1 — DECEMBER 13, FRIDAY
Here's your fear,
Its restive stubborn clockwork —Penelope Shuttle
Alice looked down into the open drawer.
“Oh my god, Cammy, come here, you gotta see this! Panty liners! The whole drawer’s full of panty liners!”
Alice knew that her husband would never actually get up to come and see so she leaned into the living room and waved a floppy handful.
“Cammy, look at this! Panty liners! Can you you believe it?”
Cammy screwed his head momentarily away from the TV. “What are those? Flip flops?”
“No, they’re panty liners. You mother’s top drawer is stuffed with them. It’s so sad. It’s like a tragedy.”
“What do you need batteries for?”
“Not batteries, honey, tragedy.” Not the least impatience creased the tone of her voice. She folded her arms and looked at her husband, but she wasn’t thinking about him. Rather about his mother, the old schemer. “She’d just die if she knew I was pawing through her private parts.”
“She’s already dead.”
“Yes, I know, but imagine if it was me, or you. What’s in your top drawer?”
“We’d be dead. It wouldn’t matter.”
“Oh, Cammy.”
“Just throw it away, Alice. That’s what I always tell you. Throw it away and let’s go get some lunch.”
Alice began to fan herself with the panty liners, then reconsidered. It was stuffy, but Cammy wouldn’t let her open the door. Too many old folks, he said. Don’t know any of them. Even the blinds were twisted down.
“Know what I’d like?” Alice mused. “Corned beef.”
“No one serves corned beef no more, you know that.”
“But I saw a place, on Florida, on the way to the pharmacy. They had a sign on the window.”
“We’re eating at the hotel. Only decent place in town. Close to our room.”
Alice sighed. A wistful, girlish sigh.
In the bathroom she found a wastebasket between the toilet and the sink. The white plastic liner was so fresh it clung to itself. She was glad for that. Bathroom trash wasn’t like kitchen trash. Bathroom trash made her squeamish.
Alice scooped the panty liners out of the drawer and dropped them into the wastebasket. It seemed a shame, throwing them away, new as they were in their pale yellow wrappers. Marvel must’ve bought them at a discount store there were so many all helter-skelter the length of the drawer.
Alice imagined someone, a stranger, opening her underwear drawer. Her panties lay flat and color-matched. One cup of each bra folded into the other cup, nice and neat. What would the stranger think of her? Nice and neat. Well, there were worse things.
She felt the tiniest stab of shame. She’d never liked Marvel; liked her even less after Harry died. Marvel became like a little girl, but greedy and sour. And it was Alice had to talk to her on the phone everyday.
She was Cammy’s mother, but Cammy wouldn’t talk to her. Women.
The plastic trash bag was stuffed and Alice tied the ends in a little knot before she removed it. The drawer was still half-full of dingy panties and fleshy bras. No one could want these. And what about the other drawers, the thready sweaters, the blouses with their blind stains? Was this what always happened? Would her black lace cake with the slippery talc of the unwanted?
Poor old Marvel. Alice sighed, but she was thinking of herself. The pang came again and she touched the bulge of her stomach. Maybe she was just hungry.
Where would Marvel keep the trash bags?
Alice didn’t look at her husband on the way to the kitchen.
She really only glanced at him on her way back to the bedroom for the holes in the stranger’s black mask sucked off her attention like a magnet, like a drain.
The box of trashbags dropped to the floor.
The eyes had a gun. The gun had an eye.
Alice stared at the tiny black hole of the gun; she stared at the glittering black eyes behind the mask; she started to raise her hands over her head.
The flash, the soft whump like a door sealing, her scarlet chest exploding -- it all happened at the same instant.
One single overwhelming instant.
* * * *
Devon’d seen the box straight off, first thing. Yeah, it was bad form to seek the treasure first when anything could happen, when the mark could’ve been agile or talking on the phone, but Devon couldn’t help it. His eyes snapped to the television and there was the box on top, just like the client’d said.
Anyway, the mark wasn’t agile. He was barely conscious in front of that TV. Devon put down his tool kit, slipped across the living room floor and shot the mark through the back of the chair. Easy.
But the woman scared the crap out of him. She appeared, suddenly, from another room -- it had to be the bedroom -- and bee-lined to the kitchen. She opened the cupboard under the sink and knocked something over.
Devon pointed his gun in her direction.
A drawer and then another slid open along a metal groove. Devon didn’t move.
The woman was halfway across the living room before she saw him.
Devon didn’t move.
Funny, she didn’t scream or make any noise at all. Kind of eerie. The look on her face could haunt him.
So he dropped the gun in his pocket and got down to business. First, he bolted the front door. Then he grabbed the box off the TV, making sure to push the flower pot to the center so it wouldn’t look like anything was missing. That’s what the instructions had said to do: first the door, then the box, then the flower pot.
He’d never had a client provide such detailed instructions before. Normally, there was just a goal, not a map of the journey. He’d memorized the instructions over two days then set fire to the hardcopy with a cigarette. Now that it was happening, it was like it had already happened. It was a weird feeling, but not completely unpleasant.
