Brightleaf Page 15

  I push open the kitchen door, and there’s Mavis and Terry sitting side-by-side at the table, looking at Terry’s laptop. He’s explaining a parody news website, The Onion, to her, but Mavis does not seem amused.

  She looks up at me and says, “Now that’s a waste of time. There’s already a bunch of crazy news to be had in the real world. Like that old lady who dug up her dead twin sister from the backyard because she got lonely. Baby, if I ever get lonely, the skeleton of Aunt Minnie ain’t gonna cut it. And don’ forget that full-grown man who pretended to be autistic to get ladies to change his diapers.” Mavis lifts her eyebrows. She draws them on each day with eyebrow pencil, so when she lifts her eyebrows it’s real dramatic.

  I tell her I agree and open the fridge. “What’s this?”

  “Tuna Helper. Have you some. It’s real good.”

  “Hmmm. What was for dessert?”

  “Sarah Lee coffeecake. Saved you a piece.” Mavis walks across the kitchen and pulls a piece of pecan coffeecake from the breadbox. “Had to hide it.”

  Terry stands up, pulls out a chair for me, and then pours a glass of wine.

  “How’d your day go?” he asks.

  “It was really good,” I say, eyeing the wine. I pick a pecan off my plate and chew it. “Can I have some of that?”

  “I hate to tell you, Mary Beth, but this isn’t Cheerwine,” says Terry.

  “Oh, I thought it was. Please? Just a little in my coffee cup?”

  Mavis says, “MB, baby, you’re a grown woman. You don’t gotta be hidin your liquor in a mug that way.”

  I say I’m doing it for other reasons. “I can’t be having boarders walking into the kitchen seeing Terry and me drinking wine like we’re on some kind of date.”

  “Why not?” asks Terry. “What if we are?”

  Mavis looks at us, shaking her head, and says she’s going to bed. She takes a quart of buttermilk from the fridge and pours some into a plastic cup with a Captain D’s logo. She says, “I got me a bottle of Bailey’s up in the room. Nothing better before bed than a glass of Bailey’s and buttermilk.” She whistles for Floyd, and they go back to her room, where he’s got a dog bed in the corner.

  I turn to Terry. “Boarder romance is against the rules. If my boarders think I’m breaking the rules, next thing you know everybody will start having boyfriends and girlfriends all up in their rooms and causing all kinds of disturbances and problems.” Then I go into this long explanation of all the problems romances between boarders have caused me in the past, yelling and door-slamming being just the tip of the iceberg.

  “So you’re basically running a safe little boarding house. A place for priests and spinsters?” He smiles.

  I tell him that there is nothing wrong with that and to quit making something good and regular come off sounding disturbing.

  Terry laughs and says, “You said it, not me.”

  “It’s not like I’m forcing people to repress their carnal desires,” I say. “Nobody’s making anyone live here. Let them go off and live in a motel or a frat house for all I care. I’m just one woman on my own. I don’t have the ability to keep an eye on everyone. That rule saves me headaches.”

  “Sorry I teased you. But it seems so funny that you, the owner of the Rapturous Rest, cannot have a romantic evening. Even just sitting on a sofa watching TV with me scooched a little closer to you. It’s harmless.”

  “I know. Hey,” I say changing the subject. “I’ve got some news.”

  I hold out my coffee cup and wait for him to pour. He pulls a few bottles from the bag he brought home from the Wine Warehouse and asks if I’m a white or red person. I shrug. He picks a pinot noir.

  I take a sip and must have made a face. Terry says, “You don’t have to drink that, you know.”

  “I know, but I feel like I want to. To celebrate.”

  “What are we celebrating?”

  “Everything I found at the library the other day. Before your Trekkie convention.”

  “It’s worth celebrating?” says Terry. He holds up his glass for a toast, and I click my mug with his glass.

  First of all, I tell Terry about the yohimbe and how Ned had it in his blood.

  “Do they think that’s what killed him?”

  “They didn’t know as of a few days ago, but Detective Metz could get in big-time trouble if anyone knew he told me. He acted like it was top secret.”

