She sat there at the kitchen table, looking as though she would crumble. “Oh, Daddy . . .”
“Trust me,” he said. “Everything will turn out fine.”
“How can you say that?” Melissa asked, her eyes red from crying.
“Because it has to,” he said.
Melissa spent the night at her parents’ home, but around six in the morning she walked into her father’s bedroom to say she wanted to go back to her apartment across town. Garfield was still under the covers, but he was awake, and had been all night. He was reluctant to let her out of his sight, but Melissa said she could handle it. She wasn’t going to stay at her place. She’d return and stay overnight in the room she lived in before moving out. But she needed to pick up some things, clothes mostly, and wanted a moment or two by herself. Melissa shared the apartment with her friend Olivia, but Olivia was away right now, visiting her parents in Denver. She didn’t know anything about Melissa’s mother.
Garfield said, hesitantly, “You’re not going to do anything I should be worried about, are you? I mean, your state of mind and all.”
She said no.
So he drove his daughter back to her place. Parked out front of the apartment, which was actually the top floor of an old house with a separate entrance. “Why don’t I just wait here while you grab a few things?” he said. “Then you can come back with me.”
Melissa told him to drive home, that she would call him when she was ready for him to pick her up.
Even though she was only nineteen, Melissa had been living away from home for three years. She was willing to admit, on the eve of becoming twenty, that she had been a difficult teen. She’d been a handful even before that. She’d gotten drunk the first time when she was eleven, lost her virginity at thirteen, and was dumb enough to leave marijuana in her room where her mother would find it a year after that. She openly ignored the limits her parents tried to set. Curfews were for breaking. Groundings meant nothing when you could open a bedroom window.
When she was sixteen, she dropped out of school. Ellie and Wendell decided they could take no more. They gave her an ultimatum. Get an education and live by the rules of this house, or move out.
The second option appealed to her more.
Melissa found a place to live with a friend from school. Olivia, two years older, was also young to be living on her own, but when you had a father who liked to crawl under the covers with you at night and a mother who refused to see what was going on right in front of her, you only had so many choices. You could stay and put up with it, kill the bastard with a frying pan upside the head, or get the hell out. Olivia got out. But as difficult as her home life was, she did well at school, wasn’t into drugs, and held down a part-time job at Pancake Castle. She introduced Melissa to the manager, who gave her a stint waiting tables three nights a week. It turned out that getting kicked out of her parents’ house was the best thing that had ever happened to Melissa. She looked up to Olivia, who was becoming a role model. Melissa was getting her act together. Without her parents to catch her when she fell, she had to stop falling so much.
She started to become responsible. Who could have guessed?
Ellie and Wendell were cautiously optimistic. Once Melissa got her head screwed on right, they figured, she could go back and finish school. If she did well enough, she might have a chance at college, Ellie mused one evening. Maybe she’d even think about becoming a veterinarian. Remember, she’d say to her husband, how when she was little, she said one day she’d love to work with animals and—
“For God’s sake, Ellie, let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Wendell said.
Melissa would come over for dinner. Some of these get-togethers went better than others. One night, Melissa would tell them about how she was getting her life back on track, and her parents would nod and try to be encouraging. But another night, Ellie, anxious to see her daughter’s rehabilitation move with more speed, would start pushing. She’d tell her daughter it was time—now—to stop being nothing more than a waitress and get back to school and make something of herself. Did Melissa have any idea just how embarrassing it was for her mother, an employee of the board of education, to have a daughter who was a dropout? Who hadn’t even completed the eleventh grade? How long was she expected to wait to see her daughter get on a path where she would amount to something?
Then they’d start fighting and Melissa would storm out, but not before asking out loud how she’d managed to live in this house as long as she had without blowing her brains out.
It always took a few days for the dust to settle after a night like that.
Ellie and Wendell still kept their fingers crossed that Melissa, despite these occasional blowups, was growing up. She held on to her waitressing job. She was saving some money, mostly from tips. Fifty to sixty dollars a week, which was at least something. And one day, talking to her mother on the phone, she happened to mention that she’d been on a college website, looking at what qualifications you needed to enroll in the veterinary program.
Ellie was beside herself with joy when she told Wendell the news.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” she asked. “She’s growing up, that’s what she’s doing. She’s growing up and thinking about the future.”
What neither Ellie or Wendell had counted on was that the immediate future would include a baby.
Melissa was already three months along when she broke the news to her parents. They did not, to say the least, take it well, but Wendell searched for a silver lining. Maybe this meant Melissa would get married. She was young to be a mother, but at least if she had a man in her life, a man who could look after her, wouldn’t that take some of the pressure off Ellie and him?
