Zero-Sum World

1 2 3

2009-06-10T14:28:00.001-04:00

I will see the remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 when it hits theaters, but only because I have little choice in the matter:

I love American movies, and I’m an adult: therefore, Denzel Washington is my movie star.

(Name another American movie star for adults…Clint Eastwood; George Clooney; possibly, some year soon, with a little more practice, Angelina Jolie.)

I fully expect that, with the exception of Denzel Washington’s performance, everything about this remake will stink.

What I am excited about, though, is that the movie landed a brand new edition of the John Godey novel in paperback racks nationwide. I’ve probably seen the original, Walter Matthau/Robert Shaw movie a dozen times, but I’ve never read the book.

I expect the novel will read much as the first movie played, as a sterling example of the sort of storytelling -- brisk and efficient, but filled with character -- that Americans, in particular, excelled at, right up into the 1970s: stories that could be moved from page to screen to radio play to stage, without losing a step.

Easy as…well, you know.

I'm Not Alone, I'm Not Alone

2009-05-11T15:02:00.000-04:00

“Here, in other words, is a long-range backstory—a device that, in…recent times, has grown from an option to a fetish…In all narratives, there is a beauty to the merely given, as the narrator does us the honor of trusting that we will take it for granted. Conversely, there is something offensive in the implication that we might resent that pact, and, like plaintive children, demand to have everything explained.”

---Anthony Lane (in this week’s New Yorker)

Read, etc.

2009-05-06T13:44:00.002-04:00

Never finished: Bandits, Elmore Leonard

If I take a book on vacation and don’t finish it during the trip, I’m never gonna finish it. Don’t know why. Sorry, Elmore.

Read: Lush Life, Richard Price

I hadn’t read Price in decades. This was great. No heroes, no villains, apt title.

Bought: the first six Richard Stark reissues from University of Chicago Press

--but only five shipped. Where’s The Jugger? Don’t make me ask again.

Reading: Casino Moon, Peter Blauner

You know how I always complain about writers changing-up between first- and third-person in the course of a book, and how much I hate it? Blauner does that here, but -- this is crucial -- he’s good enough to get away with it. Better than good enough. Recommended.

The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit

2009-04-24T11:33:00.005-04:00

Well, this is just ridiculous:

Detroit Noir contributor Michael Zadoorian, who just last month slapped the world around with his second novel, The Leisure Seeker, has a short-story collection, The Lost Tiki Palaces of Detroit, available today from Wayne State University Press.

Apparently, Zadoorian has decided to challenge fellow Detroit Noir contributor Joyce Carol Oates in some kind of Sheer Output Competition, or something...

(Michael wrote a new short story while I was typing the previous sentence.)

But, seriously...

Detroit's in the news much of late, but it's the same old story, snippets of Barry Gordy hits over footage of shuttered factories. Get the real news from Michael, a fine writer worthy of your attention.

"A Visit From The Footbinder," Emily Prager

2009-04-10T14:50:00.005-04:00

The hideous cover of this short story collection really stood out when I first saw it in the paperback rack of a small-town pharmacy in 1984. No fourth-rate Carver wannabe stories in here, it fairly screamed. Emily Prager’s cv -- fashion model and National Lampoon staffer -- closed the sale.

The short stories and novella collected herein are mostly along the lines of what I’d been hoping for when I bought the book: the kind of anti-authoritarian comedy and tone the best Lampoon short stories offered, but more expansive and lyrical, on a more personal level. And genuinely transgressive where the lesser Lampoon stuff was merely gross.

Nothing prepared me for the title story, though, and I’ve never gotten over it.

“A Visit From The Footbinder” has the power and menace and simplicity of style of a great folk tale. As far as I know, it hasn’t been anthologized and taught in college. It should be. If you haven’t read it, track it down.

Beauty Products

2009-03-31T08:46:00.000-04:00

When the guy on the next barstool tells you a story, he starts at the beginning, hits stride in the middle, and has a big finish waiting at the end. If he started in the middle and backtracked to the beginning, you’d drift away and start counting the swizzlesticks, or something. He understands this: Why have professional storytellers forgotten it? Or has it become irredeemably square to tell a story in a linear fashion? I’m not arguing that every story needs to be linear, but I find it annoying that so many books and films are now burdened with flashbacks and fractured time frames that add nothing to the story. Today’s filmmaker, handed the script for “Gunga Din,” would no doubt turn in something resembling “Rashomon.”

