“Actually, I get off at four-thirty,” Anna said. “You’ll miss Vacation Bible School.”
“It’s okay, I can miss a day.” Kendra put Dexter down on the floor and spread her arms dramatically. “And see? Four-thirty! It’s only a little after noon now. You wouldn’t be gone long at all! Just a few hours! I can take care of myself, Mommy. Really I can. I’ll prove it to you.”
Kendra chewed on her lower lip as she thought. She put a fist on her hip and shifted her weight from foot to foot. She could tell someone to keep an eye on Kendra for her that afternoon. But who? There was Debra Connor in the trailer across the way, but – no, that wouldn’t work, Debra visited her parents in a rest home most afternoons, she was probably already gone. She could ask Mrs. Snodgrass – if she hadn’t started drinking already. That was what she would do.
“You won’t go wandering off?” Kendra said.
“No!”
“No cooking. I don’t want you using the stove while I’m gone.”
Kendra shrugged. “Too hot to cook, anyway. I’ll have cereal, or a sandwich for lunch.”
“I put the cans of dog food under the sink. You might want to go ahead and feed Dexter, because we don’t know when he ate last.”
“Okay.”
Anna sighed as she stared at Kendra.
“Whatsa matter?” Kendra said.
“I don’t know. I guess… well, I’ll worry about you.”
“Don’t worry about me, Mommy,” Kendra said with a big smile. “Dexter will take care of me. And Jesus and my guardian angel will watch over me.”
For a moment, Anna thought she was going to cry. She swallowed hard a few times until the feeling passed. “Well,” she said, “I should get cleaned up.” She turned and left the kitchen, and went down the hall to her bedroom.
Kendra picked up Dexter again. “Y’hear that, Dexter? Me’n you’ll have the whole house to ourselves this afternoon.”
The little dog seemed thrilled.
Muriel Snodgrass came to the screen door about thirty or forty seconds after Anna rang the bell. She was a fat pasty-white woman with a big belly, but spindly legs that came like sticks out of the baggy blue shorts she wore. Her black-dyed hair – and a bad job, too – was a mess. She wore glasses with big square frames, a baggy sleeveless top speckled green and yellow and white. “Yeah?” she said. She held a glass of something on ice in her right hand. It was the kind of glass handed out at fast food chains to promote movies. This one had some kind of superhero on the side.
Anna hoped the glass did not contain liquor, not at this early hour. It looked like ice tea.
Somewhere in the house, a television played loudly.
“Hi, Mrs. Snodgrass,” she said, smiling.
“Hi. Keepin’ cool in this heat?”
“Barely. It’s miserably hot, isn’t it?”
“You got that right. What can I do for you?”
“Well,” Anna said, “you’ve met my daughter Kendra, haven’t you?”
“Sure. Real purty girl, too, she is.”
“Well, you know she’s a little slow.”
“Yeah. Shame, too.”
“I have to go to work, and I’m going to leave Kendra at home by herself for the first time this afternoon. Would you mind keeping an eye on her for me? I mean, just from a distance, you know? See if anybody shows up while I’m gone, or something.”
“You expectin’ someone?”
“No, no, I’m just… “ She chuckled a brief, breathy chuckle. “I guess I’m just a nervous, worried mother.”
“Yeah, I unnerstand. I was that way with my kids, too. I devoted my whole life to ‘em. I dropped my life for ‘em, y’know? Now, do I hear from ‘em? Do they come see me? Do they call? Or even write me a e-mail? Nope. Not them. Too busy. Or they live too far away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Anna said, trying to conceal her need to get away from Mrs. Snodgrass as soon as possible and get to work. The workers in the office at Redding Tractor and Lawn Mower needed a hand right away, and she did not want to make them wait any longer. “I really have to run, Mrs. Snodgrass, or I’d stay and chat.”
“Don’t worry, honey, I’ll keep an eye out for your little girl.”
“Thank you so much.” Anna turned and hurried back to the trailer.
She’d called Rose to ask her to drop in on Kendra while she was gone. But she’d gotten Rose’s answering machine. She’d called her cell phone, but it was turned off. Anna did not understand why Rose had a cell phone if she never turned it on.
Anna was dressed in a business-like blue-and-white suit and ready to go. She went inside and stood before Kendra, who was on the floor playing with Dexter with an old sock that had a knot tied in it.
“Sweetheart, I have to go,” Anna said. “Can you stand up for a second?”
Kendra got to her feet. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I’ll be fine.”
“I guess that’s my problem,” Anna whispered as she hugged Kendra. “I don’t like the idea that you don’t need me anymore.”
“Oh, Mommy,” Kendra said as she squeezed Anna. “I’ll always need you.”
They stood that way for a long moment, then Anna pulled away, pecked Kendra’s cheek, and said, “I’ve got to go.”
Out in the car, as she backed out of the carport, Anna noticed a man walking from the new trailer in unit five. He headed toward the Snodgrass house.
She stopped backing up for a moment, and watched him in the rearview mirror. There was something startlingly familiar about him. He had short dark hair, broad shoulders – he wasn’t that tall, but he was well built. And there was something about him… something. She frowned as she watched him in the mirror and tried to place him, tried to figure out where she’d seen him before. But she could not.
Anna drove out of the trailer park and headed for work at Redding Tractor and Lawn Mower.
Muriel Snodgrass heard another knock at her front door. It was really more of a rattle, because someone had knocked on the metal edge of the loose screen door. That made three so far today. What did all these people want all of a sudden?
The first had been Audrey Marsh from unit nineteen, wanting some sugar, because she was baking cookies and had run out of sugar and couldn’t run to the store because there were cookies in the oven. Muriel had invited her in and given her the sugar. Why she wanted to do any baking in such miserable heat was beyond Muriel.
Then it had been that woman with the beautiful retarded daughter.
So, who was it this time?
“Hank, get the door!” Muriel shouted. She was washing dishes. There stood on one side of the sink several piles of filthy dishes which had accumulated there over the last couple weeks. Muriel let all the dishes pile up awhile before she washed them. She didn’t wash them until they ran out of clean ones. That way she didn’t have to do it as often.
“Dammit to hell,” she said as she threw the sponge into the sink and dropped a plate with a clattering splash. She rinsed the suds off her hands, dried them on a hand towel, tossed the towel onto the counter, picked up her drink, and left the kitchen.
In the hall, cats scattered before Muriel.
As she passed the living room to the right, she looked in and saw her husband Hank slumped in his recliner, big belly sticking up out of the chair, a big, round, snowy mountain in a white sleeveless undershirt. A nature program played on TV.
“Useless,” she shuffled in her slippers to the front door. “Hi.”
“Hello, there, Mrs. Snodgrass.”
“Who’re you?”
“You don’t remember me? I’m Steven Regent, your newest tenant.” He turned and pointed. “Over there, in unit five.”