Mrs. Saint and the Defectives: A Novel Read online

  After what felt to Markie like an hour, he finally stopped crying, sniffed, and rolled onto his back again, folding an arm behind his head and looking at Markie with swollen, bloodshot eyes.

  “I have an idea about a punishment. It’s not purely grounding, though, so I don’t know what you’ll say.”

  “Try me,” she said.

  “I thought I could get a job and give the money I earn to Mr. Levin. The police said some of the guys are going to have to pay something to him anyway. But I don’t know if it’ll be enough to cover all the damages. Mr. Levin told me he paid two of his employees a thousand dollars to go down there in the middle of the night and cover it up, so by the time anyone came in early today, it would look like it always did.”

  So, Markie thought, Mrs. Saint had been lying after all. Frédéric couldn’t have seen the graffiti when he went for the paper that morning. Jesse went on.

  “He probably could’ve gotten it fixed for a lot cheaper, but he had them paint the entire outside instead of just covering the graffiti. He didn’t want people to look at the store and see something had been covered up. He didn’t want people to guess at what someone might’ve written—”

  “Oh my God! Did they write—?” Markie started, her chest suddenly filled with ice.

  “No!” Jesse shot up from the floor onto his knees. “None of us even knew their . . . background. The guys were just being idiots, doing their usual tags, nothing to do with the Levins at all. And I would never! Do you think I would—?”

  “No,” she said. “But I didn’t know about the others.”

  “They wouldn’t, either,” he said, still on his knees. “Anyway, I don’t know if the money will cover all of that. And even if it does, I want to pay him back, too.” He looked up at her, his eyes pleading. “When I’m not working I’d be at home, grounded. I should be grounded—I want to be. I’m just asking to be ungrounded for, like, a few hours a day, a few days a week, until I’ve given him the thousand dollars. And in exchange for being let out for work, I’ll be grounded for the whole time it takes me to pay him, even if that’s a longer time than you would’ve said.”

  “It’ll take you a long time to earn that much money on your own,” Markie said. “Months. Do you think the other guys will want to pitch in? The ones who don’t end up with restitution orders, I mean? Trevor?”

  He twisted his lips. “Doubt it.”

  “Do you want to ask?”

  “Nah. Pretty sure they’ll think it’s a stupid idea.”

  She pressed her top two teeth hard against her bottom lip. And this doesn’t make you reconsider whether these are kids you want to be friends with? But she said nothing. Push too hard to get kids out of your child’s life, and he’ll only pull even harder to keep them in it.

  “So are you saying yes?” he asked.

  “I want to hear what the judge says first,” Markie said. “It’s not a given he’ll let you off completely, and he might have something in mind of his own.”

  “Trevor’s dad talked to a lawyer,” Jesse said. “He said he’s, like, ninety-nine percent sure we’re going to be fine.” He started to smile, but then he seemed to think better of it. “I mean if the judge lets us off easy.”

  “Grounded,” Markie said, “except for going to and from work. And before your grounding is over, we’re going to have a long discussion about how much time you’ll be spending with those older boys. The ones who led the entire operation.”

  Jesse snapped his head up, his mouth open, ready to protest. He seemed to talk himself out of this, too, and instead he said quietly, “They’re not bad guys, Mom.”

  “Still.”

  He turned away from her, and she could see the muscles in his jaw working as he struggled to control his emotions. “They’re also my ride to school and back. Not to mention the only people I really know at school. And Trevor’s still going to be with them all the time, so if I can’t be around them—”

  “We don’t have to do this now,” she said.

  “It’s not like they’re getting pulled into the police station every week. So I’m not sure why . . .”

  His voice had changed from the plaintive tone he had used to tell her about the Levins to the touchy one that usually signaled an impending day or two of radio silence. It wasn’t much consolation to Markie that she had the upper hand here. It had been a terrible weekend, but there was a silver lining within her grasp—a newfound closeness between them, a greater degree of mutual respect, where she didn’t lower the hammer like her father would have, and in return, he didn’t shut her out completely. If she kept on about Trevor and the guys, she would strip all the shininess out. “You know what,” she said, “let’s just forget about it for now. I was thinking out loud, mostly, and I shouldn’t have done that. We can talk about it later, when you’re done being grounded. Okay?”

