Page 8

8

Death by Family Dinner

Jake

“Your parents are already here,” the hostess says, gesturing across the trendy restaurant with its uncomfortable chairs and narrow tables.

I spot them: two graying heads stooped over their menus, practically off-gassing straitlaced, affluent suburbia. They’re not my parents, but the family resemblance is there.

“Jake,” Aunt Laura says with her sunshine smile when I approach. My only living blood relative—at least, the only one who knows about me. She has the same dark hair as mine, but with white streaks at the temples, and large, dark eyes, like a gentle fawn. Pearl ear studs and a shell-pink cardigan complete the look. Laura is warm and sweet, at first impression the sort of person a child would want to bury their face in so they can huff the smell of home-baked cookies. Well, not a child like me. Not after what I’d been through by the time they took me in.

Next to her sits Uncle Andrew, judgmental as God, in a midrange suit, his shirt as crisply starched as his soul. He simply grunts when he notices me. Andrew has always made me think of some great, scaly, leathery dragon, spiteful and quick to anger, lolling on a great hoard of every single thing I’ve ever done to earn his disapproval. He sifts bullion and jewels through his fingers as he asks about my life.

I wonder why they still bother with me, what sort of obligation to my mother compels them to meet with me like this, every year. Do they feel good about themselves after? Relieved that it will be another year before they have to do it again? Is it a seasonal routine that anchors them to the passage of time? Do they go home and change the batteries in their smoke detectors after?

I avoid Laura’s gaze as I take my seat. How long has it been since we talked? A month? Two? Some aunts would make sure I was aware of it, but Laura’s not like that. And for some reason my brain slithers to thoughts of Dolores. Does she have deeply unsatisfying family relationships? What hilarious, insulting little comment will she prick me with tomorrow when I mention this dinner? I’m lowering myself into my chair with the enthusiasm of a convict walking to the gallows when a flash of bright, arterial red out of the corner of my eye catches my attention—

Dolores sits at a table for two not twenty feet from us.

But it’s Dolores as I’ve never seen her before. Instead of black, she’s wearing scarlet. Instead of a smooth knot, her hair tumbles down past her shoulders in careless waves. Instead of covering up from chin to kneecap to wrist, her arms and collarbones are bare, and it’s obvious now why she dresses like a corporate sister wife from nine to five.

“She must have spent a fortune to ruin her looks,” my uncle says, following my gaze. “What is that on her chest? A pair of skulls? It looks Satanic.”

“I think the roses look lovely,” my aunt says sweetly.

Bright, bold American traditional tattoos cover her arms and chest. Roses, spiderwebs, a skeleton, a dagger. Below her collarbones are two skulls, facing each other, one dressed as a bride with a veil, the other a groom. Her face is different, too. Her lipstick has smudged off, and I realize I’ve never seen her without her office war paint on—always some shade of vivid pink, screaming crimson, or a deep blood red. Her bare lips are almost indecent.

She must feel my gaze on her, because she lowers the menu and her eyes skim up the length of my body, from my shoes to my face. She doesn’t smile, but one eyebrow slides up at the sight of me. Coming from Dolores, it’s an enthusiastic invitation. I stand without giving an explanation to my aunt and uncle and go to her.

“Dolores.”

Dolores is silent for a long moment. She’s been silent with me ever since the rooftop this morning.

At last, she says in a bored voice, “Jacob.”

I put my robust sleuthing skills on demo. “You’re on a date,” I say.

“Yes.”

Yet there’s no coat draped over the back of the chair opposite her. Her decanter of wine is empty, her appetizer plate wiped clean.

“Where is he?”

She stares me down with the withering gaze of a woman scorned. She was stood up, and to make a shitty evening even shittier, I’m here to witness it.

“He’s dead to me.”

I direct away from the missing date. “Cat’s home alone tonight with a tin of Fancy Feast and the TV on to keep her company?”

