“Don’t you worry about Wendy,” he said. “I’ll take care of her.”
Not long after that, Jared Reiss’s mother came to the gas station. One of the strangest things about the whole case was that after her son had been convicted of murdering all those women, his mother stayed in the family house. Not only didn’t she move away, she continued with her life in much the same way as she had before, gardening, going to the library, going to church. She lived in a house not far from my own, a maroon split-level with sheared-off hedges. She looked like a teacher, head bent forward to make a point. She may well have been a teacher: I remembered she’d been pursuing some occupation that required her to be out of her house at regular hours, which was why Jared had the house to himself so much. I recognized her immediately.
The candy shop was empty when she came in, which was unusual. So I felt nervous when she walked up to the cash register, though I knew I was being unfair. She hadn’t done anything. She hadn’t murdered those women, and yet I felt angry toward her. Her inattention had brought something evil into my town. Then I thought of my brother befriending Reiss. How he’d spoken to him when nobody else had. That kindness had mattered to Reiss, but to my brother, too. That one kindness was something he came back to over and over again over the years, talking about it more frequently than his business successes, I’d noticed, as though Sunny realized that in that moment of reaching out to Reiss he’d achieved a height he’d never reach again. Could I do less? I wondered, I, who had benefited in so many ways from my brother’s kindnesses. I was still puzzling it all out when I noticed Mrs. Reiss stealing a Snickers bar.
“Hey!” I cried out. I couldn’t believe it. Her son was in prison for murder and she was stealing candy from a gas station. Not to say kids from the high school didn’t try to steal from me, because they did, and usually I let them. Once. It was almost like they had to get it out of their system. But this was a woman in her fifties. She was dressed formally: gray suit, silk blouse with ties at the neck that twisted around into a bow. It was only afterwards that I realized she was dressed to see her son. She must have been to the jail, then walked over to get a snack.
“Can you pay for it?” I asked.
She shook her head. The bell over the door chimed. New customer.
“Pay for it next time,” I said. How poor could she be? I wondered. She still owned her house. Maybe the trial fees?
The next Thursday she came and paid for the new candy bar, but not for the old one. I considered making a point of it, but one of the young mothers was standing by the counter with her baby all dewy and clean. She’d run out of gas, worried her husband would be mad at her. It wasn’t the time.
Mrs. Reiss came every Thursday after that, bought her Snickers bar, and hovered. Never spoke, but seemed to enjoy listening to me chat with the various patrons. Sometimes she leafed through an almanac, sometimes she walked up and down the aisles, looking at snacks. I noticed she never picked up the newspapers. On Christmas, I wished her a happy holiday. On Halloween, I offered her free candy corns from a bowl shaped like a witch’s claw. One time my brother came by and smiled at her, but I’m not sure he knew who she was.
Wendy didn’t come in often to see me. She was busy with her job, and she took no pride in her husband owning a gas station. She didn’t come to our Sunday dinners anymore, so I was surprised to see her one hot August afternoon when she walked through the door. She was pale, her dark hair hung limp. Immediately she sniffed the air. She hated the smell of gasoline. Then she noticed Mrs. Reiss and did an exaggerated double-take.
“Do you know who she is?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“You let her come in here?”
I shrugged. “She didn’t commit a crime.”
Wendy walked right up to Mrs. Reiss, who was, as always, dressed formally, this time in a pants suit and polka dot blouse.
“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”
Mrs. Reiss didn’t argue with Wendy any more than she’d argued with me over the candy bar. She set the almanac back on the stand and looked at me for just a moment. For the one and only time in the several years now that she’d been coming to the station, I met her eyes. Really met them, and for just a moment, the two of us connected. For a second, we were not a middle-aged woman with troubles and the mother of a murderer. For just a moment we were two women united by dislike of my sister-in-law.
“You make me tired,” I said to Wendy when she came back to the counter.
She shrugged.
“I’m planning a party for your brother’s fortieth birthday,” she said. “It’s going to be spectacular. Make sure you keep the day free.”
Sunny’s fortieth birthday. What could I possibly get him for a present? What do you give to a man who’s given you so much? Who’s rescued you from poverty, looked after you for years, played baseball with your boys, and been like a second father to them. Nothing seemed right. Clothes, books, jewelry. I’d have mortgaged my house to buy him something special, but I knew he wouldn’t want me to spend a lot of money. I needed a present that was singular. Something as special as he was.
For weeks I agonized over it.
Then, one warm Thursday afternoon, the answer appeared out of nowhere. It was September. The air smelled clean, the trees in the parking lot turned red and gold. I was straightening out some candy when Mrs. Reiss came in. The moment I saw her, I knew. What was the one thing my brother talked about more and more frequently, the one thing he felt made him remarkable? His kindness to Jared Reiss. I believed he’d come to think of that as the finest moment in his life.
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
She looked at me warily and I knew she was thinking of the same thing I was, that unpaid candy bar from so many years ago. She owed me. We’d both known at some point I’d ask her to pay up.
“Would you ask your son to write my brother a letter? Wishing my brother a happy birthday.”
Still she didn’t speak. Probably what I was asking for was worth a lot of money; there were nuts out there who bought Reiss’s artwork. A man like that, a serial killer, would have his followers. For a moment I considered taking back my words. But then I thought of Sunny’s face, how much he would treasure this note. There wasn’t much time. Sunny’s party was next weekend.
Mrs. Reiss came the next Thursday with the letter. She strode to the front counter, set the envelope down. Then she turned around and left. I knew I’d never see her again. The thought warmed me. I realized that the woman had been haunting me. She was like a blot on my conscience, punishment for a crime I hadn’t committed. She was like every second thought you ever had, every bad break. A reminder of all that might go wrong in life. When she’d left and the store was quiet, I opened up the letter. The name of the prison was engraved on top. Reiss’s handwriting was large and sloped to the left.
“Dear Sunny,” it read. “Happy Birthday. I’ve never forgotten you. You were the only person in that school who was kind to me. Thank you. Jared.”
I stared at the letter, amazed. I’d done it. The fact was, I’d come to think of myself as a screw-up. But for once, for perhaps the only time in my life, I’d done something right. I was so happy I opened up a Snickers bar and ate the whole thing, which normally I wouldn’t do, because I was always struggling over those last five pounds.
The next day, Jared Reiss escaped from jail. The first successful break-out in the jail’s history. Banner headline across the top of the newspaper. I can’t explain the feeling that flooded me except that it was like labor. It was as though my body was in the grips of something larger than me. The letter from Reiss was still in my pocketbook. I pulled it out and clutched it to my breast. For more than twenty years we’d had no contact with Reiss and now, the day before he escaped, I’d sent his mother to talk to him about my brother. What if he went to look for Sunny? What if he thought of him as a friend? Something moved in the store and I screamed, though it was just a bunch of high school kids looking to buy soda. I urged them out of there, locked up the store. Through the window I could see an ambulance go by, screaming its way into the hospital.