“CAN WE WATCH TV WHILE WE EAT?” Paul asked, standing next to me in the kitchen.
I was putting linguine on three plates, and had put the salad in a glass bowl with a couple of tongs.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You know how your mother feels about having the TV on during dinner.”
“Yeah, but Mom’s not here. And The Simpsons is on.”
This did raise an interesting question. Did we have to play by Sarah’s rules if Sarah wasn’t home? Especially when The Simpsons was on?
While I made up my mind, I said to Paul, “Call your sister, tell her dinner is ready.”
Without moving an inch away from me, Paul shouted, loud enough to make the wineglasses on the kitchen shelf ring, “Angie! Dinner!”
“Thanks,” I said.
She’d gotten home the same time as I had, headed straight up to her room and closed the door. I’d barely had a chance to ask whether she was dining with us, and she’d had only enough time to grunt “Yes.”
Paul grabbed the TV remote as he took his plate to the table. We have a TV in the kitchen, which we often have tuned to the news. He turned it on, flipped through a few channels until he had the one he wanted.
“Oh!” said Paul. “It’s the one where Homer’s an astronaut.”
That was, I had to admit, a pretty good one. Particularly the part where he eats the potato chips, rotating in zero gravity in a parody of the space station docking maneuver in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Okay,” I said, pulling up a chair.
And besides, I wanted something to take my mind off things, so that I’d stop obsessing about Trevor, Lawrence, what Angie was doing visiting Trixie, and that Annihilator.
It wasn’t like there was only one Annihilator in the city, or even one black one. Lots of people owned them. The sports editor had one, in yellow. There was a guy around the block had one, in green. And I’d seen plenty of black ones since they started coming onto the market a couple of years ago. It was probably the most popular color.
So a black Annihilator driving up my street was not reason to panic. A black Annihilator racing up the driveway, plowing through the front of the house, that would be reason to panic.
Half an hour earlier, when the SUV had made a left at the next cross street on Crandall, I had tromped on the accelerator. When the Virtue didn’t take off with as much speed as I’d hoped, I literally leaned forward in the seat, as if rocking my own body would give the car some momentum. If I could get close enough to the truck, maybe I’d know for sure that it wasn’t the one from the other night. For example, if I could read the license plate, that right there would be all the evidence I needed to relax. The plates on the one that had chased me and Lawrence, that rammed into Brentwood’s, had been obscured.
And it had had deeply tinted windows. If the SUV that had driven up Crandall and past my house had regular windows, windows that allowed you to see who was driving and riding inside, that would be even more proof that it was not the same vehicle.
I got to the cross street, turned left. The SUV was gone.
I sped up to the next intersection, glanced both ways. They weren’t hard to spot, these Annihilators, towering above all the other traffic as they did. But I didn’t see one, not in either direction. So I drove home, slightly rattled, as always.
Once I’d put the linguine into a pot of boiling water, I went up to our bedroom and dumped the contents of the Gap bags I’d left there that morning onto the bed. I ripped off tags, put the shirts and “loose fit” khakis on hangers.
Angie’d seemed a bit hurt in the morning that I hadn’t been wearing any of my new purchases, so I stripped down, pulled on a new pair of boxers, buttoned up one of the new shirts, and stepped into a pair of tan khakis. Loose fit was right. Although they hugged my waist well enough with a belt, I had all this room in them, certainly compared to the jeans I’d been wearing. They were loose enough in the leg that I might be able to pull them on over shoes, a dressing routine I had abandoned around the same time I’d stopped making peanut butter and marshmallow Fluffernutter sandwiches. I admired myself briefly in the mirror, then went down to finish dinner preparations.
I was waiting for Angie to show before taking my first bite of dinner, and when Paul shoveled in a mouthful of pasta, I gave him a disapproving look.
“She could be forever,” he said. “I think she’s making herself look beautiful, and I can’t wait that long.”
“What’s she getting all dolled up for?”
“She’s probably going out.”
I glanced at the fridge, where we’ve posted an oversize calendar and an erasable marker for keeping track of everyone’s activities. For tonight, Angie had scribbled, “Lecture.”
“She has a lecture tonight,” I said.
“Yeah, but I think she’s going out after.”
I leaned in, as though we were conspirators. “She seeing someone?”
“Hey, don’t ask me. You want to know what she’s up to, ask her. I know how this works. I squeal on her, then you’ll be pumping her for information on what I’m doing.” He twirled some more linguine onto his fork. “I’m going to eat this. I don’t care that she’s not here.”
“How about you?” I asked. “You seeing someone?” Paul put the fork into his mouth, his cheek poking out on one side. I went on, “What about, what was her name, Wendy?”
Paul shook his head. He chewed a few times, washed the linguine down with some water. “I never went out with her. Besides, she has a butter face.”
“A butter face?”
“Yeah. Everything’s great, but her face.”
Angie came in. She’d changed her clothes, refreshed her makeup, brushed her hair. She looked-and as her father, this gave me the usual sinking feeling-terrific.
“Oh sure,” she said, looking at her brother eat. “Start without me, why don’t you.”
“Hey, you owe me. Dad’s asking me questions about your personal life, and I’m refusing to testify.”
She glared at me. “Is that true?”
“No,” I said.
“I need a car tonight,” Angie said, deciding that my attempt to pry information from her brother was too routine an occurrence to get worked up about. “I’ve got an evening lecture. And I really want to take the Virtue. I want to drive down with the sunroof open.”
