Laura Lippman - To The Power Of Three

It turned out there was no taxi stand at the end of the line, and it took almost forty-five minutes for Hunt Valley Cab company to dispatch anyone, so it was after eight when Peter pulled up in front of the house. His plan was to come through the front door, super casual, and yell “I’m home!” like he was coming back from lifeguard duty or rehearsal. His mom would practically burst from happiness, he figured, despite seeing him at graduation a month ago. And his dad would be on the verge of tears, too, although he would try to hide it. They were cool, his parents. Well, not exactly cool-his father actually wore a pocket protector to work-but warm and loving in a way that Peter no longer took for granted, not after knowing Simone and some even freakier girls at NYU, girls who had grown up in empty mansions and thought the Gossip Girls books were documentaries.

The front door was locked, which was unusual. Maybe people in Glendale were spooked after the shooting, although it wasn’t as if some maniac was at large. No problem. It would be more in keeping for him to go through the garage and into the kitchen, where his mother was probably still puttering with the dishes and his father was trying to read the Sunday paper and watch television at the same time. Peter punched in the garage-door code, grabbed the key that his mother still hid beneath a Frisbee on the utility shelves, and let himself in.

But while both cars were in the garage, no one was inside the house. And something about the stillness-not to mention the air, which was warm and stuffy, the thermostat set unusually high for a June night-told him no one had been here for at least a day or two. There were no newspapers piled on the kitchen counter, no glasses in the sink. (His dad was a bit of a chauvinist, just put his dishes in the sink and figured Peter’s mom would get them into the dishwasher. She did, muttering to herself but not really minding.)

Peter wandered through the house, looking for clues to his parents’ whereabouts. There was no notation on the calendar, and only a few days’ worth of mail had been dropped through the slot. Mail slots had been a huge controversy in Glendale back when Peter was a kid. All the developments had started out with community mailboxes. But no one really wanted to commune by the mailboxes, it turned out. The Glendale Association had finally surrendered, and door companies had done a thriving business in the older sections.

Glancing through his parents’ bedroom window, Peter saw the neighbor to the north, Mr. Milford, come out into his backyard and start his sprinklers. Peter ran downstairs and into the backyard, calling to him over the fence.

“Why, Peter Lasko!” Mr. Milford said. “I understand you’re a college graduate now. What brings you home?”

“I wanted to surprise my parents. But they seem to have surprised me. Did they run away from home? Join the circus?”

“Your dad won a golf trip to Hilton Head in the United Way raffle down at his work. Isn’t that something? Me, I couldn’t win a goldfish at one of those carnivals where everyone wins the goldfish. Four days and three nights. I think they come back Tuesday. You need anything?”

Money, Peter thought. A good meal . But he still had twenty dollars in his pocket, and there was always plenty of stuff in his mother’s freezer. He’d last until Tuesday.

But the freezer, while packed with leftovers, didn’t intrigue him. It was one thing to have your mom bring all the goodies to the table, hot and ready, another to defrost them in the microwave and eat them alone, in front of the television. And his father’s liquor cabinet wasn’t anywhere near as intriguing as it used to be when Peter was underage. Besides, he wasn’t eager to drink again, not after Friday night’s excesses. Saturday had been a bit of a lost day, and alcohol was hell on the complexion. Peter hated having to think that way, but his appearance was his business, no different than his father having to know the tax codes for inventory, or whatever it was that he did know.

He slipped his mother’s key ring from the pegboard next to the refrigerator and helped himself to her Jetta. Even now he wouldn’t dare touch his dad’s car, although it was nothing special, just a Buick. But dad’s car had always been off-limits. When Peter got rich, he was going to buy his dad a car, something so extreme it would make him laugh that he had ever prized the Buick so much. Peter drove aimlessly, thinking he might get a sub at Dicenzo’s, then remembering they weren’t open on Sundays. He went to the Dairy Queen instead, the one on Old York Road. Now, here was something you couldn’t find in New York. He settled at one of the picnic tables with two chili dogs and a Snickers Blizzard, although he’d pay for it all with double workouts tomorrow. In the meantime…heaven. Thomas Wolfe didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. Everything was just as Peter remembered it.

Except, of course, Kat, who was dead. He hadn’t thought of her consciously for some time, but he realized now he had been looking forward to her hearing about Susquehanna Falls , maybe feeling a little wistful toward him. Suffer, as Conrad Birdie snarled to his adoring, panting fans in Bye Bye Birdie, twitching his hips all over Sweet Apple, Ohio. Peter had played that part, too, back in middle school. His first big role, when he was a total runt, and no one knew that he could sing and dance and act, least of all Peter himself.

Of course he had seen Kat, in passing, over the last three years. She was always polite, always sweet. Given the way they behaved, people who didn’t know the story might have assumed she dumped him, instead of the other way around. That was Kat, the ultimate good sport. Besides, what was the big deal? They had gone together less than two months, just a summer fling. He was going to be a sophomore in college. She was going to be a sophomore in high school. It wasn’t fair to her, he had said more than once, and she had nodded, as if she believed that Peter was the kind of guy who worried about what was fair for others. But that was how summer romances were supposed to go. It was one thing to run around with a fifteen-year-old girl the summer you were nineteen, to regress to dry-humping in the backseats of cars, fighting for every inch of skin. Freshman year at NYU had been one long drought, his classmates going with older boys. But it wouldn’t always be that way, Peter knew. And, sure enough, he had met a girl his first week of sophomore year, a girl who came to his room just to fuck, like it was a study break or something. And then Simone, with her Jules and Jim fantasy. Who needed a fifteen-year-old virgin, no matter how beautiful, no matter how sweet?

The problem was, he had fallen in love with Kat, just a little. And Kat, for her part, seemed to be the first girl, the only girl, who had loved Peter, as opposed to some stage version of him. She didn’t want Tony or Biff or Conrad. She liked Peter, the lifeguard at the Glendale pool. There were moments, wrestling with her in the backseat of his mother’s car or in her family’s empty house, that he had been torn between wanting to force her to do something, anything, that might give him some release and wondering if they should get engaged. Which was crazy but might have at least persuaded her to sleep with him. That’s how insane she had made him.

Instead he broke up with her, and Kat had accepted it with an almost disturbing ease, turning to the stars of the high-school crowd for her dates. Peter couldn’t help wondering, in the end, if she had used him, if she had figured out that getting Peter Lasko on the string for a summer would give her a big social boost at Glendale. Because while Peter in high school had been a kind of B-plus guy-drama guys seldom being the A guys-he was an A-plus once he graduated, while Kat was a wallflower before she took up with him. Kat, who’d never even had a boyfriend before Peter, suddenly started dating athletes and rich boys. It was hard, in retrospect, not to wonder if it was all a plan, if he had been the one in love and she had been the cool, calculating one. Like her old man, although Kat would bristle if anyone suggested that her father was less than perfect.