Good Night Wood



  Good Night Wood

  Mary Kitt-Neel

  Copyright 2011 Mary Kitt-Neel

  License Notes

  Cover Photograph © 2006 Mary Hiers

  “You want a piece of cake, Mom?” asked Email. “We’re about to take the rest of it and head over to Alex’s house.”

  Martine stood up from her desk and stretched. “Sure, sweetie. I’ll get a piece for later,” she said, walking into the kitchen. Email had bought a birthday cake for her friend Roswell’s 18th birthday. It said “Congratulations on your year of sobrity.” She had found it in the clearance cakes at Mega Foods, presumably embargoed there because of the typo, and thought Roswell would get a kick out of it. Martine cut off a small corner and put it on a saucer that she wrapped in plastic.

  “When will you be home, sweetie?” she asked. Email looked at Roswell, who shrugged.

  “I don’t know. I might want to spend the night at Roswell’s, if that’s OK.”

  “Call me by 10 if you do,” said Martine. She leaned over and kissed Email on the forehead.

  “You OK Mom?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Busy with work stuff is all.”

  “OK. See you later. Or tomorrow. I love you.”

  “I love you too, sweetie. Be careful.”

  Martine was in fact engaged in more than just “work stuff.” Her friend Bob, who owned a local night club, was embroiled in some online shenanigans that had her troubled. Bob was a very outgoing man. He had managed to make it through the 1970s with his brain not only intact despite the large quantities of illicit substances he had ingested, but as functional and heat-seeking as ever.

  Even in his 50s he continually fought off women. He had hoped for years to get Martine in on the fun, but she felt like she didn’t have the personality for it. She had been married to a cheater for 15 years, and she didn’t want to set herself up for the same kind of pain all over again, so she remained as platonic as it was possible to be with someone like Bob.

  But now she wondered if he had crossed a line somewhere. Bob had set up a website where he pretended to be a young lesbian in hopes of raking in a continual supply of anecdotes of hot girl-on-girl action, and he had been fairly successful at doing so. His online persona, “Bernadette,” had engaged in a protracted flirtation with another young lesbian named Andree for the better part of a year.

  Except Andree was a 43-year-old straight dude.

  Not only was he not just any 43-year-old straight dude, but Bob had figured out that he was a Republican state representative with a wife and 2.5 children. He was also a deacon in his church and stood proudly on a family values platform that was, it was beginning to appear, made of cheap, flimsy plywood.

  Bob wasn’t fazed by the fact that he turned out to be a guy. That sort of thing had happened before. It was the fact that he had engaged in a prolonged interaction with a conservative that had him both agitated and depressed, wondering if he knew his own mind anymore. He didn’t want anyone to know what had happened.

  Martine, on the other hand, wanted everyone in the universe to know about it. When she worked for a local newspaper, she had covered this politician, whose name was Bud Mathis, and she couldn’t stand him. He was sleazy and cheated on his wife. She knew this because he had accidentally texted her one time asking her to meet him for an assignation as soon as he could drop his kids off at Vacation Bible School. She had regretted not making that text public ever since.

  The revelation from Bob made her wonder if she really did dislike Bud enough to not only do something that could ruin his career, but that could hold her own reputation up to the light and drag Bob into the potential mess too. And there was the little matter of Martine’s sideline as a sports bookmaker.

  Eventually she concluded that she really did dislike Bud that much.

  She was chatting with Bob, trying to convince him to come forward with his information in such a way that her name would never enter into it, when she looked out her dining room window and noticed Jarrett’s car in her driveway.

  Jarrett was Martine’s card runner, and finding him asleep in his red Acura in her driveway was not unusual. He was also friends with Martine’s son Tingo, but Tingo had no idea that Jarrett ran cards for her. Both she and Tingo had told him repeatedly that he was welcome to sleep on the sofa in their living room whenever he wanted to, but he never would. Jarrett technically lived with a roommate across town, but they didn’t get along, and he had more or less set up his own little ecosystem within his car, with his power converter, sound system, and custom seats.

  However, this time, Jarrett had the hood open and was fiddling around with something. He looked as if he were under considerable stress. Martine grabbed her piece of birthday cake and took it outside to him.

  “You OK?” she asked, handing him the cake.

  “Oh, Jesus, thanks,” he said, taking the cake from her. “I need to be somewhere at 4 and it looks like my alternator’s gone to shit.”

  “I could drive you,” she said.

  Jarrett stared at his cake, looking thoughtful. Finally he said, “No, that’s cool. I couldn’t ask you to do that.”

  “Well, you don’t have to ask me. I’m offering,” said Martine.

  Jarrett leaned against the front of the car and looked off into space. Martine wondered if she should go back inside.

  “It’s a doctor’s appointment, sort of,” he said. “I can reschedule.”

  “Nonsense,” said Martine. “Let me take you. I’ve been wanting to get out of the house.”

  “It’s at Granite Health,” he said. He looked at Martine to see if she freaked out.

  “Not a problem,” she said. “It isn’t far.”

