The Most Dangerous Thing - Laura Lippman [112]
Rita walks through her house, checking surfaces low and high. It’s a tiny house, two bedrooms off an open area that contains the kitchen, dining nook, and living room. The Strawberry Hill apartment was bigger. Where did her grabber go? Again, all she remembers is the very thought—Well, this is a weird place to leave it. Ah, she spies it through the sliding glass doors that lead to a tiny patio, sitting on a wrought-iron table. That’s right. It was a pretty evening last night, warm but not hot, probably one of the last decent nights before full-on summer lands. Rita sat on the patio, eating an entire jar of cashews, rationalizing that she needed a treat. Her days of watching her figure are long gone, and although she’s not fat—Rita’s genes keep her lean, another thing that probably pisses her doctor off—she’s got a few rolls on her.
The patio door’s lock is sticky, hard to maneuver on her best days. It’s easier to slip out the front door and circle around, grab the grabber, and come back to the front door—which has locked behind her. Fuck. Her bones, her joints, whatever, didn’t begin to tell the story of how bad today was going to be. Given the nature of her relationships with the neighbors—she hates the one to the east, the one to the west hates her—she can’t see knocking on their doors at 7 A.M., asking to use the phone to call Joey. Who, bless him, would be here as fast as he can with her spare keys, no questions asked. She could walk to the Circle K and use the pay phone, but it would take her forever to shuffle that dusty mile. Plus, while her loose flowery nightgown and slippers pass muster for sitting on her front steps, it’s not an outfit that a sane woman wears walking down a busy street. She’d get picked up and taken in for a psych exam.
She sits on the steps, picks up the paper, which they won’t stop delivering no matter how often she cancels it. She gets all the news she wants from television, and the last thing she needs is something that comes in the house only to pile up and have to be discarded. Her grandchildren lecture her on recycling. On recycling and smoking and voting. When did children get so moral? Weren’t the parents and grandparents supposed to be instructing them? She has asked them as much, and they say: “But, Grandma, it’s going to be our world.”
She doesn’t have the heart to tell them that you get the world on loan, on terms you don’t dictate and can’t control. It’s about as good a deal as those furniture leases with all the hidden interest rates. Rita figures she had the world for about twenty years, from age twenty to forty. Then it was Joey’s turn to step up, take his bite out of it. Being Joey, he took a small, polite bite, sort of like: Oh, thank you for my job as a probation officer and my nice wife and my three children, but really, I couldn’t eat another bite. He was born good, that’s all there is to it, and Mickey was born—not bad, but angry and fretful, always discontent, so concerned with the fairness of things that she ended up with nothing. Best Rita can tell, Mickey’s never had a happy day in her life, and it breaks her heart, truly. Because for all she has to mourn—the breakdown of her body, being alone, all the daily demon worries about money and bills—she had a lot of fun, when there was fun to be had. A lot. She scratches her ankles, one part of her body that hasn’t succumbed to the pain or the steroids, smiling at her memories.
A patrol car idles by and she flags it down, thinking the cops can help her break into her own house. She’s pretty sure the bathroom window is unlocked and someone could wiggle through it. Someone whose body is reliable, that is. The officers are Latino, very handsome, but Rita’s not deluded enough to flirt with them, although she’s happy when one sees a photograph of her in the front hall and asks: “Is that you?” She nods and he says, respectfullike: “You must have had to beat them off with a stick.” He adds quickly: “I bet you still do.”
“No,” Rita says. “Now I have