Safe as Houses

Safe as Houses

8 7 We leave the crystal collar on the Pomeranian. The iPad and the laptops, we leave. We leave the crumpled fifty, the coins in the dish. We steal the dish—a ceramic art-class concoction that brags, Daddy. We steal the macaroni valentines. The calico cookie jar and the framed cross-stitch, we smash. “Friends Are Flowers in the Garden of Life” preens the embroidered pillow before we gut it with kitchen shears. Mars steals what’s pinned to the refrigerator by magnets shaped like wine bottles. He slides soccer schedules and report cards into one of the pillowcases. Safe as Houses 8 8 S a f e a s H o u s e s “Amanda is screwing up math. Bunch of notes from her teacher.” I flip through a self-help book on the Andersons’ counter: Coping with Care Giving; Woman as Tree. The book is swollen with countless reads in the bath, or maybe tears. “She probably watches too much television like every other kid in America.” Technically, Jill Anderson and I have never spoken. She belongs to the gym I joined two weeks ago. Untechnically, we’ve spoken several times. Jill Anderson likes to catalog her life to a friend while they run-walk on treadmills, so I know the Andersons will be at Casa de adventuras in Mexico until Friday. I know her neighbor Dorothy is walking Jill’s Pomeranian twice a day and that Dorothy once asked Jill’s husband to borrow five hundred dollars, placing the husband in what Jill called an “off-putting situation.” I know almost every inch of her house, built to look like a suburban Parthenon, minicolumns and all. The sound of snarling interrupts my reading and I look down into the snout of the Andersons’ Pomeranian, pushed forward by the weight of its own bark. “Finish up in here,” I tell Mars. “Then join me in the family room.” The Andersons’ family room is set up like the command station at nasa. You could launch a rocket or pilot a family. I kneel in front of the husband’s collection of jazz lps. Hundreds. Coltrane, Monk, Reinhardt. I pull each record from its sleeve, flip it over in my hands, and crack it on my leg. Mars returns, the Pomeranian orbiting his ankles. We wear matching orange jumpsuits. He’s a skinny kid with sandy hair like mine, only his has no gray and is normally organized into a cowlick that juts over his forehead. He has a giant mouth in the literal sense, capable of producing an impressive gape. He gapes at the television, a flat-screen affair that takes up most of the wall. Then he gapes at the horseshoe of white leather couches built in to the ground. “These people are loaded, huh, Pluto?” he says. “Can’t we take a speaker or two?” I try to ignore the hammering in my knees as I stand. “What we’re after is worth more than money. We are in tune with a loftier frequency. We are . . . Byronic.” “Byronic,” he says, staring at the television. S a f e a s H o u s e s 8 9 The papers call me what they think are clever nicknames—the knicknack knicker, the memento marauder. I have written them what I know are clever notes, five or six by now. After the first few jobs, I used cutout letters from magazines. This last one was handwritten. Anna used to say my handwriting was crap. Even now, no doubt, a writing expert was dragging a magnifying glass over it, analyzing the alley-oop of my lowercase a’s, the look-outbelows of my l’s. Upstairs we find the girls’ room. Painted signs hang over their beds—Amanda and Maria. We knee-smash the unicorn paintings. We scissor-slice the stuffed animals. I chair-slam a framed poem by Amanda called “Jake the Dog.” Your eyes are like popcorn. You are a magic dog. Then we start on the Barbies. Decapitation, hair cutting, leg twisting. Mars says, “Was she a dyke, do you think?” “Was who a . . . lesbian?” “Lindsay Wagner.” Outside on the street, a truck ka-rangs by. “Not bionic,” I say. “Byronic. Lord Byron.” The head of the Barbie I’m working on makes a satisfying pop when I wrench it from its body. He says, “You got a kid, Pluto?” “Nope.” “You got a dog?” “I’m more of a cat . . . burglar.” “Jake is...