Page 21 of Kiss Her Goodbye (Frankie Elkin #4)
T ONIGHT’S DINNER IS brEADED CUTS of thick pork chops, smothered in gravy and served with a mound of mashed potatoes topped with a golden pad of butter. Another ode to the kind of family dinners my family never had.
Daryl dives into his plate with gusto. I mostly cut my chop into tiny pieces, which I push around my plate.
I’m acutely aware that dinnertime for humans will soon be followed by dinnertime for pythons.
At least I did better at throwing Petunia’s salad into her bowl this evening.
Even managed to change out her water without screaming. But snakes…
A dozen babies.
One large big mama.
Why had I ever agreed to this? Except if memory serves, I never actually said yes. Bart just never accepted my sincere no.
Little shit.
Daryl is back to checking his phone.
“Booty call?” I finally press, mostly because I’m spoiling for a fight.
He stops chewing his food long enough to regard me intently. “Jealousy doesn’t become you.”
I scowl. My own mobile is tucked face up next to my plate, and not because I’m that anxious to get my next set of instructions from Bart.
“Oh, honey, just call him,” Genni advises me.
“Or her. You know we won’t judge.” Genni is looking particularly happy 1950s housewife in a crisp navy-blue dress with a white Peter Pan collar and an enormous star-shaped diamond brooch that both casts glittering rainbows upon the walls and threatens to poke out an eye.
She’s exchanged her red Lucille Ball wig for a blond Marilyn Monroe bombshell. They each have merits.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I reply stiffly.
She and Daryl roll their eyes.
“Twin mattresses,” I declare, remembering my commitment to Ashley the housing coordinator. “I need to get my hands on a set. The cheaper the better, though they can’t be in gross condition. Anybody have some ideas?”
“I don’t do cheap,” Genni begins, just in time for Daryl to say:
“Habitat for Humanity. They have a store in Tucson. Used furniture, appliances. Sometimes includes mattresses.”
Genni stares at him. “Well, aren’t you a fount of information?”
“Once furnished an apartment with less than twenty bucks. Learned some tricks.”
He shovels in the last bite of mashed potatoes, neatly pats his lips with his black napkin, then pushes back from the table, phone already in hand.
“My evening awaits.” He gives me a pointed look.
“Are you going dancing? Because if you see Roberta, I want to know if her brother assigned more patrol cars to Nageenah’s apartment complex. Whether or not Zahra is still there, the other tenants deserve that much.”
Daryl doesn’t respond to my blatant fishing.
“What did you two think of the kids?” I press. “You spent the most time with them.”
“Good dancers,” Daryl supplies.
“That’s not helpful.”
He shrugs. “Interesting music. Didn’t know there was such a thing as Middle Eastern discotheque.”
“Did Zahra say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Is it strange for such a young child to be so silent?”
“Works for me.”
I roll my eyes. “You’re not good at this game.”
Second shrug. “The kids seem happy. I enjoyed their company.” On that note, Daryl grabs his dirty plate and delivers it to the kitchen sink.
I sigh heavily, give up on my own dinner.
“That better not be a comment on my cooking,” Genni informs me, gesturing to my barely touched food.
“No, it’s a comment on what awaits.”
“You are going to call him!”
“I’m not that kind of girl.”
“Honey, we are all that kind of girl. Give me his number. I’ll do it.”
“Absolutely not!” I snatch my phone up before Genni can make good on her threat.
Though deep down, I feel a piece of myself waver.
Because the sex was that good? Or his company that comforting?
In the middle of the night, he would roll over, wrap his arm around my waist, and pull me tighter against him.
The first time he did it, I stiffened in alarm. But as week turned into week…
It felt good to be held close and not because someone needed me, but because he wanted me.
I could’ve stayed. We both knew it.
And yet I couldn’t have stayed. And we both knew that, too.
“I’m going to attempt to feed some snakes,” I murmur. Just in time for my phone to chime with the first message from Bart.
Step one, remove a frozen rat from the freezer…
I sigh heavily and get to it.
I FILL A coffee cup with steaming hot water, then manage not to vomit while removing Marge’s dinner, a rodent Popsicle, from its vacuum-sealed packaging.
It smells mostly like ice, which helps. As for how it looks once I’ve plopped it into the heated water… My nightmares are going to be particularly vivid tonight.
Petunia has returned from chowing down her salad and is now planted in the middle of the reptile wing corridor, staring at me.
“Any chance you’d like to feed the snakes?” I ask her. Then, remembering: “Oops. Apparently, they’d take that literally and turn you into dinner. Sorry. Though for the record, I hope you’re really appreciating my company right now.”
