Free A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne

you—”
    â€œWhat I don’t get,” continued Aunt Fran without listening, “is why he wants her so much.” I could almost hear her add: Or why she wants him.
    â€œYou know how I picture myself in ten years?” my mother said. “I picture myself enormously fat and living in a trailer home with the blinds pulled down. No one visits me and I eat potato chips all day long. The only way anyone knows I’m there is that occasionally an empty potato-chip bag flies out the window.”
    â€œLois. That will never happen.”
    â€œHow do you know? Nobody knows what could happen to me.”
    â€œNobody ever knows what could happen,” scolded Aunt Fran.
    Across the street the Morrises’ lights went out. Four houses away David Bridgeman, still mourning his stolen bicycle, was practicing “Greensleeves” on his recorder, making quavering alto sounds as I looked out at the streetlights and at the lit-up pools of lawn.
    Aunt Fran said, “Why do you think he left?”
    I could hear my mother shift on her kitchen stool. After a moment she said, “I don’t know. He’s always thought he was missing something. Some grand destiny or something. She’s the same way. You know Ada.” She stopped and made a sound deep in her throat.
    Then she shifted on her stool again, scraping it against the floor. “Marsha? Marsha? Are you on the upstairs phone? I want you to get off this instant.”
    My ankle throbbed as I eased my cast off my mother’s pillow. “Do you have some medicine I could take?” I said in a small, tragic voice. “My foot hurts.”
    Later, after I was sent to bed with two orange-flavored Bayer aspirins, I picked up the upstairs extension again as my mother spoke to Aunt Claire.
    â€œHe once told me that he hated being able to predict how his life would turn out. He said it made him feel like he was already dead.”
    â€œWell this is certainly something unpredictable,” said Aunt Claire.
    â€œHe’s a real romantic,” said my mother. “Romantics are usually bastards, in case you haven’t noticed.”
    My mother almost never used bad language and it sounded mispronounced coming from her. Aunt Claire coughed. “Well,” she said. Through my mother’s bedroom window I could see the blue light of the Lauders’ TV set through their living-room windows next door. A June bug banged against the screen.
    â€œDo you think he’ll be back?” Aunt Claire murmured at last.
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œDo you think he left
expecting
to come back?”
    My mother didn’t answer.
    Aunt Claire coughed again. “I suppose he’s not coming back anytime soon. He’s confused,” she added gently after a while. “And probably ashamed. We have to remember that. Ada’s also responsible. I’ve said all along that she’s jealous of you. She may even be the one who gave Larry the idea.”
    A dog barked from a few streets away. Then after what seemed like a long time, my mother said, “A week or so before Larry left, I told him that I’d filed for a divorce.”
    â€œWell, didn’t he want one, too?” Over the telephone wires, Aunt Claire’s voice sounded tinny and insistent. “Lois?” she said. “Lois, are you still there?”
    Far away a siren wailed. An ambulance was on its way to Sibley Hospital. The Morrises’ terriers began to howl from inside their house. “Help,” shouted someone on a television show the Lauders were watching, but then the laugh track started so I knew it was a comedy.
    My mother was in the living room the next morning before breakfast spraying Lemon Pledge on the coffee table. When I made it to the kitchen, I saw that she had already thrown away the paper shopping bags that had been wedged between thewall and the refrigerator, scrubbed the dish rack, scoured the sink, polished the