Last year, I enjoyed and admired “Michael Clayton,” but questioned the need to open the film with a scene replayed near the end. Did writer/director Tony Gilroy fear he’d lose the audience if something didn’t blow up real good right after the opening credits? As it turns out, Gilroy was just getting warmed up. His new film, “Duplicity,” keeps interrupting itself for flashbacks that are meant to deepen the intrigue, but serve only to push the movie’s running time past the two-hour mark. (My dismay increased every time some variation of LISBON: 6 MONTHS AGO flashed on screen.) At ninety minutes, you might’ve enjoyed a timely update of screwball comedy; at two hours plus, this strange mash-up of “Last Year At Marienbad” and a caper film exhausts the audience’s good will.

Then again, perhaps I’m too focused on a pet peeve, and being too hard on Gilroy, and the real problem with “Duplicity” is that the genre setting it shares with “Michael Clayton” -- the world of corporate espionage -- simply feels inconsequential when the stakes are less than mortal. The whole sub-genre of the corporate-espionage tale may well be played out, frankly. Seeing Cold War tradecraft employed in this manner has begun to seem (to me, anyway) reductive and banal. In the novels of John LeCarre, for instance, when Smiley and Karla spar, it’s thrilling and awful, and there is the spectre of a mushroom cloud in the air. Gilroy is smart and skillful, and he can get you just as excited about beauty products -- but he lets the film drag on long enough that you have time to remind yourself: They’re beauty products.

Been Away.

2009-03-23T16:04:00.001-04:00

Back now. Post soon.

Logrolling In Our Time

2009-02-17T11:49:00.002-05:00

Fellow Detroit Noir contributor Michael Zadoorian is getting a lot of ink for his new novel, The Leisure Seeker. I haven't read it yet -- the subject matter is too close to my current life -- but you should pick it up immediately. The most recent rave is from the L.A. Times.

El Wah *

2009-01-28T15:19:00.002-05:00

The last time it was so cold for so long here in the Detroit area had to be winter ’93-’94. I was living in a tiny second-floor room above a hair salon in a house in downtown Ann Arbor. I’d just moved to town and had no money, few friends, and a research lab job with no fixed schedule. The week the deep freeze really hit, I did what I only wish I could do this year: I did not leave home.

It was the only thing to do. Going to work meant a twenty-minute walk, and the mean temperature during that week was below zero Fahrenheit. Not life-threatening for a block-long jaunt to, say, the party store (cigarettes, beer, cold cuts, canned soup) or the library (getting to this in a second) -- but obviously lethal, I was certain, for any greater distances.

I used the time well. I hauled James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet home from the library. The Black Dahlia. The Big Nowhere. L.A. Confidential. White Jazz. And read All of it.

If you’ve read any Ellroy, you might question the wisdom of attempting to read over a thousand pages of his machine-gun prose over five days’ time while snowbound. Well, good call, neighbor. (I hasten to add that I’d never read anything by him before.) I read all day every day. I read most of the night. I read while sober, while half-bombed, while hung over. I slept fitfully. The trapped odor from the permanents being administered downstairs crept up through the vents. I upset furniture. I stopped using articles when I spoke. I jolted awake from catnaps and re-read entire chapters, convinced I’d been hallucinating.

It was great.

As I neared the final pages of White Jazz, we had a freak thaw -- a day in the mid fifties. All that ice became water, rushed through the streets with nowhere to go. Knee-high geysers over the gutter drains.

It was beautiful.

Now I’m finally reading American Tabloid. I’ve put off reading this book since it was published, in 1995, and put off reading The Cold Six Thousand since it was published, in 2001, because they are the first two books of Ellroy’s Underworld USA Trilogy, and I’ve heard over and over, through the years, that the final volume was nowhere on the horizon, and I finally tired of making due with one of his earlier potboilers or later miscellanies once a year or so, holding out hope that I could someday read all three books of his Magnum Opus on a bender, as I’d done with the L.A. Quartet.

