Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

She sits on the steps, picks up the paper, which they won’t stop delivering no matter how often she cancels it. She gets all the news she wants from television, and the last thing she needs is something that comes in the house only to pile up and have to be discarded. Her grandchildren lecture her on recycling. On recycling and smoking and voting. When did children get so moral ? Weren’t the parents and grandparents supposed to be instructing them? She has asked them as much, and they say: “But, Grandma, it’s going to be our world.”

She doesn’t have the heart to tell them that you get the world on loan, on terms you don’t dictate and can’t control. It’s about as good a deal as those furniture leases with all the hidden interest rates. Rita figures she had the world for about twenty years, from age twenty to forty. Then it was Joey’s turn to step up, take his bite out of it. Being Joey, he took a small, polite bite, sort of like: Oh, thank you for my job as a probation officer and my nice wife and my three children, but really, I couldn’t eat another bite. He was born good, that’s all there is to it, and Mickey was born-not bad, but angry and fretful, always discontent, so concerned with the fairness of things that she ended up with nothing. Best Rita can tell, Mickey’s never had a happy day in her life, and it breaks her heart, truly. Because for all she has to mourn-the breakdown of her body, being alone, all the daily demon worries about money and bills-she had a lot of fun, when there was fun to be had. A lot. She scratches her ankles, one part of her body that hasn’t succumbed to the pain or the steroids, smiling at her memories.

A patrol car idles by and she flags it down, thinking the cops can help her break into her own house. She’s pretty sure the bathroom window is unlocked and someone could wiggle through it. Someone whose body is reliable, that is. The officers are Latino, very handsome, but Rita’s not deluded enough to flirt with them, although she’s happy when one sees a photograph of her in the front hall and asks: “Is that you?” She nods and he says, respectfullike: “You must have had to beat them off with a stick.” He adds quickly: “I bet you still do.”

“No,” Rita says. “Now I have to beat them with a stick and drag them in here.” She brandishes her grabber at them, and they laugh. Rita doesn’t need the pretense that she hasn’t aged. The idea of aging bothers her less than it might have, perhaps because she has a specific reason to look as she does. She can tell herself she’d look good if it weren’t for the steroids. “I got a daughter, though, who looks exactly like that now. Better, if you want to know the truth.”

That’s not exactly true. But she suddenly feels generous toward Mickey, wants to balance the scales of her own mind, where she’s been running her daughter down.

“You’ll have to introduce us when she comes to visit.”

That’ll be the day, Rita thinks, going back to her teakettle, the jar of Folgers, restarting her morning. What did I do, Mickey? I know I wasn’t perfect, not by a mile, but if Joey can forgive me, why can’t you? The difference, she thinks, is that Joey is a parent. He gets it, he knows how high one’s hopes and aspirations are-and how awful it is to confront the gap between the parent you want to be and the parent you are. Maybe she shouldn’t have had kids, but where would Mickey be then? Would she rather not exist at all? Rita, for all her aches and pains, for all her mistakes, thinks life is a hoot. She’d do it all over again, and the exact same way, knowing full well where she’s headed.

Coffee in one cramped, crabbed hand, she shuffles to the living room to watch the news, smoke another cigarette.

G wen has met many people who hate journalists-they announce it happily, proudly, often at cocktail parties where she has just been introduced-but none quite as vociferously as the private detective who tried to contact Go-Go in the weeks before his death. Tess Monaghan has refused to return Gwen’s calls and didn’t even acknowledge e-mails sent to the bare-bones Web site she maintains. After several days, she finally sent back a terse note:

I don’t talk to reporters.

Gwen wrote back, under her personal e-mail :

I’m not approaching you as a journalist, but as a friend of Gordon Halloran, who died in what may well be a suicide committed after you tried to contact him, wreaking not a little havoc in his life.

Another day went by before she received this e-mail:

My office, 2 p.m.

The office is in Butchers Hill, less than a mile from the magazine’s headquarters, yet worlds away in a sense. While Butchers Hill caught a whiff of the go-go real estate boom of the century’s first decade, it is nothing like the glass canyon where Gwen’s office is located. It has retained its human scale, tucking new restaurants and shops into old rowhouses. Tess Monaghan’s office, which was virtually unmarked, sits two blocks from Patterson Park.

“It’s open,” a woman’s voice calls out. Working behind an unlocked door seems a little casual for this neighborhood, even during the daytime. But as Gwen enters, she is immediately inspected by two large dogs, a greyhound and a Doberman, and a jumpier, miniature version of the greyhound. They circle and sniff her, apparently with satisfactory results, as they then return to the sofa, where they arrange themselves in an overlapping lump. Tess Monaghan, sitting behind her desk, doesn’t rise at all, but she has good reason: she is holding a baby, who is spitting up on her shoulder.

“Way to miss the burp cloth, Scout,” she says, clearly unperturbed by the fountain of curdy white liquid that trails down her sleeve.

“He’s adorable,” Gwen says, making conversation. She can’t really see much but the dark hair. She doesn’t have any real experience with infants. Annabelle was eight months when they met her in a Beijing hotel.

“She.”

“I thought you said scout?”

“That’s her name. Her middle name.” Tess Monaghan has a manner of speaking that makes questions seem not only unnecessary but also rude. The things that Gwen might normally ask-from To Kill a Mockingbird ? Why do you use her middle name? How old?-die on her tongue.

“I don’t normally bring her to the office,” Tess says. “We had a child care crisis today and I didn’t want to cancel on you.”

“No one has to explain child care crises to me. Most of my employees are working moms. She’s so tiny, but-” Gwen stops, not wanting to comment on a stranger’s appearance, but this woman looks pretty fit for having had a baby recently.

“She was really early. She’s technically almost five months old, but if she had been on time, she’d be barely three months.” Again, it is somehow clear there are to be no follow-up questions. “So, Gordon Halloran. Just to be sure we are on the same page-I am speaking to you off-the-record and this is not for anything you might write, ever, on any subject.”

“Right.”

“And by off-the-record, we both agree that means nothing I say is to appear in print, attached to my name or to an unnamed source?”

“I’m not here as a journalist.”

“Would you be willing to sign something to that effect?”

“Sure,” Gwen says. “After it was reviewed by my attorney.”

Tess smiles. “Fair enough. I just have to be super careful.”

“Were you burned by a journalist?”

“Worse. I was one. Your magazine did once put me in your hot singles issue, when I was neither single nor really all that hot. Although now when I see photos of myself from back then-only a few years ago-I think I look magnificent.”