The Pocket Wife by Susan Crawford

second napkin whatever comes to her, things she didn’t think she remembered. She writes in a tiny, slanted, barely legible scrawl, very different from her usual neat and careful writing with its closed o ’s and carefully crossed t ’s. She must be channeling, she thinks, accessing some buried part of her subconscious, where things like Celia’s heavy makeup wait to be pulled up from the murk of the day she died—the bright gash of crimson lipstick drunkenly applied, making Celia’s mouth a large, bright, crooked oblong. There was an odor, too, something vaguely familiar that Dana can’t quite place; she jots that down as well. And the vase—a heavy, thick-sided piece. She’d touched it idly, picked it up to see, and even empty it was heavy. A lovely blue, a cobalt blue like the sky deepening into night, and then a memory bulldozes through, disturbing and intense. She stops writing. She drops the pen as if it’s on fire. She stares at her hands, folds them on her lap beneath the table as two policemen sit down at the counter and look at her across the diner, a lingering, appraising glance. She hums a vapid, tuneless sound to drown the memory dredged up from the muck of her subconscious.
    She carefully folds the napkins and sticks them in her bag, avoiding eye contact with the cops, who have swiveled on their stools to face her. She leaves five dollars on the table and hurries past the officers, waving in the general direction of Glenda at the register. She hums again, more loudly, sliding into the front seat and turning the key. St. Christopher gleams in the light from the broken sign as Dana struggles to forget how she’d stared at the yard-sale vase just before the drinks kicked in. The memories are there, though, clear and cruel, and she thinks of the moths singeing their wings in the yard lights, recalls the moment she stared at the blue vase, the moment it was crystal clear to her exactly why Celia was upset and why she’d captured Peter and the Tart inside her phone. It comes back, too, the anger that encompassed her before the alcohol kicked in, before it fogged her thoughts andmade bald spots inside her mind, how she’d wanted to pick up Celia’s lovely hand-thrown vase and bash her over the head.
    She tries to tamp down this totally unwelcome memory. She concentrates on the traffic, on counting the bricks in the building. She thinks about the note, the strange writing—a cruel joke, maybe, a nasty neighbor. “Glenda the Good,” she says, and she repeats it. “Glenda the Good, Glenda the Good,” like a mantra. She says it all the way home.

CHAPTER 11
    B y the time the doors close behind her at the station, Dana is already halfway down the hall. Reaction formation, she thinks she remembers from one of her countless psychiatric sessions, this rush toward the detective’s office, when what she wants to do is turn around and run in the other direction or flatten herself under a desk. She’s terrified of this meeting, but she wants to put it behind her.
    She hikes up her skirt, too loose and slipping down around her hips; her lack of interest in food has taken a toll. She finds the ladies’ room and ducks inside, rooting around in her purse for a safety pin, tucking the waistband together and snapping the pin in place. She glances at her face in the mirror, and then she looks away, afraid that if she looks too closely, she’ll see a murderer lurking there in the glass. She pulls out a modest, humdrum shade of lipstick, leaning over the sink to apply it, careful to look only at her lips. Satisfied, she blots them on a tissue and steps back from the mirror, concentrating on breathing until she’s in the hall.
    The walls are gray and formidable, and she tries not to look at them. Instead she looks down at the floor, and the linoleumsquares frighten her. “Detective Moss?” She stands just inside a large room in front of a