Bad People (26 page)

As Luke approached Ardiss’s front door, she came out—almost as if she had been watching and waiting for him to show up. She slammed the screen door behind her, pulled a cigarette out of the pack in her hand, and rushed up to Luke. “Walk with me,” she said, barely looking at him.

“Tell me what this is,” he said without moving.

“I want to get out of here. That fucking bitch,” she said, certainly referring to Heather, the roommate. She lit her cigarette and sucked down smoke.

“What did you do this time,” said Luke.

She looked away, blew smoke hard out of her nose. An inelegant wasteful habit that she was indulging more frequently now that they spent less time together. Last time he had come over he had refused to have intercourse with her until she washed her hair, which smelling like tobacco filth. She had done it, and even cried a little, but evidently the lesson was not strong enough to take. Here she was smoking in front of him, not two weeks later. Ridiculous. He pretended to ignore it—probably a plea for attention.

She was wearing baggy pink sweats and wife-beater. So besides smoking she was dressing more like trash too, not caring how she made him look, standing with her on a public street. She was falling apart. “I didn’t
do
anything,” she snapped. “Why do you assume it is always me.”

“From her point of view it always is. If you want to get along with her, you need to see the world as she sees it.”

“I don’t want to have a cunt-eye’s view of the world.”

Coarse. She was angrier than he’d ever seen her.

They heard the screen door again. Ardiss turned back toward the triplex. The roommate had come out. She had her shoulder bag with her. “Did you take it off?” Ardiss yelled at her.

The girl nodded and shrunk away, giving Ardiss as wide a birth on the sidewalk as possible. Her face was red and intimidated. Ardiss glared at her, knitting her brow and smoking until the roommate turned the corner. The girl was wearing a black skirt, black stockings and boots, and a red top. “She looks like the front window of Hot Topic exploded on her,” Ardiss said to Luke.

“Tell me what happened.”

“She took my bra, my only clean bra.”

“And you called me for that.”

“Yes,” she said, without remorse.

He half-turned, was fuming inside, and almost walked away. He made himself stop. He needed a moment to analyze this and figure out what it meant. He didn’t know quite how to get to that moment so he turned around and hugged her.

“Oh!” she said, startled, and hugged him back. He ran his hand along her spine, thinking. She wasn’t wearing a bra. But if her roommate had taken here only clean one, the solution was obvious, either she needed to make her roommate afraid to touch her stuff, or, if she couldn’t do that, and instead planned to knuckle under, she needed to wash her bras more often.

Something told him he couldn’t say this to her. Logic never worked with Ardiss. He had learned that the hard way. Maybe he could teach her with subtlety. But he didn’t want her to go too heavy at the roommate either; that could make trouble for him. If the two girls fell out, Ardiss would be looking to move back in with him, or at least he would have to put up with Ardiss’s renewed roommate search traumas. No, he had to find a way to keep them together.

“She wants to be like you,” said Luke.

Ardiss buried her chin in the middle of his chest. “That’s stupid. Why would she do that?” Her voice was small and childish; she wanted to encourage his flattery.

“No it isn’t. You’re cool. You dress cool. She doesn’t have your eye for clothes and hairstyles,” he said, then added, “And make-up.” Ardiss always went on and on about brands and types of make-up and skin cream and things like that. Connie, to his lasting relief, never did.

She almost cooed. “I just want to be left alone,” she said in a pout. “Why won’t she leave me alone?”

“She can’t. She’s drawn in.

“I can’t be responsible for her. I don’t want to be her friend; we are just roommates.”

“You only have to give her a little. You’d be surprised how little. She only needs a little part of you to be happy. Show her a little attention, and she will be walking on air. If she knows you hate her she will be all the more drawn to trying to please you. If you don’t want that, then give her a moment. Give her a full moment.”

He was speaking from experience, and thinking of her, but he expected her not to catch that.

“I don’t hate her; she’s just annoying.”

She disappointed him. “I understand,” said Luke. “Like the way you annoy me.”

Her face muscles worked, like she might cry, but she fought that, turned it into an attempt at an expression of menace. “Fuck you!” she said. “I hate you.”

She raised her closed hand and he caught her easily by the wrist. “Come on now. No you don’t. And anyway you know I’m kidding. I was making a joke, you know that.”

“No you aren’t. You may be
lying
, but the one thing I know you
aren’t
doing is making a joke. You’ve never made a joke in your life.”

“That isn’t true.” He found himself gripping her wrist a little harder.

“It is. She looked at him, blinking as if reacting to something entirely new. “You know I don’t think I ever realized it until now. Ohmigod. You have no sense of humor, Luke. You have no sense of humor at all!”

“Yes I do.”

“I can’t even
imagine
your laugh. I’ve never heard you laugh.”

“Stop it.”

She tried to pull her wrist away but he held it tight, like a cuff he had lost the key to. “Ow!”

“Be quiet.”

“You want me to scream? I’ll scream.”

“No you won’t.”

She opened her mouth which started to birth a sound. He released her, flung her wrist away. “All right!” He hated her.

“Your mad at me,” she said.

“You’re saying stupid things.”

“You need to channel that energy, like into having sex.”

She always brought it there.

“Not this time,” he said.

“Lets go inside,” she said. “Let’s fuck.”

“No, I have a girlfriend,” he said. “I’ve told you.”

“So what? You knew me first.”