“Had your face pressed against my living room window, I see. Are those your boomers?” she asks with a chin jerk toward my aunt and uncle.

“They seem to think so.”

“They’ve been staring at me like I’m a zoo creature.”

“I’ll discipline them later. No Facebook or Olive Garden for a week.”

“They seem so normal. The apple fell far. Unless…the real Jacob Ripper is buried in a shallow grave somewhere, and you have assumed his identity and are holding his family hostage to perpetuate the charade?”

“You know me better than anyone.”

Her eyes slide from my aunt and uncle to my face when I say that. “I don’t know you. I don’t know anything about you, Jake.”

I wonder if I sound aloof and mysterious or just plain idiotic when I say, “Do you want to?” And then it occurs to me that I haven’t cared in a long time if anyone thinks I sound like an idiot. Office Idiot is a useful disguise.

She tips her head to one side. “Maybe, for the sake of adding to your case file.” She slings back the dregs in her wineglass and rises, ungracefully. She’s tipsy .

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m bored. It’s a common problem for sociopaths.”

And then, as she passes me, she hooks one finger into my belt loop and gives me a little tug. A shiver ripples down my spine. It’s a performative gesture, one I feel like everyone in the room must have seen. When I glance at my aunt and uncle, I can see that they’ve seen it. And then, when she saunters over to their table, I realize she meant for them to see it.

“I was early, and I didn’t know what name the reservation was under,” Dolores tells my aunt and uncle in the breezy tone of a compulsive liar casting the first silk thread of her web of lies. “So I just got a table for myself and got started. But it’s so nice to finally meet you.”

My uncle’s mouth falls open, and my aunt’s face blossoms into another sunny smile.

“How wonderful, Jake,” she says sincerely. Her eyes dart to my uncle, cautiously. He stares as Dolores sits down across from my aunt and hooks her purse on the back of the chair. In her red dress she looks like a little bomb about to detonate in the midst of my family dinner. A scarlet stick of ACME TNT.

“So you were the host body,” she says conversationally to Aunt Laura, helping herself to a pour of wine from the bottle sitting on the table. “I know Morse code. You can blink a help signal to me.”

She’s funny, but I don’t laugh. I don’t ever laugh in front of Andrew.

“I don’t know Morse code,” Laura says, shooting me a confused look, but then the waiter arrives to take our order.

“Medium rare,” Dolores requests of her steak dinner.

“Rare,” I say for mine.

“Actually, I’d like the steak tartare,” she says, holding my gaze. She wins. When I look back at Laura, there’s a strange crinkle around her eyes.

“You have a girlfriend?” my uncle asks stupidly when the server leaves.

There’s a fleeting pause while Dolores levels her X-ray vision at him to read the whorls in his brain and determine exactly what to say to annoy him the most. “We don’t like labels .”

To be fair, there’s no label for two people who antagonize the shit out of each other and make out on the roof, anyway. And that’s when I realize the nature of Dolores’s drunk. She’s not a slurring, giggly drunk. She’s a waspish, clever drunk. A filters-off drunk. A power-crazed drunk. And as a mark of how drunk she is, her lips curl in a smile at me over the rim of her wineglass. An actual smile. Evil, and enjoying my discomfort, but a smile.

There’s that strange twist in my chest, as usual when I’m around her. The motor clunking over from idle, the default setting to get me through the day, into gear.

Andrew frowns at me. “What’s that supposed to mean? This isn’t serious?”

It’s my turn to fuck with Dolores. “It’s very serious. We’re getting married.”

Andrew’s eyebrows vanish into his hairline. Laura lets out a gasp, and for a brief second, I feel bad. Next to me, Dolores doesn’t even flinch.

“Which church?” Andrew asks with a stern look. I haven’t been to any sort of church since I lived with them.

“We’re still looking at venues,” Dolores says smoothly. “He wants his golden retriever to be the ring bearer, but I want to be married by Elvis in Las Vegas, and I can’t picture getting him on a plane. The golden retriever, that is.”