Devon put the treasure box in his tool kit and headed to the bedroom. Once in the bedroom, he headed to the back door. Everything was real. Everything was in its place.
The key to the back door was in the lock, just like the client’d said. Devon opened the door and looked out into the corridor, casual like. It was gloomy and damp. It was about five feet below the surface of the parking lot, that’s why. Thick dark bushes grew off the top of the retaining wall. A car door opened and shut and an old man’s hairless calves flashed between the branches. Devon lifted his cap and smoothed his bangs back.
Easy.
Squatting with the door between his knees, he examined the knobs of the back door and its bolt. The instructions had said he’d need two screw drivers: a standard and a Phillips. Devon stared. Sweat made his head itch so he took off his cap again and wiped his hair on the sleeve of his jacket. Sure, there were some different screws in the plates, but he didn’t need anything special to dismantle the lock. He didn’t even need a screwdriver. All he had to do was press the little button on the underside of the inside knob and the whole thing would come apart.
The instructions had said he’d need two screwdrivers: a standard and a Phillips.
Were the instructions wrong?
The sweat was springing off his neck and running under his collar.
The sweat was growing under the hairs above his lip.
Maybe the client didn’t know how to take apart a lock.
Maybe that was it.
The instructions weren’t wrong -- there was just a scratch. A mistake. He’d fix that and they’d be back on track. Back on track and one thing following the first thing like numbers, like connecting the dots, and the whole picture appearing at the end. Yes.
Devon dismantled the lock and laid the pieces on the floor. He opened his tool kit. On the shelf that swung back was a brand new lock with a brass bolt. He’d already removed and discarded the hard plastic packaging. Except for the two keys. They were still in their cellophane envelope. It only took a few minutes to put the thing together. The instructions said to leave one new key in the inside lock and the other one on top of the bookcase.
He stood up and brushed his knees and the back of his thighs.
* Now, take the treasure box out of the tool kit & put it under your arm where the folds of your jacket will hide it.
He did that.
* Pull the door to the apartment shut.
Okay.
* Leave the tool kit on the sidewalk, but take the old lock & walk left out of the door all the way to the end of the corridor. Notice the wheelchair ramp at the end. There is a trash can just around the corner to the right, next to the first gardenia bush. Discard the old lock in the trash can.
* Now, return to fetch the tool kit -- but first, quickly, on the wheelchair ramp, stuff the treasure box into the lower branches of the second gardenia bush.
* If you are interrupted & unable to accomplish this the first time, you must return to the tool kit, remove a screwdriver, & repeat the steps until you succeed.
Ah, but he did succeed and there was no need to try try again. Devon grabbed the tool kit with his index finger and swung it over his shoulder. He was leaving the scene. He was Devon Scott Free. He lifted his cap to an old lady with the thick cap of smooth silvery hair pushing a walker.
* If you meet a woman, smile & tip your hat, but don’t stop even if she speaks. Don’t stop. Nod & keep walking.
Yes, ma’am.
* * * *
The scissors had been a gift from her husband on the first anniversary of their marriage. Paper, of course, and scissors to go with. Hadn’t she made a joke about his wanting to snip away the loose end in their life together? Hadn’t he responded by saying he knew how she liked everything neat and clean? Small, light, perfectly balanced, they weren’t shears for cutting cloth, they were scissors for snipping -- precisely the sound they made when they bit through thread.
She was using them to cut paper.
Sewing scissors should never be used to cut paper as it dulls the blades, but she was sure her sewing days were over, therefore it was for the pure pleasure of holding them in her fingers and the articulate music she thought she could still hear that she used the fine instrument for any task at hand.
The first task this evening, now that she was home, was to cut down an old birthday card into a rectangle about two inches by four inches. Loving Birthday Wishes from Your Parents the card said. How many years? Thirty-two since the both of them had been alive. Although Mother could have sent it later, assuming Dad’s undying sentiment.
She hadn’t chosen the card for its message but for the aged look of the flowery illustration. Cut down and pasted carefully to the top of the treasure box, it looked like it had been there for years. Forever.
The unimportant contents of the treasure box were already spread across the bedspread. Odd buttons, odd earrings, a tiny pencil with its point neat. Loose ends. All of them. But in her home everything had a place.
A single scoop and the buttons disappeared into a tobacco tin along with hundreds and hundreds of others from three, perhaps four generations of sewing and mending. The tiny pencil slipped between the playing cards and Bridge tallies in the top drawer of the living room bureau. The treasure box itself became the new home for single earrings and other broken off bits. The former receptacle, the Dillard’s box, went in the trash.
She heated milk in a glass pitcher in the microwave. The numbers 1 - 0 - 0 were visible for only as long as she chose not to push the start button. She poured the milk into a Haviland teacup with matching saucer. It was early -- barely eight o’clock -- but she planned on taking her time in front of the TV with her tonic and her scissors, stripping away Marvel’s words quarter-inch by quarter-inch. Before the nurse arrived at nine, she would soften the strips in the microwave with a little water, then feed them to the disposal. The ruckus would begin, surely, in the early A.M., but she’d be all rested and put away. Why, with her hearing aids out, she slept like the dead.
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