Karin Slaughter - Martin Misunderstood

Martin spread a thin layer of cholesterollowering fake butter on to his waffle. It floated on the top of the ridges like lotion on a dead man.

To someone not intimate with Martin's private life (and in all honesty, but for Evie, that meant everyone), the fact that he knew what lotion looked like on a dead man would have seemed an odd detail needing further explanation. But Martin was late for work, and he did not like to think about his father because it only brought out the spinning spool of 'what ifs' that, quite quickly, tied him up in knots.

What if his father had been around during Martin's formative years to take the brunt of Evie's hounding?

What if his father had been there to talk to Martin about puberty, instead of Evie tossing him a bottle of Vaseline Intensive Care and telling him not to get it on the couch?

What if his father's death had been ruled an accident?

Martin considered these things as he retrieved his briefcase and car keys from the hall table. He checked his tie in the mirror, straightening the knot, trying not to notice the way his chin wattled. He gave in, checking over his shoulder to make sure Evie was still in the kitchen before pinching back the skin on either side, pulling it toward his ears to tighten it up against the jawbone. He studied himself, his turkey giblet gone, and wondered if anyone would ever be able to see past his myriad flaws and know the real Martin – the gentle soul, the book lover, the accountant with stunning accuracy who possessed an unnatural talent for explicating actuarial data.

'Are you still here?' his mother bellowed.

Are you still breathing?

'I'm leaving now,' Martin answered, dropping the skin, watching it settle back into a pouch reminiscent of a seagull's. He rummaged in the closet for a jacket, trying to find one that did not smell of his mother – an olfaction of cigarettes and White Diamonds perfume with a yeasty undertone of string cheese. He held each to his nose and picked the less offensive pea coat. As he buttoned himself up, Martin glanced back at the mirror, catching his profile.

He had not been altogether honest when he'd claimed not to covet all things George Clooney. He could not have the man's grace or charm, but through the magic of plastic surgery, he had managed to swipe his nose. Three years ago, Martin had sprung for a nose job with the plan of addressing his chin in a follow-up operation. The rhinoplasty had proved successful; however, the reaction he had gotten at work was disastrous. His old schoolmates had grown up with Martin and his nose. He had not been called 'Beak' his entire life for nothing. The fact that the beak in question was no longer there seemed to make the nickname even more appropriate. The taunting had gotten worse after the bandages came off, and though he had insisted the operation was to correct a deviated septum, no one had believed him. Chin surgery seemed an invitation to further ridicule after that.

But Martin would be late for work if he took the time to count the many travesties of his life.

He locked the front door after him and walked down the porch stairs. His Camry was parked by the mailbox, the 'twat' scratched into the passenger's side door glinting with morning dew. The insurance adjuster had said the paperwork for repairing the paint would take time to process. Ben Sabatini, the adjuster, had been one of Martin's chief tormentors in high school. Martin was under the impression that the man was deliberately taking his time.

The vandalism had occurred last week. Martin had left the house, much as he was doing this morning, only to find his car had been defiled. Evie's laughter still gurgled in his ear as he thought about the incident.

The policeman who took the report had stated, 'Obviously, this was done by someone who knows you.'

Martin switched his briefcase to his other hand as he walked down the driveway. A light rain started to fall, tickling the end of his nose. He looked at the flowers in the yard – strangely, Evie was an excellent gardener. The front lawn was bordered by all kinds of exotic blooms. Before the gardening club had asked her to leave, then kicked her out, Evie had been the top ribbonholder in the state for her colorful peonies.

Martin used his key to unlock the Camry by hand (he had read somewhere that remote-key unlocking caused testicular cancer) and tossed his briefcase into the back seat. He was halfway in the car when he noticed that something was wrong with the front end. Slowly, he walked round and saw that the bumper had practically been ripped off.

'Damn,' he mumbled. He glanced back at the house and saw the curtain twitch in the front room. Unbidden, Evie's laughter filled his ears. 'Of course it was done by someone who knows him,' she had told the cop who had taken the report. 'Have you ever seen a bigger twat in your life?'

He was not up for another humiliating police report and Ben Sabatini had stopped returning his calls on the 'twat'. There was no reason to believe this time would be any different. With both hands, Martin pulled on the plastic bumper, bending the hanging piece back and forth until it snapped in two. He did not notice the blood on his hands until he put the damaged bumper in the trunk. Thin lines, almost like paper cuts, crisscrossed his palms. Martin took his handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his hands. He did not need to look at the house to know that his mother was watching.

Had he not read Tom Clancy shortly after rereading Fatal Vision , the blood on Martin's hands might have triggered the memory that Jeffrey MacDonald, the subject of that true-crime classic, had been convicted of massacring his entire family based on the blood evidence found at the scene of the crime. Instead, his mind was filled with visions of Clancy hero Jack Ryan assassinating the more than likely drunken hood who had slammed into the front bumper of Martin's Camry.

Glancing over his shoulder for snipers, Martin opened the door and got into the car.

Southern Toilet Supply had started as a family business almost sixty years ago. Over the years, the Southern compound had spread from a single metal building to a large, modern factory. In the late nineties, a German company had bought the plant. Spreckels Reinigungsmittel und Papier was also a family-owned company, though they treated their new families about as well as Evie treated Martin, which was to say they fired half the staff the day after the papers were signed. The Germans seldom showed up in person, but they sent daily missives to Norton Shaw, demanding higher results in broken English.

'Why is it so that the 2300 cannot reach with the higher levels of salesmanship?'

It had to be said that industrial-sized toilet paper rolls were not a hard sell, but the standards of the Southern Superroll 2300 were not the same as a Scott 500 or, the gold standard in public toilet supply, the Georgia Pacific 2-92. Users of the 2300 often reported early breakage in the first wipe, followed by catastrophic breakdowns in subsequent wiping. Test groups had quit in the middle, forgoing their fifty dollars for want of better hygiene. This hadn't been an issue during the early days of toilet supply. No one had yet done the math to realize that the thinner the paper, the more squares you had to use. While this had proved to be a winning scenario for Southern for many years, lately the customer had started catching on. Why spend eight dollars on a cheap roll of paper that lasts one day when you can spend ten on one that lasts for two?

Even the bathrooms at Southern Toilet Supply did not use their own product, a fact which Martin knew because his desk was conveniently located by the women's bathroom and he saw them taking their own rolls in and out, right under management's eye. Martin had never been a tattler, so he kept his mouth shut. As a matter of fact, he kept his mouth shut about a lot of things he saw happening in the office, most of which would have gotten any number of his tormentors fired. Such was his lot in life: he was too noble for his own good.