I’m not even reading my own copy. I was, once again, in a library, during a cold snap, saw Ellroy on display, and pounced. My iced-in nostalgia was running high; Ellroy’s not getting any younger; neither am I. “If the trilogy is never finished,” I thought, “at least I'll have read the first two books.”

Kizmet. What I discovered yesterday is that the final book, Blood’s A Rover, has a publication date of September 15th, 2009.

Is this old news? At least now I can read American Tabloid and The Cold Six Thousand without the nagging fear -- and at a normal, middle-aged-human pace....

Eh. We’ll see about that.

*"El Wah” is a joke from that Ann Arbor cold snap/L.A. Quartet week, and probably only funny if you’re housebound in or near Canada, living on Campbell’s and Old Milwaukee, and reading so much your eyes feel like they’re bleeding.

Friday's Forgotten Book: Lucky Bastard

2009-01-09T10:23:00.004-05:00

Charles McCarry’s Lucky Bastard never made it into paperback, and it’s yet to be reprinted by Overlook Press, the house that’s brought most of his earlier books back into print. The Random House first edition (from 1998) is an ugly-looking book: the wrap is an inch undersized, revealing the topmost of a series of Kennedy half-dollars tumbling down the front and back of the boards. (It’s like a hardcover version of those hideous peek-a-boo mass market covers.)

Loathsome appearance aside, the novel had the misfortune of being pegged in reviews as a satire of the Clinton journey to the White House, and one that appeared a full two years after Joe Klein’s Primary Colors -- a reductive assessment that no doubt played a part in the book now qualifying as forgotten.

Klein’s roman à clef is knowing and funny; McCarry’s novel is a brazen fantasia, but one grounded, nevertheless, in what feel like political realities that any sane American would wish to be able to dismiss as pure fantasy. Difficult as it may be, even now, not to view the story of James Fitzgerald Adams and his wife, Morgan -- chosen during their college years by a rogue KGB mastermind to be future residents of the White House -- through the prism of the Clintons, it’s worth the effort. The story is bigger than that. As narrated by their soulful Russian handler, it’s a beautiful piece of writing, and reading it may leave you giddy.

for all of Friday's Forgotten Books, see Patti Abbott's blog.

Donald E. Westlake (1933-2008)

2009-01-02T11:11:00.000-05:00

Westlake made my other favorite writers look like oafs.
RIP

Go Twist

2008-12-22T16:20:00.001-05:00

Another site that’s sprung up to lessen the sting of Muzzle Flash’s demise is A Twist of Noir, helmed by Christopher Grant.

He’s roped in a lot of Muzzle Flash contributors, so a visit to Twist is time well spent.

My favorite flash there so far is THIS PIECE by Jake Hinkson, which reads like a page from one of the recent Hard Case Crime Lawrence Block reprints. Damn!

And with that, Zero Sum World quietly turns 100 posts old.
Glad tidings to all.

Easiest Thing In The World

2008-12-09T15:06:00.005-05:00

This is the last of the flash fiction I've written that originally appeared at the late, lamented Muzzle Flash.

Clay got the idea from a stand-up comedian: People spend thousands on home security systems, but they’ll hand their expensive camera to a total stranger and ask him to take their picture.

Easiest thing in the world.

All month he’d gone to the places vacationers went, and every evening he ended up with a camera or two. The simple fact he was alone was all the hook he needed. No parent seemed to want to trouble a fellow parent, trying to corral a brood of their own, and ask to have their picture taken.

Clay was starting to believe he’d been the only person watching Letterman that night.

He never had to run very far: If someone gave chase, they gave up when their confused, frightened children called after them. Getting away wasn’t a problem for Clay. He always had a lot of nervous energy in the hours his jones began to build.

Auntwan had taken all the cameras off his hands, though not without complaining. Digital! I need 35mm! If he kept coming to Auntwan, the price was going to go down. He was walking the midway of the fair, brooding over this, when the couple waved him down.

“Excuse me. Sir?”

