Читать книгу Sunday Drive to Gun Club Road - Marion Quednau - Страница 7

There were always the early birds, thinking themselves smarter than the rest.

“Control freaks of an odd sort,” Sandi remarked. She was looking down from the kitchen window to several cars parked by the curb. She hadn’t priced some of the stuff yet and had no intention of lifting the garage door until she was good and ready.

“They have their different strategies, too, I’ve noticed,” Ben added. “Some go for the big stuff—tables, stereos—almost on the run, and others prowl through the unlikeliest small castoffs, buttons and cufflinks, bathroom stoppers, running everything through their fingers, as though panning for gold.”

He was thinking about the early days of their marriage, when they would go scrounging through the neighbourhood looking for cheap furniture and end up coming home with absurd mementoes: a shoe tree, maple, size twelve EE, or a lopsided lamp with a Lassie dog at its base, tongue lolling. For some reason those Saturday morning forays would always end in bed. More than the search itself, it was their pointed dismissal of most objects—Sandi donning an all-too-silly dress of silver sequins and Ben pooh-poohing a set of gold-plated golf clubs when he didn’t know the first thing about the game—that kindled the spark of sex for them. As though they were in a posh club with only two members.

She must have read his mind, because she gave him a salty smile as she trundled off toward the doorbell’s ring. “Screw them,” she said over her shoulder.

“I’d like to screw you too,” he said, as she waved her hand to shush him.

He watched her shake her head at the front door. Long loose blonde hair in the same haircut she’d had when they’d met at school. Now that was confidence, he thought. And she even looked good in sweats. He was a lucky man.

A woman with a red topknot that looked as though she’d shoved a bunch of curls into a blender was idling by the pool cues. She ran her fingers over the tips as if she might chalk one up and start shooting a few balls into the pockets.

“You play?” Ben asked amiably.

“Used to,” she said in a hoarse voice, as though she might have been up all night winning at eight ball.

“They’re a good brand,” Ben said. “A real bargain for the pool shark in your family.”

“I know,” she said, looking at him intently. “I bought a set just like this one for an old boyfriend once.”

Oops, he thought, and turned away. He wasn’t touching that one with a ten-foot pole. Maybe disgruntled people went to garage sales just as much as the deliriously happy second-hand shoppers he and Sandi had once been.

The redhead hovered at the bookcase, thumbing through a few classics they’d decided to ditch.

“Thomas Hardy, I’ve had it with him,” Sandi had said at breakfast. “All those coincidences, all that bumph about intended fate.”

“What, you don’t believe in true love?” he’d said, just to poke fun.

“Love, yes, but we find each other, don’t you think? We don’t get run over by a guy on a horse and then swoon into his arms. I mean, what are the odds?”

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” Ben had squawked in a fake Brit accent.

“That’s Dickens, you ass,” she’d said, giving him a kiss on the cheek.

“Are you moving out, or in?” the redhead asked, without looking up from Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

“Neither,” Ben said. “We’re just shifting a few things from here to there.” He straightened an old bevelled mirror that was threatening to fall, its aged silvering bound to mar any likeness. “My wife has a rule of thumb; if we haven’t looked at it in two years it must be time to revamp.”

“But wasn’t this house for sale not long ago? I remember thinking I wanted to look at it, and then suddenly it was sold. Or am I thinking of another?”

“Oh no, that was us. But that was almost three years ago—it’s strange to think a whole whack of time has been eclipsed, just like that.”

“My name’s Moira,” she said, as if her name suddenly mattered.

“Is that Moira with a y or an i?” he wondered aloud. “I think the only Moira I ever knew was a girl with long braids in kindergarten.”

“With an i,” she said, looking at him with a sudden intensity. “I haven’t changed my name.”

“Well, Moira with an i, glad to meet you.” He could see Sandi giving him a questioning look. “I have to run along now and deal with the hagglers.”

But the redhead kept at his heels. Lingered.

“Well, I hope this doesn’t seem weird, but would you mind if I took a quick peek upstairs? I always wanted to see the layout; you can’t really tell from those wide-angle shots the realtors plop into the ads, all the lights in the house blazing like the place is on a movie set.”

He had to laugh at her dramatic way of putting things. At her odd request.

“Oh sure, why not,” he said. “I have to go up and grab another coffee anyway.”

