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Randall Morgan preferred to sit in the back row, whether it be
in airplanes, cars, even the mega-whopper-daredevil roller coaster at the
Little Heaven amusement park. He was a cool player, didn’t say much,
a real hood of a fifth-grader. His Grandma Lottie raised him.
Our whole class knew Lottie because she came to the annual gym bake sale
fund-raiser drunk as a frat boy. The back of her pool-blue housedress
was tucked into her pantyhose and she was not wearing much underneath.
She reeked of lawn fertilizer and the first thing she did when she slid
into the gym was come and hug me, just shove my face into her baggy bosom.
Randall watched.
Just like he watched my lips move when last month I told him I had slept
with his wife, Laurel. I went over to his house in Highland Hills
on a Friday night. He had made it big, invented a new kind of earplug
that didn’t hurt when worn for more than seven-point-five hours.
Laurel engineered the whole operation. They met when she moved from
Nebraska during our fifth-grade year. On her first day, she opted
to sit in the back row of our class. “It was destiny,” he said, “really.”
I worked for my father, who owned a Lucky Spoon Restaurant franchise
near Marine St. Croix. I was the heavy, the guy customers came to
when things could not be solved by Jenna, my stepsister.
Laurel was a coupon queen. She liked stuff for free, and that’s
why I encouraged her to visit me, dine at the ultimate family kitchen.
The first time she came, I had to hide in the men’s room, sheer anxiety.
She was a thin, long-waisted redhead, with bushy, high volume hair and
when she stepped down from her blue Suzuki crotch rocket, I felt woolly
hot. She wore black motorcycle pants and Lottie’s beat-up old Harley
jacket. Sometimes she wore a helmet, and this, I told her, turned
me right on. Then she’d do the charlatan hair shake.
She ordered a chocolate frosty, a double bacon burger and crinkle fries.
Randall Morgan knew things. Even in fifth grade, he was a lime-smart
kid. Other kids would cheat and he would take the rap for it.
“All right kids, now someone here did a baddity. Raise your hand
if you’re innocent,” Ms. Pleemeier would say.
We would all raise our hands, even me, who hid a crib sheet in my palm.
I raised my right hand higher and shoved the answers down my pants with
my left.
Ms. Pleemeier looked at Randall, who sat with a slight grin on his face.
“I see,” she said.
I slept with his beautiful wife in the Spoon’s back room, the back of
the cheapy movie theater, the tool shed in his own backyard. She
had a lovely body, a damn near Rockette.
“I’m a louse,” I told him that day he covered for the Pleemeier incident.
“I’ll just do this over and over again and I won’t be sorry.”
He picked up his three tall sharpened pencils he kept at the top of
his desk. One of them rolled. We watched it fall, all the way
down until it bounced off my shoe.
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