A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne Read Free Book Online

grateful. I listened to the crowd cheer on TV and ate another grape. This was the last of our rations. I pictured myself thin and pale, being carried by my father through the snow.
    â€œHow about we order a pizza?” he asked at a commercial break.
    I reached out to punch his leg, just to touch him. Then Ilooked up and saw his cheeks were wet. I asked why he was crying and behind me felt the twins stop reading their comic books. My father wiped his face with his sleeve and said he was allergic to the varnish his landlady had used on the woodwork.
    Did my mother see Ada during that time? I like to think she must have, at least once. For all her energetic stoicism, she was only human.
    They would have made arrangements to meet at the mall, somewhere public, like wary people on a blind date. My mother would have wanted no chance of hysterics, on her part or Ada’s. In different ways, they were both circumspect women. Instead of weeping and scratching each other with their fingernails, they walked around and around the upper floor of the mall, two tall women in bulky parkas and leather boots, my mother carrying a purse with a broken strap, which she had mended with an old diaper pin. Their elbows pointed at each other; otherwise, they might have been shopping the Presidents’ Day sales. But they kept their voices down and stared at their boots, ignoring the rack of gauzy negligees whenever they circled past the Coy Boutique.
    Occasionally their elbows bumped, which made them stagger apart. Ada watched my mother’s face, looking for an opening, a chance to begin excusing herself.
    She had never meant for things to go so far. From what I’ve gathered, Ada was the most prosaic and nearsighted of theMayhew Girls, the one who, in the company of the sister she was betraying, the husband she was cheating on, and the man she was sleeping with, would be truly interested in the state of her nail polish.
    Can’t we just forget about all this?
she might have said, with a trace of a whine.
    But that’s not quite right, the whine part. Ada was also the most fun of the sisters, the one who laughed most easily, the one most willing to forgive a slight. Every Christmas they all gave one another earrings, but my mother and my aunts always seemed to buy one another pearl studs while Ada gave them long dangling silver earrings with moonstones or turquoise or jade. They made meatloaf or pot roast for family dinners; she made lamb curry or chili relleños. “Hey there,” she cried when she saw you, as if you were someone she had been hoping to see. She was almost beautiful; she was almost generous. She was a relief to have around.
    So:
Can’t we just forget about all this?
she might have said, with the trace of a smile, because she actually believed forgetting was possible.
    But my mother walked on. Perhaps she shook her head. Perhaps she made a chopping motion with her free hand, the one not gripping her purse strap. Perhaps she, too, wore a trace of a smile. This is what she had come for, after all, the gritty pleasure of denial.
    Both of their faces stayed white. When they left the mall, they walked separately over the dirty snow to their cars,parked at opposite ends of the parking lot, and each sat for a few minutes behind the steering wheel before starting her car and driving away.
    One cloudy afternoon in late March I came hope from school ahead of the twins to find a note pinned to the front door. SHOPPING , it read—in a couple of the letters the ballpoint pen my mother had used had driven all the way through the paper. It wasn’t like my mother to be gone when I came home from school, but in the last few weeks she hadn’t been like my mother in so many other ways that this one seemed hardly remarkable.
    I had just turned around to hunt for the spare key hidden under the front steps when Aunt Ada’s old red VW bug pulled into the driveway.
    â€œHey there,” she called.
    She was