Sunburn: A Novel Read online

  She cools down, returns to the auction. When he raises his eyebrows in a question—You OK?—she raises hers as if she has no idea what he’s asking. She doesn’t bid again, but when they go to collect her purchases at the end of the auction, there’s the bed, waiting with her table, chair, and quilt.

  “What the—?”

  “I asked the lady if she wanted to make a quick profit.”

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “Two hundred twenty-five.”

  No way she let it go for fifty less than she paid.

  He answers her unvoiced skepticism. “She thought she could come back and get it later. But this auction is strictly cash-and-carry. Would have cost her at least fifty dollars to haul it away and that’s assuming she could find someone with a truck who wanted to drive all the way to Oxford today. And it’s strictly no refunds, so getting two twenty-five from me meant losing only fifty bucks. Pricey mistake for people like us, but she didn’t bat an eye.”

  Polly doesn’t believe a word of it, but it’s not the first time someone has gone out of the way to pay her tribute. Men have always done things for her. People. And she never asks. That is, she never seems to ask. He won’t even remember that she hit him up for a loan. He won’t want to remember. He’s her savior, Mr. Magnanimous. It’s a special art, asking people to do things, yet making it seem as if you never asked at all. There are talents she would prefer to this one, because favors often carry a hefty penalty when it’s time to return them, but it’s the skill she was given, the hand she has to play.

  So he bought her a bed. It’s funny, when she was mad at him, she was thinking that she just might get him to make a move tonight. Tonight or on the drive back home. All it would take is a hand on his thigh, about halfway up. But now that he’s bought her a bed, she’s going to have to deny him a little while longer. It would seem too much like commerce, tit for tat, quid pro quo. Bed for bed.

  He bought her a bed. On the drive home, she keeps her face turned toward the cornfields and those arching blue skies, not wanting him to see how wide her grin is.

  7

  Gregg lets Jani have chocolate cake for breakfast. Why not? In the end, what’s the difference between cake and a muffin, or even cereal? Besides, he’ll do anything to avoid whining. Pauline was always going on and on about schedules. Kids need schedules, they thrive when life is orderly. But Jani’s doing fine. Other than the fact that her mother disappeared four weeks ago and hasn’t been heard from except for a letter that arrived four days ago, postmarked Philadelphia. If he’s sure of anything, he knows Pauline’s not in Philadelphia. Someone probably mailed it for her. She had that way about her, of getting people, strangers even, to do her favors.

  She certainly got him to do her a lot of favors. Marry her. Become a dad. Buy a brick house near a park. This whole setup was all for her, and now she’s left him holding the bag.

  The letter’s not even addressed to him. It’s to Jani. A greeting card with a bear on the front, the imprinted message: “I can’t bear being away.” Then, in her tight, up-and-down script: “I love you, I miss you.” Lies, lies, lies.

  Well, today’s the day. It’s been four weeks, and she’s clearly not coming back. Maybe she’s certifiably insane. Wouldn’t that be just his luck? At any rate, he needs to find her and get her back to Baltimore to take care of Jani. He’s made an appointment with a private detective. A woman. He wouldn’t trust any man around Pauline. No, it’s not the men he doesn’t trust. It’s Pauline. She’s just too good at getting what she wants. Why did he ever fall for her? She’s not that pretty. Her shape is good, but not crazy-insane great.

  The sex was good, though.

  The private detective’s office is up in Towson and he’s arranged to come in late at the office, although things are crazy busy. After spiking up last year, interest rates are back down. Not 1993 levels, but under 8 percent for a thirty-year fixed and lower still for the adjustable-rate mortgages that are so popular now. Everyone’s trying to sell and buy before school starts up. Summer’s barely started, and people are already thinking about fall.

