“Yes, you are. I heard you.”
“Nobody’s fighting, sweetie. I promise you.”
“You better not be,” she said.
Kate rose from the bed and hug-steered their daughter back toward her room. She was a tough kid, beating boys in soccer and letting them know about it. But she was in a fragile phase. Kate said it was because her best friend, Maya, had moved away after her parents split. Loomis was putting his money on early puberty and bracing himself.
Later, in the dark, Loomis said, “I just wondered if those cards ever got sent out. Because I’d be cool with that. I’d even send them out myself. I feel like I might have overreacted before.”
“Are you trying to apologize for throwing the cards in the garbage?”
“More or less.”
“Which is it?”
“I’m apologizing.”
He reached out and touched his wife’s hip.
She hummed noncommittally. “I already sent them out.”
After lunch Loomis did a cigarette consult with Bobito the Security Guard.
“Hold up, chief,” Bobito said. “Someone stepping up on you with heat? In my parking lot? That shit is gangfucked.”
“Pretty gangfucked,” Loomis agreed.
“That shit is raped, man. What was they hassling you about?”
“Some fight I had with my wife.”
Bobito rapped his skull (shaved, bluish) with his knuckles; this was how he applauded. “Oh, shit. You got a pig on the side, chief? That what this is about? I ain’t making value judgments, man. Shit. I fucked half the bitches in this building on my fianceé’s futon.”
“There were two of them,” Loomis explained. “Sort of Godfather types. Like the movie.”
“ ‘Take the cannoli,’ ” Bobito said. “That shit is classic.”
“One had a huge scar on his cheek.”
“Naw. That’s a fake. Ain’t nobody profiling you with some scar.”
“It looked real.”
“That’s how you know it’s fake.” Bobito scratched his neck tattoo with a scythelike pinkie nail. “I’ll make sure they’re not creeping round here. That’s the easy part, chief. What I’d be asking is who hired them.”
“Yeah?”
“Mos def. Villains gotta make rent in a recession too, bro. Now along comes the Internet, Angie’s List, all that direct-sales shit. It’s got so easy to bring heat a fucking bonobo could do it.” Bobito held his cigarette like a dart and poked out little rings of wisdom. “You gotta think about your enemies, chief. ’Cause they’re sure as shit thinking about you.”
Bobito now began narrating his own criminal record and the various OG motherfuckers with whom he had compiled this record.
“You’ve been in prison?” Loomis said.
“Oh, hell yeah,” Bobito said. “I’m a ex-con. Did a dog’s year in Pondville. That’s like seven on the outside, chief.”
“What’d they get you for?”
“Felony two. Check fraud. Tried to buy some body spray for my boo at Bed, Bath & Beyond, where, by the way, I fucking worked. The whole thing was a reverse sting. These corporate lawyers do not fuck around. They flat-out gangster.” Bobito finished his cigarette and flicked the butt into the koi pond. “I been thinking about your situation,” he said. “I’m prepared to help you out in the form of personal security services.” He produced a crisp business card with the image of a rooster in boxing trunks. “Check out the website.”
“Thank you,” Loomis said. “I’ll do that.”
“Cheap and deep, chief. That’s how I do what got to get done.”
Loomis spent the afternoon compiling suspects. He came up with two: his father-in-law, Kent, and The Lesbian Anita.
Kent was a soft-spoken Kansan who sang in a barbershop quartet and had the mustache to prove it. He had grown up on a farm but worked at a car dealership now, sweet-talking gullible sophomores into sleek Korean shitboxes. Kate was his only daughter; she looked almost exactly like his late wife, Mindy. He’d called her “Mindy” the previous Christmas, then wept without embarrassment, a practice endorsed by his men’s group. Kent despised Loomis in that affable midwestern manner that often passed for affection on the coasts.
“Well hello there, stranger,” he said when Loomis greeted him. “To what do I owe the pleasure of this call?”
“No reason. Kate mentioned you had a little surgery.”
“Oh, jiminy. I wouldn’t call a colonoscopy surgery. They just run a thingamabob up your bottom and broadcast your guts on a little TV.”
“Still.”
“There’s only three things that can kill a farmer,” Kent said. “Lightning. Rolling a tractor. And old age.”
Loomis wanted to say, What about cancer? This was how his mind worked. It had made him popular in college. “Hey, by the way, thanks for sending Izzy that birthday check. It was very generous.”
“Nonsense.”
“Between you and my mom she’s gonna bank her first million by twelve.”
“It’s a good thing to save with the economy the way it is.”
Loomis cleared his throat. “I hope you got the thank-you card Izzy sent along.”
“I did. Lovely. I’m going to put it on the wall here.” Kent gestured at his wall over there in Kansas.
“Good,” Loomis said. “Because I wouldn’t want you to be angry on account of a thank-you card.”
After a pause, Kent said, “Why are you talking like that?”
“Like what?” Loomis said.
“Like a dimwit. Like someone sounding out the words.”
“I’m just saying that I hope you’d tell me if you were angry at me, Kent.”
“For what?”
“Or disappointed.”
“I don’t get it. Is everything okay with you and Kate?”
“Why? Did she say something to you?”
“This is a very odd conversation, Todd. I have to wonder if you’ve been drinking.”
So this was Loomis now: sowing panic among the elderly. The beers had been a mistake — the last two, anyway. “I’m sorry. Work’s been tough. They’re downsizing our group. I’ve lost a lot of buddies.” He was thinking about Kent, alone in his ranch house, tying bass lures, making cups of Maxwell House. It was some ginned-up notion he had about loneliness, being left behind. He heard Kent release a half sob into the phone, then realized it was him.
“I understand,” his father-in-law said. “You wouldn’t believe the stories I hear on the lot.”
“Don’t say anything to Kate. It’s just nice sometimes to talk to another dad, you know?”
Downstairs, Izzy was caressing her iPad like a lover. Kate was at a spinning class.
“Where’s Trevor?”
“In the bath,” Izzy said.
“The bath?”
“Don’t stress. I’m monitoring him. You smell like beer. Are you, like, an alcoholic now?”
And what if he was? He wasn’t. But what if? It wasn’t every day that a guy’s persecution complex came true.
After Kate and the kiddies conked out, he paced the perimeter of his darkened home debating the merits of gun control. He scanned the street for suspicious vehicles. A red Scion had tailed him home from work. Possibly twice. Later that night a loud thumping bolted him awake. “What the hell was that?”
“Trevvie,” Kate murmured. “Kicks the wall.” She laughed drowsily. “You’re so jumpy. It’s cute.”
Jumpy? Cute? He felt like slugging her in the kidney, wherever that might be.
On Saturday she returned from her weekly sojourn to Trader Joe’s with nine recyclable sacks full of festive yuppie kibble: tandoori chicken skewers, chipotle hummus, trail mix brimming with mystical Mayan seeds intended to charm his cholesterol. Loomis was busy thrashing Izzy at Monopoly, which would eventually build her character. He had no intention of wandering into the kitchen to audit his wife’s purchases. That was something the Old Loomis would have done, a petty pleasure wrung from the fluke of his economic prerogative.