“As an investigative strategy, it would be advisable to conduct knock-and-talks with as many of the homes in Hopeton as possible,” he wrote. “In particular, priority for this canvas should be the Matthews Drive/Dennis Drive axis.”
Matthews Road was a quiet, rural street, mostly filled with one-story houses on medium-sized lots. It was a good place to raise a family, which might have been why Tonya Bundick chose to return to her childhood home there, after her mother died. She and Charlie lived in a white ranch house on Matthews. About five houses down from the intersection of Dennis Drive.
CHAPTER 9
CHARLIE AND TONYA
CHARLIE HAD SEEN HER BEFORE. Since his ex-girlfriend had moved out with her kids, he’d been spending more evenings at Shuckers, and he’d noticed Tonya. More particularly, he’d noticed the tattoo on her lower back, and how good she looked when she danced, and he’d come to the conclusion that she was out of his league. Thus, he avoided her on purpose. Women like that, he always ended up making himself a fool in front of, and it seemed safer to stay away entirely.
But they had a pair of mutual friends, Jay Floyd and his girlfriend, Danielle, and on this night, the night Charlie had an eight ball of cocaine in his pocket and a vague plan to kill himself, Danielle came over and said Tonya wanted to know why Charlie never said more than three words to her. She’d seen him looking. “Are you interested or not?” Danielle, as Tonya’s emissary, asked Charlie.
Later that night, she came over again. “Tonya wants you to have her number in your phone,” she said.
Charlie and Tonya ended up talking that night in the parking lot. He told her about his past struggles, the thefts and the prison time and the drugs he wanted to shake but couldn’t. She told him about her sons, how important they were and how hard she worked at being a single mom. She said that she couldn’t have people around her kids who did drugs, it was a deal breaker for her. It was a talk that both of them would remember and tell other people about, one of those conversations that seemed to cover everything that had ever been important in their lives. Charlie kept laughing, first because he was nervous, and then because he was happy. At the end of the night, he excused himself, went back into the bar, and flushed his cocaine down the toilet.
THEIR FIRST DATE wasn’t one, really. She asked if he would come to her house and help her kids set up a PlayStation. When he got there, the boys’ father was there, too. Charlie felt awkward and spent the afternoon pretending to make calls on his cell phone until he finally made up an excuse to leave. In the days that followed, Tonya kept texting him. “Do you miss me?” she asked. And he did miss her. She was the prettiest girl who had ever been interested in him, and she seemed smart and funny, too. He never imagined a relationship coming out of any of this, though. In the beginning, they’d both decided to keep things purely physical. But after a little while, he realized what he was most looking forward to with Tonya was when they were just hanging out.
By the time he’d decided, one night in bed, to tell her he was falling in love with her, Tonya already suspected a declaration was coming, and she teased him about his nerves. She told him herself a few days later, via text message, as Charlie remembered, while he was repairing his outdoor steps. His phone buzzed, and the text was only one letter: I. The L followed in the next message, and the O after that, then the V. By the time Verizon had sent him the whole “I love you,” he had close to sawed off his finger in excitement.
He took her out on a proper date, and then again after that. After a little while, she started talking about having troubles finding babysitters. He sensed the real problem was that she couldn’t afford them on her hourly salary but was too embarrassed to admit it. “Why don’t I just come over?” he suggested. “I really don’t do much when I’m not with you, anyway.”
In truth, the arrangement delighted him. He’d always wished he could be a full-time parent to his own daughter, and he liked being around kids again. Tonya was close with her boys—homemade lunches, cupcakes for school fund-raisers—but Charlie’s and Tonya’s lives weren’t all domestic: they still went out, and she still looked good and wanted him to look good, helping him pick out clothing that would coordinate with hers. “But not better than me,” she would tease.
Eventually, he moved in with her and the boys. The location and the relationship kept him too busy to volunteer with Tasley anymore. They merged their social media accounts into one on Facebook—“TeeChar,” an amalgamation of their names—and a picture of the two of them, Charlie smiling at the camera and Tonya kissing his cheek.
Tonya posted more often, but sometimes using the same account, Charlie would post a response, differentiating his own messages by specifying, “It’s Char.”
“Having teriyaki chicken and veggies straight from the oven for dinna,” she wrote.
“It’s Char. You make the best teriyaki chicken I have ever tasted yumyumyum.”
Tonya was something of a poet and developed a near-daily ritual of posting either rhymes or homespun aphorisms that she called “Tonya-isms,” as in, “A little Tonya-ism to brighten your day.”
“Tonya-ism,” she posted one day. “everywhere i go i try to make someone laugh . . . walmart is a good place to do this . . . also mcdonalds drive thru . . . i feel if i made someone laugh for a minute or forget their problems . . . i did a good deed . . . it does work u shud try it sometime.”
“It’s Char,” he posted in response. “A lot of times when I’m stressed or just had a bad day, Tee takes me to Walmart and just does some of the craziest things and most of the time it makes me forget the stresses and worries of life.”
That was the thing about Tonya. To Charlie, she could make anything interesting. They’d go to the children’s department and play with the toys, or she’d open the tester nail polish bottles in the makeup aisle and paint each fingernail with a different color. Or, knowing how much he appreciated her posterior, she would walk a few paces ahead of him and wiggle. Sometimes it was as simple as that.
Her Tonya-isms were sometimes poems, silly or cheekily dirty.
“i love to feel the cold air . . . blowin thru my hair,” she wrote in preparation for a coming rainstorm. “lazy day of hoverin . . . underneath the coverin.”
A few days later the storm arrived: “its raining its pouring . . . the old lady ben out whoring . . . she dribblin done her chin . . . wonder where dat mouth been . . . she skirt is torn . . . she lookin real wore . . . he tapped that ass . . . she probaly got gas . . . poor ole soul ben freaked in da hole . . . she cant sit down . . . she look like a clown.”
“You are very talented with words,” a friend responded.