They went upstairs, he leading the way, she humming a little toneless ditty under her breath. They had cleaned up in case anyone wanted to see the dining table and chairs. Staging and all that. A vase of fresh flowers, wine glasses clustered as if in readiness for a celebration.

“I can see you’ve put your personal touches on everything,” she said. She was eyeing some of Sandi’s paintings of the rocky shore not far off. “None of that love-peace hoopla people put on hearths nowadays, as though they don’t have an original thought. My favourites are the sort of dollar-store mantras like Dare to Dream or Imagine, as if we can get to happiness by way of such chintzy advice.”

He had to laugh again; she was quite the character.

“Hey, mind if I use the loo? Too much caffeine this morning, or maybe I’m preggo, ha, that would be a laugh at my age.”

“No, go right ahead,” he said, reluctantly. He was getting itchy to go back downstairs in case Sandi needed help. The redhead was starting to get on his nerves.

She took forever, flushed once, then again. Beneath the sound of gurgling water in the pipes, he thought he could hear a drawer being opened and closed. Then there was sniffling, and it grew louder. Out-and-out crying.

“Everything okay in there?” Ben asked.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” a voice whispered, as though her tearful face might be pressed right to the door.

“What? Remember you?”

“You bloody well lived with Moira with an i,” she said tersely. “We listened to Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’—stared out at the stars after fucking our brains out. You gave me a plastic Mr. Peanut ring, said we would last a lifetime. You don’t remember that?”

“She vanished into the bathroom and wouldn’t come out,” he murmured to Sandi. “That’s what took me so long. Some sorrow about an old beau or something.”

“Who? What?”

“The redhead, she’s kooky as all get-out.”

“We shouldn’t open our house to strangers,” Sandi said. “Poor you. How did you talk her out of there? At least she wasn’t toting a gun or anything.”

He squirmed a little when he thought of how he might best describe their back-and-forth. Set things straight. He really hadn’t remembered her in the slightest. It had to be nearly twenty years ago. She looked totally different, had black hair then, he thought, and different-coloured eyes. Maybe she wore coloured contacts or something. But she’d always been bonkers, that hadn’t changed. He’d actually been afraid of her.

The last stragglers were taking a few desperate board games and footstools so they wouldn’t go home feeling empty-handed. Too stupid to see a real deal, or too late.

“Jesus,” Ben said, as he closed the garage door. “Let’s keep everything we’ve got and never toss out anything again.”

He expected Sandi to laugh, commiserate. But she was giving him a quizzical look in the sudden dark of the lowered door.

“It’s okay, you don’t have to explain,” she said bluntly. “Moira left a note. I went up to pee and found it stuck to the back of the bathroom door. So you two were about to get hitched—and you left her standing at the altar. No big deal,” she said.

“What a load of horseshit,” Ben stammered. “She was a one-night stand. Ages ago, in university. Maybe two nights, tops. And truthfully, thankfully, I can’t remember a thing about it. And that’s what her precious little ego is all in a knot about—that she’s holding a torch for me and I never gave her a second thought.”

“Well, she’s coming by in a couple of days to recalibrate, as she puts it. Bringing a few mutual friends, is what she said. Just for old times’ sake.”

He didn’t know what it meant; a friendly home invasion? They’d planned a wedding more as a joke than anything. There had never been any actual standing at any altar. They’d been drunk or stoned most of the time. He vaguely recalled a few dicey friends of hers he’d met on his way out the door. Maybe she’d go home and take her meds and feel better in the morning.

They jumped when the phone rang.

“I’ll get it,” they both said. But Sandi rose first, and faster; he felt muggy-headed, as though he might be coming down with something. They’d been sitting together, watching the new season of Big Little Lies, but he’d felt the tension through Sandi’s arm whenever she reached for the popcorn. This garage sale wasn’t leading to intimacy, he could just feel it.

“That was Moira,” she said. “She wants to buy the dining table and chairs. Wanted to know how many people it’ll seat with the extra bit. She’s getting married, she said.”

“Tell her to take a hike—she’s one of those stalker types, right off the wall.”

“I think it’ll get rid of her,” Sandi said. She’d always been so unflappable. “Let her bring her paramour along and take the damn furniture and we’ll eat off the floor, plates in our laps, the way we used to. Playing house.”

