Chapter 24 #2
But no. This was ridiculous. Just another tailspin.
The only thing more absurd than believing that Mimi Mar was harassing her was believing that her best friend was.
Was this paranoia? Who could reasonably say at this point?
Nothing had happened to the dog. Another childish prank.
She debated whether to text Di and tell her what had happened, but she thought better of it.
What if, what if, what if, her brain said, and so she didn’t. This is probably nothing. This is just some teenager fucking with me, trying to scare me. I am being brought to the brink of insanity.
Anna brought Hank inside and wiped him down with a towel she kept on a hook by the door—what Denny called the Dirty Dog Towel.
Louisa and Ben had come downstairs and were sitting in the kitchen, arguing over which Minecraft character was better: Steve or Alex.
It was a game that Anna did not understand or enjoy, something having to do with robotics that had also made its way into the Lego universe (another domain that belonged to her kids and to Denny and squarely not to her).
“When is Daddy coming home?” Louisa asked, seeing Anna walk back in with the towel.
“He should be home soon,” Anna said. In her head, she was already having a conversation of her own, rehearsing what she would say when Denny showed up and asked about Hank, who was more his dog than he was hers.
The dog had gotten out, she would say. The collar had slipped off in the woods.
It was nothing to worry about; he had come when called.
Yes, they had a good time at Joe’s. No, they didn’t have anything planned for dinner. Sure, Chinese sounded good.
To give the rest of it a name was to make it real.
Someone had been in the house. Someone had planned to be there in her absence, and had left a card there for her to see it, and had removed Hank’s collar and let him out into the woods, where there were fisher cats and God knows what else, where the boundary between yard and woods was blurred, where anything could have happened on a bleak January afternoon.
Anna had promised to read the latest installment of Captain Underpants to the kids—their recent obsession—but she felt winded, so she corralled them into the family room and turned on Bluey and allowed them the gentle purring of anthropomorphized Australian dogs instead, while she went into her office to sit at her desk and stare out the window for a minute.
Her computer, she noticed, was still on.
She moved the mouse and the screen saver blinked back.
A Word document flashed to life. Black Times New Roman font.
Size 36. (Aggressive, thought Anna.) Go big, go home, the words on the screen said.
A message, and not at all a subtle one. When Anna went to close the file, she found that it had been saved to her hard drive. Document name: PlummerForPresident.doc.
Dragging the document to the trash, she listened for the satisfying crunch, the telltale virtual shredding of garbage.
Over and done with. Gone. Whatever all this was, Anna Plummer refused to fall for it.
When she looked down at her phone, she noticed that Mary was calling.
Without thinking, she sent the call to voicemail.
The conspiracy theories could die in the mailbox, as far as Anna was concerned.
Denny didn’t ask about Hank, even though he must have noticed the missing collar.
That was one of his superpowers, and, if she was honest, one of the things that Anna appreciated most about her husband.
When she needed him to ignore something, he did.
When she needed him to pretend that an issue was less than the sum of its parts, he was willing—and able—to will it away, to bury it under a hill of other, more pressing concerns.
Anna hid the card that had been stuffed full of glitter at the bottom of the trash bin; she would not speak of it, and if Denny stumbled upon it on trash day, he didn’t mention it, either.
For dinner, they drove out to Kowloon on Route 1 in Saugus.
The parking lot was full, probably with tourists who had learned that the restaurant, open since the ’50s, was up for sale.
The previous summer, when Covid had everyone scared to sit in a restaurant full of germs and other people, the owners set up a movie theater in the lot so that people could still feel like they were going out in the world.
But Anna and Denny were still living in New York back then, out on Long Island, where a million people had decamped during the pandemic, crowding the beaches and the restaurants and the tiny little stores that lined every hamlet, making it feel like its own small hospital ward.
Now that they were settled into their Hamilton life, they were Kowloon regulars.
Bob Wong, working the front, showed them to one of their favorite tables in the room with the fountain in the center.
Anna let the kids order Shirley Temples with extra maraschino cherries.
For herself: a pina colada with a rum floater, served in an ersatz pineapple.
“I’ve always wanted to do this,” she said to Denny.
He looked at her like she was crazy. “They’re sixteen dollars,” he said under his breath.
“Sometimes it’s worth the price for something you love.”
He frowned, looked down at the menu, which was more like a leatherbound book, and shook his head. “Is everything okay with you?” he asked.
“You mean because I ordered a pina colada in a pineapple?”
“That, and you just seem a little . . . preoccupied,” he said.
“I am enjoying the company of my family on a Saturday night at the Kowloon,” she said.
She had put on a long purple dress, with black leather boots and a three-inch heel.
A coral necklace, looped twice around her neck.
Hair up in a tortoiseshell clip. Maybe she was feeling a little fancy.
Maybe she was trying to shake off the threat of the afternoon, trying to piece together how all of that could have happened in one day: Skee-Ball and blue raspberry Slush Puppies and glitter bombs and the dog getting out and the note on her computer and Denny none the wiser.
He loved to call her a witch, but she had no magical powers.
That was what she was always trying to explain to him.
She was painfully mortal, painfully human, just stumbling through this life like everyone else.
“Whatever floats your boat,” he said. He ordered a Miller High Life—also unlike him, Anna noted—and a pu pu platter for the table. The kids loved to watch the fire leap at the center, even if they were ambivalent about the actual food. “What did I miss today?” he said.
“I won Skee-Ball,” Ben said.
“You can’t win,” said Louisa. “I mean, he beat me. That’s what he’s saying.”
“Everyone gets their time in the sun,” Denny said.
“A good way of looking at it,” Anna said.
Even if it wasn’t true. Even if the scales were tipped.
Even if certain people made sure the scales remained skewed and uneven.
Even if the world was unfair, as her own kids had put it earlier in the day.
Even if there was no righting any wrongs, no matter how hard you worked at it, no matter how hard you tried.
Someone was always going to be waiting at the door with a glitter bomb, with a warning, with some kind of retribution.
Denny lifted his Champagne of Beers sky-high, and there, in the dining room that was designed to look like some kind of far-flung boat in a Southeast Asian sea, they made a toast.
“To Saturdays,” he said.
“To cherries!” said Louisa.
“To Skee-Ball,” said Ben.
“To drinking pina coladas,” said Anna. “To enjoying every last minute of it.”