By now Andrew has realized there’s a joke somewhere here, and if he’s not in on it, he must be the butt of it. He has no problem flipping it back onto me. He makes bored, lazy eye contact with Dolores and says, “When did you and that man end things, Jake?”

Dolores cocks one eyebrow at me prettily, unfazed.

“Who?” I ask blandly.

“That man you lived with—”

“My roommate .” It’s a conversation we’ve had a dozen times. He always says that man . My uncle thinks I get up to all sorts of sordid, ungodly things with Grant.

Well. I do . But it’s different from what he thinks.

“Roommate,” my uncle echoes.

Laura interrupts. “Girlfriend, or fiancée, or neither, we’re both so happy to meet someone special to you, Jake.” She hadn’t believed Grant was just a roommate, either, in the beginning, and she’d sported a jaunty rainbow sticker on her bumper for a whole week before Andrew ripped it off. Now she’s pivoted quickly to latch onto this good news of a real, live someone special . She glows, and I feel another twinge of guilt in the pit of my stomach. Laura deserves better than the version of me that comes out when Andrew’s around. But he’s always around when I see her. Bossy and possessive, a fiercely jealous third wheel.

“Hopefully this one sticks,” my uncle replies, resurrecting another one of his favorite subjects: my charming, beautiful university girlfriend, the one who got away. Well, the one I broke up with when I decided someone like me shouldn’t be in a relationship. I would give my left nut not to have this conversation again in front of Dolores—I consider hoisting her over my shoulder and physically removing her—but then I see her expression. She’s fascinated by all of this. And that’s the only leverage I’ve ever had with her—her curiosity.

She’s getting to know me, all right.

“ She moved on quickly enough, after. And we just got a Christmas card from them. Did you get one?”

Dolores’s eyes flash back and forth amongst us all, like she’s hanging on every word.

“No,” I say, nettled. No one knows my address. I never shared it after I moved in with Grant.

“Engaged,” my uncle says, like he’s been sharpening that word to a keen point and was looking forward to stabbing me with it.

My aunt purses her lips and glances at me, concern creasing her forehead. “Lovely girl! It’s nice to know she’s happy! And you’re happy, too!” Her voice is brittle, like a cracked windshield about to give way. “All ancient history,” she says to Dolores in a loud whisper. “It’s so good to meet you.”

There’s an awkward pause at the table, punctuated by Dolores slinging back the rest of her glass of wine. She smiles sweetly at my aunt. “Likewise. Now tell me, did Jacob torture animals as a small child?”

My aunt stares at her with an expression of alarm. “He was good with animals. He wanted to be a vet.”

My uncle snorts at this. “He had more drive as a child than he does now.”

“Andrew,” my aunt says, but my uncle carries on.

“A veterinarian would be a step up from a ‘temp.’?” He says it like it’s an experimental word that hasn’t been accepted into common usage. He uses the same invisible bunny ears he puts on words and phrases like “mental health” and “feelings.”

Dolores eyes me.

Laura ignores him. “How did the two of you meet?”

Dolores shoots me a dreamy, sickly smile and takes my hand in hers. My fingers start to tingle, but I notice Laura twinkles at our grasped hands. She’s so happy. She’s a reflective substance, requiring that I be happy in order for her to be happy. No pressure at all. I leave my hand where it is.

“It was a chance meeting. I’d stopped looking, to be honest. Do you know how hard it is to find a man who gets what a modern, equitable relationship is supposed to look like? I’m talking splitting the load. I bumped into him at a hardware store—Jake was in front of me buying rope and a hunting knife, but he was also buying bleach and a tarpaulin. I thought, here’s a guy who cleans up his own messes. No weaponized male incompetence here. We got to talking, and what do you know? He knows his way around a kitchen knife, how to clean fingerprints off walls, get bloodstains out of his own laundry. If he fills the bathtub full of lye, he’ll drain the sludge out himself when he’s finished.”

