Free When Did We Lose Harriet? by Patricia Sprinkle

have a good heart. I did it because I thought I could do it faster than anybody else. “If I’d known Jake was getting sicker, I’d never have gotten involved,” I said gruffly. I still had to tell her that Jake’s car was missing because I’d been so full of my own efficiency.
    Once she was past the initial shock, Glenna was far more horrified that she’d forgotten Jake’s day at the desk in the first place. “If I hadn’t forgotten, honey, you wouldn’t have used his car. I’ll tell you what. Call Harriet. If she’s home, you can borrow my car and take her the money right now. We can’t see Jake for a while, anyway.”
    Harriet wasn’t home, and the girl who answered had been well taught not to give information to a stranger over the phone. She never came right out and said her mother wasn’t there, but she told me that if I called back after three, her mother could speak with me then. When I asked when they expected Harriet, she was as cagey as a riverboat gambler. “You’ll need to ask my mother.”
    Since I was right by the pay phone, that was as good a time as any to call Joe Riddley about the credit cards. All I can say about that conversation is, confession may be good for the soul, but it sure can be hard on the eardrums.
    By three, the weight on my chest was definitely more literal than figurative. That fresh envelope seemed to have a dozen corners. When I wiggled around trying to get more comfortable, they poked me worse. Since I didn’t have a pocketbook, I didn’t have anyplace else to put it. Jake would never forgive me if I foisted it off on Glenna. “I think I’ll just go on out there,” I finally told her. “I can explain better in person than on the phone anyway, and if I don’t get rid of this envelope pretty soon I’m going to look like that Greek who was pecked to death.”
    Glenna drew me a map. “You can get there in twenty minutes. Think how good you’ll feel to be done with it.” She handed me her keys. Since it apparently hadn’t occurred to her I didn’t have a license, I didn’t like to bring it up.
    Although Dixie Sykes’s neighborhood is now about halfway between downtown and Montgomery’s new eastern edge, it was way out on the edge of town in the sixties when it was built. With street names like Edgefield, Fernway, and Farm Road, I figured that the pines shading big furry lawns once shaded pastures. Cows, however, were long ago replaced by Cadillacs, grazing grass with monkey grass.
    Glenna’s Ford was woefully out of place. Maids in that neighborhood drive better cars.
    When I got to the Sykes’s, I liked their yard better than their house. Joe Riddley and I live in a big old renovated farmhouse that wanders all over our lot, so I’m not partial to two-story brick boxes with black shutters and tall white columns supporting nothing but a small brick stoop. I sure admired the Sykes’s big lawn, though. It looked like something out of Southern Living —lots of irregular, gorgeous flower beds, unexpected islands of ivy, even a little humpbacked bridge over a tiny fishpond. A creamy Mercedes sat in the drive beside a bright blue Miata with Julie blazoned on its tag.
    While I waited for somebody to answer the door, I couldn’t help comparing this neighborhood with the one I’d been in that morning. They weren’t far apart in terms of miles, but could be on different planets. Joe Riddley was wrong about my imagination, for once. I couldn’t picture anybody from the teen center living in McGehee Estates.
    If the woman who came to the door was forty, she and her beautician would never admit it. Her hair was fluffy and golden, her face as pretty as cosmetics could make it, and her lipstick could never be that fresh unlessshe kept a tube right by the door. One look at her matching shell-pink fingernails and I could feel my own breaking out in hangnails.
    Yet, pretty as she was, my very first thought was, This woman is worried sick about something.
    It seemed a