Chapter 60
One of Mary’s only remaining joys in this, the sixty-second year of her life, is freshly baked cheddar-and-herb bread.
On Saturday mornings, she buys it at the farmers’ market held in the parking lot of the local library, before the library opens.
It’s only a seven-minute drive away, but people there don’t think of her as the woman who raised a murderer. There, she is simply Mary, a regular.
She went this past Saturday, with a faded Orioles cap on her head. She knows that the bread contributes to the excess fat around her hips and middle, and that does bother her, but not enough to stop eating it.
She’d sliced the heel off the loaf when she got home, ate it at room temperature with cold butter. After that, she hasn’t had any more. Her appetite died with the man across the street.
But now, again, she feels the beginnings of hunger burgeoning like spring’s first blooms. She’ll use the bread for sandwiches.
One for herself, and one for her son. Owen, who now has a full beard and ponytail.
In spite of everything, she finds herself smiling, thinking of him. Of his face. Of how close she’d been.
Until she considers that he still didn’t speak to her, that he barely acknowledged her presence at all, and she thinks of the reason she went into the basement in the first place and understands that there has been no progress. That she has no reason to smile.
Her sweet boy. The detectives can’t comprehend how she can still think of him this way. But they aren’t mothers; they aren’t his mother. Besides, what he did? It was for her.
Mary retrieves her supplies: the long wooden cutting board, the bread, turkey, lettuce, and cheese from the fridge.
She moves to the knife block to get the bread knife, but it isn’t there, still in the dishwasher from when she used it on Saturday morning.
Her second choice of knife for cutting bread, long and slightly serrated, is also gone, which gives her pause.
She can’t recall using that one recently.
She checks the drying rack, the dishwasher.
She checks the other slots in the knife block again, in case there are two knives in one slot.
She’s done that before. Not this time. She checks the utensil drawer, then all the other drawers.
And if a man had not just been stabbed to death in the backyard of the house across the street, Mary would think nothing of the missing knife.
She would assume that it had been misplaced, and that it would turn up eventually, when she wasn’t looking for it, when she was looking for something else.
The missing knife is nothing. It must be nothing. But it’s also, possibly, not nothing. It could be a problem. And the detectives could be back at any time. They could be on their way here right now, for all Mary knows. She doesn’t have much time to think.
Owen will be getting hungry soon, wondering about lunch. But she must do this. She must do it now.
There’s a box in the living room. She’s been gradually filling it with items for donation.
She’s finished with the second floor of the house—Owen’s old bedroom being the most difficult for her—and has been working through the first. Her appointment with the Realtor is next week.
She wonders whether he will cancel, tell her they should wait a bit longer to list the house, what with the murder in the backyard of the house across the street, no arrest made yet.
Mary wouldn’t mind delaying the sale if money wasn’t so tight.
She removes the knife block from the kitchen counter and places it in the box.
She rearranges the contents a little so that the knives are concealed.
She grabs a throw blanket from the sofa nearby, folds it haphazardly, and places it on top.
She wasn’t actually planning to get rid of that blanket, but she has others and she’s desperate to finish this task before she has a chance to think too much and thinks herself out of it.
Or thinks herself into doing something else.
Mary seals the box with a strip of tape and scrawls “Household goods” across the top flap in black Sharpie. She struggles getting the box outside and into her car, but somehow she manages. They may write that on her tombstone, in fact. Mary Irvin: Somehow she managed.
Usually, Mary would wait until she had at least a few boxes before making a run to Goodwill or setting up a collection at the curb, but she can’t afford to do that now.
So she takes the single box and she gives it away, and when she’s back in her car, engine turning over, she can finally breathe.
It’s not until she’s careening onto the highway that she remembers the bread knife still in her dishwasher.
The block she had donated was missing two. She hopes that doesn’t matter.
In Target, Mary selects a new block of knives.
Her old block had eighteen; this one has only four.
But does she really need more than four?
Besides, she still has the bread knife, at home in her dishwasher, and she would rather have four of decent quality than a huge set of cheap ones.
The larger sets are unjustifiably expensive.
The line for the self-checkout registers is longer than the lines for the two open cashiers, so Mary opts for the human, desperate to get home.
She has a strange sense that the detectives will be there waiting for her, and they’ll ask her where she was.
She’s terrified that if they do, she’ll tell the truth.
“This is a nice set,” says the cashier conversationally as she swipes it across the scanner. “I bought this same one for my boyfriend’s sister when she got married last year, and she loves it.”
Well, she wouldn’t tell you if she hated it, would she? Mary thinks irritably, smiling tightly. She also has quite a strong opinion that a person over the age of forty shouldn’t be using the word boyfriend to describe her significant other.
She’s being cruel—only within her mind, but she feels shame stinging the back of her neck, her irritability evincing her fear.
“Perfect,” she says instead of unleashing her misplaced vitriol. “I’m glad to hear I made a good choice.”
She accepts the offer for a bag, needing it more for concealment than portability, and insists that she does not need a receipt, gift or otherwise.
Her heart hammers persistently against her rib cage the entire drive home.
But for no imminent reason, because there’s no police car in her driveway, nor parked along the street.
They aren’t here, and Mary did it. The knives are gone, and it’s done.
Her cover-up, she thinks. But that’s absurd.
It wasn’t. It couldn’t be. It was overkill.
A mother’s irrational melodrama. Because Owen has done nothing wrong.
Not this time. And not when he killed Ed.
And no one will ever convince Mary Irvin, who has somehow managed, otherwise.