  He turned back to her, a grateful half smile on his lips. “Yeah,” he said.

  Bullet dodged, Markie thought. For now, and possibly forever. By the time he found someone willing to hire a fourteen-year-old, then got in enough hours to earn $1,000, Trevorandtheguys would hopefully have tired of waiting for him and dropped him from the group. She didn’t believe for a second they were the only kids he knew at school, nor did she worry that if he weren’t part of their little posse, he would spend the rest of high school friendless.

  “The thing is,” Jesse said on Monday night, coming up from the basement, “there aren’t a lot of people who’ll hire ninth graders.” He had appeared before the judge that afternoon, and to their tremendous relief, he was given a firm warning but nothing more, his file destroyed. Free to charge ahead with his voluntary restitution plan, he had been on his computer most of the evening, looking for jobs.

  Markie looked up from the dining room table, where she was filling out her log sheet and organizing files for the next day. “True,” she said, trying not to gloat. Operation Keep Him Away from the Bad Kids was proceeding exactly as she had hoped.

  “So I think my best bet is Trevor’s dad.”

  Her heart sank. “Trevor’s dad will hire you?”

  “Yeah. He owns a lumberyard. Trevor works there sometimes, like weekends and in the summer. I just talked to him, and he said a couple of guys quit and his dad could use some help. It’s a lot more, you know, physical than I really want, but the pay is, like, amazing. I could pay Mr. Levin super fast.”

  “I’m not so sure—”

  “It would only be me and Trevor,” he said, rushing in. “None of the others. And we’d be working the entire time, except for, like, a five-minute break now and then, which we wouldn’t even leave the yard for. I’d go straight there and come straight home after. Trevor’s in trouble, too, so he’s not allowed to go anywhere but school, work, and home anyway. And I promise I’ll walk Angel every day before school, like I did today, so you won’t have to deal with her.”

  He had taken the dog out for so long that morning that Markie worried he might be late for his first class. He made it in time, though, and Angel was so tired from the outing she dozed most of the day. She fussed twice, and Markie put her on the tie-out, but there were no hijinks—the exhausted dog trotted obediently from the crate to the leash and back again. Markie could hardly complain—it was good for her to get up and move around every few hours anyway, and the brief interruptions hadn’t interfered with her ability to get through a respectable number of files.

  Jesse looked at her imploringly, and she turned away, unable to withstand his earnestness. He had found himself a job, and a physical one at that—talk about self-imposed penance! How many teenagers would go to such lengths to right their wrongs? What reasonable parent would stand in the way?

  She tried to stifle her disappointment. This was not the months-long job search she had been hoping for, the long delay she was counting on to keep him safe from the influence of the other boys. He would be plugged into the group as much as ever if he spent afternoons and weekends with Trevor. So much for distance,
for them getting tired of waiting for him.

  “So can I?” he asked.

  Markie racked her brain for alternatives, anyone who might hire a fourteen-year-old. People she knew from their former life—she would force herself back over that creaky bridge if she had to. People Kyle knew.

  “Oh!” she said, having suddenly remembered Kyle’s friend Danny, who owned an office supply store.

  Kyle had shown up with him at dinnertime about a year earlier, explaining, as she hastily set another place at the table and redistributed their three-person meal among four plates, that they had been pals since high school and lost touch. “Until we literally smacked into each other in an aisle in his store a few hours ago! And I couldn’t very well just shake his hand and say, ‘See you in another twenty years.’ So I dragged him out for a few drinks and told him he had no choice but to come have dinner with us.”

  Danny, who had looked sheepish when Kyle claimed “a few drinks,” also seemed surprised that his old friend hadn’t called or texted his wife hours earlier to let her know about their dinner guest. But Markie told him it was fine, he should stay, and by the time the meal was over, he was clasping a hand on Jesse’s shoulder and saying the boy should look him up if he ever needed a job.