  He drops Jani at his mom’s. He thought grandmothers were supposed to love their grandchildren to the point where they could never get enough of them, but his mom’s getting a little cheesed off about all the babysitting over the past month. He hasn’t told her the exact truth about Pauline. He dropped a hint that she had to go somewhere to take care of a family member, but he didn’t provide many details. He’s not sure why he’s lying to his mother. It’s not like he and Pauline are going to get back together. He guesses he just doesn’t want his mother to say, “I told you so.” She hated Pauline from the start. Said she didn’t seem like wife material. But Gregg hadn’t been looking for wife material. He tried to make the best of it when she got pregnant, but it was foolish to think that you could marry a party girl and she would figure out how to be a party girl by night, a mom and wife by day. Now he knows it doesn’t work that way.

  The detective’s office is in a beige building off Joppa Road, a place with a credit union on the first floor, and a lot of “professional” places above—dentists, podiatrists, urologists. But only one private detective. Not how he imagined it. Then he realizes he was imagining an old movie: venetian blinds behind a glass panel with the agency’s name stenciled in gold letters. This gun for hire.

  Here, there is a plastic nameplate, security associates. Inside, Sue Snead—wait, did he pick her for the name, without making the association, Sue Snead/Sam Spade?—is small and nondescript, an asset in her work if not her life. Probably a lesbian, he thinks, taking in her short hair, button-down shirt, khakis.

  “Office buildings are air-conditioned for men,” she says.

  “What?” Her voice is gorgeous, unexpected. It’s like listening to beautiful music pour out of some kid’s rinky-dink toy piano.

  “That’s why I wear pants and long-sleeved shirts, even on a day with temperatures in the nineties. Because the business world, its thermostats are set to temperatures that are comfortable for people who wear suits. The women come in bare legged, in sleeveless tops, then complain that they’re freezing.”

  “Interesting,” he says. It’s not, but what does it cost him?

  “I think the first thing we need to do is a background check on your wife, which means I’ll order a search of all legal databases through Chicago Title.”

  “She’s got no legal troubles.”

  “How do you know?” Her tone is kind, her eyes round and serious. She’s not challenging him.

  And for the first time he thinks: How do I know? You meet a woman in a bar. She’s fun. You tell her your best stories. She laughs and tells hers—only Pauline Smith never did, come to think of it. Tell stories. She laughed and asked for more of his. In Baltimore, people always start with Where did you go to school? They mean high school, not college. But she always said she wasn’t from Baltimore, that she grew up in West Virginia. And the weird thing about West Virginia is that, although you can drive there in two hours, it feels like it’s a million miles away. There’s a reason they have those bunkers at the Greenbrier Hotel in case D.C. is ever nuked. Gregg plays the license plate game on road trips, a hangover from childhood, and you seldom see a West Virginia tag east of Hagerstown. Less often than Vermont, even. About as often as Utah, he reckons.

  “Let’s start with what you do know,” Sue Snead says, her pen at the ready.

  “Well, her name. Her birth date. Her social. And the social has to be right, because we file a joint return.”

  “Where does she work?”

  “She doesn’t.” Oh, he remembers—you’re supposed to say it differently. “She didn’t have a job outside the home, I mean. She was a full-time mom. A good one, too. She loves our little girl. Or I thought she did.”

  They talk for almost an hour and, while part of him is clocking the cost, there’s another part of him that enjoys the conversation, all those questions in that honeyed voice. Usually, talking to a wom
an this long is a prelude to sex. Maybe this is what going to a therapist is like. She seems so interested in him, kind and supportive. No detail is too small, she keeps telling him. He finds himself talking about what it was like, at first, the sex with Pauline, how great it was, and then she got pregnant and everything changed. Like, she would be up for sex in odd places—outdoors, the spare bedroom at a party, but she scoped it out first, made sure it was unlikely they would be seen. Did that mean the wildness was a calculation? Or something she had learned to control?

  He doesn’t mention the hitting, though. He admits to Sue Snead that he was thinking about leaving, but the only thing he cares about now is finding Pauline, making sure she’s not in trouble, helping his little girl, who’s brokenhearted. Divorce is inevitable, but it can be civilized, he says.

  Gambling problem? Drugs? Alcohol? He shakes his head no to each question. Sure, she’s bought a lottery ticket here or there, done a bump of cocaine on special occasions, enjoys a cocktail. But she’s the opposite of an addict, the only person he’s ever known who could smoke three or five times a year, then let it go. It’s impossible to imagine her in thrall to anything, anyone. She calls the shots while pretending not to. Even in motherhood, she has shown this steely control. She was never the type of mother to get gooey about it, or make those comments about how the tops of babies’ heads smell.

