“Indeed,” I said. I thought about what Kenny had said, that Belmont was a small place, lots of people look familiar. Either the woman wasn’t Sarah, or Sarah hadn’t gotten very far fifteen years ago. Either way, it seemed like keeping an eye on the area was the only possible way to find her.
It was after five, and I was due at my mother’s house for dinner at seven. But as I pushed outside, I saw that I wasn’t going anywhere just yet: a Belmont police cruiser was parked diagonally behind my car. The cruiser door opened and a uniformed cop got out, young, with gym-rat muscles and a smug expression.
“How are you doing, ma’am?” he said. The pin on his uniform shirt said C. Pasquale.
“I’m all right,” I said slowly.
“Because we got a couple calls. About you, hanging around here all afternoon. What’s going on?”
“Just a routine inquiry,” I said, wondering which of the unhelpful Belmont residents had called the police on me. I got my license out. He frowned at it, tilting it in the light like it was a lenticular from a Cracker Jack box.
“What kind of inquiry?”
A routine one, I wanted to say, but didn’t. “I’m looking for an individual who has been seen in the area.” I reached for my license but he held on to it. So I showed him the sketch. Maybe he had a something-doodle too.
“Who is she?” Pasquale said.
“An old friend of my client,” I said.
“Who’s your client?” he said next.
“That’s confidential.” It wasn’t, but he was annoying me. Some small-town police forces were full of good people who believed in their community. Some were full of glorified crossing guards who had nothing to do but run speed traps near the edges of town and revel in their tiny bit of power. I was getting a pretty good idea of which Belmont’s was.
“Well, next time,” he said, finally letting go of my license, “give us a heads-up that you’re out here. Professional courtesy.”
“Sure, of course,” I said, trying to sound contrite.
“Have a good night, ma’am.”
I got into my car and he got into his, but neither of us went anywhere. After three minutes, he got back out and rapped on my window.
“Do you need directions or something?” he said after I had rolled it down.
“I’m good,” I said, and rolled the window back up.
But he tapped on it again and I rolled it back down.
“That’s not an open container,” he said, nodding toward the whiskey on my passenger seat, “is it?”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” I muttered, and I put the window up and shifted my car into reverse.
*
Dinner was steak and fried onions, potatoes, and one of those coconut cakes that you store in the freezer. Although there were four of us at the table, my mother, Genevieve, did most of the talking. She never ran out of things to say. She talked about how she and her neighbor Rita were taking a tai chi class at the Conservatory on Tuesday nights. She talked about the week’s excitement in the neighborhood: a traffic accident, a glum kid selling wrapping paper from a catalogue. Outwardly, she was back to herself, more or less: all smiles and the fluffy ash-blond curls she wore to compensate for her diminutive height. But I was still anxious for her, the way she seemed wound more tightly than before behind that layer of bulletproof niceness, the way things could upset her out of nowhere. I wondered what her nights were like, in the house alone. I hoped they were nothing like mine.
“I think I need to call a plumber, for that sink,” she was saying when I came back from getting another round of beers for Andrew and me. The booze situation in this house was getting dire. Andrew and I had drunk everything in the once-formidable liquor cabinet. It felt tacky to restock it now, as if my mother needed one more reminder that Frank was gone. So we had since moved on to the beer stored in the garage, but even that was dwindling. “It’s leaking again, and it always acts up when the weather gets cold.”
Matt set his fork down on his dessert plate, eyes flicking briefly to the beer cans. He was bearded and gruff, stocky as Andrew was wiry, and he’d quit drinking about five years ago. Back then he was a disaster zone. Now he was just a self-righteous prophet of sobriety most of the time. For a second I thought he was going to concern-troll me about the beer, but instead he said, “You know, Mom, we can get you a new sink, that one’s as old as the house. You should have a nice new one.”
Andrew glanced at me as if to say suck-up.
“Oh, no, honey,” my mother said, even though she’d been asking my father to replace the sink for years, “that’s okay.” Something in her expression had changed.
“It’s just silly,” Matt went on, unwisely, “to pay a plumber to come out again, for a sink that barely works anyway—”
“Matthew, I told you it’s okay. I don’t want a new sink. I want that sink to work right.” My mother stood up abruptly and began clearing the plates. Even without my father, or maybe especially without him, every gathering inside this house devolved to an argument. But if there was anything my family was good at, it was not talking about what was really going on.
Andrew got up too. “Mom, let me help with those.”
She stopped clattering the dishes around and smiled at him. “Thank you, honey,” she said, her features relaxing. Matt glared at both of them. It had always been like this with my mother, Matt trying too hard in unspoken competition to be the favorite, Andrew not trying at all but somehow coming off better. Me staying the hell out of it.
But Matt couldn’t leave it alone. He played with the tab on his can of Coke and said, “Would you go in on the sink with me?”
“Hell no,” I said. “I’m steering clear of that hornets’ nest. You should too.”
“Come on.”
“No.”
“You owe me,” Matt said. “For Danielle.”
“I knew that was part of your long game to screw with me,” I said, and he rolled his eyes. “Thanks, though. She seems nice—how do you know her?”
Under his beard, he blushed a little. “She lives in my building. We talk sometimes in the laundry room.”
“Ooh,” I said, “like a little laundry-day love affair.”
“No, like adult conversation.”
“About what, your spin cycle?”
He ignored me, probably thinking he was taking the high road.
He was such an easy target though. He always had been. “Your agitator?”
“You’re drunk, stop it,” Matt said, trying and failing to contain a slight smile.
“I am not,” I said, “I’ve had two beers. You know I just like to make fun of you. What do you think of her?”
Matt looked at me. I didn’t usually inquire as to what he thought about things. “She’s pretty cool,” he said. “Smart—I think she’s an accountant or something, some finance thing. Do you think you can help her?”
“I’m going to try,” I said as my mother came back into the dining room. She was carrying a crystal vase full of lilies and miniature gerbera daisies.
“Did you see these, Roxane?” she said. “Tom brought them by over the weekend. For my birthday.”