“I don’t know, honey,” I said. “Why don’t I just give you a lift down? I could pick you up after.”
“I don’t believe this. We have this huge discussion, about how we need a second car, about how you don’t want me taking public transportation home late at night from school, and we get a second car, and you want to drive me down? When Mom isn’t even here, and there’s no one else who even needs the second car but me?”
Paul stopped chewing, looked at me, smiled. “Yeah, Dad.”
How could I make my case, that it would be better if I drove her, if I couldn’t bring forward my evidence? Was I going to tell her that I’d spoken to Trevor a short while ago, had tried as best I could to intimidate him, suggested that he back off and leave her alone?
She’d kill me.
And what of this cryptic warning from Lawrence, that someone might be after me? Did that mean anything, really? And if it did, did it have anything to do with Angie? That seemed unlikely.
Okay, maybe I could tell her that I’d seen a black SUV cruising up the street, that it looked like a very mean SUV, just like the one used by those guys who-
I was going to sound like a crazy person.
“I guess you can have the car,” I said. “I’ve just got a lot on my mind. It’s this story I’ve been working on, and I guess it’s got my danger radar working overtime.”
“Yeah, like we could tell the difference,” Angie said, sitting down. “But Dad, everything is okay. Honestly. You just need to chill.”
“I took the car into Otto today,” I said. “I think he’s fixed the starting problem. I haven’t had any trouble with it since he worked on it. But if you have any problems, call me.”
“Terrific,” Angie said. “Oh, and I need five dollars for parking.”
“Hold on, pardner,” I said. “There’s no way you’re getting parking money out of me. Not now that I know what I know.”
“Aw, come on, Dad. They may have closed off the walkway. I might actually need to pay to park this time.” Pleading.
“You showed Dad the secret way out?” Paul asked.
“I don’t know what I was thinking,” Angie said.
“What a dope.”
I wasn’t denying her the money on principle alone. By not giving her the five dollars, it was pretty much guaranteed that she’d sneak out of the Mackenzie grounds by using the route she’d showed me the day before. Which meant she’d be pulling out onto Edwards Street.
I could wait for her there.
If her lecture started at 8:30 P.M., as the note on the fridge calendar seemed to indicate, it would let out around 9:30. I could be in position, around 9:15, making sure, just one last time, that Trevor was no longer following her around.
And if he was, even after my chat with him, I’d have to think of something even more drastic. Maybe even a call to Detective Trimble.
“So, you doing anything after your lecture tonight?” I asked.
“Maybe,” said Angie. “Might see some friends.”
“Hey,” I said, like I’d just remembered something, “you ever keep in touch with any of your friends in Oakwood?”
Angie gave me a look that seemed to suggest a bad smell was coming off me. “God, no. I don’t keep in touch with anyone from out there.”
I nodded. “I thought you kept in touch with some of your Oakwood friends. You did do two years of high school there.”
“No, Dad.”
“How about other than students? You keep in touch with anyone from out there?”
“Dad, when would I even get out there?”
“You don’t actually have to go out there. You could talk, in one of your chat huts.”
Paul and Angie looked at each other. “Chat huts?” they said.
“Rooms. Chat rooms. You know what I mean.”
This set them both off. Paul knocked on the table, said to Angie, “Hello, may I come into your chat hut?”
Angie was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes. “Sorry, no, this is a chat condo.”
“Oh, excuse me!” He wanted to get off another line, but he was laughing too hard to do it.
“Okay, enough already,” I said.
Angie, pulling herself together, said, “No, Dad, there’s no one from Oakwood I keep in touch with through my chat huts.” Paul slid out of his chair and onto the floor, clutching his side.
Should I ask her flat out? Ask her why she’d been to visit Trixie? But if I asked her now, I’d have to come clean on the whole surveillance thing, and if I did that now, I wouldn’t be able to take one last crack at it tonight, to see whether I’d scared off Trevor for good.
So I let it go.
“I’ve got stuff to do,” Angie said, taking her plate to the counter. Paul managed to get up and followed her out of the kitchen.
“I have to lie down,” he said, still laughing. “I think I’m gonna die.”
Shortly before eight, Angie went downstairs, shouted, “See ya!”
I scrambled out of my study, where I still tried writing books but more often built models of spaceships and other science fiction kitsch, like my recently completed models of the Green Hornet’s Black Beauty, and Gort, the iconic robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
“Hey,” I yelled down to her. “You be careful tonight, okay?”
“Oh!” Angie said. “I just realized. I don’t even have a key for the new car.”
“Two came with it,” I said. “Hang on.” I’d left the second one in a dish where I keep spare change on top of my dresser. “Come to the bottom of the stairs.” She did and I tossed it down to her.
“You look good, by the way,” Angie said, doing up the buttons on her blue coat.
“Huh?”
“Your clothes. I meant to say something at dinner, but got kind of distracted. They look good on you. Are you wearing new boxers?”
“Check it out,” I said, undoing my belt, turning around, and dropping my khakis halfway down my butt.
“Oooh! The ones with the chili peppers on them!” Angie said. “You’re hot, Dad, very hot. But please pull your pants back up.”
I obliged.
Angie had her set of keys out and was slipping the one for the Virtue onto her ring. She was having a bit of trouble with it, so I came down and got it onto the ring for her.
And then I gave her a hug. “Remember, call me if you have a problem, and don’t do anything stupid, okay?”
Angie smiled. “You mean, don’t do anything you might do?”
“Exactly.”
She gave me a hug back. “I love you, Daddy.”
And then she was gone.