“Are you all right, dear?” Ema asked as the server arrived with Gregory’s toast and salad. Grains and green vegetables were easiest to digest.
“Why?” he said.
Ema cocked her head, teased-out blonde curls bouncing on the shoulder of her pale and frilly summer frock.
“You looked deep in thought.”
Gregory pushed his plate of half-eaten toast aside. “Exactly, Ema, I was thinking. Until you interrupted.”
“I’m sorry,” Ema apologized. “Was it about work?”
“What else?” he lied. “I’ve put in forty hours already this week.” Another lie.
Ema forked up a gooey lump of poultry ovum. “I’m glad to see you so absorbed in life, dear. Plus you’re looking less thin and frail.”
Gregory’s eyes narrowed. Frail? I’ve never looked frail. Ema’s constant sniping about his pallor and thinness had driven Gregory to a health club membership four months back, but the stink of bodies turned his stomach and the music hurt his head. That’s when he’d invested in a top-of-the-line Bowflex home gym. He could run through a full workout in under a half hour and practice his faces at the same time.
He said, “I’ve been exercising.”
“Wonderful!” Ema chirped. “How often do you work out? Do you have a specific regimen?”
“Not really.”
“Do you exercise to a DVD or anything like that?”
“No.”
“You should drop in on Dr Szekely. She’d love to see how you—”
“Your nattering is driving me mad, Ema.”
Ema swallowed hard, looked away. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice breaking. “I only want for you to—”
“I’m teasing, dear,” Gregory said. “Can’t you tell by now when I’m teasing?”
“Sometimes you look, I don’t know … serious, I guess. Even when you’re teasing.”
“If you can’t tell whether I’m teasing, then I’m teasing.”
“I love you so much,” Ema said. “I want you to be healthy and strong.”
“I am healthy, Ema,” Gregory said. “I just said I’ve been working out. Didn’t you listen?”
Ema’s eyes fell to her lap, telling Gregory he’d failed to keep all the anger from his voice. He sighed internally and reached for his sister’s plump fingertips, feeling microbes crawl from her flesh to his. But the gesture – I Love You and I’m Sorry – was important. Gregory found his most sincere face – This is the Best Insurance You Can Buy – and looked Ema in her green eyes.
“I’m so glad I have you,” he said. “So very happy.” He followed with three beats of I Have a Powerful New Detergent.
A newly buoyant Ema carried the conversation for twenty minutes, Gregory’s contributions being murmurs of assent and smiling in all the right places. He averted his eyes when a fork moved toward Ema’s mouth, looking instead at the ubiquitous pendant hanging from her neck, a shimmering pearlescent orb the size of a robin’s egg, folk craft from Eastern Europe. She had other baubles on her wrists, jangly things. The woman spent her life watching shopping channels and soap operas and police shows. Gregory had started wishing she’d get a full-time job or some kind of hobby.
“How are the kitties?” Ema asked, returning to a recent topic, a population of stray cats in Gregory’s neighborhood.
“Still howling all night. It’s breeding season.”
Ema paused in chewing, the fork poised beside her mouth. “A friend of mine had a problem with stray cats. She caught them in what’s called a humane trap and—”
“What the hell is a humane trap?”
“It’s like a box made of wire mesh. The cat goes in and a door springs shut. Then off to the shelter.”
“I’ll consider it,” Gregory said, thinking a shotgun would be easier.
Ema’s fat breasts wobbled below the pendant as she turned to wave for the check, the ritual over for another few days. Ema picked up her purse, a beaded concoction the size of a bowler’s bag. Gregory watched her pudgy pink fingers scrabble for her wallet.
“It’s my turn to pick up the check, right, dear?” she said, staring into the junkyard of her purse.
“I’ll get it, Ema.” I don’t have twenty minutes for you to find your wallet. Though both had money from their inheritance, Gregory made additional money writing code for a company specializing in industrial controls. Ema had a part-time income doodling out chatty little women-directed newsletters for an HMO and insurance firm, and Gregory figured she did it while watching television.
The pair stood and Ema hugged Gregory so tight he smelled her body odor beneath the cloying perfume. After kissing his cheek – Gregory hiding the grimace – Ema waddled out to the parking lot.
Gregory went to the restroom and washed his hands for two minutes before opening the door with his elbow and striding toward the entrance. An elderly woman pushed the front door open and he jumped past her, drawing a sharp glance for the incivility, but he’d not had to touch anything.
On scene at the C-store until three a.m., I spent Sunday in busywork trying to push the attempted robbery from my mind. Sometimes it even worked for a couple minutes. When Monday arrived, I slept till nine, then walked the hundred paces from my stilt-standing home to the Dauphin Island beach, interrupting a flock of gulls and sending them into the cloudless sky.
I ran the sugar-white strand for three miles and returned, launching into the Gulf and swimming a leisurely down-and-back mile. Then I had breakfast on my deck – cheese grits and andouille sausage wrapped in a plate-sized flour tortilla, a grittito, in my parlance – and drank a pot of industrial-strength coffee with chicory. I felt steady again, Saturday night’s memories fading away. I climbed into a beater truck painted gray with a roller, and headed thirty miles north to Mobile, Alabama.
Almost summer, the coastal heat was nearing typical blast-furnace intensity, so walking into the chilled air of the Mobile Police Department felt delicious. Several colleagues called out as I walked the hall to the stairs.
“Hey, Carson, I need a bag of pretzels.”
“Ryder … now that I know you moonlight at a C-store, how’s about bringing in the Krispy Kremes?”
“Yo, CR … I need fifteen bucks on pump three.”
They were congratulating me, but being cops wouldn’t use those words. The accolades were in their grins. Or the thumbs up after the joke. I climbed the steps to the homicide department. Harry was on paid leave for three days, standard procedure for a cop involved in a killing.
“Carson!” a voice called. My supervisor, Lieutenant Tom Mason, stood at his office door, lean as a teenager though in his mid-fifties, wearing his cream Stetson and cowboy boots. Tom hailed from piney-woods Bama, but he always looked straight from a cattle drive across the plains. I banked in his direction.
“Chief Baggs wants to see you, Carson.”
I winced. “Why?”
“Probably something to do with last night. Make nice, Carson,” Tom said pointedly. “He’s the chief, right?”
I went upstairs to a hushed and carpeted row of offices inhabited by the brass hats of the department, crossing the floor with