Problem Child (Jane Doe #2) - Victoria Helen Stone Page 0,35

rarely had fresh food in the house. They just didn’t bother because they could always get in the car and pick up a meal for themselves. They also never threw food away, no matter how old it was. The oldest leftovers were reserved for me and Ricky when my parents were heading out for one of their weekend casino trips. “Still good” was a common refrain, even for old, hard fries at the bottom of a greasy bag. “There’s fries in the fridge!” my dad would shout. “They’re still good!”

Still good when fries got nasty and grainy after an hour. Still good when there was a box of macaroni my mom could have cooked up if she wanted to. Still good just because she couldn’t bother running to the store for a can of soup to feed her four-year-old before they started drinking.

These days I don’t eat fries unless they’re piping hot and crispy from the fryer. The big bag of fries on the passenger seat is already cold. By the time I get to my parents’ house they’ll be soft, the first stage of fry death. Then they’ll start drying out and hardening. I’m familiar with all the stages. Mom and Dad will keep this bag in the fridge for days, making meals out of it as long as they can. My petty spirit will linger with them over the fridge, laughing.

“Still good,” I whisper as I pull out and head back to the two-lane highway out of town.

My phone rings, and it’s my law office, so I ignore it. I’m on emergency family leave. How dare they?

As I drift out of town, I pass the richest neighborhood in the county. The street is lined with big oak trees shading the nicest houses and the biggest yards around. A couple of these homes even have genuine in-ground pools. More of them have aboveground pools, which aren’t as nice but do offer a blue and shiny glimpse for the rest of us, like a cruel elevated mirage.

I used to covet these houses. My mouth would salivate at the sight of them. I imagined that I might seduce one of the owners—middle-aged men who were all upper management in oil companies—steal him away from his wife and install myself as stepmom to one of those blond girls who wore designer clothes to her high school classes.

But the girl and her mom would move away after the divorce, of course. They’d head into Oklahoma City and live off alimony and child support. Then I’d have the house and the pool and no stepchild. I’d lie on a cushioned lounge chair all summer, piña colada in hand, hoping my old husband had another business trip that week so I could be by myself.

I’d wanted their life so badly. And now it was strange to realize I drove past this neighborhood two or three times already without noticing it. Because the houses aren’t grand at all, not to my adult eyes. They aren’t estates. They’re just fairly average two-story houses. Maybe twenty-five hundred square feet? Nothing to scoff at, but nothing to go tying yourself to some doughy old sex addict over.

I could buy one of these places right now if I wanted to, and I definitely don’t want to. But I wanted this so much at sixteen I actually walked down that street several times one summer in booty shorts, looking for a likely conquest. I didn’t see any, but a cable guy called me over to his van to show me his dick. I wrote down his license plate and called his employer when I got home, pretending to sob breathlessly over the trauma of it all. I hope he got fired and starved to death.

Ah, memories.

Now these mansions, these dreams, with brass chandeliers in the dining rooms and two-car attached garages . . . they just look like plain old houses I’d see on any street in the Minneapolis suburbs. In fact, these may be just the kind of house my boyfriend is trying to talk me into buying, and here I am resenting him.

Life is really funny, isn’t it?

CHAPTER 10

I drift out of town past the one-stories and manufactured houses in no time, and once I reach ranchland, the power plant cloud is growing bigger on the skyline. Home fire, I see you and here I come!

There is no rich neighborhood in my little town. Hell, there’s not even a wrong side of the tracks. There are simple houses, then