Bad Move (3 page)

I clicked it once, then again, then a third time. "This thing doesn't work worth a shit," I said to Sarah through the glass. I tried a fourth time, without success, and now I could smell the unignited gas, wafting up into my face. I turned the dial back to the "off" position and went into the kitchen for a pack of matches. I had done this before - dropped a lit match into the bottom of the barbecue, then turned on the gas. Worked every bit as well as the red ignition button, when the red ignition button was working.

I struck a match and dropped it in, thinking that the gas that had been there a moment earlier would have dissipated by now. But when the air around the grills erupted with a loud "WHOOMPFF!" and took the hair off the back of my right hand, I understood that I'd been mistaken.

I jumped back so abruptly it caught Sarah's attention. She threw open the door. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," I said, shaking my hand and feeling like an idiot. "Man, that smarts."

The leftover propane was definitely gone now, so I tried a second time, dropping a lit match into the barbecue, then turning the dial. The flame caught with a smaller "whoompf" and I closed the lid.

"You want something for your hand?" Sarah asked.

"No, I think it's okay."

"Let me get something for it." She headed upstairs to our bathroom, where she keeps first-aid supplies. From there she called down, "I've got some aloe here somewhere!"

The front door opened and Paul walked in. "Hey," I said, standing in the front hall, holding my right hand with my left.

"Uhhn," he said, walking past me. Then he noticed that the back of my hand was bright red. "Whadja do?"

"Barbecue," I said.

"That button doesn't work," Paul said.

"I know."

"When's Mom getting home?"

"She's home. She's upstairs."

"Car's not here." He tipped his head in the direction of the driveway.

"I know. But don't say anything."

"About what?"

"That the car's not there. She doesn't know the car's not there."

Paul looked at me. "What happened? Did you smash it up or something? Because I was gonna ask her to drive me over to Hakim's after dinner."

"I didn't smash it up. I just moved it."

Now he looked at me harder. "You're doing something, aren't you?"

"Maybe."

"Don't do another one of your lame-ass things, Dad. Are you trying to teach her a lesson or something? Because, like, we're all tired of that kind of thing. What'd she do? Leave the keys in the car?"

"Not quite. But sort of. Just go into the kitchen and butter some hamburger buns."

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask if you were hungry. I asked you to butter -"

"I can't find the aloe!" Sarah shouted from the bathroom.

"Don't worry about it," I said, but the truth was, the back of my hand was really stinging. "Maybe we've got something else. Like, I don't know, isn't butter supposed to help?"

"Butter? Where'd you hear that?"

"I don't know. I just thought I had."

"I'm going to go out and get some aloe." She was coming down the stairs now, reaching into the closet for her jacket, grabbing her purse on the bench by the front door.

"Really, it'll be fine."

But Sarah wasn't listening. She was rooting around in her purse, looking for her keys.

"Where the hell are my ..." she muttered. She threw her purse back on the bench and strode into the kitchen. "I must have left them in here when I brought in the groceries ..."

I hadn't planned to make my point about the keys this quickly. Things were ahead of schedule because I'd burned my hand and Sarah was frantic to ease my suffering. It was starting to look as though my timing could have been a bit better.

"I wonder if I left them in the car," Sarah said, more to herself than anyone else. "Except I remember unlocking the door and -"

The bulb went off. You could see it in her eyes. She knew exactly where to find those keys. She strode confidently through the front hall to the front door, opened it, her eyes drawn to the lock.

Things did not turn out as she'd expected.

"Oh shit," she said. "I was sure I'd left them there. Did you leave the door unlocked when you went out?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"Then they have to be in the car." She took one step out of the house and froze. I couldn't see her face at that point, with her back to me and all. But I had a pretty good idea how she must have looked. Dumbfounded. Dumbstruck. Panicked.

"Zack," she said. Not screaming. More tentative. "Zack, Angie's not home yet, is she?"

"No," I said. As far as she knew, I was unaware that her Camry was no longer in the driveway. I came up behind her. "Listen," I said, shaking my hand at my side, trying to make the sting go away. "I should tell you -"

"Shit! Shit! Shit! You were right! Shit! I did it! It's all my fault. Jesus! Oh shit!"

She spun around and pushed by me on her way back into the house. She was headed straight for the kitchen, and I nearly had to run to catch up with her. She had the phone in her hand. "I'm going to have to call the police."

"Sarah." I didn't want her to make the call. The last thing I wanted was the 911 operator getting another false alarm from this address.

"The car's been stolen," she confessed to me. "Shit, I can't believe this. I don't even know what I had in there. What did we have in the car? We had that stuff, from the trip, those Triptiks from the auto club, and a bag of old clothes in the trunk I was going to drop off at the Goodwill, and -"

"Don't call," I said.

"- not that that's very valuable, but Jesus, we were going to give those to people who needed them, not some asshole who steals -"

"Put the phone down," I said. But she wasn't listening. She was about to punch in the number, so I reached down into my pocket, pulled out her set of keys, and set them on the kitchen counter where she could see them.

She stared at them a moment, not comprehending. If her car had been stolen, how could I have the keys?

"It's around the corner," I said, softly.

"I don't understand," Sarah said. "You were using the car?"

"It's around the corner," I repeated, whispering. "I moved it. Everything's fine."

Sarah replaced the receiver, her face red, her breathing rapid and shallow. "Why did you move my car around the corner? And why have you got my keys?"

"Okay, you see, what happened is ... you know how you thought you'd left your keys in the door?"

Sarah nodded.

"And you know how I've mentioned that to you before?"

Sarah nodded again, a bit more slowly this time.

"Anyway, when I came home, a couple of minutes after you ..."

