Cul-de-sac Page 2

  “I’m up!” Erin yells back. “Chill, for God’s sake!” Upstairs, the bathroom door slams shut.

  I would if you’d let me, Maggie thinks, knowing she’s being unfair. It’s not the teenager’s fault their lives have been turned upside down. “This is on me,” she says.

  “What’s on you?” Leo says, entering the kitchen.

  Maggie jumps at the sound of her son’s voice. How did she not hear him come down? “Where are your shoes?”

  Leo glances toward his bare feet. “Oh,” he says, indicating the backpack on the floor beside him. “I think I packed them.”

  Maggie smiles. My little space cadet, she thinks, wondering if this is the reason he and Ben Wilson have never become more than casual acquaintances. She’d been so excited when she’d learned their new next-door neighbors had a son the same age as Leo, and hoped they’d soon become fast friends, but sadly, this has not proven to be the case. She suspects this has more to do with Dani Wilson than her son, the prevailing wisdom being that Dani Wilson considers herself too good for her surroundings, that she would prefer to live in a more upscale development, one with a prestigious address more fitting a family headed by two doctors. Perhaps she also resents the professional deference regularly showered on her husband by the residents of Carlyle Terrace, a deference that, as a mere dentist, she rarely gets to experience.

  Or maybe she’s just a bitch.

  “Is it a spider?” Leo asks.

  “Is what a spider?”

  “What’s on you,” he replies, turning the question he asked earlier into a statement, his eyes growing fearful.

  I put that fear there, Maggie thinks. “Oh,” she says. “No. There’s no spider.”

  “Then what?”

  “Just some crumbs, I guess,” she improvises.

  This seems to satisfy him. He sits down in one of the four white plastic chairs, removes his sneakers from his backpack, and pushes his feet into them, struggling with the laces.

  “Here. Let me help you.” Maggie is already kneeling in front of him, hands outstretched.

  “No, it’s okay. Dad says I need to start doing things by myself.”

  “Your father…” Maggie bites her tongue to keep from saying something she’ll regret. She has too many regrets as it is. She’s running out of room. She hears the toaster pop out the two pieces of bread. “Do you want to butter your toast by yourself?” she asks. Surely he can’t hurt himself with a butter knife.

  “No,” he says. “You can butter them.”

  “Okay.” She fights the urge to thank him. “Erin!” she calls as Leo is taking his final few bites. “It’s after seven. School starts in less than half an hour. We’re going to be late.” Why schools have to start so damn early is something she’s never been able to figure out.

  “I’m in the bathroom.”

  “I know you’re in the bathroom. It’s time to get out of the bathroom.” She walks toward the stairs.

  “God, could you be any more annoying?” Erin mutters, flinging open the bathroom door as Maggie reaches the upstairs landing, a blur of waist-length, light brown hair and long bare legs brushing past her down the hall.

  “Probably,” Maggie says as she enters her bedroom and opens the top drawer of the nightstand beside the bed. She reaches inside and extricates the Glock 19, turning it over in the palm of her hand and admiring it before dropping it inside her large canvas bag.

  One of the reasons Maggie chose Florida is that it’s considered “accommodating” regarding guns, the state policy being one of “shall issue” for a concealed carry license. This means it’s legal to carry a concealed weapon and relatively easy to get a license to do so. Which Maggie did, filling out the necessary forms and submitting them, along with her fingerprints and a recent photograph, to Tallahassee for a background check, then waiting five days to receive her permit.

  She completed the three-hour-long obligatory course in firearms training within a week of buying the gun. And she’s been carrying it with her ever since.

  Just in case, one day, it becomes necessary to use it.

  Chapter Two

  Dani Wilson looks out her kitchen window to see the school bus idling on the street. “Boys,” she calls toward the den at the back of the house. “The bus is here. Tyler! Ben! Let’s go. Y’all know Manuel doesn’t like to be kept waitin’.” She counts silently to ten, taking several deep breaths to still her growing irritation at the lack of response, trying not to take it personally.

  After all, it’s nothing new. She deals with this every day at work, her patients rarely replying to her polite queries—about their day, their health, their lives—with more than one-word answers. “Fine,” they’ll grunt, or “Good.” True, their mouths are open wide and often stuffed with cotton, but would it really be so hard to add, “And you?”

  The hard truth is that no one gives a damn whether Dani Wilson is happy or not. No one is interested in the problems of an erstwhile Southern belle with a handsome doctor husband, a thriving practice, and a six-figure income. She is all too aware that the people with whom she spends the bulk of her time would rather be somewhere—anywhere—in the world other than with her.

  Is it any wonder that the suicide rate among dentists is higher than in any other profession?

  She looks toward the kitchen’s center island with its four high-top chairs lined against one side. “How ’bout you guys? How you doin’?” she asks the two betta fish, one red, one blue, each as pretty as a peach, swimming aimlessly in separate bowls on the island’s granite countertop. Two bowls are necessary because of a fierce territorial instinct that sees them fight to the death if put with other fish. Even surrounded by glass, they must be kept a suitable distance apart.

  “I thought we agreed, no pets,” Nick said when Dani brought them home one day after work, an impulse purchase she still can’t explain.

