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  “Famous last words,” her mother chuckled. She lifted her arm and drew her hand to her mouth, picked something invisible from the sheet, and once more lifted her hand to her mouth.

  “I mean it, Mother.” It occurred to Anne that she could touch the scaled skin on her mother’s arm right now, and it could shred like wet newspaper. If the inside of her looked anything like the outside, she couldn’t last much longer. “You said that if we got an offer of a million, we needed to take it.”

  * * *

  Anne’s cell phone growled. The text was from Cynthia. Bistro N? 11:30? Anne’s concentration was broken, but her mother wouldn’t notice. At the Pinnacle. C U there, she thumbed.

  “Mother, you are going to need to sign these papers so we can sell the Livingstone Road property. We’ll bring a notary to your room.”

  “I don’t want to sign anything. Famous last words.”

  “Yes you do. This is a good thing. It’s an opportunity. Remember? You said when we could get a million we should sell? Remember that?”

  “No.” She heaved her body over to face the wall. “I want to sleep now. Thanks for coming.” She closed her eyes to block Anne out. Sally folded her pudgy arms and rolled her eyes. At least Sally understood. Anne needed to leave anyway. Talking to Mother was like talking down a well: hollow, full of echoes, and not going anywhere.

  Outside the window, the skinny fingers of the live oak against the pristine August glare made Anne feel trapped. Trapped in a medicated, air-conditioned snow globe without the snow, sealed forever in this last-stop universe. August was the crescendo of summer, like Janis Joplin’s famous Texas scream, the white of it soaking through anything it fell on. Just to escape, Anne decided to walk from the Pinnacle to North Park and get some of the unending decay of her mother out of her head.

  From the sidewalk outside, the live oak looked less friendly. She walked alone through the heat that lay on her skin like an irradiated sleeve. She was surrounded by people encased in cars. Sealed in every car was a person, rarely more than one person, experiencing exactly the preferred climate, listening to the preferred voices, holding onto the preferred notion of what it meant to be driving into or out of the most splendid mall in Dallas, maybe in the world. Anne looked forward to the sight of normal, shallow people, who drove to the mall and got out of their cars carrying sweaters in the baking heat so that they wouldn’t get chilled by the air-conditioning inside.

  Beyond the armory of cars reflecting a hundred pings of eye-piercing sun, the chilled haven of tempered sunlight through frosted skylights and the calming sound of inoffensive piano music played by a man in a black suit—the signature of Nordstrom ambience—eased Anne into a land of plenty, where there was no death or sadness, no withering old ladies imprisoned in crepe-paper bodies.

  From the escalator, Anne could see Cynthia talking with the hostess. She was wearing white pants and a sleeveless black silk tank. Cynthia—smooth-skinned, bronzer-burnished, honey-lipsticked, with teeth whitened to a perfect ecru—she was Dallas incarnate.

  Anne reached to embrace Cynthia in her platform shoes. The music in the bronze-toned bistro was the kind of complicated jazz that Michael liked. A familiar refrain presented itself here and there, and then faded into a jumble of too much.

  “Your back feels warm,” she said in Anne’s ear.

  “I walked from the Pinnacle.”

  “By choice?” She held Anne’s hand as the hostess showed them to the booth. Hand-holding was a purely Cynthia pretension, but it won Anne over every time.

  The hostess gave them a booth by a tinted window. Outside, the shoppers moved through the thin whiteness like figures in a movie about untroubled prosperity. The leather-bound lunch menu offered a selection of upscale fare. A bison burger cost $12.50. The crab salad was $10.

  When the waitress offered drinks, Cynthia said, “Oh, what the fuck. Let’s get a bottle of pinot grigio. You walked all the way over here. You need refreshment. How is your mother anyway?”

  “The same, I guess. Her doctor says she is shocked by her decline, but then she says she can’t give her a diagnosis for hospice and that she could go on like this for a long time.”

  Cynthia took her cell phone from her purse and frowned, then placed it on the table next to her butter plate.

  “Well, I’ve got some ideas about your situation, but let’s have wine first.” The waitress offered the wine to Cynthia, who tasted, then twirled the stem of the glass as it filled. She raised it. “Better days.”