The man was taller than Clay, fifty pounds heavier – easy to get away from. The woman seemed bleary and happy. Clay guessed they’d come from the beer tent.

“Would you mind?”

It was a high-end digital camera. Clay nodded through the man’s brief instructions, sneaking glances at his cornflower-blue eyes.

They were standing in front of a carny game. Clay motioned them back, then held up a finger to indicate he meant to wait until a clump of old people had passed. The couple relaxed their pose as the crowd moved between them, and Clay ran.

He ran further than usual, expecting pursuit: No children, pricey camera. Near the main entrance he ducked into a tent of 4-H Club exhibits and watched for the couple or the monkeys working security to go past. He removed his jacket, turned it inside out, wrapped it around the camera, wedged the bundle under his arm, and walked to his car.

He joined the long line of cars waiting to exit the fairgrounds, playing with figures in his head. Fifty bucks? From Auntwan? He left the parking lot and pulled onto the service drive, where he was dozens of cars back from a red traffic light. It was the nicest camera Clay had stolen. He set it in his lap, monitor up, and thumbed the review button.

He’d taken a picture of the couple. Bad luck. He thumbed to the previous photograph: A close-up of a woman’s face. Not the woman from the fair: This woman had black hair, set off by a red flower nestled above her ear.

Something was wrong with her eyes.

Clay looked closer.

The red bloom in her hair was no flower.

Clay went to the previous photo: the man from the fair and the black-haired woman, standing in a park, smiling, arms around each other.

Previous photo: close-up, pale woman – her skin looked blue – staring out from the wet, orange-red hair that hung in her eyes.

Again: the man from the fair and the pale woman, seated at a wrought iron table, traffic blurring by in the background.

Clay’s jones crept up. His hands were shaking as he thumbed the button again.

A black woman, on her back, eyes closed, streak of dried blood on her neck.

The black woman standing under an umbrella held by the man from the fair.

There were more.

A horn blasted behind him, and Clay looked in the rearview mirror.

****

James smiled at the thief in the car in front of him.

He had pointed the thief out to Debbie in the parking lot. She’d been staring after the man, drunkenly transfixed, while James popped open the trunk of her car.

James enjoyed his dates. Bringing them to a close was always difficult.

The thief was small. James had fifty pounds on him.

It was going to be difficult, bringing this to a close, too, but James was looking forward to it.

Taking the pictures was usually the hardest thing.

Taking the thief’s picture was going to be the easiest thing in the world.

Note: I promise to never write another serial killer story.

A Quick Three

2008-11-20T11:41:00.004-05:00

Someone once wrote that Patricia Highsmith’s books made you realize how predictably characters in most thrillers behaved; Brad Anderson’s film Transsiberian accomplishes much the same thing. Emily Mortimer is fantastic (and, well, unpredictable) in the lead. The spell is perhaps broken in the last act, when it becomes an action movie, but I didn’t mind.

I’ve abandoned books by Frederick Forsyth and Tom Clancy and Robert Ludlum before my flight started boarding. In Gun Work, David J. Schow gets right the thing they most often get wrong: When he interrupts a gunfight to tell you that an Uzi on full auto tends to recoil up and to the right, it’s germane to the action at hand -- not just a clump of research to trip over.

Man, it’s been weeks since I put anything up here, but that’s the way it goes. Today I couldn’t find time to shave. If you like your blogs updated daily, you should check out David Cranmer’s very engaging The Education of a Pulp Writer. Today David announces the launch of a new e-zine he calls Beat to a Pulp. How could it not be good? (Dec. 15th )

Writers On The River

2008-11-07T11:42:00.003-05:00

Detroit Noir editors E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking are taking part this Sunday in the 10th Annual Writers On The River Book Fair in Monroe, MI.

Check it out, won't you? I cannot attend, and my heart flutters at the thought of those two wandering unsupervised near a body of water.

The relevant details are here.