  “You seem a lot more upright than your old man,” he’d joked.

  Kyle had laughed, too, and said, “No, really, I meant it—I’ll get the next round for sure,” but Markie had a feeling that the afternoon’s drinks weren’t all Danny was talking about.

  “I have an idea,” she told Jesse. “But I need to check into it first.”

  “So I should tell Trevor no?”

  “For now,” she said.

  Markie sent her text the moment Jesse returned to the basement: Kyle, we really need to talk about Jesse. Call me. She had tried him a few times on Sunday, to no avail, and Jesse had had no luck reaching him earlier in the day before they left for court.

  Two hours later, as she was getting ready for bed, her phone dinged with his response.

  Been tied up. Call you first thing in the AM.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Markie checked her watch after Jesse left for school the next morning: it was just after seven. Knowing her ex and his loose interpretation of the phrase “first thing,” she predicted she could get a few hours of work done before she heard from him, so she ushered Angel into her crate, settled into a chair at the dining room table, and opened her first file.

  She hadn’t even read two sentences when the crying began. “Hush,” she called. “Go to sleep.”

  The crying didn’t stop, and by the end of the first paragraph, it changed to a high-pitched howl. Markie cursed her own softness—she had let Jesse get away with only a half-hour walk this morning, since it had seemed darker and colder than the day before. No more mercy, she told herself. He would need to start wearing a thick sweatshirt and a reflective vest from now on.

  “Fine,” she said, unable to ignore the howling, “but just for a few minutes.”

  In the family room, she unlatched the crate, and the prisoner, overjoyed at her release, leaped up. The force knocked Markie backward, and her tailbone hit the wood floor, followed by the back of her head. She gasped in pain as the dog trotted over her and tore through the kitchen. Markie could hear the sound of nails scratching on hardwood and furniture being knocked into—and over—as Angel made her way past the dining room table and into the living room.

  “Angel! Come!” Markie begged feebly, in too much agony to yell.

  She eased herself to her feet, using the arm of the couch as a crutch, in time to see Angel shoot around the corner from the front hall, her paws paddling frantically as she lost her footing on the kitchen floor.

  “Crate,” Markie pleaded, pointing.

  And praying—there was no way she would be able to chase the dog down if she took off again. Angel, thank goodness, obeyed, and Markie slid the latch closed. “You can whine and cry all you want. You’re not coming out again until Jesse gets home.”

  As if on cue, the dog pressed her snout through the top bars of the enclosure and howled. Hands over her ears, Markie limped back to the dining room and tried to resume working. Ten minutes later, the dog hadn’t let up, and Markie, cursing, carried her file upstairs. She closed her bedroom door and lay on the bed on her stomach—it was a better position for her bruised tailbone anyway—and started over on the first sentence.

  The howling continued, and Markie turned her radio on, cranking the volume to drown out the dog. The music hurt her already-sore head, though, and after fifteen minutes she realized she still hadn’t made it past the first paragraph. This wasn’t the route to a healthy paycheck or to maintaining her work-from-home status.

  Glaring at her too-thin bedroom door, she wondered if she dared let Angel out long enough to fold up the crate and carry it down to Jesse’s room. It didn’t seem possible in her condition, and anyway, she remembered lying in bed and hearing the gunfire and shouting from Jesse’s video games through the heating vents. The boy had quickly agreed to keep the sound off. She could expect no such cooperation from the dog.

  She was staring, unseeing, at her file and wondering how she was ever going to earn a living under these conditions, when Kyle called. “You wanted to talk?”

  Angel howled again, and Markie winced. “Can you meet me someplace?” she asked. “Somewhere over here would be great—I’ve got a lot of work to do, and I’m behind already.”

  “Yeah,” he said, drawing out the word, and she braced herself for a complication. “The thing is, I’d need to get a cab, so distance is a bit of an issue. Can you come here?”

  “What happened to your car?”

