How to Disappear by Ann Redisch Stampler

Author:Ann Redisch Stampler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon Pulse

46

Cat

I’m hunkered down with Mrs. P. Curtains drawn. Getting groceries delivered to the welcome mat. Watching TV and baking.

I’m not waiting for him.

I’m hiding out.

Not feeling a tenth of the way safe.

The Home Shopping Network doesn’t have news. Every time Mrs. P nods off, I grab the remote and hit up the local news on channel nine.

Nothing.

No armed assaults. No barroom brawls. No murders.

I mean, somebody thought she saw a bear cub in a tree. That was news. They interviewed her for five minutes.

If we killed the guy, it would have to be news.

Where is J ditching the car anyway? Peru?

I think he’s coming back.

Maybe.

I grill Mrs. Podolski lamp chops (into the yard for mint leaves, back in under ten seconds, world record) and return to the Home Shopping Network for an ongoing sale of loose gems. Mrs. P’s birthstone is the opal. Cat’s is aquamarine. My real one ought to be rubies.

I keep coming back to bloodred.

The brightest thing I wear now is beige, but bloodred is my signature color.

Mrs. Podolski says, “The price of a good woman is above rubies. That’s a proverb for you, Cathy.”

This might explain one or two things.

By Thursday, Mrs. P is so sick of pastries, I have to stop rolling dough. When she grabs my hand with her little, liver-spotted fingers, I can’t believe her grip.

“I’m going to read your palm, Ruby,” she says.

For a second, I’m terrified she’s going to figure out who I am and why I’m in her living room by tracing the lines of my hand. Until I remember that nobody can do that. There are no real fortune-tellers or real witches or real bogeymen.

Maybe bogeymen.

I let her massage my palm with the tips of her fingers.

Meet a dark stranger. Check.

Go on a long journey. Check.

She gets distracted by a mound of cubic zirconia on TV before she gets to long life.

After a while, she’s so sick of me folding her afghan over her knees and waving my palm at her for the word on long life, she’s ready to throw me out of the house.

She thinks I poisoned her coffee. When J finally shows up, tapping on the kitchen window, she thinks he’s come to arrest me.

I want to hug him until my arms are too tired to keep hugging. But he swoops in and hugs me first. I’m enveloped in it. Also trapped. But all I feel is relieved.

When he steps back, he looks me over like the vice principal checking for bra straps and too-short skirts and random inappropriateness.

He says, “Good job! You look great.”

I have black hair parted down the middle, black eyebrows, and red bow lips. I turned one of Mrs. P’s old thermal tops into a white waffle-weave shirt. Over a black skirt.

Blah.

But a different style of blah.

“Like I looked terrible before?”

“You were supposed to look different, that’s all I meant.”

“Joking.” I reach up to touch where his cheekbone is swollen, but he pulls back. “You still look pretty beat-up.”

I’m so glad to see him, it’s borderline pathetic.

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