That was true, and as often as not Luke let Ardiss win these little battles, and they went to bed, but not today. He steeled himself. This was a body game. His mind over the crushing erection in his jeans that had grown of manhandling Ardiss.

She made him hard when he didn’t want to be hard, and she had to pay for that. “No,” he said. Not now. He turned his back on her.

At his first step he felt a tug at the back of his shirt. She’d grabbed him, and was pulling. He whipped around and pushed her, one hand on her breastplate, not hard, but enough to knock her backward. Her pink-sweated butt landed on the grass. Her mouth fell open.

“I don’t want you,” he said. “Find someone else.” He turned and started walking away.

“Stop!” she yelled.

He glanced back enough to see with his peripheral vision that she had flipped over onto her knees. “Don’t leave!”

He ignored her. Let her chase him if she wanted.

But she didn’t.

Halfway down the block he heard her slam the screen door, but didn’t hear the other door close. She was leaving that open of course, just in case he changed his mind, living in hope he would come back.

Chapter 29: Connie

Connie got up at four-thirty and made a French press of coffee. Accomplishing that had been hard, leaving her with a deficit of will with which to slice a grapefruit. Her impulse control was going to hell.

She toasted pieces of sourdough instead, but didn’t eat them; her stomach rebelled against the hour. Luke had left at three, as she insisted. The night had been warm and Connie noticed now that Luke had left his jacket draped over one of her kitchen chairs. She took it and put it in the coat closet in the entryway, then returned to the kitchen.

She had never been a person who slept much, though neither had she initially been a morning person. Through the course of her marriage, the business, motherhood, she had transformed into one. However, the transformation proved temporary. In the past few months she’d slept later and later, often rising as late as 7:30 on weekdays and an hour or so even later than that on weekends when Luke sometimes stayed over.

Her late rising meant she kept missing Stephen-David in the mornings. He had, in the wake of his father’s death, developed new fitful sleeping habits of his own. Like any teen-ager he started slow in the mornings, and that trend worsened after the murder, but in recent weeks it had reversed itself. His first class started at eight, but he’d been departing much earlier than he needed to, leaving only the evidence of coffee and the wrap of a microwave breakfast burrito behind him. Connie realized Stephen-David didn’t like Luke. One morning when she had risen at six, sure to catch her son she thought, and
still
found him already gone, she decided to force herself to return to her old habit of rising at four-thirty.

After an initial shock at the alarm’s sounding, and a self-indulgent urge to hit the snooze bar, she had made her way out of bed and into coffee-mode. This had always been her and Robb’s time to set up the day. Even through what she now knew as his period of betrayal: his infidelity, his stealing from the business, he had kept these hours with her, never giving any indication that everything had changed.

Sitting now at the condo kitchen counter in her sweats, her bare feet curled around the metal bar of the stool, this thought chilled her. She had never known Robb.

Now she was turning her son into another kind of stranger. A terrible stage of life for a son to lose a father; if only all this had happened even a few years later. Now it threatened to derail Stephen-David whole life. How would he do next year in college. Would he even go?

There was some money for that, thankfully, though Robb had looted most everything else, but she hadn’t talked to Stephen-David about his college search enough. Robb was more up on those things, having gone to a first-class school himself, so they had planned on him taking the reins on their son’s college search.

Nevertheless, she knew that, with Stephen-David last year of high school already started, he was woefully late getting going. Some of his peers had started their college searches in earnest two years ago—or even sooner.

She drank coffee, and once or twice thought about showering, but waited, figuring that she would surely miss Stephen-David if she did. At five-thirty she almost decided to go wake him up, but he chose that moment to emerge. He came into the kitchen still glazed over, seemingly not noticing her as he headed for the coffee pot, stopping only when he realized it already had some coffee in it, he turned to her, surprised. “Morning,” he mumbled.

“Good morning. Is that enough coffee for you? I can make another pot.”

“This is fine,” he said.

He slumped in a chair, his neck losing the battle to hold his head fully straight. “You’re up early,” he said.

“I thought it was time.”

“Huh?”

“Time we got back to normal.”

“Now? What’s the point?”

“
What’s the point
? What do you mean, ‘what’s the point’?”

He shrugged. “It’s early,” he said. She didn’t know what way he meant that either.

“Everything okay in school?”

“Sure.” He looked sideways, either indicating he wondered what she had heard, or—heartbreakingly—he might be wondering why she cared. He went to the refrigeration and looked through it.

“Sit down, I’ll fix waffles.”

He looked at her, then opened the freezer, and pulled out the red box. He shook it. Empty. “We’re out,” he said. He put the empty box back.

“Don’t do that, throw it out please. That way I’ll
know
we are out next time.”

“I was just looking for juice, anyway,” he said. He tossed the empty box on the counter. “There’s orange, grapefruit, and cranberry.”

“I saw. I changed my mind,” he leaned on the counter and continued to sip away at his coffee.

“Sit down at the table at least,” she told him.

He did, pulling out a chair and flopping down in a huff better fitting a seven-year-old than a seventeen-year-old.

“Why did you do that?”

“What?”

She gestured at his chair.

“I didn’t expect you to be up is all. I’m used to my routine in the morning. I’m not a morning person, and I don’t get verbal until I’ve had two of these,” he raised his coffee cup.

“This is new.”

“Not really.”

“Don’t be smart.”

“I’m not trying to be anything.”

“I want to talk to you about that. What are your plans.”

“I haven’t made any. For when?”

“For school for one. For college. What are you thinking?”