Bad Move (2 page)

While I waited to see whether Sarah would remember to retrieve her keys, Earl, the guy who lives across from Trixie's, came around the corner in his pickup. He backed into his driveway, got out, opened the garage, and started unloading bags of potting soil from the back of the pickup. When he spotted me leaning against the Camry, I waved, and he nodded back, but not all that invitingly. It had been my intention to stroll over and shoot the breeze, but now I held back. Then Earl looked over his shoulder, I guess to see whether I was still watching him. When he saw that I was, I suddenly felt awkward. So I said, "Hey."

He nodded again, kind of shrugged, and when he didn't turn away, I crossed the street.

"Hey, Zack," he said. Earl wasn't big on conversation. You had to drag it out of him. His head, which he shaved, gleamed with sweat, and his T-shirt was damp. The end of a cigarette was stuck between his lips. Earl was never without a smoke.

I shrugged. "Hey. How's things?"

He waved his hand dismissively. "Keeping busy."

We were both quiet for a moment. I broke the silence with a question of startling brilliance.

"Back from the garden center again?"

Earl smiled. "Oh yeah. Never a day I'm not down there." He paused. "So how goes the writing?"

"Not a bad day." I think Earl had a hard time understanding how I can make a living sitting inside the house all day, not getting my hands dirty. I said, "Walked down to the corner, sent off my property taxes."

Earl looked off in the direction of the mailbox. "How's the house?"

I shook my head. "I've gone through three tubes of caulking on our bedroom window. I don't even bother to put the ladder away. Every time it rains, a little more water gets in."

"You complain?"

"I've phoned the developer. They say they're going to come, nothing happens. I'm gonna drop by the office; maybe appearing in person will make a difference. You hear that thing on the news?"

"What?"

"Guy comes into a variety store, shoots the owner right in the head, right in front of his wife."

"Jesus. Here?" He tossed his butt onto his driveway, reached through the front window of his truck to grab a pack up on the dash.

"No. Downtown. Sarah phoned from work, she'd sent a reporter and a photographer out to cover it, was telling me about it, then I heard it on the radio."

"Jesus," Earl said again. "I'd never live downtown." He stuck a new cigarette into his mouth, lit it, took a long drag, then blew the smoke out through his nose. Earl's history, as he'd explained it to me, involved living out on the East Coast, a bit of time out west. He was divorced, had no children, and seemed an unlikely candidate for the neighborhood, rattling around in a big, new house all by himself. But he'd told me he felt he needed to put some roots down somewhere, and a new subdivision, where a lot of people could use his talents as a landscaper, seemed as good a place as any to make a living. Paul had called on him several times for advice, although "pestered" might be a better word. Earl had been reluctant at first to let my son into his world, but finally, maybe just to get Paul off his back, he'd agreed to give him a few tips, and a couple of times on weekends I'd noticed Earl and Paul shirtless and sweating under a cloudless sky in the far corner of our yard, digging holes and planting small bushes.

"Well, we've been that route," I said. "Living downtown. It was a worry, especially with kids, you know? Teenagers? There's so much they can get into in the city."

"Not that they can't get into trouble out here," Earl said. "You know kids, they'll find trouble wherever they are. Who's that clown?"

Earl had been looking down the opposite side of the street, a couple of houses past Trixie's. It was a guy going door to door. Tall and thin, short gray hair, about fifty I figured, armed with a clipboard. He was too casually dressed, in jeans and hiking boots and a plaid shirt, to be anyone official.

"Beats me," I said. He had drawn a woman to the door, who listened, hanging her head out while she held the door open a foot, while he went through some spiel.

"I'm betting driveway resurfacing," Earl said. "Every other day, some asshole wants to resurface my driveway."

The woman was shaking her head no, and the man took it well, nodding politely. He was moving on to the next house when he saw me and Earl. "Hey," he said, waving.

"Or ducts," Earl said to me. "Maybe he want to clean your ducts."

"I don't have any ducks," I said. "I don't even have chickens."

"You guys got a moment?" the man said, only a couple of yards away now. We shrugged, sure.

"My name's Samuel Spender," he said. "I'm with the Willow Creek Preservation Society."

"Uh-huh," I said. I didn't give my name. Earl didn't give his either.

"I'm trying to collect names for a petition," Spender said. "To protect the creek."

"From what?" I asked.

"From development. Willow Creek is an environmentally sensitive area and one of the last unspoiled areas in Oakwood, but there are plans to build hundreds of homes backing right onto the creek, which will threaten a variety of species, including the Mississauga salamander."

"Who?" It was the first word from Earl.

"Here's a picture," Spender said, releasing a snapshot from under the clip of his clipboard. We looked at a four-legged, pale green creature with oversized eyes resting in a person's hand.

"Looks like a lizard," Earl said.

"It's a salamander," Spender said. "Very rare. And threatened by greedy developers who value profit over the environment." He thrust the clipboard toward us, which held a lined sheet with about twenty signatures on it. There were other pages underneath, but whether they were blank or filled with names I couldn't tell.

I hate signing petitions, even for things I believe in. But when it's an issue where I don't feel fully informed, I have a standard dodge. I said to Spender, "Do you have any literature you could leave me, so I could read up on it?"

"Yeah," said Earl. "Likewise."

Something died in Spender's eyes. He knew he'd lost us. "Just read The Suburban. They've been following the story pretty closely. The big-city papers, like The Metropolitan, they don't give a shit because they're owned by the same corporations that put up the money for these developments."

This didn't seem like a good time to mention where my wife worked. Spender thanked us for our time and turned back for the sidewalk to resume door-knocking. "That house?" I said, pointing. "That's mine, so you can skip it."

"Salamanders," Earl said to me quietly. "Think you can barbecue them?"

