Bad Move

11

“WHAT’S WRONG, ZACK?” SARAH ASKED. “You don’t look so good.”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You sure? You seem a bit off.”

I wasn’t sure at all. In fact, I thought there was an excellent chance that I would be sick all over the dashboard at any moment. “No, I’m just fine.”

“I don’t know where they get off, charging that much for romaine. Do they think that people don’t shop around, that we don’t know that if we go down the street a ways we can get it for less? Maybe it’s a convenience thing. They figure people don’t mind paying more for something if it means they don’t have to bother to go someplace else. But if you’re getting several things, and you can save money on all of them, it just makes sense to go someplace else. Anyway, General has a pretty good butcher’s counter, so we can get steaks there every bit as good as Mindy’s.” There was a long pause. “Are you not talking to me, or what?”

“Yeah, I’m talking to you.”

“Tell me again what you got done on your book today.”

“Oh, some last-minute editing stuff. Finishing the last chapter. I’ll probably send it to Tom by the end of next week.”

“Are you happy with it?” Sarah asked.

“Yeah, sure, I guess. I don’t know. Probably not.” I glanced over at Sarah in time to see her shake her head and smile.

“You’re always like this when you finish a book,” she said. “You read through it and think it’s the worst thing anybody’s ever written.”

“Even I didn’t think it was that bad.”

“You know what I mean. You’re your own worst critic. Is that what’s got you? Letdown?”

“I never said I was down.”

“You just seem a bit off, that’s all I’m saying.”

I didn’t say anything. I had a lot on my mind. Jail, for example. As we drove to General Mart, I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror more than I usually do. I figured someone would be after me. Someone should be after me.

I had, after all, stolen something. But I was not, I told myself, a purse snatcher. Not technically. A purse snatcher was someone who ripped handbags from the clutches of their owners, usually little old ladies who didn’t have the strength to hang on to them and who got knocked down in the process, suffering a broken hip. I had broken no little old hips.

I drove for a while without saying anything, then: “You’re sure you didn’t bring your purse?”

“Huh?”

“Your purse. You’re sure you didn’t bring it along, out of habit, even though you’re wearing that thing on your waist?”

“A fanny pack.”

“Pardon?”

“It’s called a fanny pack.”

I glanced down at her lap. “That doesn’t make any sense at all. It doesn’t hang over your fanny. It hangs over your, well, it hangs over your front. Maybe they thought ‘crotch pack’ didn’t have as nice a ring to it.”

“They also call them waist bags, but that sounds like something somebody with a colostomy wears,” Sarah said. “Do you not like my fanny pack?”

“It’s fine. I like it. I just don’t understand why you decided to stop carrying a purse. You have a lot of stuff. You can’t get everything you need into a little bag like that. You need a purse.” I seemed to be running out of breath. “You should really be carrying a purse.”

“Let me ask you a serious question,” Sarah said.

“Yeah?”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“No, all I’m saying is, this is a bit of a shock. You live with someone for almost twenty years, you see her carrying a purse every day, which is, like, a hundred thousand days or something, and then, one day, without warning, she decides to go around with a fanny pack. I just, I don’t know, I would have liked a little warning is all.”

Sarah looked at me and said nothing. There was a long pause, and then she said, “You know you just drove past General Mart.”

I glanced around, saw the market over my shoulder, and said, “Shit.” There was one of those concrete medians down the center of the street, which meant I had to go up a full block and make a left before I could turn around.

“I still say there’s something wrong with you,” Sarah said. And then, like a bulb going off: “That reminds me. All this talk about purses.”

“What.”

“In the store, after you left, there was this woman, she started going absolutely nuts.”

“What woman?” But I had a feeling I already knew. A blonde lady, looking at garbage bags, who liked low-fat cookies.

“She was just up the aisle from me.”

“What did she look like?”

If Sarah thought this question was unusual, she didn’t let on. “I don’t know, mid-twenties, thin, blonde hair. Wearing a white suit. She looked kind of familiar to me, actually.”

“You know her?” This was hopeful. With a name, I could get this purse returned right away.

“No, I just felt I’d seen her someplace before. So she goes, ‘Where’s my purse?’ You know, screaming that her purse is missing, and she looks totally frantic, which I guess I would be too if someone grabbed my purse.”

“What do you mean, grabbed it? Did she see someone take her purse?”

