Chapter 24
THE PTO ELECTION was two weeks away. Anna had put out of her mind the dinner with Mary.
In fact, she hadn’t spoken with her since.
Instead, she had relied on Di for information about the ebbs and flows of the polling.
On Wednesday, the day designated for their regularly scheduled tête-à-tête at Honeycomb, Mary sent a group chat saying she was sick.
It was for the best, Anna thought. She didn’t want to sit in uncomfortable silence, nor did she want to explain to Di what their third-wheel friend had said.
At some point, they would have to face the uncomfortable reality of it: a jealous friend who would never fit the same way that Di and Anna had.
That’s what she was telling herself, at least—that all of this was because of jealousy, that Mary had felt the twinge of a thirty-year friendship brushing against her nascent one.
The other feelings that had risen up Anna pushed to the back of her mind.
On Saturday, Anna told Denny to sleep in and she and the kids drove to meet Di and her kids all the way out to Salisbury Beach, even though it was winter.
“Mom said I could do as much Skee-Ball as I want this time,” Louisa told Ben in the car. That wasn’t true, of course. There was a limit. Forty dollars. But that could buy a lot of Skee-Ball, even accounting for inflation.
“Mom, did you say that?” Ben asked. He always wanted to play the sucker games, the grabber that got the tickets that no one ever won, and anyway, even if you got the ring of nine hundred tickets, it bought you one stupid little lollipop, twenty bucks for something that cost a dime at CVS.
“Not exactly,” Anna said. “But I’ll let you do way more Skee-Ball than those grabber machines that you seem to love so much.”
“Totally unfair,” he whimpered.
“You’re right,” she said. “Totally unfair.”
Di had bought her boys cotton candy, which was the first mistake.
She let her sticky kids loose in the arcade with a card stocked with money.
“I really do not care what they do,” she said.
“It’s Saturday. Let them exist.” Henry and Ben were over at the grabber, a toy that always succeeded in grabbing money, if never a toy.
Di had gotten herself a Slush Puppie, for no apparent reason, blue raspberry, in the middle of January, and her tongue and teeth were stained blue.
“You are so weird sometimes,” Anna said.
“Oh, good, you’re finally here. I apologize for not getting you one, too,” Di said.
“Believe me, I’m not offended. It’s nice to see Ben and Henry playing together. They haven’t seen each other in a while,” Anna said.
“I know. Henry got moved around a little.” Henry had, in fact, undergone a complete transformation.
His move from T-ball prospect to soccer whiz was first. Next, he had been promoted from First Grade A to First Grade B, and the scuttlebutt among the Hamilton Mommies was that First Grade B was the class with the advanced students.
Ben was in First Grade A, so the boys saw less and less of each other these days.
“Well, anyway. I’m glad to see them together again.”
Di smiled and held up her index finger. “Hold on, just one second,” she said, pulling out her phone. “I have to let the man of the house know what time I’ll be back. What time do you think we’ll be home?”
Anna looked at her watch. It was just past noon. She’d give the kids two hours to get their energy out. “Say two? A little after if we get pizza?”
“Thanks,” Di said, dashing off a text. “All set now.”
All four kids had disappeared into the grim dark of the arcade, which looked exactly the same as it had thirty-five years earlier: peeling linoleum floors, a pop of neon lighting here and there, grizzled employees waiting for the shift to end.
Joe’s Playland had no doubt stayed the same since it opened in the 1950s, always a year-round respite for the local kids who had nothing to do on the weekends.
“Amazing how this place never changes,” Di said, reading Anna’s mind.
“One of the few things that always stays the same.”
The stasis was something, though, that Anna couldn’t entirely wrap her head around.
Here in Salisbury, where the linoleum crumbled under her feet and the best thing to eat was a piece of pizza with crust the consistency of cardboard and sauce that was 90 percent sugar, staying the same was just fine.
She and Di could comfortably slip into old versions of themselves: sweatpants and hoodies, Slush Puppies that turned their mouths blue.
Joe’s compressed time turned them back into the teenagers they had been a long time ago, and so it was easy to forget that they were also mothers and wives and citizens, that Di was also the kind of person who wore overpriced yoga pants and thick-soled vanity sneakers to the grocery store, just in case she ran into anyone from the neighborhood.
