“I’m done, Gregg. Sorry, but I’m done. Let it go, let bygones be bygones. You’ve got your mom. You’ll be okay. Jani will be okay, too. Eventually.”
He takes a step forward and Adam instinctively shoves him, knocking him back over a bramble bush. Gregg still doesn’t drop the gun, though, not until Adam stomps on his hand. Gregg screams, but not many people live along the old Main Street, so the scream attracts no attention. Polly picks up the gun, but Adam doesn’t stop stomping on the guy’s hand until he hears the crunch of bone. Probably would have happened sooner if he wasn’t wearing the rubber clogs he prefers for kitchen work.
“You didn’t need to do that,” Polly says, but her eyes are feverish. She loves it.
Adam takes the gun from her and tosses it into the sewer, and they listen to it clattering down, making its way toward the bay, then on to the ocean.
“What about the money, Polly?” Gregg asks, getting to his feet, left hand cradling the damaged right one. If he has a stick shift, he’ll have a hard time driving home. But a guy like this doesn’t drive a stick shift. Probably doesn’t know how.
“What money?”
“I know what you did with the insurance check.”
This pricks Adam’s interest.
“Nothing illegal.”
“Forgery’s illegal.”
“I didn’t forge it. Not my fault you’ll sign anything I put in front of you during a football game.”
“That check was made out to both of us.”
“And it was deposited in our joint account. Then withdrawn—by me. All legal. I left you half the money, even though it was my car and you wrecked it. I’m fair.”
Oh, a car, penny-ante stuff. Still, she does know her way around an insurance check, doesn’t she?
“I got you another car.”
“That broken-down Toyota. There are holes in the floorboard.”
“You’re not right.”
It’s unclear to Adam if Gregg is contesting the issue at hand or something larger, making a pronouncement about her general character. At any rate, Gregg gives up, stalks away holding his damaged hand.
Adam sees her to her door. He doesn’t offer to walk her to the top of the stairs, though. This stairway is an afterthought, small, the carpet smelling faintly of mildew.
Polly lingers in the little vestibule. “You want to come in? See that bed you helped me get?”
No. Yes. No. Yes.
“Sure.”
He convinces himself that it’s weird not to go up, that she will suspect him if he doesn’t. In cartoons, devils and angels argue it out on a guy’s shoulder, but he’s long past a fight between right and wrong. There’s nothing to be done.
The walk up the stairs is the longest walk he’s ever taken. He goes in, stands in the doorway to her bedroom while she lingers behind him in the large room that serves as kitchen and living room. Amazing how cozy she’s made the place with just a few possessions. Lucky she likes old things—the stove and fridge look to be at least forty years old.
“Yep, that’s a bed,” he says, looking into her bedroom. It’s staged as if she knew he would be here tonight—a bedside lamp draped with a pink scarf, a silk robe tossed over the rails at the foot of the bed. There’s a vase of wildflowers on the bureau. They didn’t buy a bureau that day at the auction. Was it already here? Or did she get some other guy to take her to another auction? It makes him crazy jealous, thinking about her at another auction with another man.
When he turns around, she doesn’t have a stitch on.
“I asked if you wanted to see the bed. You want to get in it, you’re going to have to earn it.”
She goes over to the little metal table from the auction, hoists herself up on it, never taking her eyes from his. She’s excited and he knows why. It’s the violence, the sound of her husband’s hand under his foot, his whimpers. Well, Adam’s not going to let her call the shots. He picks her up and carries her to the bed. She fights him, bites and scratches. It’s shaming how much he likes this. They haven’t even kissed yet, and she’s drawn blood on him.
“We do it my way first,” he says. “Maybe later I’ll let you call the shots.”
She smiles and he realizes she’s still in charge, that everything is happening as she wants it to. He tells himself that he wants it this way, too, and then he shuts down the voice in his head, the one worrying about the job and ethics and where he goes from here. He convinces himself that this is the only way to do the job. Follow her. Get close to her. Those were his instructions.
He can’t get much closer than he is now.
12
Polly’s first test for Adam is to make him break up with Cath. Of course he’s going to stop seeing her, that’s a given. But that’s not good enough. Polly needs him to break up with Cath in a way that will be at once humiliating and baffling. Only he has to think it’s his idea.
It helps that he brings it up first.
“So,” he says. “I was seeing Cath. I guess that will have to stop.”
It is ten hours later, and they have been on what can only be called a bender, one of those sex hazes where one stops for a little food, a little sleep, maybe a shower. Taken together, of course. Her shower is the one mean, dark room in the apartment, a rigged-up thing with one of those cheap detachable hoses. It’s hard enough for one person to get under the spray from the cracked, handheld showerhead. But they are in that mode where nothing matters as long as they can touch each other.
How long will this last? she thinks.
How long does she want it to last?
How long does she need it to last?
He brings up Cath after they step out of the shower, towel each other playfully. She is ashamed of her towels, although they are new. Thin, cheap, inadequate. All she has ever wanted is a home, a place with things that bring comfort. Thick towels, deep chairs, soft rugs. That doesn’t necessarily mean having money, but it means having more money than she’s ever had. So far.
“You can’t stop seeing her. She works there every day. What are you going to do, shut your eyes?”
“Very funny,” he says, kissing her neck. For a while, everything she says will be funny, wonderful, profound. For a while.
“I don’t like fake words. Seeing. Yeah, I see her, too. But I don’t have sex with her. Don’t use a word to make something sound nicer than it is.”
“Euphemism.”
“I guess you went to college, huh?”
“So did you.”
Her impulse is to snap her head around, stare him down, but she fights it. Looks in the mirror, runs her fingers through her damp hair. The shower has a knack for getting nothing wet except the things you want to keep dry. “I never said that.”
“I just assumed—I meant—sorry. You’re clearly smart as a whip.”
“That’s a weird phrase. Whips aren’t smart. They smart.” She raises one eyebrow, hoping this gives the impression that she has firsthand knowledge.
He laughs. “See what I mean? That’s pretty good wordplay. Cath couldn’t do that. Cath couldn’t find her way out of a room with no walls.”
She decides to risk a little cattiness, knowing it will read as jealousy and he’ll be flattered. “But even she can find her ass with both hands. She’s got quite the caboose. If you could move that thing to her hip, she’d look like she had a sidecar.”
“Sidecars,” he says. “You never see those anymore.”
“I don’t think I ever saw one in real life, only movies. And maybe in that cartoon, from when we were kids? The one with Penelope Pitstop?”
“Oh, yeah. What was that called? With the bad guy and the dog who tried to cheat. Anyway, you know where you see sidecars? Cuba. Havana.”
“How’d you get to Cuba? I thought that was illegal.”
“I spent some time in Jamaica and there was a resort that arranged day excursions, did it in a way that you didn’t get your passport stamped. Havana was fascinating.”
“Yeah, but—what is there to see?”
“There’s always something to see. Don’t you want to travel?”