And so I was. Here, instead of there. Reeling in to the couch instead of dancing away into darkness. Wearing the weary mask of Dexter the Sofa Spud instead of the bright silver gleam of the Dark Avenger.
“Come on in, you,” Rita said, filling the doorway with such warm good cheer that I felt my teeth grind together, and the crowd inside howled with disappointment but slowly filed out of the stadium, game over, because after all, what could we do? Nothing, of course, which was what we did, trailing meekly into the house behind the happy parade of Rita, Astor, and ever-quiet Cody. I managed not to whimper, but really: Wasn’t this pushing the envelope a tiny bit? Weren’t we all taking advantage of Dexter’s cheerful good nature just a trifle too much?
Dinner was annoyingly pleasant, as if to prove to me that I was buying into a lifetime of happiness and pork chops, and I played along even though my heart was not in it. I cut the meat into small chunks, wishing I was cutting something else and thinking of the South Pacific cannibals who referred to humans as “long pork.” It was appropriate, really, because it D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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was that other pork I truly longed to slice into and not this tepid mushroom soup–covered thing on my plate. But I smiled and stabbed the green beans and made it all the way through to coffee somehow. Ordeal by pork chop, but I survived.
After dinner, Rita and I sipped our coffee as the kids ate small portions of frozen yogurt. Although coffee is supposed to be a stimulant, it gave me no help in thinking of a way out of this—not even a way to slip out for a few hours, let alone avoid this lifelong bliss that had snuck up behind me and grabbed me around the neck. I felt like I was slowly fading away at the edges and melting into my disguise, until even-tually the happy rubber mask would meld with my actual features and I would truly become the thing I had been pretending to be, taking the kids to soccer, buying flowers when I drank too many beers, comparing detergents and cutting costs instead of flensing the wicked of their unneeded flesh. It was a very depressing line of thought, and I might have grown unhappy if the doorbell had not rung just in time.
&
nbsp; “That must be Deborah,” I said. I’m fairly sure I kept most of the hope for rescue out of my voice. I got up and went to the front door, swinging it open to reveal a pleasant-looking, overweight woman with long blond hair.
“Oh,” she said. “You must be, ahm— Is Rita here?”
Well, I suppose I was ahm, although until now I hadn’t been aware of it. I called Rita to the door and she came, smiling. “Kathy!” she said. “So nice to see you. How are the boys?
Kathy lives next door,” she explained to me.
“Aha,” I said. I knew most of the kids in the area, but not their parents. But this one was apparently the mother of the faintly sleazy eleven-year-old boy next door, and his nearly 1 6 6
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always-absent older brother. Since that meant she was probably not carrying a car bomb or a vial of anthrax, I smiled and went back to the table with Cody and Astor.
“Jason’s at band camp,” she said. “Nick is lounging around the house trying to reach puberty so he can grow a mustache.”
“Oh Lord,” Rita said.
“Nicky is a creep,” Astor whispered. “He wanted me to pull down my pants so he could see.” Cody stirred his frozen yogurt into a frozen pudding.
“Listen, Rita, I’m sorry to bother you at dinnertime,” Kathy said.
“We just finished. Would you like some coffee?”
“Oh, no, I’m down to one cup a day,” she said. “Doctor’s orders. But it’s about our dog—I just wanted to ask if you had seen Rascal? He’s been missing for a couple of days now, and Nick is so worried.”
“I haven’t seen him. Let me ask the kids,” Rita said. But as she turned to ask, Cody looked at me, got up without a sound, and walked out of the room. Astor stood up, too.
“We haven’t seen him,” she said. “Not since he knocked over the trash last week.” And she followed Cody out of the room. They left their desserts on the table, still only half eaten.
Rita watched them go with her mouth open, and then turned back to her neighbor. “I’m sorry, Kathy. I guess nobody’s seen him. But we’ll keep an eye open, all right? I’m sure he’ll turn up, tell Nick not to worry.” She prattled on for another minute with Kathy, while I looked at the frozen yogurt and wondered what I had just seen.
The front door closed and Rita came back to her cooling coffee. “Kathy’s a nice person,” she said. “But her boys can be D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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a handful. She’s divorced, her ex bought a place in Islam-orada, he’s a lawyer? But he stays down there, so Kathy’s had to raise the boys alone and I don’t think she’s very firm sometimes. She’s a nurse with a podiatrist over by the university.”
“And her shoe size?” I asked.
“Am I blathering?” Rita asked. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I guess I was just worrying a little bit . . . I’m sure it’s just . . .”
She shook her head and looked at me. “Dexter. Did you—”
I never got to find out if I did, because my cell phone chirped. “Excuse me,” I said, and I went over to the table by the front door where I had left it.