“Oh, my,” he said again and stared at the wooden handles of the shears as if waiting for them to explain themselves.

Then the flashlight dropped and he pitched forward. The blade points popped out through his back and he blinked once, his chin in the dirt, then sighed. Then nothing.

Desiree turned the gun toward me but it popped out of her hand as the handle of a hoe smashed into her wrist.

She said, “What?” and turned her head to her left as Angie stepped out of the darkness covered in dirt from head to toe and punched Desiree Stone so hard in the center of her face that I’m sure she was well into dreamland before her body hit the ground.

41

I stood by the shower in the downstairs guest bathroom as the water sprayed across Angie’s body and the last of the dirt sluiced down her ankles and swirled into the drain. She ran a bath sponge along her left arm, and the soap dripped down along her elbow and hung there for a moment in long teardrops before falling to the marble basin. Then she went to work on the other arm.

She must have washed each part of her body four times since we’d come in here, but somehow I was still entranced.

“You broke her nose,” I said.

“Yeah? You see any shampoo in here?”

I used a facecloth to open the medicine cabinet. I wrapped the cloth around a small vial of shampoo and squirted some into my palm, walked back to the shower.

“Turn your back to me.”

She did, and I leaned in and rubbed the shampoo into her hair, felt the wet tangles envelop my fingers, the soap churn up through the roots as my fingers massaged her scalp.

“Feels very nice,” she said.

“No kidding.”

“How bad’s it look?” She leaned forward and I pulled my hands from her hair as she raised her arms and scrubbed her hair with more force than I’d ever use on my own hair if I intended to reach my forties with it still attached to my head.

I rinsed the shampoo off my hands in the sink. “What?”

“Her nose.”

“Bad,” I said. “Like there’s three of them all of a sudden.”

I came back to the shower as she tilted her head back under the water and the white foamy mixture of soap and water poured between her shoulder blades and cascaded down her back.

“I love you,” she said, her eyes closed, head tilted back to the spray, her hands wiping the water away from her temples.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” She threw her head forward and reached for the towel as I put it in her hand.

I leaned in and shut off the water and she wiped her face, blinked her eyes open and found mine. She sniffed at water in her nose and wiped her neck with the towel.