Rating: ★★★★☆ Tags: Mystery Detective, General, Fiction

Women
are fucking crazy
. No qualifier: Not 
some
women, not
many
women. Women are crazy.

---

Once night fell fully, I drove to my dad’s vacant house,
Amy’s clue on the seat beside me.
Maybe you feel guilty for bringing me here
I must admit it felt a bit queer
But it’s not like we had the choice of many a place
We made the decision: We made this our space.
Let’s take our love to this little brown house
Gimme some goodwill, you hot lovin’ spouse!
This one was more cryptic than the others, but I was
sure I had it right. Amy was conceding Carthage, finally
forgiving me for moving back here. 
Maybe you feel guilty
for bringing me here … [but] We made this our space
. The
little brown house was my father’s house, which was
actually blue, but Amy was making another inside joke. I’d
always liked our inside jokes the best – they made me feel
more connected to Amy than any amount of confessional
truth-telling or passionate lovemaking or talk-till-sunrising.
The little brown house story was about my father, and Amy
is the only person I’d ever told it to: that after the divorce, I
saw him so seldom that I decided to think of him as a
character in a storybook. He was not my actual father – who
would have loved me and spent time with me – but a
benevolent and vaguely important figure named Mr Brown,
who was very busy doing very important things for the
United States and who (very) occasionally used me as a
cover to move more easily about town. Amy got tears in her
eyes when I told her this, which I hadn’t meant, I’d meant it
as a 
kids are funny
story. She told me she was my family
now, that she loved me enough to make up for ten crappy
fathers, and that 
we
were now the Dunnes, the two of us.

---

And then she whispered in my ear, ‘I do have an
assignment you might be good for …’
As for bringing back the goodwill, that was another
conciliation. After my father was completely lost to the
Alzheimer’s, we decided to sell his place, so Amy and I
went through his house, putting together boxes for Goodwill.
Amy, of course, was a whirling dervish of doing – pack,
store, toss – while I sifted through my father’s things
glacially. For me, everything was a clue. A mug with deeper
coffee stains than the others must be his favorite. Was it a
gift? Who gave it to him? Or did he buy it himself? I pictured
my father finding the very act of shopping emasculating.
Still, an inspection of his closet revealed five pairs of
shoes, shiny new, still in their boxes. Had he bought these
himself, picturing a different, more social Bill Dunne than
the one slowly unspooling alone? Did he go to Shoe-Be-
Doo-Be, get my mother to help him, just another in a long
line of her casual kindnesses? Of course, I didn’t share any
of these musings with Amy, so I’m sure I came off as the
goldbricker I so often am.
‘Here. A box. For Goodwill,’ she said, catching me on
the floor, leaning against a wall, staring at a shoe. ‘You put
the shoes in the box. Okay?’ I was embarrassed, I snarled
at her, she snapped at me, and … the usual.
I should add, in Amy’s defense, that she’d asked me
twice if I wanted to talk, if I was sure I wanted to do this. I
sometimes leave out details like that. It’s more convenient
for me. In truth, I wanted her to read my mind so I didn’t
have to stoop to the womanly art of articulation. I was
sometimes as guilty of playing the figure-me-out game as
Amy was. I’ve left that bit of information out, too.

---

I’m a big fan of the lie of omission.
I pulled up in front of my dad’s house just after ten p.m.
It was a tidy little place, a good starter home (or ender
home). Two bedrooms, two baths, dining room, dated but
decent kitchen. A for-sale sign rusted in the front yard. One
year and not a bite.
I entered the stuffy house, the heat rolling over me. The
budget alarm system we installed after the third break-in
began beeping, like a bomb countdown. I input the code,
the one that drove Amy insane because it went against
every rule about codes. It was my birthday: 81577.