Read Online A Crime in the Neighborhood by Suzanne Berne - Free Book Online Page B

door to call me in for dinner. She stood looking at our yard, twining her hand in her hair before she called me again. After a few moments, she walked slowly onto the dark grass, calling, “Marsha? Marsha Martian?”
    She passed close to my tree, one hand now fingering the collar of her blouse. I could see a fork of white scalp through her brown hair and a dab of ketchup on the pale inside of her arm near the elbow. Bits of wet grass stuck to her sandals. If she had only looked up and to the left, she would have seen me watching her through the crab apple leaves. But she didn’tlook up. She walked to the daylily bed and for a long time she simply stood there, smoothing her cotton skirt. At last I saw her reach into the loose collar of her blouse and lightly hold her throat.
    She looked over the hedge into our new neighbor’s yard, where his boatlike Dodge was anchored in the driveway. A light flicked on in his kitchen. “Marsha?” called my mother again, higher this time; as she spoke my name the brassy, jungly opening bars of a jazz tune wavered out from Mr. Green’s kitchen window. Across the street, the Morrises’ sprinkler began to spurt. A gray cat crept into the yard with something dangling from its mouth, then slithered into the hedge like an eel. My mother swayed a little by the daylilies, pressing the balls of her feet into the grass, her skirt brushing her bare knees.
    As I shifted in the tree to get a better look at her, pushing leaves from my face, a spiderweb ghosted over my hand and all in a single rush my mother slipped away and I lost my grip on the branch I was holding, and felt myself slide, hitting my head against another branch, and felt myself fall, and fell clear to the ground.
    The wind was knocked out of me, and for one wild, cottony moment I thought I was dead.
    By the time I sucked my breath back my mother was crouched over me, lifting me under the arms. “You’re okay,” she kept saying, panting hard. She pounded my back, beating between my shoulder blades.
    Her lips made a perfect O as I turned my face toward her.It took a good several minutes for either of us to realize that I had broken my ankle.
    In the excitement of rushing me to the hospital, where I had X rays and then got my ankle swaddled in an important-looking white plaster cast that stiffened to my knee, my mother forgot to check the mail and it wasn’t until Sunday afternoon, after we had finished eating tuna salad and rye bread and dill pickles for lunch, and she had washed the dishes, and put them away, that she found the note from my father, handwritten on a memo pad that said at the top “From the desk of Lawrence Eberhardt.”
    â€œLois,” it read. “By the time you read this I will be on The Road. Ada and I have decided to make a Go of it. I know this will be hard for you to Understand, but none of this is meant to hurt You or the kids. That is the truth. Love, Larry.”
    My father had not gone to Delaware for a real estate convention. He had not even driven back to his apartment on MacArthur Boulevard after meeting us in the mall parking lot. He did not appear at his office on Monday to sit behind his Scandia blond-wood desk with the green-shaded fake brass library lamp and the glass jar full of peppermint drops. That Saturday, after saying good-bye to us, my father picked up Ada in Bethesda and together they drove all the way to Connecticut, where they spent the night. The next day they drove to Maine and took a ferry to Nova Scotia.
    All this I discovered later. I found out about the note that night by listening in on the upstairs extension in my mother’s bedroom, with my ankle propped on a pillow, while she talked to my aunts, one after the other, on the kitchen telephone.
    â€œOh, for Pete’s sake,” said Aunt Fran, when the note was read to her. “Oh, Lois. I’m sorry, but this is ridiculous.”
    â€œIt may be ridiculous to