"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.
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!"