Practical Jean (8 page)

“No, I guess not.”

“If I'm going to do this I'm going to do it right, okay?” At the end of the phone Welland said nothing for a moment and then he sighed again. It was a long, deep sigh but not nearly as loud this time, more of a surrender sigh, which was heartbreaking to Jean. “I'm sorry to be harsh with you, Jeanie. 'Cause it's not your fault. I'm just a bit aggravated because he said he'd train me yesterday—I need two sessions but that was supposed to be the first one—and then he called and said he had to push it off, and now I'm just waiting.”

“Who said? Who's supposed to train you?”

“Ted Yongdale. He just made inspector so I guess he's all of a sudden busy.”

Jean knew Ted Yongdale. He was a perfect sweetheart who'd once tried to date her when Milt was off at teacher's college. That was nearly thirty years ago but he still smiled at her whenever they crossed paths. It was one of those little inconsequential things that lifted Jean's spirits every now and again, and she knew it did something for Ted Yongdale, too.

“Okay, you just keep hanging in there, Welland. And how's everything going with finding a band for the picnic?”

Welland sighed. “I'm still looking. No one plays Garth Brooks anymore.”

“Well, that's understandable.”

After they said their goodbyes, Jean closed her phone and opened it right back up, called the Kotemee police reception, and had Melissa connect her with Ted Yongdale. While she was waiting she gazed out her window and noticed a bronze Cadillac SUV that looked a lot like Fran Knubel's parked three spaces over.

“Inspector Yongdale.”

Jean heard the faintest chuckle in Ted's voice, as though he was awfully pleased with himself. “Ted,” she said, “it's Jean Horemarsh. I'll bet it feels real good to say
inspector
now, congratulations.”

“Oh, hey, Jean. Yeah, thanks. Been a while coming, for sure. Sorry to hear about your mother, by the way.”

“Are you supposed to be training Welland right now on the CPIC?”

That seemed to bring Ted up short. “On the what?” he said.

“It's called the CPIC system. I'm sure you've heard of it.”

“Yeah, I'm just surprised to hear it coming out of you, is all.”

“Oh, well, you'll get a real earful out of me if you don't get down to training him like you said you would. Here all this time I thought you were the nicest man in Kotemee, and now I don't know.”

It didn't take long for Ted to promise to get Welland up to speed on the CPIC and whatever else he needed, pronto. And before she hung up, Jean did her best to bat her eyelashes through the phone with her voice, just to make sure Ted knew there were no hard feelings. Then, as she was putting her phone in her purse, Jean saw Fran coming out of the Sobeys and heading right for her with her cart. She twisted the key in the ignition just as Fran saw her and waved.

“Hey, Fran,” she called as she backed out of her spot, “I just came out myself, I don't know how I missed you.” Then Jean accelerated out of there, cursing under breath because now she was going to have to drive nine miles to Hillmount and shop in their dinky little A&P.

Jean sat at a picnic table in Corkin Park, on the west side of Kotemee, with little strips of paper on whi
ch she'd written the names of her friends, trying them in different orders to see if that would help make things clear for her. She'd finished shopping and knew her groceries were gradually warming in the car, the frozen juice going soft and the red leaf lettuce wilting, but this question of who first and who next was plaguing her, and she knew she couldn't move forward with anything until she'd sorted it out.

The slips of paper weren't working, though. It was becoming clear to Jean that solving this problem wasn't going to be a matter of feel, the way she so often worked when she was trying to decide on this or that arrangement of leaves in a ceramic, or the name for a piece, or whether it would be glazed in green or white or vellum gray. She was going to have to be more commonsensical and put aside her qualmish worries about being fair. Jean gathered up the strips of paper and mushed them into a tiny ball between her fingers.

So . . .

Natalie seemed an obvious person to start with, because she was such a dear—no, thought Jean, that was thinking emotionally. Was there any practical reason to consider? Handiness—Natalie lived four blocks away—was all she could think of. No less significant a consideration could there possibly be. But it was also no reason to rule her out. So, for the present: Natalie was an option . . .