Double Feature: Degenerate Gamblers

2008-10-30T12:32:00.002-04:00

I could not stand Matthew Broderick when he was young; after Election, I’m cheered whenever he waddles onto the screen. Since bulking up and slowing down, he’s become ridiculously smooth and low-key, a great comic actor. His boyish face, changing slowly from one bland expression to the next, makes for a perfect mask for the degenerate gambler he plays in Finding Amanda. There are some comedy set pieces in the film, but that’s when the film is least funny (with the exception of Steve Coogan’s first scene). The real laughs are kind of painful, but it’s funny nevertheless to watch the matter-of-fact way Broderick lies to everyone. When he develops an interest in his runaway niece Brittany Snow, a twenty-year old prostitute, it is also seems natural that there’s nothing sexual about it: Being interested in anyone is a new experience for him. The small-group swing and light tone is a perfect mask for a lonely and cutting little movie. Lose the scenes with the wacky dealer and the funny pimp and you’d have a minor gem.

In Cassandra’s Dream, the indispensible Tom Wilkinson has a small role which haunts the entire film, much as he did in Michael Clayton. Here, it’s the moment of rage his character allows himself (directed at Colin Ferrell; the audience sympathizes) that stays in the mind, and keeps the movie from drifting away. It’s noir, all right, but held at a distance, with pretty surfaces and a soundtrack by Phillip Glass and characters theatrically declaiming what’s eating them, and Woody Allen just doesn’t have the stomach for this high-style low-life stuff the way David Mamet does. Oh, listen, it’s better than I’m making it sound. Recommended.

Former Detroit Mayor Reports To Jail Today

2008-10-28T11:57:00.005-04:00

I’m tempted to say that I will miss him…

How could I not? In some ways, the last six years in Detroit have been like living inside a really good James Ellroy novel.

…but he won’t be gone that long.

Upon his release: Talk radio show? Pulpit? Both?

(Wikipedia has the Kwame Kilpatrick story well-covered.)

Thurston Ray

2008-10-27T15:47:00.004-04:00

This is the first of two stories that appeared on the Muzzle Flash site, which is No More.

The ground above, the sky below.

Lloyd looked through the spiderweb crack in the windshield and the dead branches and ditchwater that crowded it and thought the horizon was the strangest thing he had ever seen.

He fell back to sleep for a minute.

He woke up still behind the wheel of the overturned Lincoln, suspended a few inches below the seat by the seatbelt and shoulder harness.

Lloyd thought of cars flipping over in movies, how they burst into flame, annihilating everything.

He braced himself and wrestled with the seatbelt release and fell onto the roof of his company car.

***

Out of habit, Lloyd reached for his business cards, which were somewhere else, with his belt and his shoes.

He wiped his palm on his pant leg before extending his hand and saying his name.

“Thurston Ray,” his cellmate said. His hand was a dead fish.

***

Thurston Ray was Drunk and Disorderly. He was a gangly local kid with hair that hung in his eyes, jeans gone in the knees, and dirty fingernails.

“How’dya get soaked?”

“I ran,” Lloyd said. Thurston Ray beamed at him. “I ran into a field, but the moon was behind me, and I ran into a fucking swamp.”

“Pond,” Thurston Ray said, and laughed.

***

After Lloyd vomited, he began to worry. He worried for his job with Sunblessed Seed. He needed to get out of the lockup, see to the car repair himself, phone in excuses to his regional manager and to the farmers and greenhouse owners expecting him the next few days.

He could be released on his own recognizance if he paid the bail, Thurston told him; but Lloyd was cash poor, thanks to the titty club his last customer had insisted on visiting.

Thurston Ray had a proposition, which began, “Let me call my mother.”

***

Thurston Ray’s mother was nineteen at the outside. She had short-cropped hair the color of beets, and a wide mouth. She wore capri pants that could have been a tattoo.

The desk cop knew her, Lloyd thought, but he couldn’t say for certain.

In the parking lot all she said was “That’s eight-fifty.”

Lloyd climbed in the aging Camaro and gave the name of his bank.

***

“Fuck!” Thurston Ray’s mother said, shaking the gun at him.

Lloyd explained about his credit limit, slowly, carefully, but she did not want to hear about it.

He had been able to extract enough cash to pay his own bail and Thurston’s – twice over – but fell short of the sum Thurston had, in his phone call from the police station, instructed her to extort.Her bitterness over this shortfall seemed heartfelt. Lloyd guessed the kids planned to blow town on their profit from his misery, and he felt a tremor of the empathy that had led him to discuss his circumstances with Thurston Ray in the first place: for he was also a drunk trying to get down the road.

