The Housewife(54)

We’re standing in the hall which is all stone floors and dark slate walls. I walk through the living area.

“Where do you think you’re going?” she asks.

“I need to sit down. We need to talk,” I say over my shoulder.

It’s an open-plan setup, with the living room flowing into the kitchen and then into the hallway. I have never seen so much granite and marble in my life. I turn to face her. “You don’t like color or soft furnishings?”

She blinks. “This house won a prize. It’s been featured in Architectural Digest.”

I raise an eyebrow, then my glance falls on the open laptop on the kitchen table.

Two Killed in Early Morning House Fire in Yuma

I drag it close to me. “What the hell, Erin?”

Two people were found dead after a house fire broke out early Monday morning in a residential neighborhood on Yuma’s east side, according to the Yuma Fire Department— She slams the laptop shut.

“What the hell is this?” I blurt.

“That story you told me about your parents, your whole family dying in a house fire. I looked it up. ”

“You looked it up? You are fact-checking me now? After you stalked me to a bathroom in a gas station?”

“There have been no reports of anything like this happening in Oklahoma for the last twenty years.”

“And?”

“And you lied, Jodie!”

“Who says I lied? Maybe it’s your research that’s faulty.”

“I happen to know that Deborah grew up in Arizona. In Yuma.”

I swallow a lump in my throat. “So?”

“There was a house fire in Yuma.”

I shrug. “So what? Happens all the time.”

“Six weeks ago, Jodie!” She points at the laptop. “Six weeks ago, a couple in their early sixties died in a house fire!” She crosses her arms over her chest. “I think Roy has a right to know who the hell he’s married to.”

I lean against the sink, cross my arms over my chest, my mouth turned down. “They were not nice people,” I say finally.

She claps a hand over her mouth. “Oh my God.”





I wouldn’t have killed my parents if Deb hadn’t been dead. She didn’t like them any more than I did, but she would have disapproved. She always felt a strange sense of misplaced loyalty toward them, simply because they were our parents. I wasn’t surprised she invited them to her wedding. She would have invited them to Thanksgiving, had she been alive. That’s who she was. Pure to a fault. She only saw the best in people, and in the case of my parents, that would have taken some looking.

Anyway. Roy had this weird obsession about wanting to keep in touch with Deb’s family, which I believe was more of a decoy so people wouldn’t suspect him of killing her. First, he wrote to them to say he was marrying again, because he thought it was proper, like they’d care. Then he wanted to invite them to the wedding and I managed to convince him otherwise, but I knew I was on borrowed time. He wanted to give them a little money, for Deb’s sake, like she’d care, and let’s just say that my parents can smell a handout two hundred and eighty-four miles away, which is the precise driving distance between Beverley Hills and Yuma.

Then he started saying he wanted to send them a nice photograph of our wedding--along with a check—when the time came, and at that point I knew I had no choice. We were only a week away from getting married, and I still had my ugly little walk-up unit, so one day I told him I had a cold (we were spending an awful lot of time together, what with the baby and all) and I bought a bus ticket to Yuma—cash.

When I saw my mother again the day I killed her, she was standing at the door, smoking, her long dirty fingernails yellowed with it. She was wearing a shabby red cardigan with holes at the elbows and dirt on the cuffs, jeans, and gry slippers. Everything about her was brittle and grimy.

“What are you doing here?” My mother snapped. Her hair was grayer, dirtier, greasy strands tucked behind her ears.

“I got out,” I said .

“I see that.” She stood in the doorway leaning on one side, her arm stretched across the doorframe in case I got it into my head to go in.

“I don’t know why nobody contacted me about your release. I thought that’s what they did when a murderer was let out of prison.”

“No, they don’t. And anyway, you’re not a victim.”

She took a drag. “So what do you want?”

“I need a place to sleep tonight.”

“We don’t have room.” She started closing the door on me. I held it open. “I have money.” I pulled out fifty dollars from my back pocket. “Just for one night.”

She snatched it out of my hand so fast it was like watching a magic trick. “It’ll have to be the couch. We’re using your sister’s room for storage.”

“Couch is fine.”

For now, though, the couch still had my dad on it.

He was watching NFL football with a can of Budweiser resting on his stomach. He barely acknowledged me, if you call glancing at the door for a nanosecond an acknowledgment.

“Hi, Dad,” I said.

He upped the volume on his remote.


It was still cold, and they still had the same old crappy gas furnace in the living room. We watched the game together on the couch. Then, when they went to bed, I turned the furnace back on, loosened the gas line, fished out of my mother’s cigarette stub from the ashtray and lit it. Then I dropped it on the carpet and took the ten-thirty bus back to LA.