The Housewife Assassin's Handbook (3 page)

At least, that is what I tell myself.

Even if that weren’t true, I’d still have to do something other than maintain a spotless household to keep from feeling so helpless about his death. I can assure you, no amount of scouring can purge my grief. But obliterating some bastard set on ruining more lives goes a long way toward assuaging my pain.

Besides, can I help it if I’m a better assassin than I am a housewife?

My mother was the consummate homemaker. Our house, a tiny Craftsman cottage, gleamed and sparkled with her obsessive use of Lemon Pledge, Windex with Ammonia D, and any cleanser that produced scrubbing bubbles.

Around our velvety lawn was a white picket fence from which pale pink tea roses cascaded gently to the sidewalk. From the thickest limb of the broadest oak out back hung a tire swing: a brand new Michelin, of course. It would never hit the road, but safety was always on my mother’s mind.

This was why she never let Dad keep his guns in the house but out in the garage, under lock and key.

Every meal was a bountiful delight, many of its offerings picked or plucked lovingly from our own backyard garden. Each holiday was a memorable themed event: a tie-dyed Easter egg hunt, a Christmas tree trimmed with tiny white origami cranes. One year the Thanksgiving meal was completely vegetarian! Did we miss the turkey that Dad brought home with him, a gift from his company? Not with the feast Mother prepared in its stead. She donated the bird to the local homeless shelter, already herbed and roasted, of course.

The shelter’s chef called up the next day to thank Mother for the most succulent bird they’d ever served. “Can I have your recipe?”

“Sorry. It’s a family secret…” was the answer she gave, with that tinkling laugh of hers.

Family secrets. Yep, she was big on those.

Her biggest one wasn’t divulged to either Dad or me until it was too late. When I was eleven, her doctor diagnosed her with terminal cancer.

She covered up the news with a whirlwind of activities—specifically, ones aimed at teaching me the necessary skills to take her place as the lady of the house. But no matter how many devil’s food cakes I baked perfectly from scratch, no matter how many curtains I sewed or how shiny the tub gleamed or how white the sheets came out in the wash, I could never take my mother’s place.

At least, not in our hearts.

My father didn’t put it that way. Instead, he drank himself into oblivion as he mourned his sweet, perfect wife.

During that first year after Mother’s death, her older sister, my Aunt Phyllis, came to live with us. Sweet, sloppy, lovable Aunt Phyllis, who had none of Mother’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies, who thought nothing of letting me have a collie (something Mother wouldn’t have let me do, what with all the hair they shed!), who never fussed when I left my room a mess, and who burned every meal she attempted to make.

Well, nobody’s perfect, right?

And that was the point. I didn’t have to be, either. Not for her. Not for myself.

 Certainly not for Dad. He wasn’t going to notice, anyway. Not with his head stuck deep in that bottle.

Then one day out of the blue, I asked my father to teach me how to shoot his gun. It wasn’t that I wanted to be the son he never had, but I desperately wanted to share something with him, anything at all.

Since I was too young to drink, guns were my only alternative.

To his credit and to Aunt Phyllis’ horror, he didn’t try to discourage me. In fact, two things came out of those hazy afternoon practice sessions with his .38 Special:

I’d finally earned his grudging respect. For a few hours, anyway.

And I learned I was good at something. Great, really. In fact, I was a crack shot. I had an innate ability to turn, aim, and shoot. Tin cans off our picket fence. An old stump. Anything and everything in our backyard or out in the vast empty field beyond, was a potential target. Then, to see how well I did with moving targets, Dad yanked one of the rock star posters off my bedroom walls, pinned it onto the tire swing, and gave it a push–

I hit the horny bastard right between the eyes.

After that, any fears Dad had about my abilities to take care of myself seemed to vanish—and along with it, some of his dependence on Johnny Walker Red. I was making him proud. He finally wanted me to feel the same about him.

By the time I turned fifteen, others had picked up on my cool, calm confidence, too: mainly unabashed, taut-muscled boys who rightly detected that some ice hot desire lay beneath the surface of my sunny demeanor, and wanted to be the first to unleash it–preferably in the backseats of their muscle cars. But gently, I’d demur.

Even if they ignored me, they certainly listened to my Smith & Wesson.

That was how I learned that men other than my father also appreciate the way I handle a pistol. No doubt about it, a gun is a deadly weapon. But in a woman’s steady, skilled hand, it can also be the most potent aphrodisiac.

And a great way to pick up guys.

I was never a hunter. Back then, the sight of blood made me queasy. But I lived for target practice. In fact, I met Carl at a shooting range. A cute meet, don’t you think?

Maybe too cute, now that I think about it.

It was during my last year at UCLA. We’d just completed midterm exams, and the whole campus was looking for a way to unwind. For some students, that meant a weekend of clubbing, maybe even a trip down to Cabo. I, on the other hand, found my release in the click of a cocked pistol. I’d just purchased one of the new Ladysmiths, which was smaller and lighter than the guns I was used to shooting. That should have allowed me to be more accurate, but for some reason I kept missing the pop-up targets, ones that I would have easily hit with my eyes shut had I been sporting my old tried-and-true snubbie five-shot Smith and Wesson. Maybe I was overcompensating for the Ladysmith’s puny size…

Or maybe my nervousness came from knowing that the very cute guy standing next to me there on the firing line had been scoping me out from the moment I first walked in.

