Free PALINDROME by Lawrence Kelter Page A

friend was the last thing I wanted to do. “What do you say we
blow off the current agenda and cruise out to Port Jeff? Let’s hit
the Steam Room for a bucket of fried clams and some cold beer?”
    Gabi’s smile returned, not because she loved
the idea of guzzling a cold one and wolfing down mounds of fried
shellfish, but because I had reached out with the proverbial olive
branch. I may not be the wisest of souls, but I have the ability to
know what’s needed and to offer it when it will do the most good.
Gabi hung a U-ey at Browns Road, and we headed northeast
toward the Suffolk coast and a rendezvous with heartburn. In due
course, our conversation returned, and we were both careful to
avoid the sore subject, the one that had preempted an afternoon of
hoity-toity car shopping and fine dining.
    After a couple of beers, Gabi managed another
smile, but the pall had been cast and would not lift that
afternoon. I knew in my heart of hearts that Gabi would dwell on
this for a long time. The mood was gloomy, though the sun burned
strongly in the sky. We hung out at the pier and watched the ferry
load and embark for Connecticut.
    It was late in the afternoon before we headed
back home. Conversation was still not flowing easily. This time, it
was Gabi who needed a break from the silence. She reached for the
radio knob, and Dee Snider’s voice once again emanated from the
smart car’s tinny speakers.

Twelve: Guilt is a Son of a Bitch
     
    Hemingway once said, “All things truly
wicked start from innocence,” which was just the way I was feeling.
What had begun as a simple girls’ night out had now evolved into
something truly vile. I was thinking about the night when Gabi and
I had gone out dancing—just two close friends out to blow off a
little steam after a tough week of summer session. We had been
laughing and dancing and for once didn’t have a care in the world
when Vincent’s drugs found their way into my margarita. Vincent was
dead. Keith Cooper, the instrument of Vincent’s wicked plot, had
made a visit to prison, and now I was sitting with fifty thousand
dollars of blood money—money that had been extorted, money I had no
right to. Guilt is a son of a bitch.
    The gifts Ax and I possessed, the way we
handled our day to day business—no one else in the world would
manage their lives the way we did. We never did anything in a
conventional way, and I doubt any two other people thought about
life the same way that we did. Ax and I could copy almost anyone,
and because we could, there were options available to us that were
unavailable to anyone else, and so we thought in this way and lived
in this way. Our solution to everything was to transform into
someone else. Subterfuge is a sinister-sounding word, but it was
the name of our game; though we never started out planning to hurt
anyone, sometimes people got hurt, and now for the first time, a
life had been destroyed. Yes, an unworthy life perhaps, but a life
nonetheless.
    I had alienated Gabi, my sister in all
things; and now I was feeling very much alone. Ax was my other half
and was always there for me when things went badly, but he was
always so dark and aloof. I never knew where he was or what he was
up to. Gabi had always been my emotional rock, and now . . .
    It was time for life as usual: work and then
school followed by more work and more school. But at the end of
this week, there would be no dancing at the Suds Shack and no
sisterly chat with my BFF. My life had really taken a nasty turn.
Fifty thousand bucks. It was true what they said, “Money doesn’t
buy happiness.”
    I normally worked straight from eight until
two, and then wolfed down some chow as I drove to campus.
    Hester Moffet, DDS, my boss and fine human
being, had been thirty minutes into a root canal—which, for a
dental assistant, was the most boring thing in the world. It was
slow, precision work, and all I could do to help had been to
suction the patient’s saliva that would have