Spoonbenders by Daryl Gregory

Author:Daryl Gregory
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2017-06-26T16:00:00+00:00

12

Teddy

Love was waiting for him in the mailbox, coiled like a rattlesnake. A plain white envelope. He knew what it was even before he saw his name in Maureen’s razor-sharp cursive, and in a trice the old, sweet poison raced to his heart.

Oh, my love, he thought. You knock me out, even from the grave.

The letters were coming more frequently now, and he had no idea why. There’d been a flurry after she died, then a tapering off, so that for years at a time he’d thought they’d finally stopped. But this was the second one this summer. Was it a sign of the end-times? He was getting old. The obituaries were full of hardier men, younger men, struck down by strokes and prostate cancer and heart attacks. The stress of these letters was enough to do him in. Mo was going to kill him at the mailbox.

“Are you all right?” Irene asked. She was twenty feet away, standing by the car. Too far away to see the handwriting on the envelope.

“Paper bullets,” he said. He tucked the envelope into his jacket pocket. There’d be time to look at it later. “Straight to the brain.”

“How are you getting mail on a Sunday?”

With anyone else he would claim that it was misdelivered and a neighbor must have put it there—but this was Irene. His only choice was to dodge the question entirely. “Let’s go,” he said. “Graciella’s waiting.”

Irene made no move to get in the car. “We have a deal, right? If I go with you, no matter what happens, you’re watching Matty for me.”

“Yes, yes.”

“Four days, next Thursday through Sunday.” He’d made the mistake of giving her the keys so she could get the air-conditioning going, and now she was holding them ransom. She stood by the driver’s-side door, one hand drumming the roof. He winced to think of her rings scratching the paint. She said, “And you will watch him this time.”

She would not let him forget about the time he babysat Matty when he was two. “He’s a teenager now, not a toddler,” he said. “This time if he drinks a glass of gin it will be on purpose.”

Irene groaned, but surrendered the keys.

She managed to sit in silence until the third stoplight. It was more than he could have hoped for.

“Do you trust this woman?” she asked. Meaning Graciella.

“Do you? You’re a better judge of character than I am.” In fact, that’s why he kept bringing Irene along.

“She’s using you,” she said.

“I want her to use me. That’s the point of friendship, Irene.”

“She’s not a friend if she’s after your money.”

“Money? What money? I’m on social security, for Christ’s sake.”

“This car’s a year old. You get a new one every eighteen months.”

“That’s just good sense. New cars are dependable. You break down on the skyway, you’re likely to get killed.”

“And the suits? And the watches?”

He took a breath. How to phrase this, for a woman who can smell a lie? “Just because I don’t dress like a hobo doesn’t mean I’m rich.

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