Laura Lippman - The Most Dangerous Thing

“This is why MTA buses have cameras,” she tells a mystified Gwen. “Whenever there’s an accident, people try to say they were on the bus in order to file a claim. And it’s why,” she says over her shoulder, retreating back into the tiled vestibule, “that I have a thriving business. People are always looking for an angle, another pocket to pick.”

Walking to her car, Gwen is briefly entranced by the insight that Tess has just handed her, wonders if there’s a feature in it for the magazine. But then she thinks about the larger meaning of Tess’s words. Another pocket to pick . If Chicken George’s relatives wanted to file a wrongful death suit against someone, then Gwen’s pockets-actually Karl’s-would be the deepest. Can she be sued under such circumstances? Could any of them? What if she goes ahead and divorces Karl? Does that make her more vulnerable or less?

Yet it would be a relief if money is all that someone wants from them. Money always can be found, some way, somehow. If someone bears a grudge toward them, if someone knows that they left a man to die-money will be the least of their problems.

I t was never McKey’s intention to continue attending the AA meetings at the old St. Lawrence, and no one was too alarmed when she skipped the first few sessions after Go-Go’s death. She uses the cover of her work schedule, tells her sponsor that she’s attending meetings in Minneapolis, where she has frequent layovers. Luckily, the sponsor knows nothing about a flight attendant’s life and has no idea how little time she has on such trips, the airlines turning them around as fast as the regulations allow. At the same time, the sponsor is worried about her. A death in the group is a dangerous thing, especially when it involves someone falling off the wagon. He keeps checking in, and McKey decides it would be easier to show up than to endure Dan’s achingly sincere phone calls. Guy wants to bang her so bad, it’s pathetic.

She doesn’t share at the meetings. Go-Go didn’t either, at least not after she started showing up. But McKey’s work has made her good at appearing to be an empathetic, interested listener, and those who do speak seek out her gaze, especially the men. She is the best-looking woman here, there’s no use being modest about it. And the ban on relationships gives male-female interactions a kind of buzz that McKey hasn’t experienced since grade school, if even then. Men want her, or think they do because she meets their eyes and nods, encouraging them.

“We were worried about you,” Dan says when the others step outside to smoke, one vice McKey has never known.

“Because I wasn’t here?”

“And because of Gordon.”

She measures her words. “That was shocking.”

“You knew him, right? Outside of AA.”

Never lie until cornered. Counter first. “What makes you think that?”

“You two talked about how this place used to be a Catholic parish, back in the day.”

She remembers now, how Go-Go reacted the first time she came here, his inability to disguise his feelings at seeing her. She let him-them-off the hook with some inane chatter about St. Lawrence, showed him how to play it off. Just like when they were kids.

“My little brother went here, but he was much younger than Go-Go.”

“Go-Go?”

Shit. “What?”

“I thought you said-”

“One of those things. Gordon. I meant to say Gordon. I barely know my own name, after working eighteen hours yesterday. Mouth not connected to brain.” She smiles, lets him contemplate the mouth in question, full and wide under a fresh coat of lipstick. “Gordon. Duh.”

Joey had gone to St. Lawrence, at Rick’s insistence. Rita hadn’t even known that he was Catholic when they were together, but when he realized how close Rita’s apartment was to the school, he insisted that Rita enroll Joey there and he paid the tuition. McKey went to public school, not that she cared. She didn’t want to wear a uniform every day. Now that she wears one for work, she finds she enjoys it. One less decision to make. Joey went to St. Lawrence through third grade, the year that McKey graduated from high school. Her mother, by then on the outs with Larry-big surprise, that not working out-decided she wanted to move back to Florida, make a new start. Rick objected, and that’s when she dropped the bomb: Joey’s not your kid. Nowadays, there are talk shows essentially dedicated to paternity testing and baby-daddy-dom, but twenty-plus years ago, this was considerably more novel, the kind of judicial issue that all but required a Solomon. Rick was lucky enough to land a progressive judge, someone who said it was basically his choice: He could continue to pay child support and inhabit the role of Joey’s father, although he still couldn’t stop Rita from taking him to Florida. Or he could suspend ties altogether.

McKey thought it should be a no-brainer: if he couldn’t prevent Rita from moving away with the kid, he should definitely end support. But Rick didn’t see it that way. After the breakup with Rita, he became almost insufferably proper. Rita cheated on him, played him for a fool, but Rick acted as if he were the one who had to make amends. He started going to church, enrolled Joey in the parish school, married a young goody-goody, ended up adopting two kids when it turned out she couldn’t have any of her own. He stayed in touch with McKey through college. “I’m here for you,” he would say, and she always wanted to say back: No, you’re not. Because Rick, for all his goodness and niceness, could never quite treat her like a daughter. She was his girlfriend’s daughter, his son’s sister, but not his daughter. It obviously wasn’t a blood thing because the lack of a blood connection to Joey didn’t keep him from wanting to be Joey’s dad. Eventually she stopped worrying about it.

What did she know from fathers and daughters, anyway? The only example she had close to hand was Gwen and her dad, and that wasn’t anything to emulate. For one thing, he was old and he looked it, even back in the day. And he was always-what was Tally Robison’s term for it?- holding forth . On the occasions that Mickey ate dinner with the Robisons, the meal was like another class, with quizzes on current events and science and history and vocabulary. She didn’t even try to participate, except when it came to plants and trees. Even as a girl, Mickey knew as much about those subjects as Dr. Robison. She didn’t have all the right words, but she understood the natural world in a way that Gwen didn’t. She was aware of the seasons and the smells. It was Mickey who taught Go-Go how to catch salamanders, Mickey who lured crawfish from the old storm drain at the bend in the creek, Mickey who found the tiny little fossil, which Rita threw away.

“You should study botany,” a bored high school adviser told her. But that wasn’t right for her. No job was. Park ranger, gardening-there was no paying gig that could return her to the way she felt when she roamed the hills of Leakin Park as a child. Maybe there is no job that can make a person feel as she felt at ten, eleven. That do-what-you-love bullshit-it’s another scam, as far as McKey is concerned, another way people set you up for disappointment. She loves having a job she doesn’t love because she’s always clear on why she’s there: to pay the bills.

The AA meeting gets under way and she assumes her attentive posture, listening and nodding, capable of taking in the stories, even while following her own thoughts. There really are only so many variations to addiction stories. Names change, but bottoming out, based on what she hears here, appears to be a largely universal experience. How much longer must she attend? Perhaps she’ll tell Dan she’s moving to Minneapolis. Always tricky to tell such a lie in a small-town city like Baltimore, where people’s paths are forever crossing, but if that day should come, she’ll find a plausible reason to be back here, no? Dan is a pain in the ass and too chummy for her. Maybe all his concern really is part of his role as her sponsor, but she’s dubious.