Fall Guy by Carol Lea Benjamin Read Free Book Online

I took everything that would spoil, if it hadn’t already, out of the refrigerator and put it all in the bags, tying the handles on top twice to make sure things stayed put. Last, I took the watering can off the sill so that I could take care of the plants. There were beer bottles on the sill, too, and empties all over the counter and on the table—beer cans, liquor bottles, wine bottles. The sink had dishes in it and not just one night’s dinner dishes. Pots and pans and plates and glasses were piled almost to the tap. I imagined that washing those would fall to me now. Unless I merely pitched them out, too. I remembered that when Lili and I were doing my mother’s apartment, the longer we worked, the more readily we threw things away, anxious to be done with it, to breathe the air outside, eat pizza, make love, anxious not to be thinking about death.
    I headed for the bathroom to fill the can in the bathtub. That’s when Brody moved. Fast.
    â€œRachel, wait!” His hand on my arm. I turned to face him. “Don’t go in there.” Grim, he was. I turned again, to look at the closed bathroom door, then back to look into Michael Brody’s brooding eyes.
    â€œHe was cleaning his gun in the bathroom?”
    Brody took the watering can from my hand. “We can get water in the garden,” he said. “There’s a hose.”
    I was going to tell him we could use the Brita pitcher to water the plants. What difference did it make now? Instead, I said, “Why don’t we just take the plants out.”
    I put the can back where it had been. Brody picked up an angel-wing begonia from the kitchen sill, its cheerful pink flowers at odds with the reason we were here. He put it on the round table near the second door and went back for another plant. Without speaking, we gathered the rest of the small plants. Then Brody opened the door, unlocked the garden door, propping each open with a plant. I began taking the small plants out while Brody went back to the living room for the big ones.
    As I stood holding a coleus and a wandering Jew that for some reason were sitting on the counter instead of hanging from the two hooks in the ceiling over the sink, looking for a good place to put them down, I thought I might suggest the neighbors adopt them sometime before the cool weather settled in. That’s when the garden door to the west opened and Jin Mei came out, Yin Yin in her arms.
    â€œOh, Rachel. You’re back so soon.”
    And before I had the chance to tell her to shut up, wishing I could say it in Cantonese or Mandarin or whatever the hell she spoke so that I could get the message across surreptitiously, I could smell him behind me. Right behind me. There was Dashiell, too, going right up to Jin Mei, lifting his front paws off the ground so that he could stick his big nose in the little Abyssinian’s butt.
    â€œWe’re bringing Tim’s plants out,” I said. Not knowing what else to say. Not wanting to turn around and look at old stone face. “I thought perhaps the people who share the garden might take a few each at the end of the summer.”
    Jin Mei nodded. Her straw hat bobbed. Her mouth trembled and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. “Tim promised that when the time came for me to meet my ancestors, he would find a good home for Yin Yin. Now I have to find someone else to do that. It’s good Tim’s plants have you to make sure they get a good home.”
    When all the plants were placed out in the garden, with Jin Mei’s considerable input, I walked back inside, Dashiell following, Brody bringing up the rear. I still hadn’t looked him in the eye. I’d only glanced at the ground as he passed me with the corn plant, noticing that the shine on his shoes had gotten messed up by the wet soil in the communal garden. I wondered if he’d noticed. But he probably shined them every night, no matter what.
    When he closed the