  “Detective Metz is feeding you top secret info, huh?” He raises an eyebrow. “That may not be all he’s feeding you.”

  “Stop,” I say. “The detective understands how much I care about Ned.”

  “How understanding of him.” Terry gestures for me to carry on.

  I tell him how I found out yohimbe is the bark of a tree that grows in Africa. And how dangerous it can be if people consume too much. Then I tell him about the dark side. “You wouldn’t believe what all I learned about pagan rituals and that type thing, even zombie lore.”

  “My god!” Terry clutches his heart like he’s not taking me seriously. Then he says, “What are you saying? Ned was practicing voodoo or what?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. What I do know is unspeakable activities often revolve around that drug. Ned’s dying was not right.”

  “Unspeakable?” Terry makes a face like he’s not sure if I have my facts straight. Then he says, “I agree. Ned’s death wasn’t right.”

  “Also, the police found Ned’s journal, the one where he wrote his dreams. Apparently they thought it was a hoot. Like Ned was a few clowns short of a circus. Loco. But I think there must be something important in it.” I take a big gulp of wine. “I keep going back to Doyle and his prediction for Ned.”

  “As weird as Doyle is, he’s actually got talent,” says Terry. “He had me pegged.”

  “It’s not a talent. Grocery reading is inherent to the Stubb family,” I say.

  We both laugh. Then we get into this conversation about the difference between talents and giftings, inherited versus learned. It’s great, and I’ve managed to drink more wine than I planned.

  Then I end up saying something that’s been gnawing at me.

  “How long to do think Jeanine will stay?”

  Terry takes a deep breath. “Don’t know.”

  “What if she never leaves?”

  “She will.”

  “Do you think she hopes ya’ll will get back together?”

  He looks at me. “I hope she understands that’s not happening. I’m here because she’s driving me batshit. I mean, she opens my mail, calls my office four times a day, uses my razor, and sleeps in my shirts. She’s totally invaded my privacy. I told you before she moved in this wasn’t about love. I’m just helping her.”

  “Be right back,” I say.

  I run down the hall to the bathroom, forgetting my pipes aren’t fixed yet. I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited, though. He was talking about Jeanine when he said this wasn’t about love back when he called me to let me know Jeanine was moving in. This emboldens me to act on an idea. I run upstairs, quickly change clothes, then, stumble a little coming back down the steps. When I get back to the kitchen, I hold out my coffee cup again. I think I’m starting to like wine. Terry is looking at something on his laptop. When he looks up at me, he laughs.

  “You look really nice,” he says. “Nicer than I imagined.”

  “You imagined me?”

  “More than once,” he says closing his laptop.

  “Are you some kind of pervert?”

  Terry stands and walks slowly over to me, smiling. I am wearing the Star Trek stretchy suit he bought me at the convention. He puts his hands on either side of my waist and says, “Thank you. You look beautiful.”

  “I don’t look fat?”

  “You don’t look fat at all.”

  I hold up my face to his, clo
sing my eyes, thinking this is probably about the time that he should kiss me. He’s still holding my waist, and we’re standing so close I can smell the starch on his shirt. The seconds tick past, and he still hasn’t kissed me, so I open my eyes. Terry is standing there, staring at me in a way no person has ever looked at me in all my life. Like he’s considering my very molecules. Like he wishes he could inhale me right here, on the spot. And then I’d disappear. All my particles would be absorbed into Terry. And as far as I’m concerned, he can do that. Make me disappear. So I close my eyes again, expecting something to happen.

  “It’s getting late,” he says.

  Then he takes my face in his hands. He leans in and kisses my forehead.

  I open my eyes and look at him. I am so embarrassed I don’t know what to say. Was it my breath?

  “Time for bed,” he says.

  “Bed?”

  “Good night.” And he walks out of the kitchen.

  I stand there in the stretchy suit, feeling all at once like a goddess, and a goddess rejected. But mostly drunk.

  I down the wine in my cup and walk after him. “Hole it right there, buddy. You can’t jus walk away fromme in my Cap’n Janeway outfit.”

