Of course, her card partners weren’t strangers anymore; they were her best friends. But the fact was, people arrived in Sun City without a past and without acquaintances. They set about joining groups and making those friends, but in many cases—certainly in Clemmie’s—they never recited a history. “Oh please, too boring,” someone might say, and later you’d find out he was a famous cardiologist. “That’s so last year,” someone else might reply, and then you’d be told that she had been vice president of international affairs for some conglomerate, or else a drugstore clerk.
Clemmie set her mug on the coaster on her coffee table and leaned back on her sofa, both cell phones in hand. Like everyone these days, she used the phone as a pacifier. One stroked one’s phone, opening the comforting apps of word games and weather, headline news, and Instagram. It was quite similar to sucking one’s thumb.
Her family cell phone sang out the crazy cascade of notes Bentley had installed for her, and indeed it was Bentley, having received her snapshot of the tree dragon. Clemmie was thrilled to hear from him, because Bent had little use for his elderly aunt. If she ever ended up in assisted living or, God forbid, an Alzheimer’s ward, Bent was not likely to visit. Cool! he texted. But it isn’t a sculpture. It’s a rig for smoking pot.
Clemmie’s jaw dropped. You smoked a drug out of that gorgeous glass? How? Where did you put your mouth?
Harper texted seconds later. It’s beautiful, all right. Your neighbors are serious stoners.
RICH serious stoners, added Bentley.
The one and only piece of decor in Marcia and Roy’s entire home was a marijuana rig? She wondered now about the scent in Dom’s place. Was it in fact the scent of marijuana?
Clemmie had not led a sheltered life, but pot was not among her experiences. She had read somewhere—she took three newspapers and glanced at headlines from three more on her smartphone—that aging baby boomers had returned to using weed, and it was commonplace all over again.
Clemmie ran her mind over all the men and women she knew from pinochle, euchre, canasta, dominoes, line dancing, water aerobics, book club, pottery, beading, and pickleball, although she no longer played pickleball, having fallen once and twisted an ankle. She considered everybody she knew from Monday-night lectures and Tuesday-morning Bible study. She visualized every other couple and single in her own pod of twenty-one villas. All those people were smoking weed?
Impossible.
And if Dom and the Coglands were using pot, they didn’t need a door linking their garages to accomplish it.
Bentley texted again—Bentley, who never sent a birthday or Christmas card or thank-you note. Which neighbor? he asked. The guy with arthritis? It probably helps him feel better.
The guy with arthritis was Dom. She must have bored the grands with a list of Dom’s ailments at some point. She wondered if Bent remembered any of her complaints, and whether marijuana would actually help Dom’s arthritis or just cast a fog over the pain.
She was fixing herself a piece of toast when yet another text arrived. She had never excited her grands this much.
I did an image search on that glass, Bentley wrote. It’s stolen. It was made by a lampworker called Borobasq. Go to Instagram and read his posts.
Clemmie’s mouth went dry, which happened now and then due to medications, but this time it was horror. The third unit’s sole accessory was stolen goods? She had been tiptoeing around leaving fingerprints in a place where neighbors completely unknown to her stored stolen drug paraphernalia?
She had never heard of an image search. Was there an app where you plugged in your snapshot and the app ran around the virtual universe and located identical photographs?
Clemmie tapped her Instagram icon, carefully entered the oddly spelled Borobasq, and sure enough, up popped a picture of the very glass she had seen while trespassing.
This fellow Borobasq, who had an astonishing eighty thousand followers, was in a rage, using many WTF’s to describe his predicament. It wasn’t clear how the piece had been stolen. Perhaps he had outlined that in an earlier post.
What was clear was that Clemmie’s grandnephew, Bentley, had already posted on Borobasq’s site: Your rig is sitting on a table in the house next door to my aunt. He had included her photograph of the tree dragon in the shaft of sunlight.
Bentley had involved her in a theft.
Borobasq of the filthy vocabulary now knew that he could find his stolen drug paraphernalia by coming to Clemmie’s. The police would be summoned to arrest the thieves. Dom would find out that she had crept through his unit, found his cut-through door, and used it. The Coglands, owners of stolen goods, would find out that she had trespassed in their unit, photographed their possessions, and ratted them out.
Dominic Spesante had always sounded to Clemmie like a mob name. A name for somebody who offed people and abandoned their bodies in Jersey swamps. Did she want Dom for an enemy? On the other hand, would mob people name their son Wilson?
But Clemmie was in possession of some strange knowledge. Last year she’d been standing in front of her little villa, wondering whether to grub out a particularly boring foundation shrub and replace it with her favorite bridal wreath spirea, when Dom’s garage door opened and out came his golf cart with its harsh backing-up beep. Dom always started lowering his garage door before he was wholly out, so that you always worried that the cart would get caught by the descending door. It occurred to her now that he didn’t want anybody to spot his connecting door.
On that particular day, he had not zipped the cart walls up. A gust of wind blew a piece of paper from Dom’s hand, or from the seat next to him, into Clemmie’s yard.
She reached for it, but it blew further away. She pounced; it eluded her. On the third try, she stepped on it, picked it up, and because she was a compulsive reader, read the address on the envelope.
It was addressed to somebody named Sal Pesante. Very similar to Dom’s name, which was Spesante.
S. Pesante.
Was it possible that the name Spesante didn’t exist? That it was a condensed initial and real surname? She had been laughing when she handed the envelope back, not because of her uncoordinated leaps over the grass, but because—perhaps—both she and Dom were faking their identities here in quiet, bland Sun City.
“What’s so funny?” Dom had snapped.
“Life,” she had said.
He glared, gripped the envelope and the wheel at the same time, and drove away. Of course she hadn’t told anybody about Dom’s possible other name and never would, because she was filled with admiration for anybody who could pull off the trick of living under a false name. She well knew how hard it was.
Her family cell phone rang. An actual call, not a text. The only people with whom she used this phone were her niece, Peggy, who called monthly, and Peggy’s children, Harper and Bentley, who never committed actual live conversation.