Forty-One
Outside Roosevelt Elementary, bundled to the gills in my winter camouflage, I avoided the other moms as I shivered under a
sky so gray it was hard to believe it would ever be blue again. Where the hell was Connor’s body? If law enforcement somehow
came across it, they’d surely pair it with my scrapbooking scissors, in which case Miranda and I would both be in deep shit.
The police might come for me at any moment. Or worse, Ralphie and Errol might find me. I needed to spend some quality time
with my girls while I still could.
When the twins came out the school’s front entrance and spotted me, they ran toward me, arms outstretched to give me a giant
double hug.
“Why are you wearing sunglasses, Mommy? The sun is never out in Boise,” Alice asked.
“You look weird in that scarf,” Phoebe added. “I can’t even see your face.”
“Since it’s Friday, I thought we could go to Caffeina for hot chocolate,” I said.
They jumped up and down, clapping and cheering, my odd outfit forgotten.
As I drove, I told myself the rest of the day would be fun and festive because I’d make it fun and festive. But the twins
and I had only tramped halfway across Caffeina’s parking lot when I slipped on an icy patch and landed right on my butt in
a dirty pile of slush.
I was still brushing bits of snow from my soggy jeans when Phoebe yelled, “Look, Mommy!” and pointed toward the entrance of the Library!
No, I thought. No, no, no. Because Agent Nate Duran, Principal Cruz, and Maricela were emerging, laughing and joking, each of them carrying a stack
of books. They looked like that impossible thing: a happy extended family.
“Maricela from soccer! And Coach Duran!” Alice said, like an LA tourist spotting Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya in the wild.
“And Principal Cruz!” Phoebe said. “Mommy, let’s hurry so we can say hi!”
“No!” I hissed, pulling the twins behind a parked Sprinter van. No one would recognize me under the bundle of my scarf, sunglasses,
and hooded coat, but the twins were unmistakable. I peeked quickly around the edge of the van to see Nate and his family climbing
into his road-worn Land Cruiser.
“What’s wrong?” Phoebe asked.
“Why are we hiding?” That was Alice.
“I can’t handle a Stop-and-Chat right now,” I said. Not after Nate had searched my house with his ATF bro that morning, both
of them thinking I was hiding my white supremacist paramour in a nook or closet.
“Why can’t we talk to them?” Phoebe demanded. “We like them. We need frieeeeeeends.”
“We get lonely,” Alice chimed in, looking mournful.
Ugh! I hated to admit it to myself, but Emmylou had been right. The twins were clearly craving more connection and community
than I’d been able to provide since we moved to Boise. Without Emmylou on our side, our little household felt so small and
sad, so broken. Perhaps I was denying my kids their actual family! After all, if Nate was their biological father, then technically,
Principal Cruz was their aunt and Maricela was their cousin.
Blessedly the Land Cruiser pulled out of the parking lot and receded down State Street.
“Now who’s ready for some hot chocolate?” I said, forcing cheer into my voice.
“Me!” both twins said, but they sounded melancholy.
With all the joie de vivre knocked out of me, the depictions of local landmarks gracing the walls of Caffeina seemed aggressively
ugly, especially the Idaho State Capitol cut from a potato sack and the Lucky Peak Reservoir made of soda can pop-tops. But
the twins seemed to be cheered by the warm cozy space. I took off my scarf and sunglasses, confident Ralphie and Errol wouldn’t
venture into a place on the far north side of town that sold seven-dollar oat milk matcha lattes.
While I waited for our drinks—sweater tied around my waist to hide my soggy rump—I spotted an abandoned New York Times splayed across a nearby table.
The leering face plastered across the front of the Arts section gave me an electric shock.
Mickey Larynx. As if in a trance, I picked up the paper and started to read.
Totally Depraved Comic Mickey Larynx Finds His Voice
Mickey Larynx believes in second acts and second chances.
“Should anyone tug their tug boat in a hotel hot tub?” Larynx asked as I sat across from him at a booth in famed Santa Monica
hamburger stand Father’s Office. “Probably not. But find me a person who hasn’t made a mistake and I’ll never pick up a microphone
again.”
After complaints last January that Larynx had committed lewd acts in the hot tubs at the Four Seasons San Francisco at Embarcadero
and the Fort Sutter Hotel Sacramento, his fifty-city comedy tour was canceled. But less than a year later, he seems to have
cracked the comeback code. For his sold-out Totally Depraved tour, he’s renting out arenas himself instead of going through
bookers.
“Tilly!” the barista called.
In a daze, I shuttled our drinks to the twins, who sat engrossed in a game of Connect Four. Once I joined them at the table,
I tried to scan the rest of the article but I’d basically blacked out, as if my unconscious mind wouldn’t let me absorb any
more information about Mickey Larynx’s happiness and success.
Why should Mickey Larynx be allowed a comeback so soon after endangering public health? What he did was beyond disgusting,
potentially traumatizing—and unsanitary! While he’d ruined my prospects with his public perversions, he’d totally recovered
his own footing. Meanwhile, I was stuck at rock bottom in Boise, Idaho, with no career, no boyfriend, no babysitter, and a
couple of sadistic bigots trying to hunt me down.
“Mommy!” Alice wailed, snapping me out of my mud bog of self-pity. “Phoebe is cheating.”
