As La La gets up to leave, she sees, on O’Bannon’s desk, a studio photograph of a harried woman and three robust boys. It’s a different family than the one he used to have. Round two, she presumes. Or perhaps the boys are his stepchildren, cared for by a host of mothers and fathers.
Growing up, La La had only Zev. Her mother disappeared when La La was eight. Four years later, La La buried a pair of white cotton underwear at the bottom of the hamper because a constellation of mysterious brown stains convinced her she had an accident. Discovering the panties, Zev said, “You’re a woman now. No need to be ashamed.” Though it was ten at night, he drove to a supermarket and bought sanitary pads. Returning home, he bleached the underwear.
The next day, Zev arranged fruit—two lemons, an avocado, and loose purple grapes—on a table and demonstrated how a woman’s reproductive system worked. “Pretty clever design,” he said. He told La La it was one of the few things his mother had taught him in case he had a daughter. After Zev walked La La through two monthly cycles, they ate the grapes, and Zev made guacamole. “If you have cramps we can warm up a hot water bottle,” he said, while he mixed the garlic and avocado.
La La scooped a dollop of guacamole onto a chip and opened her mouth. “Delicious uterus,” she said, after she swallowed.
“Gourmet,” Zev said.
When La La was thirteen, Zev accompanied her to a department store to buy her first bra. “Treat her nice,” he said to a salesclerk, slipping the woman a twenty.
“That’s my job, sir,” the clerk said, but she stuck the folded bill down the front of her shirt and brought half a dozen bras to La La in a communal dressing room. La La faced a corner while taking off her shirt. She slipped her arms through a bra and struggled to hook the back.
“Here, let me do that for you,” the woman said. She yanked the clasp closed, then turned La La around and tugged on the bra straps to adjust them. Her fingers were clammy. La La selected two bras just so she wouldn’t have to feel the woman’s hands on her again.
As she rode home with her father, she kept her eyes on the department store bag in her lap. She wondered what it would have been like to shop with Elissa, instead. Her mother’s absence, familiar and heavy, squeezed the air from her lungs.
Zev caressed the back of her head with his hand. As if reading her mind, he said, “Not many fathers get to help their girls buy their first bras.”
La La clutched the top of the bag, trying to keep from crying. “You didn’t help me. That woman did.”
“I guess she wasn’t your first choice.”
“No.”
“Sorry about that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” La La said.
“It matters.”
The bag slid off her lap. Zev took her hand, and she let him, just that once.
Years afterward, when La La was in high school, Zev pleaded guilty to a burglary they committed together, so that the charges against La La would be dropped. Never mind that it had been La La’s fault they were caught.
He was never exactly a candidate for father of the year, raising her to be a burglar, homeschooling her, and isolating her from other kids, but she can’t afford to think about all that now.
The next morning, Friday, La La e-mails Dr. Mun that she’ll be out again. By mid-afternoon, a bail bondsman has pledged to pay Zev’s bail if he fails to appear in court, and Zev is back in his house. La La pulls up in her Honda and pauses before exiting the car, collecting herself. A dinged-up van with the equipment Zev needs for household rekeys and installations parks in front of the house, HONESTY LOCKSMITH splashed across the side. Between that and his illegal work, Zev eked out a living, though they had never had the kinds of possessions they saw in homes they robbed, designer goods that didn’t come from discount stores.
Topped with a coating of Colorado snow, rosebushes line the flagstone path to the front door of the three-bedroom ranch house. Elissa had cultivated and pruned the flowers every spring, but now they grow wild. Long, barbed branches shoot out in every direction, taller than La La or her father. No longer fertilized, they nevertheless remain hardy. La La has begged Zev to trim them, has even offered to do it herself, but he won’t hear of it. What she really wants is to dig them up, fill the holes with fresh earth, and forget about them, though she knows that would be impossible. If they were gone, she would search for traces of them, stubborn tendrils winding out of the earth.
A fresh scratch from the thorns always marks Zev’s face. In the summer, deep cuts fester yellow and green on his exposed arms and legs. He isn’t lazy. He paints the house every five years, dragging out ladder and drop cloths, mixing the same colors, maroon with white trim. But the bushes are a monument to his wife’s treachery, never to be tampered with. Like the flower box that dangles vertically from a single nail. Zev stuffed it with geraniums every Mother’s Day, when they still observed the holiday instead of ignoring it, boycotting TV and radio with their endless barrage of ads. The soil in the box has hardened to chalk.
La La circles around to the back door, avoiding the bushes. Her childhood dog, Tiny, died seven years ago, but La La still remembers how he’d come bounding toward her. He escaped from the house and was struck by a car while she was in college in Wisconsin. As La La sat in a biology lecture, pain jabbed her spine, so sharp she passed out. She woke on the floor minutes later, her body numb. When Zev called, she was in student health services. “I got him to Dr. Bergman as fast as I could,” he said, adding after a while, “I’m sorry.” La La wouldn’t ordinarily experience the trauma of a creature a thousand miles away, but she wasn’t as attached to other animals.
Oiled and polished, her father’s collection of locks shines on the fireplace mantel and dozens of curio shelves. Antique and state-of-the-art padlocks, dead bolts—single cylinder and double cylinder—knob locks, lever-handle locks, cam locks, mortise locks, wall-mounted locks, furniture locks, vending machine locks, jimmy-proof dead bolts, rim-latch locks, key-in-knob cylinders, Berlin-key locks, disc-tumbler locks, combination locks, and more. Zev has disassembled the locks and reassembled them. When La La was ten, he began teaching her to pick them. It was a skill they practiced infrequently when they robbed homes. Usually it was faster to pry open a door or smash a window.
Mo, a seventeen-year-old cat with brindle fur and a flat, round face, curls up on the back of the sofa. When La La rubs the underside of the animal’s chin, her own skin tingles and her throat hums. But as Mo adjusts herself, La La’s elbows and shoulders begin to throb. “Are you giving her the tramadol?” she asks her father as he enters the room.
Zev resents the question. He’s taken care of La La, after all. “You think I’d let her suffer?” His daughter’s stubby, efficient fingers work Mo’s joints. Her spruce-colored eyes shine, though they often seem dull when she regards people.
He takes her puffy coat, a chill clinging to the outside and La La’s industrious scent—salty and medicinal—emanating from the inside, and he hangs it in the closet. Father and daughter settle on the couch, the beige cotton fabric pilled and threadbare. When she sits back, La La’s sneaker-clad feet barely brush the carpet.
A fat ankle monitor pushes up the bottom of Zev’s clean blue sweatpants. The DA successfully argued for home confinement as a condition of bail. Zev stabs a padlock with a slender pick, his fingers moving nimbly over the metal.