"They'd probably slip through the grills," I said.

We chatted a moment longer. I told Earl, even though he hadn't asked, that Paul intended to pursue his interest in landscaping, maybe go to college someday for landscape design. It was, for me, a surprising development. Most kids his age wanted to design video games.

"He's good," Earl offered. "He doesn't mind getting his hands in the dirt."

"It's not my thing. Writers, you put a shovel in our hands, we start whining about blisters after five minutes."

It was looking very much as though Sarah was not going to come to our front door and retrieve her keys. I felt I'd given her long enough to redeem herself, told Earl I had to go, and headed back to our house. On my way in, I took Sarah's set of keys from the lock and slid them into the front pocket of my jeans. I could hear her in the kitchen, and called out, "Hey!"

"Back here," she said. It was a good-sized kitchen, with a bay window looking out onto the backyard, lots of counter space, and a dark spot in the ceiling above the double sink, where water from our improperly tiled shower stall had dripped down over several months. I tried not to look up at it too often; it made me crazy. I had to go over to the home sales office and make a fuss.

My earlier theory that Sarah had come through the front door weighed down with groceries was right. Empty bags littered the top of the kitchen counter. Some carrots and milk still had to be put into the fridge.

I turned to the fridge, which I seemed to recall was white, but was covered with so many magnets and pizza coupons and snapshots that it was hard to be sure. A large part of the door was taken up by a calendar that mapped out our lives a month at a time. It was on here that we recorded dental appointments, Sarah's shifts, lunches with my editor, dinners with friends, all in erasable marker. I noticed, just before I opened the door to put away the carrots and milk, that we were to attend an interview with Paul's science teacher in a little over a week. And a couple of days after that, Sarah's birthday was indicated with stars and exclamation points, drawn by her.

"Hey," she said.

"I heard about the thing, the shooting, on the radio," I said.

Sarah shrugged. "They're gonna take one story for the front, do a color piece for the front of Metro."

"Uh-huh." I had my hand in my pocket, running my fingers over the keys. "You got anything left out in the car that needs to come in?"

"Nope, that's it, I'm done. I shopped, you can cook. I've had it." She'd worked nearly a double shift in the newsroom.

"What am I making?"

"There's chicken, I got some burgers, salad, whatever. I'm beat."

This particular week, Sarah was on a shift where she had to be at the office by six, which meant she was up by half past four in the morning.

"Did you bring in your briefcase?" I thought mentioning the items she typically carries into the house with her might help jog her memory about the keys.

"I got it," she said, sitting down on one of the kitchen chairs and taking off her shoes.

"You wanna beer?" I asked.

"If it comes with a foot massage," Sarah said. I grabbed one from the fridge, twisted off the cap, and handed it to her.

"Massage to follow," I said. "I got something I gotta do. Back in a minute."

Sarah didn't bother to ask what, and took a sip of the beer instead. I slipped out the front door, used her keys to unlock her Camry, and backed out of the drive. I didn't need to go very far. Just down to the end of Chancery, then a right onto Lilac, just down from the mailbox. Far enough around the corner that the car wouldn't be visible from our place, even if you went and stood at the end of the driveway. I pulled it up close to the curb, made sure all the windows were up, locked it, and jogged back to the house, passing Spender, Defender of the Salamander, on the way. Sarah was still at the kitchen table when I came in.

"Where'd you go?"

"I bought some printer paper today and left it in the car," I lied. "And then I saw Earl and got talking to him."

Sarah nodded. She didn't know the neighbors as well as I did, and she'd never taken to Earl.

Her mind was still back at the office. "So this guy, the clerk, his wife's right there when he gets it."

"The variety store thing. Yeah, awful."

"Sometimes you're right."

"Huh?"

"Moving out here. The last thing I wanted to do was move out of the city, but I'll admit I'm not looking over my shoulder out here like we did on Crandall. There's not addicts leaving their needles all over the slides at the playground, girls giving blowjobs in the backs of cars for fifty bucks, no guy waving his dick at you on the corner -"

"I remember him. What was his name?"

"Terry? Something like that? I always just thought of him as Mr. Dickout."

"I ran into him once at the Italian bakery. He was buying some cannolis. Think there's a connection?"

"God, cannolis," Sarah said, taking another swig from the beer bottle. "I looked, on the way home, at the grocery store, for some. They don't have them out here. No cannolis. It's so hard to find anything like that. Twinkies, those I can get. You want white bread, I can get that for you."

"I know," I said, quietly.

"And there's no place to get decent Chinese," Sarah said. "The kids are always complaining that there's no decent Chinese out here, or Indian. The other night, Paul says he'd kill for a samosa. What happened to my foot massage?"

I was unwrapping some lean ground beef, not thinking about meal preparation so much as the plan I had put into motion. Later that night, maybe, or the next morning, when she got ready to leave for work, there'd be the payoff. At some point Sarah would happen to look out the window, or step out into the night air, and it would dawn on her that her car had gone AWOL. She'd dismiss it at first, figure I or our seventeen-year-old daughter Angie had it, and then she'd realize that I was in my study rereading what I had written that day, and that Angie was up in her room, or fighting with her brother, and she'd take a sudden, cold breath and say quietly, "Oh no."

And right about then she'd picture her car keys in the door, and it would all come together for her.

"I can form burgers, or I can rub your feet," I said. "Or I could do both, but I think I can speak for the rest of the family when I say the burgers should be done first."

There's a set of sliding glass doors that open out from the kitchen to our small backyard deck. I went out there and opened the lid of the barbecue, unscrewed the tap atop the propane tank nestled underneath, and turned the dial for the grill's right side. When I heard the gas seeping in, I pressed the red button on the front panel to ignite the gas.