Dark of the Moon

eight years now.”
    “What happened eight years ago?”
    “That was the year before I got married,” she said.
     
    S HE WENT OFF down the hall to the back bedroom, yelled, “There’s Coke in the refrigerator, there’s instant coffee, you could make it in the microwave.” He stirred around in the kitchen, looking it over, checking the refrigerator. She wasn’t a foodie, that was for sure. She had about three knives, and most of the stuff in the refrigerator looked like it had been there for weeks.
    A door in back closed: the bathroom? He got a Coke, went into the living room. An open door led into what might have been a small dining room, or television room, now converted to an office, with a desk, computer, and file cabinets. He saw a wall of family photos, stepped into the room and looked at them: found the same thin man in plaid pants in two of them, thought it might be her father.
    But she and Jim must take after Laura, because Mark Stryker really was a slight figure, except that he had the same white-blond hair of his son and daughter…
    Slid open a drawer in a file cabinet, listening for her, for a footstep, looked at some tabs—business and taxes—and pushed it shut.
    Just being snoopy now, he thought. No good could come of it. He eased back into the living room, heard a door open: “Hey. Are you going to wash my back, or what?”
     
    A LMOST STOPPED HIS HEART.
    He put the Coke down and headed back down the hall; saw her damp face and hair at the end of it, and then she pulled back inside the bathroom. And by the time he’d gotten to the bathroom, she was back inside the shower.
    He opened the shower door, and there she was, her back to him, as well as the third-greatest—he gave her an instant promotion—ass in Minnesota, and maybe on the entire Great Plains. “Oh, my God,” he said.
    “Just the back.”
    “Just the back, my sweet…”
    “Just the back,” she said. “You offered, I’m accepting.”
    “If you…”
    “Don’t you get in this shower, Virgil Flowers,” she said. “You’ll get all wet and we have to be at my mom’s in fifteen minutes and she’ll know that we’ve been up here fooling around.”
    “Gimme the soap and back up,” he said.
    He washed her water-slick back, and the third-greatest ass, and then, squatting, her legs, one at a time, working upward, and by the time he was getting done, she was hanging on to the faucet handles, and when he was done, he snatched her out of the shower and turned her around and kissed her and said, “Fuck your mama.”
    “Not my mama,” she said. “Not my mama.”
     
    T HEY WERE twenty minutes late getting to Laura Stryker’s, driving over with all the truck windows down. Joan wanted to get the smell of sex off them, she said.
    “Not as late as I might have hoped,” Joan said.
    “You weren’t complaining twelve minutes ago,” Virgil said, “unless that was your way of screaming for help.”
    “Don’t be too proud of yourself,” she said. “I’d been waiting for a long time. Bill Judd Junior could have gotten to me after all that time.”
    Virgil leaned close to her: “The fact of the matter is, you’ve gotten hold of something far beyond your simple country experience.”
    That made her laugh, and she pushed him away and said, “Next time, though, we’re going for the slow hand.”
     
    W HEN THEY GOT out of the truck, Joan said, “Stay here, but leave the doors open. Mom might smell something if we don’t air it out a little more.”
    “Jesus, Joanie, you’re an adult…”
    “It’s my mom .”
    So he left the doors open and the engine running, and stood out in the sunlight and worked up a little sweat while Joan collected Laura. In two or three minutes they were on the front porch, Laura carefully locking the door behind her.
    Laura was a handsome woman for her age, slender as her daughter, with carefully cut and tinted hair. If you were checking out mothers to see what a daughter would look like in twenty-five years, you would have taken the daughter. She got into the backseat, said, “Pleased to meet you, Virgil,” and Joan hopped into the front passenger seat and said, “That’s the first time I ever saw you lock the front door.”
    “Everybody’s locking doors now. If Janet came over after dark, and knocked, I might hide out and not answer, not until this killer’s caught,” she said.
    Joan to Virgil: “Janet’s her best friend,” and to Laura: “I don’t think you have to worry