“What about tomorrow?” she said.

“Tomorrow?”

“Can you get more money out of the ATM tomorrow?”

***

Her name, she said, was Kimberley.

It started when, not wanting to let him out of her sight, she followed him into the motel bathroom.

They were drinking heavily and he could not say how he got the gun away from her.

At 4 AM, he moved her to the trunk of the Camaro.

He parked in the woods, vomited, walked to the other motel in town, and took a room.

***

He drank more and used the phone. He had the Lincoln towed from the impound to the town’s sole garage. He called missed appointments and was mellifluous and cajoling. He was on his game, on the phone.

***

He drank more and used the phone. The garage said their man was devoting all his time to the Lincoln . He called his office, forgot to mute the violent movie on HBO, slurred on “Good morning”, and hung up.

***

On the fourth day he walked to the garage. “Still waiting on a part,” he was told by the mechanic, a gangly local kid with hair that hung in his eyes, jeans gone in the knees, and dirty fingernails.

Muzzle Flash RIP

2008-10-27T11:42:00.004-04:00

Muzzle Flash has followed Murdaland and Demolition and Hard Luck Stories (and Flashing in the Gutters, and...) to the netherworld.

Hopefully Plots With Guns and Thug Lit will soldier on.

Thanks and best of luck to MF editor DZ Allen.

The two stories of mine that DZ was kind enough to accept for Muzzle Flash will turn up here soon.

Hardboiled v. Noir

2008-10-21T13:47:00.004-04:00

Hardboiled: "Somebody's going to pay for this."
Noir: "I am going to pay for this."

EVENT: Wednesday, Temperance, MI

2008-10-20T12:28:00.004-04:00

I thought the Detroit Noir editors were kidding when they asked me to join them in temperance.

After a few moments of ugly confusion, though, we got things straightened out:

Detroit Noir editors John C. Hocking and E.J. Olsen, along with contributor Joe Boland, will be speaking at the Bedford Branch of the Monroe County Library.

The event takes place on Wednesday, October 22nd, and starts at 7 p.m.
We’ll talk about the book, Joe will read from his work, and we’ll take questions afterward.

We’ll also have books for sale, so please join us!

The Bedford Branch is located at 8575 Jackman Rd. in Temperance, MI.
Call the branch for more details at (734) 847-6747.

The Nightstand

2008-10-17T12:37:00.001-04:00

Read:
The Moving Target, Ross MacDonald
Devil in a Blue Dress, Walter Mosley
A Diet of Treacle, Lawrence Block
Shooters, Terrill Lankford
Slide, Jason Starr & Ken Bruen
Fright, Cornell Woolrich
Consider The Lobster, David Foster Wallace
Protocol For A Kidnapping, Oliver Bleeck

Reading:
Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker
Born Standing Up, Steve Martin

Re-Read:
Put A Lid On It, Donald Westlake

Re-Reading:
Deadly Honeymoon, Lawrence Block

On-Deck:
The First Quarry, Max Allan Collins
The World in Six Songs, Daniel J. Levitin

A Character in Two Sentences

2008-10-15T08:59:00.001-04:00

Joanie settled in with her face in her palms and her eyes shining and for a while I said whatever came to mind. Joanie loved stories –- she probably lived her life the way she did because she loved stories –- but she didn’t necessarily listen to them that closely.

--Max Phillips, Fade To Blonde (p.149)

RIP Eddie Brinkman, 1941-2008

2008-10-07T12:05:00.001-04:00

Nobody Home

2008-10-06T12:18:00.003-04:00

I wrote this flash fiction in July and sent it to Muzzle Flash. I didn’t hear back from editor DZ Allen and, in fact, the Muzzle Flash site went dormant for a month or more. (DZ recently resurfaced there, explaining -- possibly tongue-in-cheek, possibly not -- that he’d been locked up.) Long and short of it, the story is probably not Muzzle Flash material anyway, and I don’t know of anywhere else to send it -- so I’m putting it up here, because I need some action.