“I always feel like a kid when I’m here,” Di said.
“Come. Let’s take a photo.” She pulled Anna by the hand and brought her into the photo booth, which looked as old as they were.
It was probably the same booth where they had taken photos the day of their eighth-grade graduation, when Di’s mother had paid for them to come down to the beach and the arcade in a limousine, a motley crew of teenagers.
Di inserted a five-dollar bill and made ridiculous faces as the lights flashed, and Anna looked right into the mirror that showed her reflection, fine lines creeping up around her eyes now.
When the long strip of black-and-white pictures printed out at the end, she handed it over to Di.
“You keep it,” she said. “Something to remember us by.”
“As if I ever need anything to remember you by. I can’t seem to get rid of you,” Di said. She folded the strip in half and tucked it into the pocket of her jeans. That was true, Anna thought. Di had never quite been able to get rid of Anna, her perpetual sidekick, always around, always there.
“Maybe you’ve never really tried,” Anna said. It must have been her imagination, the way her friend looked at her, just a moment too long, before sticking her blue tongue out.
“Beat you at a game of Skee-Ball,” Di said. And off they went, to tackle the demons of Joe’s Playland.
When she got back home, something about the kitchen was different.
Anna could not quite put her finger on it.
The bowl in the center of the kitchen island looked almost as if it had been disrupted.
She had left in the morning and there had been a handful of avocadoes ripening.
Now she noticed that all of the fruit lay over to one side, as if someone had rearranged them on purpose.
“Denny?” she called out. “Are you home?” She hadn’t noticed, pulling in, whether or not the Jeep was in the driveway. The house was midday-January dark. She walked around the kitchen, turning on the lights as the kids went upstairs to change into sweatpants.
“Daddy isn’t here,” Louisa called from her room. “The Jeep isn’t here!”
Good to know, Anna said to herself. Something else about the kitchen felt wrong.
On the edge of the island, Denny—well, she assumed it was Denny, at least—had brought in the mail and stacked it in a tidy pile.
On the top was a Hallmark card, in a pink envelope, addressed to Anna in sloping ballpoint letters, perfect cursive, no stamp.
She slipped her finger beneath the seam of the card, and in the process gave herself a paper cut. Fuck, she said to no one. As she said it, a flurry of pink and white glitter—hearts, actually—fell out onto the floor. Annoying. A glitter bomb, the kids called it.
Anna pulled the card out. A brown dog, sitting in the sun. I’m sorry for your loss, the card read. A pet sympathy card. She opened the card. Unsigned.
She wondered if it was some kind of message from Mimi, a joke that was supposed to be funny, about the upcoming election. To drive over from Nancy’s Corner to leave it in her mailbox, though, well, that took some nerve.
When did this come, she texted Denny, sending a photo of the envelope.
No idea, haven’t seen it.
You didn’t bring this in?
No. Be home soon. Just stopped by Home Depot.
Someone had been inside the house, her house, stacking the avocadoes to one side, lining up the mail so that she would the card when she came in.
From outside, Anna suddenly became aware of a faint barking.
The sound was from beyond the property line.
Hank. Someone had let Hank out. I’m sorry for your loss.
She was at the slider in a flash, then out in her own icy yard yelling for the dog.
“Hank! Hank! Come here, boy!” Anna could hear the faint bark again, but the more she yelled the stronger the bark became.
Soon, it sounded like the bark was approaching, and then she could see an outline of a dog cresting the hill between her neighbor’s property and her own, his brindle fur covered in mud.
“Good boy,” she yelled. “Oh, good, good boy!” He was missing his collar and one of his hind legs looked like it had been scraped up pretty good, but he was okay.
Just cold and a little nervous. He rubbed up against her legs and licked her cheek when she bent down to pet him on the head.
She had been out. And someone had known that she was out.
Anna could not allow herself to believe what any reasonable person would have told her.
I have to let the man of the house know what time I’ll be back, Di had said.
What if it had been a lie? Anna had been away for two hours; Denny had been at Home Depot—that much would have been obvious to anyone driving by the house.
The Jeep was always parked in the driveway and never in the garage. Di would have known that.