If Brian Griggs loves someone as awful as Carrie Masters, he must be kind of awful too.
Gabriel is parking our car now, about twenty feet away from the other cars. He parks in the shadows, cuts the lights. He tells me to take all the stuff out of the back. I ask him where he’s going. He won’t tell me, but I know. I’m watching him heading toward Brian’s Accord. I see the gun in his hand. Officer Nelligan’s gun. In the other, he is holding the handcuffs. A different girl would stop him. A better girl would. But I don’t. I just watch, and I sing to myself.
Oh, what a night.
Twenty-Six
Reg
“ARE YOU FEELINGall right, Mr. Sharkey?” It was Mrs. Bowen from next door. Always sticking her nose in everybody’s business, especially Reg’s. She’d lived in that house for God knows how many years, and for as many of those years as he could remember, Reg couldn’t go outside to mow the lawn or turn the sprinklers on or even get his mail out of his damn mailbox—which he was trying to do right now—without Mrs. Bowen popping up out of nowhere, her mouth open like a baby bird, ready to feed on his misery.
One time, he’d gotten her good. Just like always, she’d tapped him on the shoulder while he was watering his lawn and asked, “Howareyou, Mr. Sharkey?” leaning hard on theare, each word dripping with fake concern. But that particular time, Reg had turned around too fast and accidentally-on-purpose sprayed her with the hose. Made him smile just thinking about it. The sight of her in her sopping wet housedress, her roller-set curls all stuck to her face. “Well, I never!” she’d said. Like she was Scarlett O’Hara. But now that he thought about it... Boy, that had to have been a long time ago. Had to have been before he’d put the sprinkler system in, and he’d put the sprinkler system in just about a year after Kimmy was born...
Reg stared at Mrs. Bowen, wondering how it could be that she looked exactly the same as she had forty-five years ago. How was that possible?
“Mr. Sharkey?” she said again, and it dawned on him like a thick fog clearing. Mrs. Bowen had died a couple of years back, and this wasn’t her talking to him at all, but her daughter, Karen. No, not Karen. Corinne. Corinne Palmer. That was her married name. Reg was fine. His brain was fine. He just wished he didn’t have to talk to nasty Corinne Palmer, with her shitty TV shows blaring out the window all day and all night.Hoarders. My 600-lb Life. 16 and Pregnant. People flaunting their misery for a few bucks and some attention—there was nothing more depressing than that. But Reg supposed that for a nosy person like Corinne, who lived off the misfortune of others, these TV shows were a regular opiate. Her mother, at least, had never blasted the TV.
“I’m fine, Corinne,” Reg said. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, I heard you arguing with that young man a couple of days ago, and I haven’t seen you since. You usually mow your lawn on Mondays, but you weren’t out there yesterday.”
“Lawn didn’t need mowing.”
She just kept talking, as though he’d never spoken. “I was worried for your welfare. That young man sounded so angry...”
“I’m fine.”
“If I’d gone another day without seeing you, I was going to call the police.”
“The lawn didn’t need mowing. What the hell more do you want me to say?”
She took a step back, blinking like someone who’d just dodged a punch. Her nose was red and bulbous like her mother’s had been, and something about her expression too, the way she opened andclosed her mouth like a dying fish on a dock... What had Mrs. Bowen’s first name been again? Had Reg ever learned it?
“Who was that young man?” How old was Corinne when he’d doused her mother with the hose? Twenty maybe. Did she have any idea, back then, how cruel her own DNA would turn out to be? “You can tell me, Mr. Sharkey. Who was that young man?”
“Kate’s son.”
“My God. Really?” She sounded deliriously happy.
He said, “This better thanHoarders?”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
Reg opened his mailbox, which was what had brought him out here and into this unpleasant conversation in the first place. Maybe if he threw all his energy into opening his mail, Corinne would feel ignored and go back inside her house.
Reg thumbed through his letters: phone bill, electric, brochure from Home Depot.
Corinne Palmer said, “I don’t think I’ve seen Kate’s son since he was a little boy.”
Reg thought,Why can’t she take a hint?But then a memory flickered in his mind: a little boy. Chubby cheeks. Thick glasses. Black hair flopping like a puppy’s ears.Pleath can I have a doggy oh pleaaatttth?The funny way he used to talk, that kid. But no. Reg was wrong again. It wasn’t Kate’s son with the funny voice. It was. Oh, it was...
“Mr. Sharkey, are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine.” Reg swiped at his eyes, at the wetness on his cheeks. Tears. Mortifying.The way the body betrays you at this age.Reg thought of that song Kate used to blast when she was a teenager, about only the good dying young. Wasn’t that ever the God’s honest truth... He looked at his neighbor. “Run along, Corinne,” he said.
She blinked again. “Remember, Mr. Sharkey, if you ever need me, I’m just right over—”