NOBODY HOME

Devin was supposed to be looking for a job, but Rachel wasn’t convinced. He never got out of bed before she left for work, and when she came home, to an empty apartment, the TV was warm to the touch, the game controller in a different spot. When he returned in the evening, after she’d eaten dinner alone, there was always beer on his breath and smoke in his clothes.

The promise to look for work was ripped out of him on Valentine’s Day, and now Mother’s Day was around the corner. Rachel tried once again to convince him to work at the florist, just for the holiday.

“We always need delivery help for Mother’s Day. It’s something. They pay cash!”

“Cash?”

“I told you last time. Five, six bucks a signature.”

“Five bucks,” Devin said.

“You know your way around,” Rachel said. “You could make ten, twelve deliveries an hour, sixty, seventy bucks.”

“What happens if there’s nobody home?”

“You try next door, on either side, across the street. Get someone to sign for it. We have these red tags for the front door that say, Flowers for you, you weren’t home, we left them with – and there’s a space where you write the address.”

“What if nobody’ll sign for ‘em?”

“Yellow tag for the door that says, Call us, we’ll bring your flowers back when you’re home.” She could see Devin was losing interest.

“Then you gotta make a second trip for five bucks,” he said.

Rachel and the other floral designers usually ran those deliveries back out on their way home, for no extra money, but she didn’t say anything more to Devin. She knew he wouldn’t understand: People working together, busy times, pulling more weight than usual.

Ann, one of the designers, was the first person to guess Rachel was pregnant. They were greening the stupid FTD Mother’s Day baskets, production-line style, and she caught Rachel sobbing.

“I am,” Rachel said. It was the first time she’d told anyone at all.

Ann told her to go home.

Go: That much sounded good to Rachel. She washed her face in the restroom and walked out to the garage, where the temp drivers shuffled around with maps and clipboards and boxed roses. They were drinkers and deadbeats, and she admitted to herself that Devin wouldn’t have looked out of place among them.

A funeral spray she’d made before starting on the FTD crap was still here. Hard to get a five-dollar signature from a dead man, she guessed. She carried it to the company’s panel van.

At the funeral home, the name of the deceased didn’t appear on the blackboard in the delivery room. It was late in the day, visitations in progress, but she pushed through the door that opened into the main hallway off the parlors, to double check.

The first parlor on the left was unoccupied, and Rachel ducked in, sat on a couch. The empty stillness promised quiet, but she could hear a constant low murmur of voices from the other rooms. It was not that different from sitting alone in the apartment.

What kind of home did she have?

It was night when the designers finished stocking the cooler with arrangements. The deadbeats had cashed out, left behind the usual half-dozen soggy-looking packages. Rachel took two with addresses on streets she recognized, said something reassuring to Ann, and carried the flowers to her car.

The people at her first stop had seen the door tag and phoned, expected her; the second stop was a stab in the dark. The house was in a neighborhood where friends had lived when she was little: Shingle Victorians and Tudors on large lots along the curving streets, separated from the city grid on three sides by a shaded creek. She’d daydreamed about living here when she grew up.

There were lights on inside the house as she pulled up to the detached garage. When she got out of the car, the lights on the ground floor went out, and lights came on upstairs. She hurried to the side door to the house, hoping to catch them before they went to bed, when she saw the yellow tag hanging from the doorknob, bright as day.

So they returned home and walked fifteen yards out of their way to use the front door… Odd, but there were many other explanations, and it was the end of a long day. She rang the doorbell.

A floodlight on the garage clicked on, showing her car to the people in the house. Long minutes passed before the room behind the door filled with light. Then a silhouette loomed behind yellow half-length curtains no hand reached to part.

Rachel forced a smile and gave the package a meager hoist, a gesture she hoped looked friendly, even as cold sweat glued her blouse to her spine.

Devin opened the door, stood there with a weighted-down bag in his hand.

He was listening to me, Rachel thought. Yellow tags. He was paying attention.

Rachel still wore her florist apron. Blade in the pocket.

Devin never let go of the doorknob. When he finally dropped the bag, heavy crystal shattered and spilled at her feet