  “Well, if you’re really OK with it, I’d be much obliged,” said Jarrett.

  “Let me go get my purse,” she said.

  Granite Health was a mental health services provider. Jarrett was not the kind of person who would share the fact that he needed a shrink, particularly not to his best friend’s mother, and particularly not when she depended on him for services that were at best nontraditional.

  Martine, however, figured that 99% of the population needed psychological help, herself included. She rather admired anyone who actually acted upon the need. Her only concern was whether or not she should take her computer with her and try to get some work done. She ended up leaving it at home.

  They managed to get the one shady parking space in the lot. As Jarrett got out, Martine said, “I’ll be around. Take your time.” He nodded.

  Martine dug a book of Sudoku puzzles and a pen out of her purse, rolled down the windows, and set to. The weather was surprisingly nice for June, not humid at all, and there was a breeze. Slowly, she filled in the grid with numbers, trying not to think of the situation with Bob and Bud Mathis.

  Getting the truth out into the open would hurt Bud, no doubt. But would it hurt Bob too? That was the concern that had taken root and started growing. Was the satisfaction of taking Bud Mathis down worth damaging her friendship with Bob over? After all, even if Bud did resign, his successor would likely be just as big an asshole, and Bud would probably end up with his own syndicated radio show or something. And if anything, that would increase his public influence.

  By the time she had solved the Sudoku puzzle she realized she was hungry. Across the street was a convenience store where she could grab something and probably be back before Jarrett was through. But to be on the safe side, Martine dug a receipt from the glove box and wrote a note to stick under the windshield wiper.

  “J: I have gone across the street for a soda. I will be right back. M.”

  She bought a bag of peanuts and a diet soda and brought them back to the Granite Health parking lot, but didn’t feel like sitting in the ca
r. The office building had a large, wide, covered staircase with a landing where she could sit without being in anyone’s way. She sat with her back against a support column and closed her eyes as she ate the nuts and sipped her soda.

  When she opened her eyes she discovered there was a young man sitting right next to her, and she recognized him as a worker at a thrift store she frequented. He was slightly mentally challenged, and had bright blue eyes. He had recently shaved his head. “Hi,” he said when she looked at him.

  Martine nodded and sat up straighter.

  He held up a white paper bag, obviously full of free prescription drugs, and rattled it slightly. “Got my bag of goodies,” he said, his eyes animated.

  Martine’s first thought was whether it would be morally defensible to offer to trade him her bag of peanuts for whatever drugs he had and quickly concluded that it would not be.

  “Awesome,” she said, giving him a thumbs up gesture.

  The boy stood up. “I gotta go,” he said, giving her a slight wave before heading off across the parking lot.

  Martine knew better than to ask Jarrett how it had gone when he returned. She chose to stay with the safe topic of how he planned to deal with his car.

  “Well, if you wouldn’t mind too much taking me by the tire store up there next to Safeway, I can get a second battery. And if I could plug my battery charger in at your place and charge it up good, I can hook it up to my other battery and it should have enough juice to get me home.”

  “Not a problem,” said Martine, backing out of her parking space.

  As she waited in the parking lot of the tire store, Martine checked for new text messages. Her peripatetic boyfriend, a studio and touring musician named Francis, had sent her a few messages from the road. “I’m sending some few pictures of this huge-ass cornfield we just drove through,” read one message. “Are you having a good week?” asked another.

  Martine had an old phone that could not take, display, send, or receive pictures, but she hadn’t let Francis in on this fact. He was always “sending” her pictures, and she would always thank him and say something polite, but vague about them rather than admit she had a crappy old piece of technology that she had neither the funds nor the desire to replace.

  For Francis’ part, it added to the mystery that surrounded Martine. He knew about her bookmaking business, knew that she dated other men, and knew that she was very hard to get to know. On an earlier tour, he had sent her a photograph of his erect penis, referring to it in the text that preceded it as “a picture of some of the local scenery.”

  Francis was a bit confused when Martine replied, saying, “That’s quite a view you have there. I used to take tons of similar pictures with my wide angle lens!” He wondered briefly if it was a joke, and if so, if it was at his expense, but he was afraid to ask.

  Martine, totally innocent of the photo’s contents, had simply known at the time that he was traveling through the foothills of Virginia, and based her reply on general tips she had picked up from years of amateur photography when she was younger.

  As she waited for Jarrett to return with his new battery, she replied to Francis’ latest missive: “I’m at the tire store waiting for Jarrett to get a battery. My friend Bob found out the lesbian chick he was flirting with online (while pretending to be a lesbian chick himself) is actually a straight, middle-aged man. He’s also a politician, and I’m trying to get Bob to out him, but no go. Oh well.”

  Before she could hit “Send,” Martine got a call from her best friend Paula, who wanted to go out for a beer later.

  “I went to the eye doctor today and they gave me a trial pair of colored contact lenses. I have blue eyes now!”

  Martine tried to imagine what Paula, an olive-skinned brunette, looked like with blue eyes. “OK. Can you pick me up? I’m sick of driving.”

  “I’ll get you around 6:30,” she replied.