Louise was arguably just as handy as Natalie; five blocks east or four blocks north, it hardly made any difference. But Jean could see a very obvious reason not to do Louise first. It was the whole matter of her affair with Milt. People who knew about the goings-on between those two—she imagined there were certainly a few still working at Hern Regional High School—would be asked if they knew of anyone with a motive to harm Louise.
Harm
would be how they would think of it. And Jean's name was sure to come up. It would be difficult, she thought, to convince suspicious people that she hadn't even really thought about the affair in years, even though the very fact that Louise was her good friend should have been evidence itself. And if the police started nosing around (she couldn't assume favors just because she was the chief's sister; that wouldn't be fair to Andrew Jr.), there was a chance she wouldn't be able to finish what she'd started. So, under the circumstances: Louise might have to be last.

The fact that Adele lived in the city was a mark both for and against her, Jean thought. For her, in that the element of distance would obscure any connection between the two of them. Against her, in that it was such a bother to have to drive into the city and deal with all that terrible traffic. Honestly, it was a full-day ordeal. And Adele was always so busy, it was hard to fit into her schedule. Sitting at the picnic table, Jean rolled the ball of names between her fingers and thought, well, inconvenience was hardly a good enough reason to exclude Adele from consideration. So: Adele, an option . . .

Now Dorothy, thought Jean. Dorothy . . . Living out along one of the rural concessions, not right in town, not too far a drive. Working hard to take care of Roy; now there was a bad situation that was only going to get worse. Oh, she put on a brave, no-nonsense face, but Jean could tell from Dorothy's eyes that she was starting to despair. “Big Boy” was close to three hundred pounds now. He could still dress and feed himself, but for how long? And when he got angry he was like one of those movie monsters tearing up everything in his path, except there was so little left now because their money was running out and he'd already smashed or torn or kicked so many of their nicest things. Poor Dorothy deserved to be rescued from all of that. She deserved to be treated to a special, joyful, passionate experience, and then freed . . . All things considered: Dorothy was a definite possibility.

Last, Jean put her mind to Cheryl Nunley. She thought that if she
could
choose someone for purely emotional reasons, it would have to be Cheryl. Because there was so much Jean felt a need to make up for. The abandonment of her friend at the darkest moments of her life. The subsequent decades of neglect. The hateful lack of curiosity about what had become of someone with whom she had shared so much formative teenage experience. It was as if she had worn Cheryl like a favorite pair of shoes and then kicked her to the back of the closet.

And yet, it was hard to imagine Cheryl being an option in the immediate future because Jean had no idea where she lived, and there was no telling how long it would take Welland to find her. The possibility existed that she wasn't even alive, which was just awful to think about. So Jean had to accept the facts: Cheryl was on the back burner . . .

As she sat at the picnic table, Jean let her eyes drift over to two men who stood chatting by the southern edge of the park near the line of scrub brush while each of their dogs, a boxer and a retriever, rolled around and chewed on sticks for lack of any organized activity. It was irritating for Jean to watch. The men had gone out to take their dogs for a walk and here they were standing. They were having a nice
stand
. Maybe it was just her mood talking, but it seemed to Jean that if you were going to do something, you should just get on with doing it.

She stood up from the picnic table and tossed her little wad of names into a garbage bin. The decision was made: it was going to be Dorothy first. Jean just hoped that somehow she could make it up to Cheryl, if she ever saw her again.

Chapter 7

I
t was gray. It was gray. Oh, God, it was gray. Another miserable, malicious gray day.
Oh, God, not another one
, she thought. Couldn't take it. Couldn't take any more of these gray days. Thought she would die. Wanted to die. It was unfair. God, it was so . . . oh . . .

Sheet.

It was the sheet pulled over her eyes.

With a vague swipe, Cheryl Nunley armed the sheet away and fell back to sleep.

