Shallow Graves

heard his voice. She saw the glossy dark scar. A machine gun. An Oldsmobile. You’ve lived here how long?
    Keith rolled off. She pressed her legs together tightly and stretched. They lay together for five minutes. (Nothing, nothing, think about nothing!) Then slowly Meg sat up. A local ? she thought angrily. He thought I was a local?
    Who’d lived here ten years?
    “Love you,” Keith said.
    “Me too.”
    She sat for a moment then saw her face in the mirror. A confused, frightened look in her eyes. She smiled at her husband and forced all thoughts of the location scout out of her mind. She swung out of bed and walked into the hall.
    The bathroom was carpeted in black shag. The shower curtain was black with red roses on it and the walls were pink. (Meg couldn’t decide whether the decor was eighteenth-century country or Victorian bordello.) She shook her head and tossed her light blond hair with her fingers. It stuck out wildly in all directions from yesterday’s spray and the electric curlers she set it with. It would take half an hour of diligent work to turn herself into a blond, bouffanted, real estate agent.
    She fixated on the mirror. Her lips had always bothered her. They were nearly flat planes and she used two subtly different shades of lipstick to give them dimension. And, when she remembered, she would keep the bottom lip curled forward slightly.This tended to make her look more pouty than sensuous, but, in her experience, men liked pouting women as much as sexy ones.
    Out of the shower, drying her thin legs and waist, Meg stepped on the scale automatically, though she’d never weighed a pound over 105 since a month after Sam was born. She combed her hair straight, pulled on her robe.
    She called down the hall, “Sam, let’s go, honey.”
    In the bedroom Keith was still in bed. He seemed asleep. As she passed he groped playfully for her butt. She slapped his hand gently then tugged at his arm. “Up, up!” she called. “The world awaits.”
    He groaned.
    Meg walked down the stairs. She didn’t put on her slippers until she stepped into the kitchen. She liked the touch of the carpet on her feet in the morning.
    Fifteen minutes later, rolls were warm, coffee was hot. Meg was sipping from a heavy mug and wondering where they got the crazy names for kids’ breakfast cereal when Sam came thumping down the stairs. He was his father’s son in many ways. In the morning he was groggy, puffy faced, his sandy hair going at odd angles. But unlike Keith (a pudgy boy forty years ago, a pudgy man now), Sam was lean and tall.
    And brilliant. This gift was from his father. If Meg had said prayers, she would have thanked the generic all-powerful spirit she nearly believed in that Sam had received the gene for Keith’s brains, not hers.
    Meg Torrens, with two years’ community college, was going to be the mother of Samuel K. Torrens, Ph.D., cum laude.
    Keith came down the stairs slowly, wearing knife-crease gray slacks, a white dress shirt, a green-and-black striped tie.
    She poured coffee. He said, “Thanks, darling,” and started working on a sweet roll.
    They paid the premium for the New York Times but Keith preferred the Cleary Leader, which if you read it regularly would really scare the hell out of you, and make you think that Dutchess County was filled with nothing but murderers, child molesters and the mournful classmates of teenagers who’d driven the family car into trains while tanked up on their father’s vodka. Today was Tuesday, publication day, and he read the thin paper hungrily, boning up on local gossip.
    “Hey, Mom,” Sam said, sitting forward on his chair, making valleys in his cereal. “What happens when a duck flies upside down?”
    Meg knew that success as a mother, just like success as a politician, is largely dependent on cheerful insincerity. She turned to him, thought a moment, then frowned. “I have no idea. What?”
    “He quacks up!” He laughed. Meg did too and wiped a bit of Smurf off his cheek. Keith grunted a laugh and ruffled the boy’s hair.
    Sam dodged away and shook his hair back into place. “Dad!”
    Keith looked at him for a moment, an affectionate gaze, then turned back to the paper. There was a shyness about Keith, even with his wife and son, and he didn’t look up as he said, “If I don’t have to work, how about going to the game on Saturday?” It was as though he was afraid they’d turn him down.He added, “They’re playing . . .” He looked