  “Your rules,” he says, shaking his head slowly. “Just following the rules concerning boarder romance. Sleep tight.” Terry smiles and walks upstairs. I hear his door softly close.

  I have a pressing reason to see Detective Metz, but I can’t remember what it is. I just know I need to get down to the police station. For some reason, I’m wearing a very short skirt, and I keep thinking that my underwear is showing in the front, so I keep pulling my skirt down. When I see Detective Metz, he looks at my skirt, and then I realize I wore it to get information out of him. He approaches me, staring at my legs, and says, “Want to get some wine, Ms. Green?” I’m sick of him looking at me like that way, so I say, “You have many other fish in your sea, Clark. I have no plans to be another notch on your stick, another charm on your bracelet, another apple in your basket that you chew down to the core and spit out.” Then Ned walks up. A certain light-headedness creeps into my being, accompanied by a blackness, and then I only hear voices.

  Detective Metz says, “Nedbolyth Hillman, what are you doing here?”

  Ned says, “Just taking a break from Evil Otto, man.”

  “How’d you get away?” Metz wants to know.

  “Spinach, man. It’ll save your life.”

  I open my eyes and see Ned. He’s looking down at me lying on the pavement. I grab his hand.

  Ned says, “It’s okay, Mary Beth. I came to warn you that Otto is coming and that you better run.”

  Then Ned runs.

  I’m confused until this smiling face comes bounding towards me. I freeze, terrified, and realize there’s a good chance I’ll be exterminated if I just lie here. So I make a subtle move to edge myself away from Evil Otto’s smiling approach. My limbs are heavy, like sandbags. Otto yells, “Intruder alert! Intruder alert!” So I force myself to move. I am suddenly zipping through passages with electric walls. Somehow I know that if I touch the walls, I’ll die. And now I’m running through Brightleaf; robots surround me blurting, “Get the humanoid.” I easily knock them down and continue making headway for Main Street and home. I run up the front steps, so happy to be safely home. I reach for the knob, and Otto materializes through my front door. “Intruder alert!”

  I’m doomed.

  My head is pounding when I wake up. I’m not good at drinking wine, I discover. Also, I do not recommend sleeping in a Star Trek stretchy suit. After peeling off the suit and kicking it to the floor, I lay in bed for another fifteen minutes. Eventually, I slide one foot out of bed and then the other, pull on my robe, and open my bedroom door. Someone at some point slid a note under my door. It says: Drink lots of water. Eat asparagus.

  I assume Terry put that there, and that he’s speaking of my jumbo headache. We might have a can of asparagus in the kitchen. We definitely don’t have any fresh. Anyway, I have other pain that needs attending that I doubt asparagus will make right. I hope to heck Terry won’t be downstairs when I get there. The clock says it’s ten, so there’s an excellent chance he left for work an hour ago. I peek through the curtains. His car is gone, but the light is blinding. I put on my sunglasses and grab some Aleve from the medicine cabinet, a towel and toiletries, and tiptoe down the steps and out to the carriage house.

  The carriage house was finished being newly plumbed yesterday afternoon. Just a few more days till the whole house will be complete with running water again. I haven’t had a shower in my own house in weeks. We’ve all been taking our showers a block away at the Y. I turn on the water and wait for it to warm up. I start thinking how Ned was the last person to shower here. His skin cells are probably still haunting the drain. I get a chill just thinking about it, and I know I need to make something right, somehow.

  Hot water streams over my face and rolls down my back like a hand of kindness spreading over me. I carefully massage shampoo into my scalp, thinking about Terry and Jeanine. For some reason, I equate my head pain specifically with Jeanine. Like if I’d never stolen Floyd, I wouldn’t feel this way. I start thinking about what Jeanine must be doing now. She’s probably waking up in Terry’s bed, sleeping in one of his wrinkly button-downs. I imagine her walking to his bathroom, removing her clothes, and taking a shower in Terry’s shower, washing her body with the same soap Terry uses. Now she’s getting dressed, walking into Terry’s kitchen, filling Terry’s coffeepot with water, and cutting on Terry’s TV, watching shows Terry would never watch. Jeanine unlocks the front door and looks out to see if anything touched the dog food on the front porch. Meanwhile, Terry is busy at work checking women’s breasts for lumps, a chore which should make any man happy. But he is not happy. He’s a stranger in his own home. His mail gets shuffled through, and his bed is slept in by a woman he doesn’t love. He’s needlessly suffered at the hands of Jeanine and become estranged from his own home because of me.