My aunt laughs and says, “Oh, you like that stuff, too. Jake was always so interested in it. He used to spin theories with me about the best way to off someone.” She smiles fondly at me, like plotting murder was our alternative to I Spy for long car rides. Because it was.

Dolores stares between the two of us.

“For a while I thought he’d follow in my footsteps,” my aunt continues. “It takes a strong stomach, I suppose, being that close to death every day. At any rate, you figure out the best laundry stain removers on the market pretty quick. But it’s an interesting career. Every day is different. The variety ! The number of ways a person can be killed! It’s fascinating.” My aunt prattles on pleasantly like that, like she’s participating in book club conversation. “My favorite murder weapon so far has to be the fake leg—”

“Laura!” my uncle hisses. “We’re in a restaurant. There are people around.”

Laura turtles in on herself and glances around nervously.

For the first time, Dolores looks like she’s at a complete loss. I allow her to feel uncomfortable for ten seconds while I slowly sip my wine.

“She’s a mortician,” I explain. “An excellent one, so she winds up with the most grisly cases. Accidents. Murders. She makes them…presentable.”

Laura beams at my praise.

Dolores is fascinated. “And him?” she asks, gesturing to Andrew.

“Catholic school superintendent.”

There’s a certain logic to it if you know how to look for it. Catholics display their dead. I’ve imagined their meeting: Laura lurking behind a floral wreath with a paint palette in her purse for last-minute touch-ups on a cadaver she really got invested in; across the room, Andrew, only tangentially related to the stiff in the casket but present nevertheless for the recreational experience of pouncing on the grieving and helpfully rationalizing their loss as God’s plan. Andrew and Laura raise their eyes, connect gazes over the top of the casket, and nothing is ever the same. Laura has a romantic streak. All the white flowers, the sunlight slanting through the stained glass onto the pews, the muted sobbing into handkerchiefs—it must have felt almost bridal.

Dolores sips her wine thoughtfully. “In a Catholic school and a mortuary you were raised,” she says archly. “So much about you makes sense now.”

“Funeral home ,” Laura corrects with a warm smile. “I try to emphasize family and human connection in my business. You know, I actually come across a lot of tattoos through my job. Nobody has secrets from me. And—I just noticed you have someone’s dates on that tombstone tattoo—”

Dolores’s right hand twitches over to cover her left forearm, and Andrew makes a noise.

“Why do women these days ruin their bodies with tattoos?”

It bursts out of him so forcefully, it must have been building pressure this whole time. Dolores looks down at her smooth, colorful arms, and I do too. I spot a death moth, a bottle of poison, a claw hammer.

“?‘Women these days’?” Dolores intones. “My great-grandmother was covered in traditional batok tattoos. I’m very old-fashioned.” There’s something different in her tone now. She has the better part of a bottle of wine in her system, and her give-a-fuck meter is running on E. “It must be hellish being conservative. To wake up every day terrified of the things you don’t understand. Just think of all the interesting people you can’t be friends with. And what’s it like being a man? Going through life thinking women exist to be decorative elements in the visual landscape?”

She turns to me. “Your dad’s a creep. You came by it honestly.”

There’s a stunned little silence. Laura blinks several times at the tabletop. Andrew’s mouth falls open once again, and when his eyes meet mine, there’s raw fury in them.

Dolores stands and takes the bottle of wine around the neck and shoves it in her purse. She sways ever so slightly. “I’m not sticking around for the main course. It would interfere with my alcohol absorption. Adios, amoeba,” she says to my uncle. “It was lovely meeting you,” she says to my aunt. “Maybe next time you can show me pictures of Jake dressed as an altar boy or whatever twisted stuff he used to get up to.”

And with that, she stalks off across the restaurant, flames smoldering in her footsteps as she goes.