“Honey, Petunia has a lizard brain. You get that, right?” Genni has her entire six-foot-four self leaning against the kitchen counter. She’s not even pretending to clear the rest of the dishes, just taking in the show.
“Start by delivering thawed rat to the one big snake or by feeding crickets to the dozen baby snakes?” I ask Genni, since Petunia is no help.
“Have you tried extracting feeder crickets yet?”
“Aren’t they in some box sitting beneath the ball pythons’ terrarium? Just grab with tongs? Deliver one by one to waiting serpents?”
Genni tsks at my na?veté. “They’re shipped in a box, honey. Then Bart dumps them in an aquarium for tending. Can’t feed live crickets if the crickets don’t stay alive.”
I stare at her blankly. Boy Wonder never mentioned any of this, I’m certain.
“Crickets are fed cricket food. Which, between you and me, is ground-up crickets.”
I make a slight gagging sound.
“Also, never give them water—they drown too easily. There’s a pan of green gelatin cricket goo used instead.”
ON CUE, MY phone chimes in rapid succession. Step four, reach into the feeder cricket terrarium and remove the first cardboard egg container…
I swear, then have to quickly read backward.
Sure enough, there’s an entire trade craft involved in feeder cricket extraction.
Luring crickets into the hollow depressions in cut-up egg cartons, lifting the cardboard piece out carefully before plucking out the intended victim, then offering it to the waiting python baby…
By the time I’m done reading about live cricket distribution, feeding a single semi-thawed rat seems like a much easier proposition. Maybe.
I pick up the rodent-filled mug. Sigh heavily.
“You can do this,” Genni assures me.
I shudder, squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t want to do this, I really don’t. And yet…
Some people make healthy life decisions. Some pay attention to their inner wants, needs, desires. And some of us… we just do what we have to do. Even if it hurts us later…
I step around Petunia, march one, two, three, four steps down the carpeted corridor.
And I suffer a strange sense of déjà vu.
Myself as a kid, returning home after school following one of my parents’ blow-out fights, when my mother screamed she couldn’t take one more minute of my father’s drinking and he swore, begged, pleaded he would do better.
Leading to a stilted breakfast where my father, who’d clearly spent the night sobering up with six pots of coffee, moved about the kitchen with relentless good intentions as he dished out overcooked eggs and prattled about the beautiful weather.
Except now it’s eight hours later, which he’s spent alone in a house that, no matter how hard my mother and I try, always has a hidden liter of Jack.
My footsteps slow as I approach the front door, my backpack growing heavier. My hand comes to rest on the door handle.
This is the moment. Twist the knob, push open the door, and…
Passed-out-drunk Dad is a given. Sober Dad…
Sober Dad is hope and heartache in equal measures, because it never lasts, and we all know it.
Which makes this moment right now, my small fingers curling around a smooth brass handle, a kind of limbo. Where I wish for the best, while assuring myself I can handle the worst.
Where I stand for endless minute rolling into minute because even when you promise yourself that you’re strong enough…
It doesn’t mean it won’t hurt all over again.
I have loved my father my entire life. And to this day, memories of him hurt me, which is particularly awful, because my father never wanted to be that man. There wasn’t a mean, violent, angry bone in his body. Just an illness that robbed his family of him all the same.
And soon enough, it became the curse he shared with his daughter. I’ve never been able to figure out which was worse during my own hard-drinking high school years: my mother’s deep disappointment in my behavior or my father’s self-conscious shame.
I wish they could see me now. I wish I could know them as the person I’ve become.
But life doesn’t work like that. Moments come, moments go, and even the truly horrific ones, such as what Sabera Ahmadi experienced, are seared into our souls while journeying on.
We’re left in some kind of cosmic toaster oven, where the universe’s memory is long gone, while we still struggle with the burn marks left on our psyche.
I’m not a young girl anymore.
And behind this door isn’t the specter of my maybe drunk, maybe sober father.
The doubt, the dread, the terror, however, remain uniquely my own.
My phone chimes with additional texts from Bart. I don’t bother to look. It’s time to get this done.
Final deep breath, then I step into the darkened interior, my eyes requiring a moment to adjust to the gloom.
On my right, the raised glass enclosure with its slithering mass of hungry baby snakes above, much smaller cricket cage below.
Straight ahead, the even more impressively sized terrarium housing the coiled bulk of pale-yellow Marge, her head now rising into the air, forked tongue darting out to test the air.
Except Marge isn’t eight feet away in the comfort of her custom home.
She’s unspooling from a spot on the floor a mere three feet away.
I yelp.
I hurtle a half-thawed rat in her direction. Then, as she lunges for the dead rodent…
I get the hell out of there.