“I don’t know. You just assume, I guess. She called down to me, standing by her cart, asks if I’ve seen her purse, like I’m keeping track of her stuff, and I guess I shrugged no, and then she ran to the front of the store, and that was the last I saw of her.” Sarah took a breath, made a funny expression with her mouth, like she wanted to say something but didn’t know how.

“So it’s like I said,” she said.

I was making a left at the light and heading back toward General. “Whaddya mean?”

“Well, you’re the one who’s always telling me not to leave my purse in the cart, and that’s probably what that woman had done, and someone happened along and just took it. You only have to be looking away for a second and it’s gone. And the hassle! You have to cancel all your credit cards, get a new driver’s license and God knows what all. And then there’s your keys. You figure, a guy takes your purse, he looks at your license and knows where you live, and he’s got your keys. I mean, most guys probably take the cash and ditch the purse, but there’s always that chance, right?”

“I suppose,” I said, pulling into a parking spot.

“So what I’m saying is, you were right. I guess it was just lucky that today I happened to be wearing this fanny pack, or it might have been my purse that got swiped instead of that lady’s.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Lucky.”

“Are you coming in or waiting out here?” Sarah asked, her hand on the door handle.

Come in or stay out? Come in or stay out? I had this small matter of a strange woman’s purse in the trunk of the car. If I went in with Sarah, there’d be no opportunity for me to get rid of the purse before we came back out to the car, popped the trunk, and Sarah asked, “Whose is that?”

“Let me tell you about my new hobby, honey,” I could say. “I collect handbags now. From strangers. Sometimes they contain valuable prizes.”

But if I stayed with the car, what exactly was I going to do with the purse? I could hide it under the trunk floor, jam it in next to the spare tire. Or maybe I-

“I have an idea,” I said. “How long do you think you’re going to be?”

Sarah shrugged. “I don’t know. Fifteen, twenty minutes maybe.”

“Maybe I’ll whip over to Kenny’s. You know I ordered that model of the dropship from Aliens? The one the Marines ride to get to the planet’s surface?”

Sarah shrugged again. The mere mention of SF trivia was enough to shut down any further questions. She said, “Sure. Just pick me up at the door here.”

And she was gone. I backed the car out of the spot and pointed it back in the direction of Mindy’s. While I was not yet prepared to come clean with Sarah, I figured if I could find the woman in the white suit, an honest approach was the best one. If she was still at Mindy’s, I’d tell her my wife had asked me to take her purse to the car, and that I’d gone to the wrong cart and grabbed the wrong one. Not the truth, exactly, except for the part about making a mistake.

And it was an honest mistake. There had been no intent to steal anything. When you grab your own wife’s purse, even if, technically speaking, she is not aware of it, surely that’s not stealing. This was like, I told myself, going out to the parking lot, seeing a car that was the same make and model and year of your own. Suppose, just suppose, your key happened to work in this other car, and you got in, and started it up, and drove away, well, that wouldn’t be stealing, would it? Anyone with an ounce of common sense could understand that. And this thing with the purse wasn’t any different, so long as no one noticed that when I left the store I hid the purse under my jacket, and that I had looked about me suspiciously as I dumped it into my trunk, like I was dropping a dead baby in there.

I parked and hit the lock button on the remote key. I didn’t want anyone else making off with my stolen purse. I passed by a kid who was rounding up shopping carts and went into the store, hoping that the woman might still be there. Talking to the manager, perhaps. What I dreaded was that she might have already called the police, but I saw no patrol cars in the lot, and a quick scan of the line of checkouts showed no officers. I did the same routine as when I was looking for Sarah, walking past the end of each aisle, looking from the front of the store to the back. I slowed as I went past the aisle where Sarah had been looking at pasta sauces and the woman with the blonde hair had been checking out garbage bags. There, still halfway down the aisle, was the shopping cart with nothing but a box of cookies in it.

For a moment I thought, Just put the purse back. Drop it back in the cart, let someone else find it. Maybe the woman would come back later, check with store management, and they’d tell her, “Lady, it was right there where you’d left it. If it had been a dog it woulda bit ya.”

All I had to do was nip back to the car, smuggle the purse back in, place it in the cart and-

And then the kid I’d seen rounding up shopping carts out in the parking lot appeared at the end of the aisle, reached for the box of cookies to put it back on the shelf, and hauled the cart back to the front of the store.

Out of desperation, I made one more round of Mindy’s, but the woman was clearly gone. Although I’d hoped to resolve this situation by talking to no one other than the woman herself, which would have been awkward enough, I could see now I was going to have to make some inquiries.