The man’s name was Lester Cody, and he was thirty years old. A Pancake Castle regular. Always ordered four frisbee-sized chocolate-chip pancakes with double syrup and a side of sausage, only 1,400 calories. (Melissa had ceased to be amazed at how many people liked to eat this stuff for dinner.) He was, not surprisingly, somewhat heftier than the average man, at two hundred and eighty, but there was encouraging news. He was a dentist. He drove a Lexus. He had his own clinic. He pulled down a hundred grand a year. And—best of all—he was not married.
Ellie felt herself coming unraveled. One day she’d tell Wendell their daughter was ruining her life, having a child so young, but the next she’d confess how excited she was at becoming a grandmother. “At my age, who’d believe I’m a granny?” she’d say. She’d have long discussions with her husband about whether it would be a boy or a girl, to which her husband would grumble, “One of those two, I suspect.” Then the next day she’d ramble on about Lester Cody, how he was really too old for Melissa, though he had a good job and could provide for their girl and their grandchild. But then Melissa dropped the bombshell that she really didn’t have any feelings for Lester, that he was nice enough and all, but she never imagined that she’d be married to a dentist. She’d met another man, who worked at the Cinnabon in the mall, and he was pretty cute, and not as fat as Lester, even though he could sneak as many frosted buns as he wanted. Ellie tried talking some sense into her daughter, telling her that if Lester Cody was interested in her, and could provide for her, then she’d be out of her mind not to invest in that relationship. Because, let’s face it, even if she wanted to go to veterinary college, she was going to have to complete her high school first, and how long was that going to take? Lester could probably get her a part-time job at the dental clinic after the baby came, answering phones and booking appointments and taking X-rays.
Melissa would scream at her mother to stay out of her life. And the next day, she’d call her up, asking for a lift to the doctor’s office for her ultrasound appointment.
In between all the hand-wringing and exorcising, Ellie Garfield resumed her knitting.
“This child is coming one way or another, and it’s going to need something to wear,” she said, and she would hold up half a sleeve and ask her husband what he thought of it.
>
It was more than Wendell Garfield could stand. Most times, in fact.
All this tension between his wife and daughter, the relentless discussions Ellie wanted to have with him about what their girl was going to do with her life. All this talk about the baby. How would Melissa manage? Would she marry Lester? Would he provide for the child even if Melissa didn’t want to share her life with him? Would Melissa keep her waitressing job at Pancake Castle after the baby was born?
Sometimes Ellie would do a one-eighty, and lash into Lester Cody as though he were in the house with them. “Thirty years old! Sleeping with a teenager! He took advantage of her, that’s what he did.”
The discussions. They never stopped.
Wendell Garfield wondered if it was all this that had driven him into the arms of Laci Harmon, or if it would have happened anyway.
Six
They both worked at the Home Depot, Wendell in plumbing most days, unless they were shorthanded in some other department, and Laci over in home lighting fixtures. They’d had coffee breaks together, talked about their families, the joys and—mostly—heartaches of raising kids. She had two boys aged fifteen and seventeen who did nothing but fight with one another. Laci confessed once, only half jokingly, that she wished they’d have one final no-holds-barred battle and kill each other.
Wendell laughed. He said he knew exactly how she felt.
He always found reasons to stroll through the lighting section.
Laci often seemed to be passing through the plumbing department.
It started with friendly teasing, then double entendres. When Laci wandered by, she’d narrow her eyes and say she needed help with her plumbing. When Garfield was over in light fixtures, he’d bump into Laci on purpose and say he wondered if she could help him keep his light switch in the up position.
All in fun, of course. Totally innocent. After all, they were both, from all indications, happily married. Wendell and Ellie had been together for twenty-one years. Laci and Trevor, an assistant bank manager in Bridgeport, had just celebrated their twenty-third anniversary. They’d caught the train into New York, checked into the Hyatt by Grand Central, and taken in Priscilla Queen of the Desert, which Trevor, to his amazement, absolutely loved, even though he was not what you’d call a big fan of the drag queen community. It would have been a perfect getaway, except for when Laci took a beer from the minibar, and Trevor had a fit, telling her they could have gone to the closest grocery store and bought a six-pack for what that one beer was going to cost them. He wasn’t going to mention it when they checked out, see if they figured it out later and charged it to his Visa.
Which they did.
One day at work Wendell had been asked to assemble, for display purposes, a vinyl-sided utility shed. He was inside the nearly finished structure, tightening up some bolts to make sure the thing wouldn’t fall down in the wind, when Laci Harmon stepped inside, slid the door shut behind her, and placed his right hand on her left breast.
“Feel my nipple,” she whispered. “Feel how hard it is.”
Wendell had been touching the same two nipples for all of those last twenty-one years, although not quite as often as he once did, so feeling an unfamiliar one, even through Laci’s blouse, was an electrifying experience. He thought he’d explode right then, and probably would have if he hadn’t received a call on his employee radio that someone needed help picking out a leaf blower.
They agreed to rendezvous that night at a Day’s Inn. It was a Thursday, which meant Ellie would be out doing the weekly shopping, and Wendell wouldn’t have to make some excuse about why he was leaving the house. But they’d have to be quick. Ellie was never gone more than two hours.