"I'd just come in with the groceries," Sarah said slowly. "I stopped for them on my way home, even though I had a totally crappy day at the office, did five extra hours because Kozlowski booked off sick and we had the variety store thing, and picked up some things so we could have dinner."

This was not good. Sarah was developing a tone. That meant she was already ahead of me. She knew where this story was going and how it was going to end. But I decided to tell the rest of it anyway. "So when I came up the driveway, I saw that your keys were hanging from the door, you know, where anyone could find them. This is the thing. You know, it's lucky for you, really, when you think about it, lucky for you that it was me coming up the driveway then, and not some, you know, crazy axe murderer or car thief or something instead, because that's what could have happened. You know I've mentioned this before, about you leaving your keys in the lock, and all I was trying to do was make a point, you see, to help you, so that you wouldn't do this sort of thing again and expose us to any, I guess you could say, unnecessary risk."

Sarah was breathing much more slowly now. And just staring at me.

"So, you see, that's why I did what I did."

"Which was what, exactly?"

"I moved the car, just, you know, just a little ways down the street. Like, around the corner."

"Where I wouldn't be able to see it."

"Yes. That, that was the plan."

"And when I went to look for the keys, I wouldn't be able to find them, and then when I saw that the car was missing, I'd think it was stolen, and would have a fucking heart attack so that you could make a point, is that about right?"

"It was never my intention to give you a heart attack or anything. It was merely intended as a, well, as a lesson."

"A lesson."

I swallowed. "Yes."

"I'm finished with school, Zack. I graduated. I have a university degree. I'm an adult now, and the last person I need to take lessons from is you."

"I just felt that this might help you remember in the future."

"You know what else might have helped me remember in the future? You could have taken my keys out of the door, walked up to me, and said something like 'Here, honey, you left your keys in the door.' And I would have been grateful, and said, 'Thank you very much, next time I'll try to be more careful.' "

"Well, in fact, the first time you did it, that's exactly what I -"

"And here's the part that really gets me. I'm running around this house, trying to find my keys, so I can race over to the drugstore, to get you some fucking ointment so you can put it on your stupid hand where you burned it because you dropped a lit match into a gas-filled barbecue, which, if memory serves me, I have told you before never to do!"

Paul had been standing at the door to the kitchen the whole time, and now that there was a brief pause in the screaming, he decided it was safe to navigate his way between us so he could get to the fridge. "Nice going, Dad," he said. "It's the backpack thing all over again."

Before sending me out to fetch her car, Sarah said to me, "God, you are such an asshole."

You see what I mean. You're not the only one.

Chapter
3

Despite the priority I've always put on security, it's not like I always dreamed of making a life for ourselves in the suburbs. We liked living in the city on Crandall. It was a neighborhood rich in history and character. Most of the houses dated back to at least the 1940s, and there were always renovators' vans parked out front of someone's place, bringing a house up to code, tearing out old wiring and replacing it with new, blowing out an attic to make a guest room or den or plant-filled sunroom, gutting a first floor to put in a new kitchen, living and dining room. Narrow lanes separated one house from the other, and garages, often too small to house sport utility vehicles or too full of junk to park even a reasonably sized import, were tucked around back. You could walk to just about everything. The elementary school Paul and Angie attended was five blocks away, and when they moved on to high school they had a ten-block hike that didn't take them any more than fifteen minutes. At the end of our street, which intersected with a main thoroughfare, there was a deli, a used-book store and, a block away, a bookshop that sold nothing but SF (that's "science fiction" to non-regulars), a great Chinese place where Paul always had three of their egg rolls with the paper-thin batter just for starters, a Thai restaurant (nice to have nearby, but too spicy for me), and an Italian bakery where Sarah would often pick up those cannolis on the way home plus a loaf of the best bread I've ever eaten. There was also a diner that didn't appear to have changed in fifty years, with narrow booths, counter stools that spun, and cracked black-and-white-square linoleum. You could get a breakfast of three eggs, sausage, home fries, and toast for $4.99. There was a secondhand dress shop, a tattoo joint, a head shop, an independent pizza place, and a video store that was sure to have the latest titles directed by Woody Allen or John Sayles or John Waters or Edward Burns. There was Angelo's Fruit Market, where you probably paid a little more for seedless grapes or a head of romaine than you did at one of those massive chain grocery stores where the produce section has its own area code, but you'd never get to meet Angelo's daughter Marissa at a place like that, who at age four could ring up your order, make change, and say something like "Be sure to say hello to your lovely wife Sarah." I'd have paid ten dollars a bunch for bananas for the pleasure of her conversation.

The neighborhood didn't empty out through the day, not like the suburbs everyone left behind to work in the city. It wasn't a place people used only for sleeping. There were young families, old retirees, and everything in between. Every morning, Mrs. Hayden, whose husband died back in the sixties in a Pennsylvania mine cave-in, would walk past our front porch on her way to the corner, where she would buy her morning paper. We thought it was sweet when Mrs. Hayden said she started buying The Metropolitan in honor of Sarah, but it was a mixed blessing, because Mrs. Hayden would invariably stop when she saw Sarah out on the porch to point out grammatical, factual, and spelling errors she'd encountered in that week's various editions. And sometimes the crossword was all screwed up.

But Sarah was used to this sort of thing. She would explain patiently to Mrs. Hayden that newspapers must gather, interpret, and present thousands of facts in a very limited time, and what was amazing, to quote one of the paper's esteemed and now deceased editors, was not how much newspapers got wrong, but how much they managed to get right. And Mrs. Hayden would listen politely and say, "But why doesn't your political cartoonist know the difference between 'its' and 'it's'?" Sarah would then ask Mrs. Hayden if she would like a cup of tea or a glass of cold lemonade, and Mrs. Hayden would invariably say yes.