, had just unloaded two dozen four-by-eight sheets of plywood from a truck when he clutched his chest and dropped to the ground. The paramedics said he was dead before his head landed in the soft grass. I rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, picking the blades out of his thinning gray hair.
Dad had been sixty-four. I was thirty. I made Doug Pinder my assistant manager.
Doug was a good right-hand man. His area of expertise was carpentry, but he knew enough about all the other aspects of construction to supervise the rest of the trades, and pitch in when needed. And where I was reserved, Doug was outgoing and jovial. When things got tense on a job, Doug knew just what to say and do to keep everyone’s spirits up, better than I could. For years, I don’t know what I would have done without him.
But things hadn’t been right with Doug the last few months. He wasn’t the life of the party anymore, or at least when he tried, it seemed forced. I knew he was under pressure at home, and it didn’t take long to figure out it was financial. When Doug and his wife, Betsy, moved in to a new house four years ago, they’d gotten one of those too-good-to-be-true, subprime mortgages with almost nothing down, and when it had come up for renewal last year their monthly payments had more than doubled.
Betsy had been working in the accounting department of a local GM dealer that had closed its doors. She’d found a part-time job at a furniture store in Bridgeport, but had to be bringing in half of what she used to, if that.
The salary I paid Doug had remained constant through all this, but at best, he had to be treading water. More likely, he was drowning. While the construction and renovation business had slowed, I had, up to now, resisted cutting the pay of anyone who worked for me. At least those on staff, like Doug, Sally, Ken Wang, and our kid from north of the border, Stewart.
The Pinders had a wood-sided two-story off Roses Mill Road, near Indian Lake. Both their cars-Doug’s decade-old Toyota pickup with a cargo cover and Betsy’s leased Infiniti-were in the drive when I pulled up out front.
I could hear loud voices inside as I raised my hand to rap on the front door. I held it there a moment and listened, and while I could determine the mood inside that house-“ugly” was the word that came to mind-I couldn’t make out any actual conversation.
I rapped hard, knowing I might not be heard over the commotion.
The shouting stopped almost immediately, like a switch had been flipped. A moment later, Doug opened the door. His face was red and there were beads of sweat on his forehead. He smiled and pushed open the aluminum screen.
“Hey! Whoa! Will you look who’s here! Hey, Bets, it’s Glenny!”
From upstairs somewhere, “Hi, Glen!” Cheerful, like they hadn’t been tearing into each other five seconds earlier.
“Hi, Betsy,” I called out.
“Can I get you a beer?” Doug asked, leading me into the kitchen.
“No, that’s-”
“Come on, have a beer.”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not.”
As I came into the kitchen my eye caught a pile of unopened envelopes sitting by the phone. They all looked like bills. There were bank and credit card logos in the upper left corners of several of them.
“What’ll it be?” Doug asked, reaching into the fridge.
“Whatever you’ve got is fine.”
He took out two cans of Coors, handed me one, and popped his. He extended it toward me so we could clink cans. “To the weekend,” he said. “Whoever invented the weekend, there’s a guy whose hand I’d like to shake.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
“Good of you to drop by. This is terrific. You want to watch a game or something? There must be something on. I haven’t even looked. Gotta be some golf, at least. Some people, they don’t like watching golf, think it’s too slow, but I like it, you know? So long as you got enough people playing, camera can go hole to hole, so you don’t waste a whole lot of time watching people walk up the fairway.”
“I can’t stay long,” I said. “I’ve got groceries in the car. Some stuff that has to go into the fridge.”
“You could put it in ours for the time being,” Doug offered enthusiastically. “Want me to go out and get them? It’s no problem.”
“No. Look, Doug, there’s something I need to talk to you about.”
“Shit, there a problem at one of the sites?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Doug’s face went dark. “Goddamn, Glen, you’re not laying me off, are you?”
“Hell, no,” I said.
A nervous smile crossed his lips. “Well, that’s a relief. Christ, you gave me a start there.”
Betsy popped into the kitchen, came over and kissed my cheek.
“How’s my big strong man?” she said, but in her heels, she was nearly as tall as I was.
“Bets,” I said.
Betsy was a tiny thing, barely an inch over five feet, but often wore killer heels to compensate. With them, she wore a super-short black skirt, tight white blouse, and jacket. She had a handbag hooked over her elbow, the word PRADA emblazoned on the side. I figured she got it the night Ann Slocum used our house to hawk her fake designer bags. If I were Doug, I wouldn’t feel good, my wife heading out of the house looking like, if not quite a hooker, at least like someone who was on the prowl.
“How long you gonna be?” Doug asked her.
“I’ll be back when I’m back,” she said.
“Just don’t…” Doug’s voice trailed off. Then, “Just take it easy.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything crazy,” she said. She flashed me a smile. “Doug thinks I’m a shopaholic.”