I approached the woman at the express checkout. “Excuse me,” I said, “but is the manager around?”

She pointed. “Checkout 10. Wendy.”

There, I found a heavyset woman in a “Shop at Mindy’s!” apron ringing through an elderly couple’s groceries. Her name tag read “Wendy.”

“Pardon me,” I said, coming around from the bagging side. Wendy grabbed one item after another, passing them over the scanner. The couple both looked at me, wondering who the hell I thought I was, interrupting their business this way.

“Hmm?” said Wendy.

“Was there a woman here, about ten minutes ago, who’d lost her purse?”

“At this checkout?”

“No no. Not right here. But in the store. I understand there was a woman all upset about losing her purse.”

Wendy kept advancing the conveyor belt, scanning items, not looking at me. “I heard something, but she didn’t ask me about it.”

“Maybe she talked to someone else? Or called the police?”

“If she talked to anyone else, they would have let me know about it, and if anyone called the police, you can be damn sure I’d hear about it.”

“You’re sure?”

Wendy took her eyes off what she was doing long enough to give me a look that seemed to suggest that this was the sort of thing a person might remember, especially if it happened in the last five minutes. “Okay,” I said. “Thanks.” And I turned in a hurry, thinking that I better get back to the other grocery store, where Sarah might already be waiting out front for me. I got back in the car and started the engine, but before putting it in drive took a moment to assess the situation.

Why hadn’t the woman gone to the store management to report her purse missing? She’d had a fit in the aisle. Sarah had seen that much. But what had she done after that? Maybe she’d gone out to her car, thinking she’d left the purse there. But she wouldn’t have been able to get into her car, of course, because the keys were most likely in the purse. Unless she didn’t have a car, and walked to do her grocery shopping. There were hundreds of houses within walking distance of Mindy’s. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from our neighborhood. So maybe she walked back home, thinking that her purse hadn’t been swiped, but that she’d forgotten it. But if she got home and found her door locked, she’d know she had her keys with her when she left, which would mean that she’d left home with her purse. And if she’d had her purse when she left, and didn’t have it now, that meant that yes, someone had swiped it.

And furthermore: Who’s on first?

Was there a point to this line of thinking?

There was an easy way to solve this, I told myself. Get the purse out of the trunk, check the wallet for a name and an address, go to her house, return the purse, offer a million apologies, hope to Christ she had a sense of humor.

An excellent plan. But first, I had to pick up Sarah. She had said she’d be fifteen or twenty minutes, and I was pushing half an hour now. As I feared, Sarah was already standing out front, weighed down with four white plastic shopping bags.

“Pop the trunk,” she mouthed from the other side of the passenger-door window.

Shit shit shit shit shit. Wasn’t this what went through my mind only half an hour earlier? That Sarah would come out and want to put the groceries in the trunk? Of course, my plan back then (it seemed like hours ago) was that by now the purse would be back with its rightful owner.

I shouted, “Just throw them in the back!”

“What?”

I fumbled with the power window switches on the armrest under my left hand. First I put down the left rear window, then the right rear, then the window where Sarah was standing. She had that tired, why-did-I-marry-him look on her face. “You figured it out, huh?”

“Just throw the stuff in the back seat,” I said. She sighed, opened the rear door, and set the bags on the floor. She slammed it shut and got in the front.

“Sorry I’m late,” I said.

Sarah nodded. “Did you get anything?”

“Hmm?”

“At Kenny’s. Did you get anything? Did the drop-thingy come in?”

“No,” I said. “It hadn’t come in. But it’s hard to get, they stopped making it years ago, and Kenny doesn’t even know for sure whether he can get one. I’ll just have to keep looking around, you know? Like, maybe next time we go to New York, I can check that shop down in Greenwich Village, the comic store that had all the really obscure model kits?”

“Whatever,” Sarah said. “I got the steaks, and some romaine, which was, if you can believe this, the same price as it was at Mindy’s, there must be, like, a frost or something in California, I don’t know, and the other stuff I needed, plus I got some more frozen pizzas. I bought five of them on the weekend, and I looked in the fridge last night and there wasn’t a single one left.”

“Don’t look at me.”

“The kids must be making them after we go to bed. I make them dinner, they say they’re not hungry, that they went out for lunch, or had a snack at someone’s house after school, and then at ten o’clock they’re in the kitchen heating up pizzas. It makes me crazy.”

