The Pocket Wife by Susan Crawford Page A

welcoming gesture with his arm as the Steinhausers’ across-the-street neighbors swarm over the threshold. Clearly Dana has underestimated. There are at least twenty-five people milling through her house, oozing into the kitchen, where she stands dishing up plates of scrambled eggs and dying for a Bloody Mary. She hasn’t given a brunch in years, and after today, she promises herself, she never will again.
    She glances up from the skillet to see Peter standing in the doorway, his hair sticking up on top. She thinks fleetingly of a rooster. “What?”
    â€œOh,” he says, “nothing, really. The office sent a clerk over with a discovery for a trial we’re working on.”
    â€œWhere is he? Or she?”
    Peter backs up, takes a quick look at the living room. “She. And she’s on the couch,” he says, “talking to Wanda. Can you manage for a few minutes while I look it over—make sure it’s all there?”
    â€œ What trial?” Dana snaps, but the eggs are sputtering and crinkling at their edges, so she turns back to the stove. By the time she takes them out to the table, Peter has disappeared and Wanda is alone on the couch. Lon Nguyen makes his way through the crowds, and Dana remembers the signs he posted on telephone poles and stuck on the outsides of mailboxes several months before. LON NGUYEN, BLOCK CAPTAIN , they said, and there was a phone number, presumably his, that she’d not bothered to jot down before she tossed the thing into the recycling bin. He isn’t exactly a walking advertisement for Neighborhood Watch groups today—notat this makeshift wake for the bludgeoned, dead component of his block.
    She picks up a fake sausage. “Sorta sausage,” Jamie calls it, and she chews on the rubbery morsel, swallows it down with a thimbleful of orange juice, all that’s left after the sudden gush of guests. She spots Ronald by the bookcase in the hall and makes her way over to where he thumbs through a book. He’s inches from the bedroom, and his eyes aren’t really on the book. They’re scanning again, as if he’s looking for something.
    â€œDid you have enough to eat?” She stares down at where he’s squatting on the floor.
    â€œYes.” He nods. “Good sausage.”
    â€œDid you try the eggs?”
    â€œI’m vegan,” he says. “You have some interesting books.”
    â€œI do.” Dana glances at the title in his hand. “But Bugs in Your Backyard isn’t really one of them. Would you like a Bloody Mary?”
    â€œYes,” he says, turning back to the book, “I’d love one.”
    Dana finds some slightly aging tomato juice in the refrigerator and adds quite a bit of vodka, along with horseradish and various herbs and spices she finds in a cabinet. It’s getting noisy in the dining room. She swishes everything around inside the two glasses with her index finger, making her way slowly through the crowds in the three rooms between her and Ronald, who now seems focused on the bookshelf for something more illuminating.
    â€œThanks.” He sips at his drink. “Do you know all these people?”
    â€œNo. In fact . . .” Dana surveys the living room from where she leans against the wall. “I know Wanda and her boys and Lon Nguyen, and that’s about it.”
    â€œI’ve seen the guy in the Dockers,” Ronald says. “He lives across the street from us. From me. And Nguyen, of course. He’s the one who started our Neighborhood Watch.”
    Dana nods. “Which really needs to be more . . . um, watchful.”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œBy the way,” Dana says. She leans over so she’s nearly whispering in Ronald’s ear. “Do you have Celia’s phone with you?”
    â€œNo,” he says, back at the book. “Why? What is it with you and Celia’s fucking phone?” Dana sees he’s suddenly stopped