Jesus was not in her wineglass. Of course he wasn't. It was the late afternoon, or the early evening, and for a minute there in the winery's big tasting room—for one bedazzling, unbelievable, oh my Holy Lord moment—Cheryl had been convinced that Jesus was staring at her from her glass of Cabernet-Franc. Of all the people, dead or alive, who could have been staring at Cheryl from her wineglass, Jesus was the one she would have wanted most. Jay Leno would have been nice too, because his smile was gentle and comforting. But Jesus, on the whole, was better. Cheryl blinked at the image in the glass. Her eyes were somewhat numb and she had to work to focus. “Hello, Jesus!” she shouted. “Say something, Jesus!” Cheryl clamped onto the stem of her glass with her two trembling hands and stared down into the wine, into his blood, the blood of Christ. “Talk to me, Jesus!” she shouted. “I'm listening!”

But it wasn't Jesus at all. Cheryl stared at his face, watching him saying nothing, which wasn't like Jesus, and she saw that it wasn't his face. It wasn't any face. It was just the reflection of some stupid . . . there . . . the stupid light fixture over her head. That's all it was, a light fixture. Not Jesus.

And nothing to cry about either, so just . . .

Cheryl smeared her cheeks dry and pushed her hooded gaze around the room at all the empty tables. She thought, it was a good thing Mr. Binderman wasn't there.

Oh,
great
. Cheryl raked through her purse in the parking area. She dumped the contents out onto the pavement in the dark and got down on her hands and knees and picked through the lipsticks and cigarettes and lighters and . . . corks and . . . button and . . . receipts for some stupid thing and . . . and what was that? That wasn't hers, that stupid metal hook thing, whatever it was. Throw that away. She had to find the ring of keys and . . . there was the ring of keys but there was. no. car. key. on. it. She swayed and stared at the keys and then she remembered, oh, they took that key away from her. That was her key and they took it. Okay, so now she couldn't go into town. And that meant she couldn't get more birdseed. And that meant Buzzy was going to die. Buzzy her cockatiel. From starvation. Buzzy, Buzzy, Buzzy. Buzzy who whistled and warbled like a telephone and other whistly things. She laid her head down, mourning Buzzy, who wasn't dead yet but surely would be soon because there was no food and he would be silent forever and that was sad. Buzzy, Buzzy, Buzzy, oh Buzzy. Nothing she could do. Her eyes were closed. It was okay to sleep here, on the pavement, Cheryl thought.

“Mrs. Yoon?”

Mrs. Yoon was not her name. That was someone who no longer lived here. That was someone she used to be, but that person was not her anymore.

“Mrs. Yoon?”

Someone was still saying “Mrs. Yoon.” How could a person keep calling another person by the wrong name? What was that?
Misidentification
. Probably a crime of some nature. Determined to make that stop. Tried to open her eyes but the sun poured in like lemon juice, so she kept them shut.

“I'm not Mrs. Yoon.”

“Mrs. Yoon, you have to get up.”

“What's my name?”

“Mrs. Yoon.”

“No it's not.”

“Mrs. Yoon, you are on the pavement. Please get up.”

“Why don't you listen? I am not, not, not Mrs. Yoon.”

“I'm sorry, Mrs. Yoon. I can't really understand you. I don't know what you are saying. But you have to get up now.”

Mr. Binderman took hold of her arm and pulled her into a sitting position. She knew it was Mr. Binderman because no one else was here now, and also because he smelled like the vineyard, sweet and green, and because she recognized his voice, his old-mannish, Austrian voice—not German—which was kind and imperious and afraid all together. It was Mr. Binderman pulling her into a sitting position, from which she wanted to throw up. So she did throw up.

“Oh, Mrs. Yoon, no, that's not good. Not good. Here, I'm sorry, you take this. Please, you take it.”