  “Maybe there’s another man,” he blurts out. Until he says it, he hasn’t really considered this possibility. But what else can there be? Sure, she took two thousand dollars out of their savings account the week before she left, a smart play on her part. But how long can she go on two thousand dollars? Someone has to be supporting her. She’s not fit for much work beyond McDonald’s.

  He writes a check for the retainer and Ms. Snead promises to be in touch within the week. He knows he should go to work, but he calls in with a “family emergency” and goes to Wagner’s Tavern, the bar where he met Pauline. A beer at lunch isn’t really drinking, not in a place like Wagner’s, a cop bar tucked into a corner of Joppa Road.

  That was the first thing Pauline ever said to him: “You a cop?”

  “Do I look like a cop?” His hair was on the long side, his jeans tight.

  “That’s not a no. You could be undercover. You’ve got that look.”

  “What kind of look is that?”

  “Like a guy who’s trying not to look like a cop.”

  Forty-five minutes later, they were having sex in his car. It was weeks before she believed he wasn’t a cop, just a guy from a title company less than a mile up the street.

  Today at Wagner’s, one beer turns into two turns into three and then he has to drink a big cup of coffee before he gets behind the wheel. Pauline’d kill him if he drove tipsy with Jani in the car. Well, too bad. You want to set the rules, you can get your goddamn ass home.

  And then I’m going to leave. Maybe she thought she was clever, that if she left first, he would change his mind about leaving. How had she even figured out what he was planning to do? A witch, that one. She’s a witch.

  Sometimes, he used to wake up in the middle of the night and find her looking at him. The light from the streetlamp threw a stripe across her eyes, and it was as if she were wearing a mask that allowed her to read his every thought.

  He turns on the radio and it’s that goddamn song that’s on the radio all the time this summer, the one about chasing waterfalls. No one chases a waterfall. You go for a swim and next thing you know, the current catches you and throws you right over.

  8

  A new convenience store, a Royal Farms, has opened near the spot where the bypass will eventually join the beach highway. It’s a big deal in Belleville and Polly has heard people in the bar talking about it. The old-timers claim they will never patronize the convenience store, the first to open in Belleville, where one family has long had a lock on the grocery trade. They see it as a symbol of everything that is wrong, with Belleville and the world beyond. Open for twenty-four hours, undercutting the local gas station with its prices, a place where teenagers can be idle.

  As a local, at least for the time being, Polly should stay away. But there’s something about the store’s bright, shiny newness that promises anonymity, a rare commodity in this town. In the mornings, she finds herself walking more than a mile there to buy a Diet Mountain Dew or a Good Humor bar, the one with toasted almonds. It’s a strange breakfast, to be sure, and she has to be careful about sweets: she wasn’t always thin like this and it was hard, getting the weight off after Jani. But there’s something about having an ice cream bar for breakfast that makes her feel truly free, maybe for the first time in her life. How thoughtlessly she squandered her freedom, taking up with Gregg and getting pregnant. If anyone knew her whole story, that might be the truly shocking part, the way she ruined her own second chance.

  But no one knows her whole story. She plans to keep it that way.

  She eats the ice cream bar in the store’s little alcove of preformed tables and benches, where almost no one else ever lingers. Only 9 a.m., it’s already hot enough that the ice cream will melt quickly if she takes it outside, and she wants to eat it as slowly as possible. She catches a glimpse of a familiar face from the bar, one of the locals who claimed he would never come here. He’s drinking a cup of coffee and eating some kind of breakfast sandwich made with a croissant. He registers her gaze, shrugs. Hard to know if the gesture is a sheepish concession to his hypocrisy or a kind of hello, the kind that says, I see you, I like you, but I want to be alone. She thinks it’s the first, but decides to believe it’s the second. What does it matter? The same nonresponse is fine for either one.

