Stay At Home Dead by Jeffrey Allen Read Free Book Online Page B

didn’t approve. Just that they thought I might lose Carly at Target or something some afternoon. Which was always a possibility.
    “Leave it all alone, son,” my father said.
    “What?”
    “They found Benny in your car. So what?” He shook his head, frowned. “The bozos around here will try to make something of it, but the couple of right-thinking folks in Rose Petal will figure out. Shoot, I wish they’d give you more credit.”
    “How’s that?”
    “Some kid of mine knocks somebody off, I hope he’s got the smarts to drop the body off somewhere other than the back of his rice-burning minivan.”
    I laughed. I never recalled my father being a funny guy when I was a kid. He was a little stern, a disciplinarian. Supportive, but tough. It wasn’t until I’d finished at A&M that I started to get a taste of his humor.
    “Stay out of it, Deuce,” he said, tilting his head back, closing his eyes. “It’ll sort itself out, and you can go back to sponging off your wife again.”
    Maybe he wasn’t that funny.

14
    Julianne loves lists. Grocery lists, to-do lists, Christmas lists, and Deuce lists.
    When we laid out the ground rules for my staying home, we both agreed that leaving me a list of chores every morning would be a terrific way of driving me insane.
    “I don’t wanna see a list every day of things to do,” I said. “I’ll go crazy.”
    “I understand,” she replied.
    “I understand” was apparently code for “I don’t care, and I am going to leave you a list of things to do every day for the rest of your natural life, and if you go crazy, our insurance covers mental health” in wife talk. I had trouble recalling a morning during the previous three years in which she did not leave me a short note, reminding me to go to the grocery store, gas up the car, call the doctor, or solve the Lindbergh kidnapping. When I complained, she said I was exaggerating, but that she would try and ease off.
    She would then write that down on a sticky note to remind me she would try to ease off and to pick up the dry cleaning.
    Someday, I am positive, someone is going to sue 3M on the grounds that their little convenient invention led to relationship failure.
    Amid the chaos at Cooper’s the previous day, I’d left our groceries behind, and Julianne left me a note that morning, reminding me we still needed groceries. I didn’t dare head back to the market, knowing that everyone there would be well aware of Benny having been found in the back of our car. Instead, I headed over to the Wal-Mart in Lewisville, where I knew I could get my shopping done in anonymity.
    After filling the new van with the groceries, I sat at the light and the strip mall across the street caught my eye. Actually, it was one store in particular.
    Land O’ Rugs. Benny’s former employer.
    The smart thing to do would have been to take my father’s advice and just let it all go. Take the green light, turn right, head home, and put the groceries away and pick up the house before my parents brought Carly home in time for dinner. And then make dinner, too.
    As I went straight through the light and pulled into the parking lot in front of the rug store, I wondered if my father was wrong.
    Maybe I was dumb enough to put a dead body in the back of my own minivan.
    Land O’ Rugs was sandwiched between a school supply store and a doughnut shop. The entire strip mall had the appearance of barely hanging on, as if a bulldozer could come by at any moment and wipe it from the face of the earth and no one would be the wiser. In all my years in Rose Petal, it was the first time I could ever recall noticing the occupants.
    A distant doorbell chimed somewhere in the back of the store as I stepped through the door. A scrawny cat looked up at me from its perch on a pile of rugs. Short hair, orange and white striped, with one ear significantly shorter than the other, as if it had been clipped. The cat stood up, arched its back at me, and hissed.
    “Boo,” I