Mr. Binderman shoved a cloth into her hand. A flimsy cloth. A handkerchief. What was she supposed to do with it? Wipe her nose? Be that as it may, she had to throw up again. She did throw up again. All this was best done with eyes closed, Cheryl thought.

Buzzy was her only friend. Buzzy, the cockatiel, had been there from the beginning, arriving in Cheryl's life eighteen months before as a grand, angelic gesture, white warbling proof of Tam Yoon's affection. Cheryl was then just a divorced claims adjuster living in Syracuse, New York, who liked to go on winery tours and sometimes got a little silly and snuggly with well-dressed men she happened to meet. From his perch in his white wire cage, Buzzy had seen it all—Cheryl's sudden, swooning love for fifty-seven-year-old Tam; the determined effort to defeat the lifelong temptation that could undo her; the fervid plans for a future with someone a foot shorter and many, many times richer thanks to Tam's very astute investments in the cellphone industry; the campaign to convince Tam to use just a bit of that money to buy a little winery and retire in the very setting that had brought them together; the early, giddy excitement when Cheryl thought she had finally secured everything that mattered and could matter in a life like hers; the gradual weakening of that certainty, and the steady disintegration of everything that had been sweet and new and possible; the shouting and the crying and the horrible, angry accusations; the “you're pathetic” and “ridiculous”; the slammed door; the nights of Cheryl on the phone, begging Tam to forgive her; the anguish and remorse; the self-hatred; the days of lost hours; the months of lost days.

The surrender.

Throughout the formless, shattered days since Tam had gone, Buzzy was Cheryl's steady comfort. At noon, or thereabouts, he sat perched in his cage on a table in the living room, watching his circumscribed world with black-marble eyes. He never spoke but made a series of chirping and warbling and whistling noises that could sound like the kettle or the telephone or the fax machine or the alarm clock. Some of those ringing noises sounded very much like a phone call from Tam wanting to apologize and come home. But they weren't Tam calling. There was a dent in the side of Buzzy's cage to remind Cheryl.

By about five o'clock every afternoon, Buzzy had stopped sounding like phone calls and often seemed, to Cheryl, to have acquired the power of rudimentary speech. But he used it to utter only warbly nonsense words that Cheryl found indistinguishable from the Chinese curses Tam had sometimes hurled at her, his mouth contorted, his black hair flying.

By nine or ten, many nights, Buzzy was conversing emphatically with Cheryl about her failed marriage. Buzzy had a harsh opinion of the cellphone industry that had fueled Tam Yoon's fortune, and of Tam himself, and of the New York wine industry, opinions which he was only too happy to share, and which resonated with Cheryl and seemed to confirm every qualm and misgiving she had had and ignored before committing herself to the life that now consumed her. Once in a while Buzzy said something so right and true that Cheryl would hug the cage. She would press her face against the wire bars so fiercely they left imprints that took hours to fade.

But by three and four in the morning, in Cheryl's experience, Buzzy had typically risen above such petty concerns. By then, most nights, Buzzy had convinced Cheryl to free him from his confinement, and he was flying about the living room and the dining room, the foyer and the stairwell, the kitchen and the solarium, his great white wings outstretched like the reach of a divine herald, lighting now and then on a chandelier or a curtain rod or a banister, delivering God's message in white, glistening packages.

By nine or ten in the morning, whatever heavenly force had imbued Buzzy with the power of speech and argument and transcendent grace had dissipated, and he was returned to the form of an animal, indeed, a menace. One who made unholy, piercing noises no pillow could block out. And in these bewildering, terrorized hours Cheryl often found herself shouting at Buzzy thinking he was the phone, or at the phone thinking it was Buzzy. There were times when things would get so cloudy and confused she would pick up one of these ringing, warbling things and fight it, bash its head against the wall, strangle it, while growling the bird's name. “
Buuuzzzzzzyyyyyy
.”

And late the next morning when Cheryl pried open her eyes, Buzzy would still be there, perched and happy in his cage as if the world had not come undone.