Sandi gave him a grin but it wasn’t totally convincing.

They had already moved the dining set down into the garage, had no intentions of inviting the folks upstairs. The table, mahogany with a dropped apron, was heavy, a real challenge to carry down the curving stairway. They’d almost lost their grips a couple of times, Ben cursing and Sandi laughing in a slightly hysterical tone.

“No cheques,” he said. “It has to be cash.”

“Good point,” Sandi agreed. “No bouncing, no tracking them down. That’s the last thing we need.”

When the van pulled up, they could see she’d brought along a couple of burly fellows. If they were old friends he couldn’t recall either of them. It was hard to say which of the two might be her intended soulmate.

One of them eased his way out of the passenger seat slowly and turned a blank stare toward the house. He sported a long, thin white cane, and Moira walked beside him protectively.

“Meet Sonny,” she said, with a flinty smile. “He’s fearless, was a cliff diver in Mexico and hit the water at a wrong angle. So now he’s legally blind; he can see shapes, shadows, but that’s about it.”

The other fellow, Dimitri, with his sallow complexion and narrowed eyes, dark unibrow, didn’t seem full of life either. He slunk along rather than walked. They were probably both con men, could slash open a face with that fake cane, Ben thought.

He swung open the garage door, and indicated the table and chairs as the sun struggled to come out to give the lacquer a swish shine.

Moira seated herself, as if expecting coffee and croissants. As if on cue Sonny tap-tapped his way toward the table and gingerly sat down as well. His shtick was quite convincing, Ben had to admit. The Dimitri guy sat at one end of the table, glowering like a crime boss.

“I’m just sitting a bit to see how comfortable the chairs are,” Moira said.

Oh no, now she was going to barter, Ben realized too late. She was smiling brightly, too brightly. Was being quite the drama queen, leaning forward, as if reaching for the baked potatoes, then leaning back, as if after an ample meal. The legally blind leading the certifiably crazy, Ben thought bleakly.

When Sandi joined them and sat across from Moira, Ben raised an eyebrow. He wanted them on their way. Ciao, see you later, alligator.

Sandi offered them a deal, said she’d take one hundred dollars off the price. As if they were owed something. And Ben scowled, clearly didn’t like it.

“Something old, with a grandma vibe, and something new and surprising,” mad Moira muttered. “Something borrowed, something blue…”

The table was old, had been in his family forever. Suddenly he regretted letting it go. Wanted to tell Moira and her pals to bugger off, forget the whole deal. But he wasn’t brave enough to take up the slack.

“Here, let me carry a couple of chairs out to the street,” Ben offered.

As he reached for a chair beside Sandi, Sonny whipped his long, thin metal cane across Ben’s knuckles. Ben’s middle finger crumpled against the chair back as Sandi rose and howled in horror.

Moira stood then and held out a curved knife, the sort used to gut fish, leaned across the table toward Sandi. Ben pulled Sandi back with his good hand, while Moira etched a long zigzag line along the table’s surface, the knife blade making a terrible scritching sound. Dimitri kicked a couple of chairs to the floor to block any pursuit, the threesome hoofing it to the van, Sonny in the lead and hopping nimbly into the driver’s seat, Dimitri howling with laughter like a hyena. Moira slipped into a back seat before the van squealed away from the curb, burning rubber.

Sandi was wrapping Ben’s hand in an absent-minded fashion, holding it against the ice; it was swelling, a dark purple.

“You should probably get that looked at,” she said.

“It hurts like a bugger, if that’s any indication of a broken finger or two,” Ben said, wincing at her touch.

“I guess that’s what she wanted,” Sandi said, with an edge to her voice.

Things were going to get difficult, he could see that. He would have to tell her everything, how he’d skedaddled because Moira had been off her nut, even then. Sandi would understand.

But she could probably figure out the timing. That he’d screwed Moira after meeting Sandi. That was the bad part. So maybe he’d have to keep everything between them hidden. He had to decide.

“We’ll have to move,” Sandi said. “I don’t feel safe here anymore.”

Ben could feel a dark collapse inside himself, a hollowing—she had loved this house. He knew how hard it would be to pack up and resettle. Almost impossible.

“We’ll keep the table and chairs,” Sandi said. “A table runner should cover the gouging, and if nothing else, it’ll make a good story at dinner parties.”