“Her face is cheating!” Phoebe snapped. “And I have to go to the bathroom!”
As I guarded the bathroom door, I studied the craft abomination hanging on the opposite wall. Hopefully no one would call
the bunch of bottle caps strung together in the shape of Idaho “art.” It wasn’t a perfect rendering of the state either—the
bottom southeast corner was missing, a few loose threads hanging down. As I mentally critiqued the piece, it finally soaked
in that the bottlecaps were stamped with the word BuckSnort.
Hands shaking, I reached into my purse and pulled out the BuckSnort bottle cap I’d found in my jacket pocket soon after I
discovered Connor’s body.
The hole drilled in my bottle cap was a perfect match for the ones on the wall.
When the twins emerged from the bathroom, I hurried them to the front counter where a bored barista with algae-colored hair
and a glistening silver beauty mark gazed off into the middle distance.
“Have you by any chance seen me in here before?” I demanded.
“People from your generation all look alike to me,” she said with a shrug.
“Were you working two Sundays ago, like at night?” I insisted.
“Nope.”
My heart flattened like an indecisive squirrel under a sixteen-wheeler as the barista spun on her heels and disappeared through
the swinging door to the kitchen. But then she reappeared with a gangly blond wearing a jean jacket.
The gangly blond stared at me. “Ugh. You again.”
“You recognize me?” I said.
“You owe Ellen DiMarco eighty bucks for damages.”
“Ellen who?”
“The artist.” She gestured at a rendition of the Boise Depot woven out of shredded grocery bags.
Hope was the most dangerous emotion, but I couldn’t guard against it now. I turned to the twins. “Hey, will you two go see
which T-shirts they have in a medium?”
As Phoebe and Alice scampered off to investigate the T-shirt rack, I leaned in toward the gangly blond. “So you were here?”
I asked. “Two Sundays ago?”
“Unfortunately.”
Adrenaline shot through me. “Somebody Ambiened my drink before I came in here.”
“Ambien!” she said. “That makes sense. You passed out on that couch at about nine thirty.” She pointed to a purple velour
couch that’d seen better days. “It was slow in here so I just let you sleep. You woke up at like four.”
“I didn’t go anywhere? From nine thirty to four? I was right there?” Though I’d been at an all-time nadir five minutes ago,
sunshine shot through me now.
“In plain sight.”
“Thank you, sweet St. Lucille Ball.” My knees felt like they might buckle.
I’d been sleeping here all night, in plain view.
I had an alibi! An alibi! It was a joyful mantra.
It wasn’t like I went around with vials of Botox and a syringe in my purse.
Still, without knowing where I’d been all night, I hadn’t been able to chase away the niggling worry I’d been involved.
But now that worry dissolved. I had an alibi!
“You were making me anxious,” the barista continued. “I kept thinking like, what if you were my mom, you know?”
“I’m way too young and fresh to be your mom,” I said.
“She’s forty-three,” the barista said. “How old are you?”
“Never mind.”
“Once you woke up, you were staggering around. When I followed you to the bathroom, I saw you rip a chunk off of BuckSnort, Idaho.”
It made sense. Even sober, I was always appalled by truly bad coffee shop art. “Did you see where I went?” I said. “When I
left?”
The twins had pressed their shoulders together so they looked conjoined and sidled up to an old woman eating an oversized
blueberry muffin. Ten bucks they were asking for a handout. Normally I would’ve intervened, but I was grateful they were distracted.
“I made you call an Uber,” the barista was saying. “You were so messed up I waited outside with you—because I’m an altruist. But I had to run in to help a customer. When I came out you were heading down the alley behind Huckleberry’s. I kept thinking:
If my mom was in such a bad state, I’d want someone to look out for her, you know?”
Oh my god, enough about your mom.
“So I went to the end of the alley and yelled that your Uber was here,” the barista continued. “The weirdest thing was, when
you staggered back out you were wearing a vest you hadn’t had on before.”
“A teal vest?”
“Yep.”
“Hot damn!” I said, my heart exploding into a hundred cavorting Jack Russell puppies. “How long? How long was I in the alley?”
“I don’t know? Two minutes? Three minutes?”
A drugged-up Connor had probably stripped off his vest before deciding to take an ill-fated dump in the trunk of my car.
Only after Connor was dead in that same trunk and Miranda long gone had I wandered down the alley in my drunken and Ambiened state, picked up his abandoned vest, put it on, banged on the back alley door of Huckleberry’s, and talked to the dishwasher.
(I hadn’t been in the alley nearly long enough to do all that and murder Idaho Connor and stuff him in my trunk).
My alibi now made total sense! Which didn’t change the fact that hiding the (now-missing!) body in
my yard might come back to bite me in the ass. And I couldn’t exactly confess all to the police without leaving Miranda and
poor Tater Tot out to dry. Still, relief—that I had an alibi, that my conscience was clear—bathed every single cell in my
body.
“Amazing!” I said. “Seriously, you’ve saved my life.”
I happily handed over my last eighty bucks from the Therapy Jar to pay for damages to the ugly bottle cap art. In exchange,
I requested the gangly blond’s full name and number.
“That night got crazy,” I explained. “And there is a teeny-tiny chance law enforcement will need to talk to you.”