  Anne preferred chardonnay, but Cynthia’s choices were usually the ones that trumped. Wine was a good way to put her mother in a sealed envelope for the time being.

  The two women had walked the long road from the day they picked up their Theta invitations to the care and stowage of their failing parents, taking their separate paths, avoiding the clashes on the loaded questions, staying neutral and helpful, each silently judging the other’s choices, still meeting once a month for lunch after all these years. Anne was godmother to Cynthia’s daughter from her second marriage to the anesthesiologist. There was comfort for both women in knowing that someone else shared all the details of the past, knew family, knew all the mundane intricacies of how their lives had moved from there to here.

  The waitress approached the table again, flashing her smile, reciting the specials like she was describing a double-feature porn show. “Today’s special is salad of baby lettuce with crunchy candied pecans, tossed with seasonal cherries and blanched pears with a balsamic vinaigrette dressing, and for our entrée the roast chicken pomme frites with herb butter.”

  Anne ordered warm Asian glazed-chicken salad. Cynthia ordered the salmon diablo. The restaurant was filling up with overdressed people, women wearing high heels and men in ties, the business crowd.

  “Your father’s funeral was beautiful,” Anne said. “I haven’t told you that.”

  “Thank you. Daddy wanted it simple. No eulogy.” Her staged smile was the same one Anne had seen when she moved through the receiving line three weeks ago. Cynthia sighed, and the smile dissolved. “It’s a relief to have him gone. Does that sound bad? He had no quality of life. I’m thankful.” Her face suddenly brightened again. “And he died in time to avoid the repeal of the Bush tax cuts.”

  Did she really just say that? The food arrived, and Cynthia poured more wine into their glasses, even though Anne’s was half-full.

  “How is your mother?” Cynthia asked. “You were just with her. You said she was the same. You said the doctors were shocked, but she could last a long time. How much is it going to cost you if she lives past December? Do you know?”

  Anne took a bite of her salad. She didn’t know what to say. The chicken was arranged in a star shape on top of three kinds of lettuce, pears, and walnuts. It was so lovely it made her want to cry.

  “Thirty-five percent, right? As opposed to nothing if she dies before December? Are you telling me you haven’t ever considered the estate tax? Never? What’s wrong with her accountant?”

  The room was getting warmer, the music was getting louder, or maybe it was just the wine. “The only thing she takes any pleasure in is ice cream,” Anne said. “Her brain has two channels. One is I’m going to have a party, and it’s going to be all about my family history. Michael calls it her Deathbed Tableau. Then there’s Get me out of here. And when she says it, she looks like Linda Blair in The Exorcist. She can’t walk. She can’t hear, and she’s losing her mind. Yes. I pray for her to go, and it would be especially convenient if it happened before December.” The chicken seemed to swell in her throat.

  Cynthia’s cell phone moaned, and she looked at its face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I have to take this call.” She slid from the booth and strode in her platform heels past the entrance to Bistro N and into the children’s shoes department. Anne hated Cynthia’s surgical proficiency in finding whatever gangrenous spot her soul housed. Yes, she had thought about the estate tax, and when she was lucid, Mother had thought about it too. S
he and her accountant had spent years moving assets into limited partnerships to avoid the looming 35 percent. Now Cynthia had made Anne her conspirator.

  She pulled her own phone from her purse to make sure Sally hadn’t called about Mother. She drained her first glass of wine and poured another. The music was getting louder, probably because of the crowd. It sounded like a duel between the saxophone and the piano. Across the room she thought she saw someone in her book club. For some reason she wanted to hide.

  “I’m sorry. That was Luke,” said Cynthia as she slipped into the booth. “I have to take his calls. I don’t know what we would have done without him. One time one of the caregivers didn’t show up, and I called Luke, and he dropped everything and went right over there. He drove Daddy to work out at the Dallas Country Club, he took him out to lunch, he took him to the doctor, he took him to get milkshakes at Highland Park Pharmacy. He never lost his temper, no matter how unreasonable or even abusive Daddy got.”