I said nothing the rest of the way home. I knew Sarah was still thinking there was something wrong with me, but she wasn’t going to bring it up again. She grabbed the bags from the back seat while I went to open the front door, but it was already unlocked. There were several pairs of shoes in the front hall, kicked about haphazardly, which meant Paul and Angie had brought some friends home with them. As Sarah went past me into the kitchen, I said, “Hang on, I think I left something in the car. I’ll be back in a second.”

I pressed the trunk button on the remote and watched it swing open. I reached inside and grabbed the purse in my right hand. This was the first time I’d had my hand on it since learning it wasn’t Sarah’s, and it was like touching ice. A chill swept over me.

“Stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid,” I whispered to myself.

Of course, now that I knew it didn’t belong to Sarah, I realized that the purse did not look familiar to me. It was a dark brown leather bag, and Sarah’s tastes ran to black and deep blue. To Sarah, this would be one of the more moronic aspects of this crime. I could almost hear her now: “If you’d been asked to kidnap me, instead of steal a purse, would you have been able to pick me out of a crowd? Or would you have come home with the housecoat lady?”

Again, I tried tucking it under my jacket, which looked almost as ridiculous as if I’d simply carried it out in the open. But I was able to get through the front door and into my study without Sarah seeing me, although she heard me and called out, “You want to start up the barbecue so we can do these steaks and then help me rinse this lettuce?”

“Yeah, in a minute,” I said, slipping the purse out from under my jacket.

About then, Paul and three of his friends-Andy, Hakim, and Darryl-came bounding down the stairs from his bedroom, rounding the corner and heading for the door to the basement. Darryl had several video-game cartridge boxes in his hand, indicating to me that they were planning to park themselves in front of the downstairs television for the next several hours. Andy caught a glimpse of me as he passed the study door and shouted, “Hey, Mr. Walker!”

“Hi, guys,” I said.

“Nice purse, Mr. Walker,” Andy said. “Suits you.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Thanks,” I said, closing the door. I flicked on the desk lamp next to the keyboard, sat down in my writing chair, and set the purse on the table.

Sitting there, in the quiet of my study, the video game noises in the basement and the soft sounds of water running in the kitchen both muted by the closed door, with the handbag of a woman I did not know on the desk in front of me, I began to sweat. I took a couple of deep breaths, letting them both out slowly, in a bid to get my heart rate down a bit.

“Relax,” I said. Okay, I had done a stupid thing, a really stupid thing. But this was a problem that could be solved. In short order. Before Sarah got wind of it and had something she could lord over me the rest of our marriage.

I unzipped the top of the purse and peered inside. I didn’t want to look very closely. I had a sense of the invasion I was perpetrating. All I wanted was a wallet. For a name and an address. The purse had some heft to it, there was a lot of stuff in there, but my interests were very specific. I just wanted to track down the owner.

There were some tissues, a couple of white tubes down in the bottom I realized were tampons (oh man), a film canister, a couple of letter-size white envelopes stuffed with papers, a small makeup bag, a set of car keys with a “VW” emblem on the side, and a red leather wallet. Gingerly, I reached into the bag and took it out.

I unsnapped and opened it. There was the usual assortment of credit cards. I took one out, a Visa, and read the name: Stefanie Knight. Okay, Stefanie, now we just have to find out where you live. I rooted around in the wallet. There was a twenty and a five, a mini-pocket for coins that was heavy with pennies, and there, tucked in with the cash, was a hard plastic card that looked like a driver’s license.

I took it between my thumb and forefinger and held it under the lamp. Her photo wasn’t terribly flattering; driver’s license pictures never are. Her hair wasn’t quite as blonde when it was taken, and there were dark lines under her eyes, like the picture was taken during a police lineup rather than at the DMV. But there was a passing resemblance to the woman in the off-white suit that I’d walked past in the grocery store.

And I had the same feeling, looking at the photo, that Sarah said she’d had upon seeing the woman, that she knew her from someplace. I studied the photo for several seconds, tried to place her. I felt as though I’d seen her someplace recently, but exactly when and where wouldn’t come to me. It’s like when you see your mailman at the mall; you know you know him, but seeing him out of context throws you, hinders recognition.

Next to the photo was her actual license number, a long jumble of numbers and letters, and below that, her name-KNIGHT, STEFANIE J.-and an Oakwood address on a street I didn’t know: 2223 Deer Prance Drive. If not our own neighborhood, it sounded like a street in a new development someplace.

So, I had a name and an address. All that was left was for me to do my civic duty and return the purse to her. In an hour, this would all be over, and there’d be nothing else to do but laugh about it.