John Lutz - The Ex

Chumley made no move to zip his fly.

“God!” he said softly, “you didn’t have to stop!”

“I’m sorry,” she told him. “I…well, I’ve got a lot of worries lately.”

“Such as?”

She hesitated, as if she really didn’t want to burden him with her problems. Then: “There’s this apartment I found. It’s perfect! All I have to do is get the money for a security deposit and I can have it.”

“So?”

“I’m afraid somebody else is going to want it and snatch it away from me.”

Chumley tucked in his chin and gazed down at her in surprise. “For God’s sake, Deirdre, why didn’t you say so earlier? I can give you an advance on your salary.”

“That’s a wonderful idea!” Then she backed away and looked at him, suddenly concerned. “But are you sure you can afford it?”

He smiled. “Of course! The company’s healthy enough for that. We’ve had a good quarter.” He pulled her back to him so her head was against his shoulder again, then tenderly brushed a strand of hair up off her forehead. “Besides, I trust you, Deirdre.”

She resisted his efforts to hold her and sat forward again so she could twist her body and look into his eyes. As the cab struck a pothole, the suspension bottomed out, and she almost slipped from the seat. “That’s wonderful of you,” she said. “I won’t forget this. I really won’t.”

The cab rocked as it rounded a corner, and this time she let the momentum take her and collapsed far back in the seat in great relief, beaming.

The cabby glanced again in the mirror. “Back to the office?”

Chumley pretended not to have noticed the hint of sarcasm in his voice. “No, just drive around the park some more for a while.”

Deirdre wrapped her arms around Chumley’s neck and kissed his cheek. Her eyes met the driver’s again in the rearview mirror. She winked.

Then she grinned at Chumley and slid down again to sit on the cab floor.

Molly was seated cross-legged on the living room floor that evening, playing with Michael, when David came home from work. They both waved to him then went back to using Michael’s See ’n Say, a toy that made appropriate animals sounds when a cord was pulled. “This is a sheep,” said the See ’n Say as David tossed his attache case in the chair then hung his coat in the closet just inside the door.

“Not me, I hope,” he said, over the Baaaaaa of the See ’n Say.

“You’re early,” Molly said.

“One of our fee clients is driving me nuts, claiming we won’t try to market his manuscript because it’s political dynamite. He’s convinced Charles Manson engineered both Kennedy assassinations.”

“What do you think?” Molly asked, smiling.

David crossed the room and picked up Michael, then kissed him and playfully jostled him.

Molly stood up and looked at both of them with pride and a possessiveness edged with worry.

“Why don’t we see if Bernice can watch Michael, then let’s go to Rico’s for dinner?” David said. “This time just the two of us.”

Pleased, Molly thought the offer over. “Better yet, why don’t the three of us go?”

She wasn’t sure he was going to agree, but he grinned and handed Michael to her. “Okay. Just give me a minute, then we’ll leave.”

She watched him walk toward the back of the apartment, then go into the bathroom. A minute later she heard water running.

In the bathroom, David was standing shirtless before the mirror, twisting his torso this way and that to examine the scratches on his back.

He stared at them for a long time before deciding they looked better. They were scabbed over evenly and there was no swelling. He wouldn’t have to worry about infection.

The hunger Deirdre obviously felt for him was something he couldn’t quite fathom, but he had to admit to feeling flattered somewhere within his agony of hating the circumstances that had entrapped him in the Fifty-fourth Street apartment with the wide bedroom window.

Of course, Deirdre considered it destiny and wanted him to think of it the same way. But wasn’t that how all adulterers thought?

A loud knock on the door made him jump.

“Hey,” Molly called through the door, “you okay in there?”

He hurriedly struggled back into his shirt. “Sure. Be right with you!”

When he emerged from the bathroom, they were standing by the door to the hall.

“Better not keep us waiting any longer,” Molly said jokingly. “We’re starving, and it’s alarming what hunger can do to the disposition.”

Molly stopped the stroller by her mailbox in the lobby the next morning and glanced out through the rectangle of glass in the street door. Early as it was, the sun was glaring on West Eighty-fifth Street.

“Go!” Michael exhorted from his seat in the stroller. “Let’s go!”

“Ease up,” Molly told him with a smile.

“Wanna walk,” he said.

She didn’t pay much attention to him; he hadn’t used his no-compromise voice that might lead to a show of temper.

Michael was getting too big for the stroller, and she dreaded when she’d have to walk with him to Small Business. He was still young enough to be subject to sudden impulses and outbursts of speed, taking adults unaware, and there was so much danger to run toward in Manhattan.

“Walk next year, maybe,” she told him, and unlocked and opened the brass door of the mailbox.

She leafed through the mail. Nothing but junk and a postcard from a friend who was traveling in South Dakota. The card featured a color photograph of Mount Rushmore. Molly couldn’t look at Mount Rushmore without thinking of the Hitchcock movie North by Northwest. Average people suddenly pulled into dangerous situations through no fault of their own was a recurring theme in Hitchcock movies. Molly was glad it didn’t happen that often in real life.

She closed and locked the mailbox door and turned around.

Gasped and dropped the mail.

Deirdre was standing in the lobby, smiling at her.

She was wearing jeans and a faded red T-shirt and had on brown cotton gloves, the kind sold in hardware stores for working in gardens.

“This must be Michael!” she said, and bent down and touched his cheek with a brown cloth glove finger. “He really does look like David!”

“What are you doing here?” Molly asked.

Deirdre picked up the mail while she was bent over to be on Michael’s level, then straightened up and handed it to Molly.

“Sorry,” she said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

Molly stood holding the mail, staring at her, puzzled and not at all liking her presence so close to home. “If you’ve come to see David…”

“Oh, no, that’s not it,” Deirdre said. “The fact is, the darnedest thing has happened.”

“Darnedest thing?”

“Yes. David might have told you, I’ve been having some trouble finding a decent apartment. Well, a real estate agency recommended an apartment in this building, on the fourth floor. I looked at it and loved it. It was perfect! It wasn’t until I’d signed the lease this morning and started moving in what little stuff I have that I noticed the name ‘Jones’ on one of the mailboxes, just saw it out of the edge of my vision. Such a common name, though, I figured it couldn’t be my Joneses. But one of the neighbors said yes, David and Molly Jones! It’s a tiny world, isn’t it?”

Molly was thunderstruck. Her mind couldn’t grab on to what she’d heard. “You mean you’re moving into this building? Here?”

“Sure am. Right this very moment. Craig’s helping me.”

The street door opened, letting in a wave of warm air and Craig Chumley. He was wearing a blue workshirt and paint-spattered jeans, clumsily backing into the lobby carrying a large cardboard box that had once held cartons of Cheerios.