  “It’s important to have good help,” Anne said. “One of the things I didn’t know was that I would need a caregiver, even at the Pinnacle. I love Sally. She takes whatever Mother dishes out and just sort of sighs. Mother has fired her three times, and she has come back every time. She’s angelic.”

  “That’s what I mean. Luke was an angel from heaven. And it set Charles off into a whole new area of medicine. This business of watching our parents just withering inside and out has given Charles an exciting direction that’s a win-win for everybody involved.” She was animated, incandescent. She swallowed a large bite of salmon and rolled her eyes. “Some people don’t like salmon, but I do. If you eat it three times a week, they say, you’ll add five years to your life.”

  Cynthia grinned at her plate. She was winding up. She looked as eager as a Labrador. “It’s good to be married to an anesthesiologist,” she chattered. “Charles started working with Luke on Daddy’s meds. Charles can write prescriptions for anything. One of the reasons why Luke was perfect was that he has no interest in drugs at all, which is an important factor for us in hiring help because we always have samples around. Charles and Luke just experimented with whatever would keep Daddy contented. It was so much easier than having to persuade some doctor you don’t know that he needed Oxy or something like that. We were able to keep Daddy in his house.”

  “Comfortable,” Anne said. She watched as Cynthia poured the last of the wine in her glass.

  “Better than comfortable. High all the way to the end. I can honestly say that Daddy had an easy exit. And what’s most important at the right time, which is something hardly anyone gets. This is the way of the future, and Charles sees it as a whole new market for doctors like him. Of course, when Luke went to work for Charles’s cousin, he raised his fee because he’d gotten training from Charles. He still works pretty closely with both Charles and me. He gets a percentage of the estate, but nowhere near what the government would get if the tax cut repeal goes through.”

  Anne’s head was buzzing, either with the jazz or the wine, and she looked around her to see whether the room had contracted. The smell of the salad dressing, the parade of people moving from table to table, the change in the tempo of the music were overpowering, and she breathed deep to calm herself.

  “So he’s moved on from Charles’s cousin?”

  “He’s with Charles’s partner’s family now, but he’ll be free probably by late September.”

  The waitress arrived and picked up Anne’s empty plate. “Can I get you ladies anything else?” The table between the two women, holding the detritus of their meal, felt as vast as a dance floor to Anne, and she wondered whether she could ever reach across it into the land where the easiest solution to anything was to make it convenient.

  “Only the check,” Anne replied. “Do you want to just divide it in half?”

  “Oh no, I’ll pay,” Cynthia said. “I treat everybody since Daddy died.”

  Cynthia amazed Anne, her teeth bleached just enough and not too much, everything about her in harmony with what she wanted to be. She had always managed her whole life that way.

  “Let me give you Luke’s number.” She pulled a card from her purse and wrote on the back with a pink easy-ball pen, then pushed it across the table to Anne as she rose from the booth, straightening her skirt, steadier somehow than she had been at the beginning of the meal. Anne looked at the card with Cynthia’s fat pink script on it: an offer of ease and a door into another world. She picked it up and put it in her purse. Picking it up didn’t mean she would have to use it.

  The two women embraced. “I love you, sweetie,” Cynthia whispered into their squeeze. “You’re going to be fine.”

  * * *

  Luke turned on the sound system to the hip-hop station, a little dance music to work by, and his spirit lifted. He’d made a good job of it. A sandwich would be great right now, and even a beer. There was no need to hurry. The calling list was by the phone, prioritized by Miss Cynthia herself. She was a demon on the phone. She loved this shit. You’d think she got some kind of buzz getting these mummies taken care of. By the time she called everybody, he would be out of the house.

  The refrigerator was full, even though nobody ever ate here. There was an entire honey-baked ham in there. He guessed the old dude’s family told all their friends that he was on the way out. Great ham, German mustard, thick rye bread, fresh leaf lettuce—a real rich man’s sandwich. And a Newcastle ale. He could feel the vibrations of the bass in the floor and in his skin and even his hair, just as he felt the vibration of his phone in his hand. It wasn’t Cynthia this time. It was a number he had never seen before. Good old Cynthia. She always managed to line something up.