“Would you be offended if I gave you a few tips on your aim?” He was trying hard not to grin at my helplessness but wasn’t succeeding. I shrugged. He was adorable, with deep-set green eyes and a dark curly forelock that just begged to be tousled.

I nodded. What the heck? It had been a while since I’d played the damsel in distress.

He steadied me from behind and softly murmured sweet directives into my ear: “You see, it’s all in the timing. Raise your hand just a bit. Now, push down gently on the hammer… That a girl… ”

Oh yeah, you better believe I was ready to be rescued.

Bullseye.

The passionate kiss I gave him certainly led him to believe that I owed it all to him.

It was the last lie I was ever to tell him.

If only he’d made that same promise to me.

Afterward, he took me out to an all-night diner, where I learned that he too was living on a student’s budget. Carl, a recently decommissioned Navy SEAL, had returned to graduate school on Uncle Sam’s dime. His undergraduate degree, which he earned while at a small Midwestern college on a baseball scholarship, had been in mathematics – not that he’d planned on using it. Considering the accuracy of his pitching arm, it was taken for granted that he was headed for the major leagues.

But the first Gulf War changed that. In World War II, his grandfather had been a Marine. His father had also enlisted in the Corps, during Vietnam. For Carl, it was a no-brainer that God and country came before baseball.

That was okay. He was a winner in the game of war, too. His two Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and the Distinguished Flying Cross, earned over two tours of duty, were proof of that.

Once home, he worked just as hard for that master’s degree in statistical analysis because he wanted his bosses at some international conglomerate called Acme Industries to take notice, to realize that they could count on Carl to win for them, too, at any cost.

He’d lost both parents before he reached eighteen, and like me he had been raised an only child. “That’s why I want a big family,” he said, looking me straight in the eye.

If he were looking for an argument, he’d get none from me on that issue. I, too, would have preferred some brother or sister who could have shared my grief over Mother’s death and the job of propping my father up afterward, so I was certainly open to the concept.

More than open. I was ready, willing, and able to make babies with Carl Stone. He was everything I’d ever dreamed of in a husband.

And in a lover: Playful. Passionate. Thorough.

I found that out also that night, as we fell into bed together. Well, really on the hard tufted mattress of my futon, back at my studio apartment in downtown LA’s Koreatown.

He was right. It was all in the timing: how he spaced those sweet, gentle kisses, which made their way from my lips, down my neck; then onto each nipple, giving one, then the other, its fair share of his knowing tongue until, erect and quivering, they ached for more. His hands, inching their way across my body, took their time, too, most appreciatively as they discovered that spot—the tight, moist center of my being—that ached to have him there inside me.

He didn’t keep me waiting long. His cock–thick, hard, and generous–smarted as it entered me, but immediately found the tempo for its satisfying thrusts in the rhythm of our hearts as they beat together as one.

All in the timing.

We married right after my graduation. Dad’s liver lasted just long enough to allow him to walk me down the aisle, which is a shame because I know he would have been proud of his grandchildren. To his credit, he didn’t drink at all during the wedding reception. Between Aunt Phyllis and AA, he had finally found the strength to forgive Mother for leaving him.

Leaving us.

I never questioned whether I’d taken enough time to really get to know Carl. I assumed that everything was right there on the surface. He was one of those quiet, still-waters-run-deep guys who always kept his cards close to his vest. Mary’s birth, a year into our marriage, and then Jeff’s, added a dimension of purpose I hadn’t seen in him until then. He was a hands-on father who made vanilla-cinnamon waffles for the kids, and went to all of Mary’s ballet recitals. It was why, at five, Jeff could throw and catch a baseball as well as kids three years older. In fact, because of Carl and Jeff’s daylong practice sessions, Jeff was good enough to skip T-Ball altogether.

He’s a winner, just like his father.

Yep, we were living the American dream.

At least, I thought so. In truth, it was a nightmare. Only I didn’t know it at the time…

Or did I? 

Okay, maybe I suspected something, but I just didn’t want to admit it to myself.

Like the time Carl came home after one of his long, exhausting business trips and jumped in the shower. As he scrubbed up, his cell phone, which he usually turned off the minute he came home, began to hum. Instinctively I picked it up, only to hear the man on the other end of the line chattering away in German. Amazed, I didn’t respond. Suddenly he paused, then uttered in perfect English, “Peter? Are you there, Peter?”

“No, there is no Peter here. You have the wrong number.”

The deathly silence between us was finally broken when, in perfect English, the man asked ever so politely, “Tell me, who owns this phone?”

I hadn’t heard Carl come out of the shower, hadn’t even felt him standing there, beside me. But before I could answer, he plucked the cell out of my hand and slapped it shut.

He didn’t have to tell me that what I had done, simply by picking up that phone, had somehow upset him. I knew this instinctively. In fact, I had known for quite some time that something was bothering him by the amount of time he had been spending at the office.

Because of those many long, weary road trips he made for Acme.

Because my funny, sweet guy was now so serious and melancholy…

And dark. Particularly when we made love. Now there was an urgency–no, more like a savagery–to our lovemaking.

I can’t say that I didn’t like it, because I did. In fact, I lived for it. Just knowing that the kids were sleeping soundly in the next room as he pinned me down, surged deep inside of me, made me beg for him, and gave me a thrill like none other.