Page 20

Bad People

Brenda Palumbo-Chavez watched her husband sweep the last of the hair clippings into a neat pile. “You’re sure the wives said it’s for the insurance money?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Hmm.”

Brenda picked up a cloth and passed it over the counter. “And the husbands want you to kill whoever’s after them?”

“That’s what they said.”

“Do you think they know it’s their wives?”

Hector stopped sweeping and leaned on the broom. He smiled to himself. This was the second time she’d asked him that. Funny how she accepted the wives were killing their husbands but couldn’t fathom that the husbands could kill their wives. He watched her wipe a spot on the counter. He understood her confusion and congratulated himself. She knew he could never harm her. Ever. His mother would be proud of him. Brenda turned to face him, her eyebrow raised in question. He shrugged. “You know how it is, amor. Some things we’ll never know.”

Brenda looked out the window. “There’s a Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher movie on Netflix.”

“Oh yeah?”

Hector smiled.

When Hector had first moved to the States, his ESL teacher suggested he watch movies to improve his English. Every day, when he wasn’t job hunting, Hector planted himself on the sofa and turned on the classics: Goodfellas, The Godfather, Pulp Fiction, Get Shorty, Snatch, Scarface. But when Hector had started calling money “dough”

and when passing the dessert tray to her dad urged him to “take the cannoli, leave the gun,” she’d stepped in. She’d prepared a list for Hector’s recommended viewing, and they’d sat side by side and watched those movies until they could practically recite the lines aloud. Yet another thing they enjoyed doing together.

Jerry Maguire, Notting Hill, Love Actually, When Harry Met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle were the tip of the iceberg. Hector knew his wife appreciated his soft spot for Reese Witherspoon—Walk the Line, Legally Blonde, and especially Election. For a while Hector spoke with a bit of a Nashville twang.

Brenda folded the cloth by its corners. “Remember Sweet Home Alabama? Remember the misunderstanding when Melanie thought Jake didn’t love her anymore, but really everything he had done was for her, she just didn’t know it. Jake had this hope he could get her back—”

Hector put up his hand. “Stop right there, amor. First of all, ninety percent of rom-com plots are that same misunderstanding, and secondly, I’m not going to look for some rom-com analogy to justify these people. I know you look for the good in people, and I love that about you, but sometimes . . . people are fucked up.”

“I guess.”

Hector put his broom aside, walked over to his wife, and cradled her face in his hands. “In my line of work, it’s either bad people doing bad things to other bad people”—he shrugged—“or sometimes, it’s good people doing bad things. Either way—it’s fucked up.”

“Could be. Well, if nothing else, you’ve got yourself the perfect double dip.”

“I do not know this term.”

“It’s when you’re paid for two jobs but only have to do one. A double dip. That’s what this is. The husbands want what they want. The wives want what they want. They’re both paying you. But you only have to do one of their jobs.”

Hector nodded slowly. “Because the dead ones won’t know I didn’t finish their job.”

“Exactly.”

Hector mulled that over for a moment, then said, “That’s obviously an American term. Because in El Salvador we do the job we’re hired for. To completion.”

He kissed her forehead.