Maybe the Moon

snapshot it provided of her life.
    I’ve been pampering her all day to the best of my ability, dispensing her favorite instant coffee (Irish Mocha Mist—gag) and reading out loud from trashy magazines. I knew she required attention more than anything, so I called Neil this morning and canceled our lunch date, filling him in on the details. He got it immediately, as I knew he would, and even offered to swing by with takeout and leave us to our girl talk. Tempted though I was by a chance to see him again, I thought it best he stay away for a day or two. This is no time for Renee to be reminded of Neil’s surpassing sweetness.
    Like most of Renee’s calamities, it happened on a date. This one was set up by Lorrie, her ditzy pal from The Fabric Barn, who knew a guy who had a friend who’d been “out of circulation for a while” (whatever that means—prison, if you ask me) and wanted his ashes hauled in the worst kind of way. Lorrie didn’t know this, of course, or claims she didn’t, and had no misgivings about leaving Renee alone with this dude after the four of them went out drinking in Venice. Renee insists he was “a perfect gentleman” all the way back to the Valley and didn’t show signs of actual derangement until they got here and parked in the driveway and she informed him as nicely as she knew how that the date was over.
    At first he pleaded with her, she says, playing pitiful. When that didn’t work, he exploded in righteous anger, depicting himself as the victim of false advertising—Renee’s poor jiggly bod being the billboard, I suppose, and he the innocent motorist who’d been conned into taking the wrong exit off the freeway. From there it degenerated into “dirty words,” the shortest of which—“Cunt!”—slashed through the shrubbery like hedge clippers and invaded my bedroom, waking me from a light sleep. I heard a car door open and close, then another, and a sickening, high-pitched scream, unmistakably Renee’s. I flipped on the light, rolled out of bed naked, and bolted—or my own best imitation of that—to the front door.
    Yanking the cord that enables me to open said door, I eased out onto the little brick porch. Renee lay on the lawn next to the driveway, propped up on one elbow and whimpering softly, having just been hit. Her dream date stood over her, snarling and cursing under his breath, a surprisingly skinny creature considering the ferocity of his voice. He had a pale, chinless, ferrety face that might have struck me as pitiful under other circumstances. Under these, it seemed like depravity itself.
    “ OK, cowboy, get the fuck outa here !”
    This was me, thank you very much. I don’t know where that cowboy shit came from or who I thought I was—Thelma and/or Louise, I guess—but the sheer audacity of the act produced thedesired effect. The guy wheeled around to find the source of this angry chipmunk voice and discovered under the porch light a fat child with tits and pubic hair, watching his every move.
    “I mean it,” I said. “I’ve already called the police.”
    As if in response to this invocation of authority, a light came on at the Bob Stoate residence. Renee’s date glanced toward it, then back at me, then down at Renee, who was stumbling to her feet finally, no longer whimpering. The mere sight of her naked rescuer had apparently been enough to stun her into silence.
    “Do you know this asshole’s name?” I asked as she hobbled toward the stoop.
    She made a feeble sound that meant yes.
    “Get inside, then.”
    She slumped past me into the house. Her assailant muttered something unintelligible—I doubt seriously that even he knew what it meant—and climbed into his car, slamming the door shut violently. By the time the little worm had scratched off into the street, spewing gravel, Mr. Bob Stoate, the Toyota salesman, had appeared on his own doorstep, wrapped in a terry-cloth Lakers robe and brandishing a pistol.
    “It’s OK,” I yelled to him. “He’s gone.”
    He peered at me, aghast, across his driveway.
    At this point modesty seemed superfluous. “Sorry about the outfit,” I said.
    “Did he hurt you, Cady?”
    This is just about the nicest thing anyone from that house has ever said to me, and I came close to being touched and responding in kind, except that I wasn’t really dressed for it. “No,” I told him. “I’m fine. I think he hit Renee.” And I retreated into the house, feeling exposed for the first time.
    Renee was