  “Well, they were so pretty and I just thought…”

  “You thought what?”

  “Well, it’s not like a dog or a cat….”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “I thought it’d be good for the boys,” she said.

  “Trust me,” Nick said. “They’ll lose interest in a week.”

  Of course, he was right. At least as far as their younger son, Ben, was concerned. After loudly insisting that the blue betta was his, he’d proceeded to largely ignore him. “He’s boring,” he proclaimed. Tyler, on the other hand, has spent hours with his forehead pressed against the smaller red betta’s bowl, talking to it to the point that the fish, whom he named Neptune, now actually allows the boy to put his hand inside the bowl and stroke him.

  Dani finds this amazing; Nick is unimpressed. “I’m worried about that kid,” he’d say, with a shake of his head.

  “He’s sensitive.”

  Another headshake. “Who bonds with a fish?”

  Dani sighs and heads for the back room. “Boys! Let’s get goin’. The bus is fixin’ to leave without you.”

  “No, it’s not,” her husband contradicts, his back to her. He is standing in front of the glass-fronted cabinet that houses his impressive firearm collection, ten-year-old Tyler to his left, eight-year-old Ben to his right. “He’s early. He can wait a few minutes. And it’s ‘let’s get going,’ ” he adds, stressing the final g. “Not ‘goin’.’ The g is not silent.” He glances at his sons. “Proper pronunciation is important,” he tells them. “People judge you by the way you speak. Remember that.”

  Dani nods. She knows he’s right. He’s right about most things. But she was born and raised in Alabama, and even though she’s lived in Florida since they got married almost fifteen years ago, a Southern cadence isn’t the easiest thing to lose.

  To which Nick would undoubtedly counter that, last he heard, Florida was still considered part of the South, and that her habit of pepperi
ng her sentences with corny aphorisms makes her sound like a hillbilly, and dropping her g’s as well as using contractions like “y’all” has nothing to do with geography and everything to do with being grammatically lazy.

  And he’d be right. Because he’s always right. Although she remembers a time when he found such speech idiosyncrasies endearing. Funny how the very things that once charmed us become the things that irritate us the most, she thinks, remembering that she used to find his self-confidence—some might call it arrogance—appealing. Her father, a successful internist, had been casually dismissive of her stay-at-home mother in much the same way. Wasn’t that at least part of the reason she’d been so determined to have a career?

  Of course, it hadn’t hurt that both men are tall and handsome, saved from being a cliché by being fair-haired instead of dark. Dani has always assumed arrogance went with the territory. And Nick is pretty high on the medical hierarchy, being a well-respected, even revered, oncologist. There’s no question that his patients adore him. His website overflows with tributes praising his diagnostic genius and warm bedside manner.

  Of course, she’s a doctor, too, she reminds herself. Although her father would argue that a dentist isn’t really a doctor, not in the strict sense of the word.

  And she doesn’t need reminding that no one likes going to the dentist, regardless of competence.

  Maybe if she were young and beautiful, instead of forty, on the short side, and still carrying around the ten extra pounds in baby weight she hasn’t been able to shed since Ben’s birth, it would be a different story.

  “Maybe if you watched what you ate and stuck to an exercise regime,” Nick has said.

  “I’m tryin’.”

  “Trying,” he corrected.

  He’s right, of course. He always is. She can’t keep blaming her extra weight on her younger son. Ben is eight years old, for God’s sake. It’s time to take responsibility and get proactive, cut back on those calories, get a membership at the gym, maybe even hire a personal trainer.

  “What’re y’all doin’?” she asks now, exhausted by the mere thought of a trainer.

  “Dad’s showing us his new rifle,” Ben answers, swiveling around to face her, pointing a weapon almost as big as he is in the general direction of her heart. “And it’s ‘doing,’ not ‘doin’.’ ”

  Dani gasps and takes a step back, not sure if her reaction is due to the rifle aimed at her chest or her son’s admonishment.

  “Whoa there, partner,” Nick says, quickly removing the weapon from his son’s hands. “What have I told you about never pointing a gun at anyone?”

  “It’s not loaded,” Ben protests.

  “Doesn’t matter.” His father returns the rifle to its proper place, then locks the cabinet door. “Now, listen to your mother. Get moving.”

  The boys respond immediately, Tyler offering up a shy smile as he hurries by.

  “You didn’t tell me you bought a new gun,” Dani says when her sons are out of earshot.

  “Didn’t think you were interested.”

  For an instant, she’s tempted to chide her husband on his frequent habit of leaving out nouns, then decides she’s being petty. Turnabout might be fair play, but she’s learned it rarely works in her favor.

  “ ’Course I’m interested. How many does that make now?” Her eyes do a silent count of the many guns and rifles on display.

  “Eighteen.”

  “Well, bless my heart.” Dani has never shared her husband’s passion for guns, and never accompanies him when he goes to the nearby shooting range for target practice.

  “Thinking of taking the boys with me to the range one of these weekends,” he says, as if reading her mind.

  “What?” The unnerving image of eight-year-old Ben pointing the weapon at her chest flashes before her eyes.