  The coffee maker in the living room is huffing and puffing, so I stop to grab a cup, nodding at two people playing checkers and watching TV. A man with a thin, straggly beard and another man with meticulously combed hair and a shaved face. Both have the appearance of being a little over-exposed to the elements. This is the way I like it: people finding a place for themselves, but sometimes I wish I were less friendly. About now I could use a little privacy. This is my first hangover, and I don’t want those homeless people knowing that I have this problem. They look up and smile and nod like they understand and welcome me to their world. All along I’ve thought of the people I reach out to as mostly crazy, and I’m the only one with the sound mind, able to offer a hand and some relief from this unforgiving planet. But now I see these people are not ignorant. They’ve seen people with hangovers their whole lives. I am them now. I am my mother.

  I head to the kitchen and push open the swinging door. A steaming plate of poached eggs over blanched asparagus drizzled with hollandaise sits on the table. There is also a small glass of tomato juice on ice, with a wedge of lemon resting on the rim. A newspaper is spread out to the front headlines reading, “Death of Local Man Continues to Stump Investigators.” A hot pink sticky note is affixed to the front of the paper: Eat up. Talk later—Terry

  I sit down, grabbing the sides of the table, and ease my way into my seat. If my head didn’t hurt so bad, I’d be amazed at this beautiful dish of food sitting before me. But being amazed takes too much energy. I take a sip of the juice and shiver as coldness flows down my throat. The eggs and asparagus taste like love, pure and simple. The eggs are soft in the middle, the way I like them. I can’t say how they got here, but I feel comforted like an infant who’s cried all night and now breathes steadily into a peaceful sleep. The eggs slowly absorb the throbbing in my head.

  I study the photograph of Ned in the paper before me. He’s all sprawled out on a blan
ket at some outdoor concert and smiling. He was sweet. I start remembering everything I learned at the library and my own dream. Last night I dreamt Ned tried to help me get away from Evil Otto. There was something about my dream. Why couldn’t you have listened to Doyle? I ask the smiling picture.

  “Detective Metz, speaking.”

  “Hey, Detective, it’s Mary Beth Green,” I say, holding the phone in one hand and my notebook in the other.

  “It’s Clark. How can I help you?”

  “Um, Clark, I’ve been doing a little research, and I think I might be able to help in your investigation. I mean, I know I’m no detective, and it probably won’t mean much to you, but I thought I’d tell you what all I’ve learned. Do you have some free time? When you’re off-duty?” I figure if he’s off-duty he’ll be more willing to collaborate with me. I can tell him what I learned, and he can tell me what he knows without doing it in an official capacity.

  “Are you asking me out, Ms. Green?”

  I hate to have to deal with this man. I say, “It’s only about Ned.”

  “Ms. Green, if you have information you can tell me now.”

  “I can’t say what I want to say over the phone because it might sound far-fetched. I want you to take me seriously.”

  “Whatever. Yes, Ms. Green, we can meet for lunch. I’ll have thirty minutes at one. I’ll meet you at the Salad Station.”

  Even though I despise the Salad Station, I agree to meet him there. The Salad Station is a help-yourself buffet across the street from the police station. The lettuce is often wilted, and there is hardly anything appealing to put on it. It’s not like it’s a regular salad bar. The buffet is loaded with gelatins, tomato aspics, fake crab salad, tuna salad, chicken salad, egg salad, and fruit in heavy syrup. There’s usually a congealed sheen over certain salads that I’m positive are teeming with E. coli. Brightleaf’s idea of eating light.