Turned out all they really needed was about ninety seconds.
“You’re just nervous,” Laci told him. “You’ve never done anything like this before.”
“Have you?” Wendell asked.
Laci was horrified by the question. “Of course not.” She pointed out that she was not that kind of girl.
Except now she kind of was.
They managed to meet once or twice a week. Not always at the Day’s Inn, because it was expensive to have to rent a room every time. Sometimes they did it in Laci’s Honda minivan. One time, they tried it in the backseat of Wendell’s Buick, but he concluded that you’re not quite as limber in your forties as you were in your teens, so they opted for Laci’s van, which had seats that folded right down into the floor.
Handy.
The first few times, Wendell felt consumed with guilt. But the more Ellie went on and on about their daughter, the more he told himself that he had been driven to this. It wasn’t his fault. It was survival. It was the only way he could cope.
Maybe, once the baby was born, and things with Melissa had settled down, he’d end it with Laci.
That was what he told himself. There were times when he even believed it.
* * *
A few minutes after he’d finished talking with the police, the phone rang. He thought maybe it was Detective Wedmore calling, but when he saw the call display, he swore under his breath. What the hell was she doing, phoning him at home? Did the woman have no sense?
“Hello?”
“Oh, Wen, I just had to get in touch.”
“Laci, this isn’t a good time.”
“But I can’t stop thinking about you, about what you must be going through,” she said. She wasn’t whispering, which told Garfield that she was alone in her house.
“Where’s Trevor and the boys?” he asked her.
“He took the boys to Schenectady for a long weekend to see his parents,” Laci said. “They’ll be back later today. I’m just heading out the door to work. Wendell, you have to talk to me.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“Have they found out anything? Do the police know what happened? I watched it on TV. I watched it at six, and I watched it again at eleven. It was very moving. You were very good, if you know what I mean. You held it together really well. I think, if anyone knew anything, if they knew anything at all, they’d call if they saw that.”
“I just got off the phone with the police,” Garfield said. “They haven’t received any good tips.”
“I feel . . . I feel so . . . It’s hard to explain,” Laci said. “I feel sort of guilty, you know? Because of what we’ve been doing, behind her back.”
“Those things don’t have anything to do with each other.”
“I’m sure that’s true, but I keep thinking, what if someone finds out? What if someone finds out what’s going on between us, and they think it has something to do with what’s happened to Ellie? And if, God forbid, something actually did happen to Ellie, then how is it going to look if—”
“Laci, please, don’t go there,” he said. “Maybe she just decided to go away for a while, clear her head.”
“Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. But I suppose it’s a possibility. I mean, they haven’t found her car or anything. If something had happened to her around here, you’d think they’d have at least found her car.”
“So you think she just decided to drive away? Like, to Florida or something?”
“Laci, I don’t know, okay? I don’t have any goddamn idea.”
His tone stopped Laci for a second. “You don’t have to get angry with me.”
“I’m going through a lot right now. I’m just trying to keep it together.”
“How’s Melissa coping?”
“Not well.”
“What about that man who got her pregnant? Is he still in the picture? Can he be there for Melissa at a time like this?”
“She says she doesn’t want anything to do with him. Honestly, I don’t think it would make things any easier for me if he was around right now.”
“I was just—oh my God, I just thought of something,” she said.
“What?”
“They’re not tapping your phone, are they? They’re not listening in?” br />
He felt a chill run down his spine. Could they be? He could kick himself. It hadn’t even occurred to him until she mentioned it. He’d been doing such a good job, being the distraught husband, he hadn’t thought there was any reason for the police to be bugging his phone. Sure, he knew the cops would probably be looking at him sooner or later, but he didn’t believe he’d given any indication that he was in any way responsible for his wife’s disappearance.
“I mean, if they hear us, and know we’ve been seeing each other, then—”
“Hang up, Laci,” he said.
“—then they might think that you had something to do with it, you know, so that you could spend your life with me and—”
He slammed down the phone. If the police had been listening, the damage was done. They’d know he’d been having an affair. They’d know he and Laci had been seeing each other for weeks now.
Not good, not good at all.
Laci’s call left Garfield rattled. He tried to tell himself he was going to get through this. He had to keep his wits about him. Even if the police found out he’d been sleeping with Laci, it didn’t have to mean he’d had anything to do with this business about his wife.
They hadn’t found a body. Or her car.
And he was as sure as he could be that they never would.
Pull yourself together, he told himself.
The doorbell rang.
Jesus, he thought. They really were listening to his phone, and now they wanted to question him about Laci, about whether he’d killed his wife to be with this other woman.
He took a couple of deep breaths, composed himself, and strode through the living room to the front door. He pulled the curtain back first, to see who it was.
It was a woman.
A woman with green parrot earrings.
Seven