  “Long story, but there’s a coffee shop near my apartment. On Water Street. You know the one?”

  She thought of the stack of unread files on her table and sighed. “Meet you in thirty minutes?”

  He stood when she reached the table, reaching his arms out stiffly, awkwardly, more Dr. Frankenstein’s monster than ex-spouse. She had no idea what he expected her to do—turn herself sideways and squeeze between them?—so she leaned around and pecked him on the cheek. They put their orders in with the barista, and when they sat down, Markie apologized that she didn’t have much time, so she was just going to jump right in.

  “Brace yourself,” she warned, and then she described everything that had happened in the past three and a half days, from the thump in the night to the banging on the door to the squad car, the new dog, the judge, and blessedly, the warning and the destroyed juvenile file. She relived it all in the telling, and as she spoke, her heart pounded, and she pressed her thumb and forefinger against the bridge of her nose to stop the tears that were threatening. When she was finished, she looked up through her fingers to find Kyle was mirroring her—finger and thumb against the bridge of his nose, head down.

  “I know,” she said gently. “It’s a lot to take in. And so disappointing. I cried—”

  It was then that she realized he wasn’t crying. He was laughing.

  “You think it’s funny?” she said, and a couple at a nearby table looked over. She ignored them and repeated the question, louder this time.

  He looked up at her, guilty, and tried to stop laughing.

  “I don’t believe this!”

  “Oh, come on,” he said, reaching for her hand. She moved it away. “Nothing happened to him, right? Record destroyed, you said? So then, no harm, no foul. And you’ve got to admit . . . I mean, think about it! He’s hidden behind the dumpster, completely out of view. Safe! But he has to be all God-and-country about it and give himself up! I mean, it’s funny! He couldn’t be a criminal if he tried!”

  Markie stood, purse in hand. “I didn’t drive all the way—”

  “No!” he said. “Don’t go! I’ll stop!” He stood, too, and took her by the arms. “Please. I’m sorry. It’s just so . . . classic Jesse. ‘Here I am, Officer! Arrest me, too!’ I mean, any other kid would’ve crouched down in the dark unt
il the cops left and then hightailed it out of there. And who else but Jesse would’ve come up with the idea to pay the old man back? I know he’s been cranky with you for the past few months—with both of us. But it’s times like this when a person’s mettle shows, and I’ll tell you what—our boy’s got some.”

  He pushed her gently backward and down, until she was seated again. Sitting, too, he said, “I know you were worried—are worried. But think about it. He came home crying, you said. He wants to earn a thousand dollars and give every cent of it to this man. This is not a kid who can stomach crime. He’s wielded his last can of spray paint, I guarantee it.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Markie said. “But I do know I’m not thrilled about him working with this . . . Trevor. So I was thinking maybe your friend Danny could hire him at his store. To stock shelves or whatever. Remember when he was over? He loved Jesse, and when he was leaving, he told him—”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said, dragging a palm across his chin, “I’m not sure that’s going to work.”

  “Why not? Can you at least ask him before you—?”

  “The thing is, Danny and I are . . . sort of on the outs at the moment.”

  “Why?”

  “He says I owe him money.”

  She looked at the ceiling, then back at him. “Which means you do owe him money.”

  “So he says.”

  “Is there some reason you won’t just pay him back?” she asked, but before he could answer, she stopped herself. “Never mind,” she said. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m done hearing your lame excuses—”

  “Can we not do this here?” he asked quietly, looking around the shop.

  Markie slumped in her chair. “Fine. Do you have any other friends who might hire him? Ones who’re still talking to you, I mean?”

  “Seriously, Markie. Can you not? With the attitude?”

  “I need help here, Kyle, and so does your son.”

  “Kyle?” the barista called from the counter, and Markie watched as he jumped up and flashed the woman his most enchanting smile. At the counter, he leaned toward her to pick up the lattes and said something in a low voice. The barista threw her head back, laughing, and said, “I can see I’m going to have to keep my eye on you.” Markie turned away.