  “It’s time they learned how to shoot.” He looks around the room. “Where’d you put my iPad?”

  “What?” she says again.

  “Left it here last night.”

  “I haven’t touched it.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “ ’Course I’m sure. You probably left it in the bathroom.”

  “I didn’t leave it in the goddamn bathroom.”

  Dani tenses at the unexpected irritation in his voice and is grateful for the sudden shouts—“Stop it!” “Leave them alone!” “Mom!”—coming from the kitchen. She runs toward the sound and sees her boys wrestling with the fishbowls, the two bettas being tossed carelessly from side to side as water sloshes from the tops of the bowls to the island countertop. “My goodness! What’s goin’ on here?”

  “Ben keeps putting the bowls too close together,” Tyler says, his voice quivering. “Neptune’s getting all upset.”

  “It’s fun,” Ben says, laughing. “You should see them. They get all puffed up, start banging at the glass.”

  “They’ll hurt themselves,” Tyler argues.

  “So what? They’re just fish.”

  “Okay, that’s enough.” Dani returns the bowls to the counter, leaving plenty of space between them. “Time to go. Manuel’s waitin’.”

  “Waiting,” her husband corrects, entering the room, iPad in hand. “You heard your mother. Go on. Off with you.”

  “Kisses?” Dani asks as they race for the front door. Only Tyler returns, offering up the side of his head to be kissed. Her lips brush against a lock of golden-brown hair. “Have a good day,” she calls as the front door opens and shuts.

  “So, what was all the yelling about?” Nick asks.

  “Ben put the bowls too close together again.”

  Nick laughs.

  “It’s not funny. It upsets Tyler.”

  “Kid’s too soft. He could use some toughening up.”

  Dani decides not to argue. “I see you found your iPad.”

  He nods.

  “Where’d you find it?”

  “Bathroom.”

  “So, I was right.”

  “I guess. Is that really so important to you?”

  “I just don’t like bein’ accused….”

  “Nobody accused you of anything. I just asked if you’d seen it.”

  “No, you asked where I put it. There’s a difference. And you shouldn’t be correctin’—correcting—my grammar in front of the kids.”

  Nick shakes his head. “Look. I don’t have the time or the energy to argue with you right now. I have a full day ahead of me and I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night….”

  “Why didn’t you sleep?”

  Another shake of his head, causing several strands of the same golden-brown hair as Tyler’s to fall across his eyes. “I don’t know. Some stupid bird kept squawking. I was tempted to go outside and shoot the miserable thing. And…” He stops, pushing the hair back into place.

  Don’t ask, she thinks. “And?” she asks anyway.

  “Well, I hesitate to say anything, because you seem to be in a mood….”

  “I’m not in a mood—”

  “But you’ve got to do something about your snoring, babe,” he interrupts. “I know you don’t do it on purpose….”

  Dani sighs. They’ve been through this before. There’s no point reminding him that he also snores, or that he could at least try the earplugs she bought him the last time he complained about her snoring.

  “Anyway,” he says, “let’s drop it. I have a tough enough day ahead of me.” A third shake of his head. “I have to tell a man his cancer has spread and we’ve run out of options.”

  “I’m so sorry.” Dani feels immediately guilty for giving him such a hard time. At least your patients have the good grace to die, she thinks, feeling even guiltier. When did she become so insensitive to the suffering of others? What’s the matter with me?

  “I’m sorry, too,” Nick says
, surrounding her with his arms, drawing her into a tight embrace. “I did imply you’d moved my iPad. You had every right to be pissed. And I had no business correcting your grammar in front of the boys,” he adds without prompting. “That was wrong. I’ll try not to do it again.”

  “Thank you,” she whispers as he withdraws.

  “I love you,” he says.

  “I love you, too.”

  He tweaks her nose. “But you really must do something about that snoring.”

  Chapter Three

  From his usual position at the living room window, Sean Grant watches the school bus pull away from the curb in front of the house next door, taking with it the privileged offspring of the eminent Doctors Wilson. He wonders, not for the first time, why two successful professionals would choose to live on this simple cul-de-sac when they could be living in one of the more upscale gated communities nearby. They had to have a combined yearly income of close to half a million dollars, if not more. Hell, as one of the top cancer specialists in the area, Nick Wilson probably earned that all by himself. Sean knows that if he were making that kind of money, he’d be living in Palm Beach proper, or maybe he’d buy a house at the Bear Club, Jack Nicklaus’s exclusive golf and country club over on Donald Ross Road. He used to be a pretty good golfer. Of course, it’s been a while since he golfed, golf being an expensive habit to maintain.

  One he can no longer afford.

  “Sean!” his wife calls, her high heels clicking against the beige ceramic tile that runs throughout the downstairs rooms. “Where are you?”

  He reluctantly leaves the window, joining his wife in the small center hall at the foot of the stairs before she can ask again. He finds the layout of the house awkward—the combined living-dining room to the right of the stairs and virtually everything else to the left. Who designed these houses anyway? Shouldn’t the kitchen and dining rooms be closer together? he thinks silently, although this sort of thing never bothered him before he became the family’s chief cook and bottle washer.