I look back at the house, relieved to see the basement light isn’t on. “Maybe Marietta wanted a midnight snack. We should get moving, though. I wouldn’t put it past her to do a bed check if she thinks she heard something.”
Although I don’t say it, we both know that if that’s Marietta in the kitchen, she’ll probably check our beds, even if she doesn’t check house-wide. When Daniel brought us back, he told her a cruiser would be keeping an eye on Bart House and that he’d be picking us up tomorrow so we could answer some more questions. To his credit, he also told her that we’d done absolutely nothing wrong, but one look at her pinched face made it clear that she wasn’t buying one little bit of it.
I call a local cab company to have a driver meet us outside an apartment complex just off Georgia Avenue. If Marietta discovers we’re missing she’ll alert the police. That makes hanging around on a street corner trying to flag down a cab a very bad idea.
The driver drops us about six blocks away from Kelsey’s place, in a subdivision near Kensington, just to be on the safe side. Deo hasn’t been here before, but I had secret sessions here twice a week for six of the seven months that the state had someone else assigned as my official therapist. I made stuff up to tell the other guy and saved my real problems to discuss with Kelsey as we sat in the white rockers on her front porch. Those rockers are still in the same spot, along with the spider plants in macramé hangers that Kelsey’s daughter made when she was a teenager.
The only thing that’s different is the car in the driveway. And Kelsey’s behind the wheel.
“I thought you said she didn’t drive?”
I shrug. “She doesn’t. I didn’t even know she owned a car.”
Kelsey walks to the office, bikes to the grocery store. She takes the Metro or Uber if she needs to go anywhere more than a few miles away. Once, she admitted to me that she might have gotten past her fear of getting behind the wheel if she’d scheduled time with a therapist herself after her husband was killed. I said why not do it now, but she just laughed and said that walking the half mile to work was better for the environment, better for her health, and better for her nerves.
She gets out but doesn’t close the car door. “I’d hoped we could do this tomorrow morning, after you’d gotten some rest, but I received a call about twenty minutes ago from . . . what’s that dreadful woman’s name?” She shakes her head, annoyed.
“That would be Marietta.”
“Yes, thank you, Deo. I didn’t answer, of course. But she left a message, asking me to call if I heard from either of you. She’s probably alerted the police that you’ve run away again. Your best bet is to head out now.”
“Whose car?” Deo asks.
“Mine, of course. I bought it two years ago so my granddaughter would have something to drive when she was taking classes at GWU, but she’s living with that Jason boy now and they don’t have parking spaces for both cars. I go out to the garage and crank it every few weeks, just to be sure it works. Are you sure you’re not too tired to drive?”
“I’m not sleepy.” It’s not exactly a lie—I’m at the stage Deo calls tired but wired. “But in case you’ve forgotten, I don’t have a license.”
“True. But how many of your previous lodgers were licensed drivers? Five? Six?”
Seven, actually. Three of them even drove in the DC area. “But none of them have driven recently.”
Deo rolls his eyes. “I’m not worried. You’ll know how to drive the same way you knew how to fix that leaky pipe in Kelsey’s office. The same way you know French, a lot of really boring history, and the capital of every country . . . or ice-skating. You remember last winter?”
I do. I wouldn’t have gone at all if it hadn’t been one of those mandatory group home outings. I was scared to death, not just of slipping my feet into shoes that might have been the last happy moment of some malcontented spirit, but also the more mundane fear of falling and breaking my neck on the ice.
But when I rifled through the memory banks, I discovered that Lydia, the sister who hung out on the porch swing for all those years waiting to tell her Vietnam vet brother good-bye, had spent every spare moment in the winter on the pond near her house. After my first tentative step onto the ice, that section of my brain kicked in, bypassing my fear and communicating directly with my body. I was doing figure eights and even managed a few pirouettes by the time we left the rink.
I was incredibly sore the next day, so sore I could barely walk after exercising muscles that I didn’t even know I had. But once that wore off, I’d gladly have gone back to the rink. Ice-skating may be the most fun I’ve ever had, but that’s the only chance I’ve had to do it. All of the outings since then have been bowling or movie nights, and there’s no way I can fit an expensive hobby into my budget on what I make at Joe’s.
Joe. Yikes.