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

and he and my mother stayed up very late talking in the living room. Uncle Roger was Greek. Doudoumopolous was his last name; for many years it was the longest word I could spell. He had a high, creased forehead and heavy-lidded brown eyes with broken capillaries netting the corners. My mother once told me that he had been handsome when he was younger—actually, her word was “slick”—but his flamboyant black mustache always reminded me of seaweed. That night he blew a kiss to where I stood blinking at the top of the stairs, but he didn’t say hello.
    â€œGo to bed,” my mother told me from the landing, putting up her hand like a traffic cop. Her bare heel was the last thing to vanish into the living room; I saw it lift right out of the back of her shoe.
    For a few minutes I listened to the dip and swell of their voices, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying; after a while I sniffed the brown stink of Uncle Roger’s cigar, something my mother had never before allowed in the house.
    â€œGood-bye,” said my mother when Uncle Roger was leaving. I woke up to hear the screen door bang. “If you don’t mind, I’d rather we keep this little episode to ourselves.”
    The “episode,” I found out much later, was that Ada and my father had slipped away together for a weekend.
    That part doesn’t surprise me when I think about it now. People who have gone so far always go a bit further. One careless step—then it hardly matters what carelessness follows. Or at least, that’s how it can seem to the person who has been careless.
    But I’m no longer sure I understand why Ada came to see my mother just before she and my father went off for their secret weekend. Maybe she wanted to be talked out of it. Or was she counting on my mother’s bitterness to goad her into doing what she’d otherwise lost heart for?
    I imagine her driving her little red car up our street, muttering to herself, repeating whatever phrases she had rehearsed, knuckles whitening as she gripped the steering wheel. Those small bright eyes, that defiant mouth, the rounded shoulders, all that dense, fox-colored hair. She hadn’t meant to let go of her sister so easily—or to be let go of. But then, when she arrived, my mother wasn’t there, only me clutching my book-bag. And she lost her nerve.
    But for what kind of fight? That’s the question that keeps needling me—whether in the end Ada persuaded herself that she loved my father or hated my mother. It had to have been one or the other for her to do what she did.
    Or could she simply have made a terrible mistake? And once she was caught in the middle of it, she couldn’t see howto get out of it. Or maybe she even fell in love with her own confusion—there was her grand passion, her way at last to be different, extraordinary, to make her sisters stop claiming that they knew who she was. For a little while at least, her mistake might even have looked like bravery.
    Because the truth is, mistakes are where life really happens. Mistakes are when we get tricked into realizing something we never meant to realize, which is why stories are about mistakes. Mistakes are the moments when we don’t know what will happen to us next. An appalling, exhilarating thought. And while we entertain it, the secret dreaming life comes groping out.
    So my father and Ada snatched a couple of days together, went to the beach, probably Virginia Beach because it was close. They would have rented a motel room with a view of the ocean, a little cement balcony where they could sit in the evening with their drinks. They wore their coats, a cold ocean breeze chapping their faces as they glanced back and forth between each other and the sand. They watched the waves scrolling in toward shore, gazed past the surf to a flat, wide distance. That span encouraged them; perhaps it looked like an open margin between themselves and the