  The old dude’s family wouldn’t begrudge him the sandwich or even a beer or two. They would be an overflowing fountain of gratitude. They always were.

  COINCIDENCES CAN KILL YOU

  BY KATHLEEN KENT

  Cleburne

  The setup was perfect. It should have worked.

  Except for the woman. The Good Samaritan with more time than sense on her hands. The kind of woman who would feed a hungry dog on the street while leaning over the homeless guy lying next to it. I’ve seen it happen. One poor bastard roused himself enough to say, “Hey, lady. What about me?”

  Anyway. Just about every officer in our department had been working on this operation for over a year. Five undercovers, positioned around one modest suburban house, hundreds of man hours spent in preparation, a federal wire that had taken months to procure and countless favors called in. Sleepless nights at the office and in the field. Sleepless nights at home, on the couch, because the wife was frosted about the nights spent in the office and in the field.

  The house was in a community north of Dallas. McMansions packed tightly together for miles like the Wall of China, only Texas style, with an abundance of American flags and Vote Republican signs nestled among the drought-hardy geraniums.

  True to our informant, a worn Mercedes pulls up into the driveway, and the driver, an older guy, gets out—he could have been the manager at the local HEB—locks his car door, takes another key out of his pocket, and lets himself into the house.

  I’m about to signal over the portable to stand by, when this woman, who’s out walking her dog, sprints over to the Mercedes and starts talking to someone, or something, in the car. The driver had opened the windows a crack before locking the car and a furry head pokes its way out of the backseat. It’s a small dog. And it’s surface-of-the-sun hot outside. The woman, who’s picked up her own pocketbook schnauzer, starts pulling on the door handle. She’s trying to open the driver’s-side door.

  She’s cooing to the dog inside, talking to him: “Poor baby, poor baby . . .”

  Then she marches up to the door and starts ringing the doorbell. I’m not holding my breath at this point. An exhalation of Fuck, fuck, fucks are streaming into my radio.

  When the owner doesn’t answer the door—the guy is probably looking out the window, going What the fuck
? himself—the woman takes a phone out of her belly bag. And calls the police.

  Exactly four minutes later the neighborhood patrolman shows up. Listens to the woman. Goes to the door. Knocks on it. The door opens, there’s an argument. And our guy is arrested. On animal cruelty charges and threatening an officer. A guy who was waiting on one of the biggest heroin suppliers in North Texas: a faceless dealer who was going to meet up with our HEB guy and do a Very. Big. Deal. I sat and watched several cars coast slowly by the house as the bust was made. Were they rubbernecking, or was one of the drivers our heroin guy?

  The upshot is the HEB guy skips bail, gets on a plane to nowhere, we lose our wire, and over a year’s worth of work goes up in flames.

  Oh, and did I mention that our guy was a member of the woman’s church? She offered to be a character witness for him, feeling badly as she did for calling the cops. A misunderstanding. An unhappy coincidence, as she didn’t usually take that route to walk her dog.

  In my ten-plus years on the force, I’ve found that there are three kinds of coincidences that can and probably will befall a case: The happy coincidence. The unhappy coincidence. And the gods-must-be-crazy-bat-shit-weird coincidence. And that kind of coincidence can be very, very dangerous.

  Okay. What do a Civil War general, an antique sword, and an AK-47 have in common? Nothing. Unless they all converge during one of my cases.

  It was after this case that my fellow officers stopped calling me Brooklyn Betty and began referring to me as Detective Ryczek. I had moved to Dallas from New York with my wife, after spending five years with Brooklyn homicide. My wife was in forensics and happy with her job, but she had grown up in Texas and wanted to be closer to her sick mother. It was not in any sense an easy transition; in some ways the hardest thing was being subjected to my mother-in-law’s long-simmering outrage over me, her daughter’s lesbian “friend.”

  The Texas cops were the least of my problems. How do you rattle a female detective who’s spent years proving herself to the grandsons of wild-eyed, Fenian, IRA-supporting Irish cops, or with Italian cops whose fathers are “connected”? And they had almost all been connected in some way to organized crime. They all knew someone who knew someone, or had a relative who was in the business.