Fresh Kills Read Free Page B

car—a four-year-old BMW; the adoption business must pay pretty well—took a wide left onto a road marked Platinum Avenue and traveled behind the mall into a complex of low-rise garden apartments, each a depressing replica of its next-door neighbor.
    The development showed a positively stunning lack of taste, but it was clean and suburban-nice; bare trees poked spindly branches into the wan March sky. Lawns were still winter-pale, with outcroppings of black-edged snow; near the houses an occasional snowdrop poked a white, bell-shaped head above ground.
    Marla turned a few times and pulled up before a huge false-brick two-family house. A regular American house, like the one the Brady Bunch used to live in. There was no sign at all that this place was occupied, not by one big happy family, but by the flotsam and jetsam of not-so-happy families.
    The door opened and a very pregnant girl stepped out. She looked about fifteen, with lanky, mouse-colored hair and a pale moon face. She wore a pink smock over leggings; her swollen feet were jammed into pink slippers. She waddled over to the car.
    My first impulse was to tell Amber to get the hell back into bed. But before the words escaped my mouth, Marla greeted the child with a “Hi, Lisa” in a voice so patently artificial you could have put it in coffee and not gained a pound.
    Lisa looked at Marla with bovine sullenness. “Hi, Ms. Hennessey,” she said unenthusiastically. “Mrs. Bonaventura sent me to tell you Doc Scanlon’s with Amber. You can come inside, but you’ll have to wait till he’s finished.”
    â€œIs something wrong?” Marla and I both asked approximately the same question at exactly the same time.
    â€œI don’t know,” Lisa replied. “But Doc looked serious when he came in, and you know how he is. Always smiling. Like Santa Claus,” she added, a smile creeping over her plump face.
    â€œJesus” was all Marla said, but she slammed the car door hard and walked quickly, the heels of her shoes making little holes in the grass as she took the straightest path to the door, disregarding the curved flagstone path. I followed, wrapping my jacket around me and wondering how Lisa could stand being outside without a coat.
    Inside, the place was homey, but institutional. Everything had been done to make it seem as though a family lived here—afghans over the rocking chairs, souvenir plates mounted on the wall, a colorful rag rug—but with a touch of impersonality. Like a Shelter Island summer house, with transient group renters season after season.
    A middle-aged woman I took to be Mrs. Bonaventura came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a towel. She extended a still-damp palm and motioned for me to sit. I chose a rocking chair; she sat on the edge of an uncomfortable-looking sofa. She didn’t bother urging Marla to sit; anyone with half an eye could see my colleague was bent on pacing and smoking until she’d seen the doctor.
    â€œThis is a nice place,” I said lamely.
    Mrs. Bonaventura smiled as though I’d called the home a palace. “We do what we can,” she said. She was about five feet tall, with dark hair pulled back into a bun. Her accent could have been Spanish, Italian, Greek—Persian, for that matter—indefinably not American.
    This was a deeply meaningful conversation, but it wasn’t getting me closer to my client. But then I wasn’t sure I was ready for another girl with a high school face and a mother’s belly, especially one being seen by a doctor who might pronounce the product unfit for sale.
    Jesus, stop thinking like that . I spoke to myself pretty sharply. I did not want to start talking like Marla, wearing armor clothes, peroxiding my hair. Smoking.
    My colleague stubbed her cigarette into a cut-glass ashtray, the kind you see at stoop sales for fifty cents because nobody smokes anymore. Two hard twists of the wrist and the butt