She points above our heads with a bent finger. “Donny bought me that so I could watch my shows.”
Alice makes a tiny noise. I cross my legs and pat Alice’s knee, working up my most GIRLy smile. “What kind of shows do you like to watch?” I say.
“Game shows mostly. At night, I like Raymond. It’s still on, in repeats. The CSI shows. The close-ups, they show up real well on this new screen.”
CSI? Worries about rapists coming door-to-door? Is a hidden camera filming this as a joke? Immediately, I think of the truth in Kellan’s words: it’s like I’m forever being punked.
“I bet,” I say.
“You said your shrink wants you to hear nice things about Donny, not what shows I like.”
The thing shifts again, a quiver in my gut. The speed with which I could snap Yvonne’s chicken neck isn’t such a bad thing to think of, not when you’re just thinking about it. It would take the police a week, maybe more, to notice anything amiss. Even the postman knows Mrs. Jessup never collects her mail, just lets it pile up in rain-soaked wads in her mailbox, and if you don’t have a car, you’re basically a shut-in, so nobody’s out looking for you, and those Peapod bags near the front door mean food gets delivered, so she must barely leave the house, probably doesn’t leave the house, there isn’t even a pet, no animal to feed, at least not now that Donny’s gone, hardy-har-har …
“He must have had hobbies.” Alice breaks the silence.
My fingers tingle. I release my grip of the couch arm, letting blood flow back into my fingers. “Right. He liked gaming, isn’t that true?”
“Ack, Donny and his computer!” Yvonne’s eyes go someplace else for a second. “You couldn’t get him away from that thing. He hardly ever left his bedroom. Kept him out of trouble, I figured.”
Alice coughs. I slap her back a smidge harder than necessary.
Yvonne’s head bobs. “What was I saying?”
“You were talking about Donny’s hobbies,” I say. “Did he have other ones, besides gaming?”
“What did you call it? Gaming? He wasn’t playing games. He was working on his computer. That was his job! They paid him big bucks to work from home. He could work in his pajamas and fuzzy slippers, he’d say. It made me feel safe to have him here all day, not going off into Boston, riding the train and getting mugged, or worse. Now every noise I hear sets me on edge, and there’s been a lot of it, those good-for-nothing kids partying in the woods behind the soccer field on Saturday nights. Any one of them knows an old woman lives alone here, they could get it into their drunk minds to break in and steal my TV. You can see the screen flashing through the curtains from Washington Street at night. I told Donny that wasn’t a good spot for it, it’s too tempting for burglars, but Donny insisted. He was trusting.”
I don’t remind her that as a condition of Donny’s parole he probably couldn’t travel as far as Boston. Not that anyone was paying attention to the electronic breadcrumbs left by his monitoring bracelet. I also don’t tell her that Donny hadn’t worked a day since he left GameStop on disability for a back injury. I wonder what Yvonne lives on, cash-wise. Probably some dead husband’s pension. Then I remember not to care.
“Plus his sponsor liked him to stay close,” Yvonne adds.
“His sponsor?” Alice chimes in, before I can.
“Donny got into a little dope problem when he was younger. Typical teenage stuff,” Yvonne says, shaking a gnarled finger at us in turn. “Now don’t you go thinking he was a druggie.”
“Never,” I say. “You said he had a sponsor?”
“From a support group. Narcotics Anonymous. Said they met at the church. Guy would pop in and check on Donny once in a while. But he didn’t need to; Donny’d been clean for years,” she said.
I shift in my seat, barely able to stand it, remembering the joint between Donny’s thick fingers. Alice senses my distress.
“Are you sure he didn’t have to stay close to home because he wore a monitoring ankle bracelet?” Alice says sweetly.
My head snaps. Alice, I mouth.
“You mean the thing on his leg? That was some device his sponsor gave him so that Donny could be in touch immediately if he had the cravings. Some crazy techno-thing. Worked like my Medical Alert pendant. You know: ‘I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!’? Donny tried to explain how it worked, but I couldn’t make sense of it. All I know is that he couldn’t take it off. Whatever that guy said to him about drugs, it worked, because Donny was clean and sober, he was.”
“His … sponsor … must have been real broken up about what happened,” I say tentatively.
“Nah. Guy hadn’t been around in years. Guess he knew he’d done his job right,” Yvonne says.