Free The Best American Mystery Stories 2016 by Elizabeth George

didn’t actually see the gun?”
    â€œI saw the clear outline of a gun.”
    â€œDid they demand money or property?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œWhat did they want, exactly?”
    Loomis flashed to the thank-you cards, which were in the shape of little ice cream cones, no doubt hand-cut by an order of incorporated monks. Fourteen bucks for a pack of twelve—the sort of quaint corruption upon which American capitalism now relied.
    â€œI can’t help you if you don’t tell me everything, you know,” the cop said in her patient, insinuating tone. “Let me ask you this: Have there been problems in your marriage recently?”
    â€œFor fuck’s sake,” Loomis said. “I’m the
victim.
”
    Â 
    Kate had made her virtuous stir-fry. She was feeling fat, though she weighed only five pounds more than the day they married, whereas Loomis, upon reaching forty, had bloated up like a tick. He stared down the soggy broccoli florets and tempeh chunks and felt a surge of empathy for his children, Izzy, age ten, and four-year-old Trevor, who had once referred to this meal, in a phrase appropriated from Izzy, who had appropriated it from Loomis, as “Mommy’s shit-fry.”
    Everything was fine. He was home, his drafty little home on the outskirts of Boston. Kate ate like she always ate, mauling her food, punishing it for her hunger. She asked everyone to say their Favorite Part of the Day. It was part of her Gratitude Agenda. Izzy said reading Harry Potter. Trevor said building a cave for his Uhmoomah. Kate said snuggling with her Uhmoomahs before school. Loomis said being here with all of you right now. He looked round the table and felt the truth of it punch his throat.
    â€œAwwww,” Kate said.
    â€œDad’s being sweet,” Izzy said suspiciously.
    Trevor farted. “Broccoli fart,” he observed.
    They’d been married a decade: met in grad school for library science, danced to the wretched bands then being danced to, broke up, found new people, backslid. Then Kate announced her move to Boston, do or die, and Loomis did, in a small Vermont ceremony officiated by Kate’s best friend, The Lesbian Anita. It was a modern arrangement.
    When Trevor came along, Kate quit her position at Widener Library to become a full-time mom, and Loomis was suddenly the sole breadwinner. He bid farewell to his post at the branch library reference desk and made for the ergometric wards of biotech, where remarkable things were being done to override our loser genetic material.
    After dinner Kate read a story to Trevor while Loomis forked at the crud in the toaster oven and tried to figure his approach.
    In the bedroom, Kate was rubbing coconut butter into her ankles. “What’s with you?” she said. “You seem tense.”
    â€œWhat’s with me,” Loomis said, “is that your goons came and talked to me.”
    Kate’s expression landed somewhere between bewilderment and mirth. “My what?”
    Loomis saw his error at once. Kate didn’t hire goons to resolve marital issues. She communicated. She lit candles and acknowledged the underlying conflict, and sometimes later they screwed in some mildly raunchy yoga way, though not so much recently because Loomis was fat and often failed to be present in the moment.
    â€œDid you say goons?”
    â€œDid I say what?”
    â€œGoons.”
    â€œI said,” Loomis said slowly, experimentally, “that I’m sick of the balloons. I feel like they’re stalking me. We had this thing at work—”
    â€œBalloons?”
    â€œJust listen, honey. We had this thing at work, one of these team-building exercises, and they ordered everyone to blow up huge balloons with, like, foot pumps, and the balloons had all these, like, Buddhist affirmations on them, like
Tranquility is the ultimate dividend.
And after a while with these balloons, it was like they were stalking