  A young woman comes in with two fretful children, boys, no more than eighteen months apart, maybe both still in diapers, although the bigger one is walking alongside the double stroller. “Can I have?” he keeps whining. “Can I have?” Polly studies the children intently, waiting to see if she feels anything. No. She feels nothing. She is not an indiscriminate lover of children. Wait, that’s not quite right. She feels intense empathy for the mother, who looks miserable. The poor thing has large, fleshy thighs, dotted with a scarlet rash. Her hair is almost half and half—six inches of dull brown roots, six inches of a brassy blond that looks slightly greenish. She can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, but she moves with the shuffling tread of a much older woman.

  She picks up milk, a carton of eggs, and, with a quick look over her shoulder, a bag of off-brand chips, then pays with a card. Probably a welfare card, loaded with her food stamp benefits. That’s the reason for the nervous look. She thinks someone is going to bust her for buying chips. Allowed, under the rules, but taxpayers always think they have the right to look over a welfare recipient’s shoulder, dictate her choices.

  All the while, the older boy is whining, Can I have, can I have, can I have? It’s like a high-pitched saw at a construction site.

  “I wan’ treat, too,” the younger boy says.

  “I’ll share my chips.”

  The older child: “I don’t like those chips. Too spicy.”

  Polly can almost feel the woman’s palm itch with the desire to slap him.

  Polly was on welfare once. Very briefly. And very fraudulently, as she claimed a child she didn’t have. It was a risk, doing that. But she was stuck. She needed money to start a new life, so she borrowed a few things from another life—a name, a birth certificate, a daughter.

  Daughter. She should get another card to Jani, but it’s tricky, finding someone to mail it, someone westward bound, with a soft heart and no curiosity about the woman who doesn’t want a Belleville postmark on her letters.

  Her fake daughter and real name had been enough to get temporary benefits from an emergency fund at the county level. She learned about food pantries, even took the bus to the occasional soup kitchen. Every dollar she could get her hands on, she had to use to put some kind of roof over her head—a room in someone else’s row house, strictly cash. She had the good sense
to settle in Baltimore County, although at the north end, and shopped around until she found a male social worker. He got her into a motel that was taking homeless families, never asked to see the daughter she claimed to have, not even the one night he came to “check on her” and brought a bottle of white zinfandel.

  Then she went to Legal Aid, where she told the truth straight up, and that was good enough to get her the name change she needed. She kept it simple, going from Pauline Ditmars to Pauline Smith, and then Pauline Smith became Pauline Hansen when she married Gregg. But she had been Polly as a kid, so it’s no stretch, answering to that again. She had thought about changing her name to Pollyanna, thought about using it again when Adam Bosk first asked her name. A little in-joke because she’s pretty much the opposite of Pollyanna at this point.

  But a Pollyanna calls attention to herself, whereas a Pauline doesn’t. The point of becoming Pauline Smith four years ago was to disappear and start over.

  So why was she in that bar, Wagner’s, the night she met Gregg? It was within walking distance of the motel, no more than a mile or two, although that strip of Joppa Road wasn’t very friendly to pedestrians. Dark, with cracked sidewalks leading past stores with dusty windows, places that sell things like blinds and suitcases and tile. She wasn’t officially Pauline Smith yet, but she was on her way, trying the name out in anticipation of the day the paperwork came through. Still, it was dangerous to go to that bar. She could have been spotted by someone who knew her well enough not to be fooled by the red hair, long as it was by then. She couldn’t have long hair when she was married to Ditmars. Too much like a leash, too easy to grab.

  Gregg was very ordinary trouble at least. Fun, at first. She didn’t expect to see him again after that first night—and maybe she wouldn’t have if she hadn’t gone back to Wagner’s two nights later. Of course, she could never take him to the motel, she saw that right away. And she didn’t have a phone. She told him that when he asked and he laughed, thinking she was making a joke. “I don’t,” she said. “Give me your number and I promise I’ll call you.” She made good on her promise seventy-two hours later, calling from a pay phone outside the Bel-Loc Diner. When he asked her out for a real date, she told him that she worked at the mall and he could pick her up in the food court. They went to a movie, had pizza. Then came the question she dreaded: “Can I take you home?”