Nursery Crimes Read Free Page A

skills as a mother. Ruby was turning out fine, if willful, stubborn, brilliant, and funny qualify as fine, but I wasn’t any June Cleaver. I did all the things mothers aren’t supposed to do. I yelled. I was sarcastic. I let her watch TV. I fed her candy and almost always forgot to wash the pesticides off the fruit. I never kept up with the laundry. My shortcomings as a mother bothered me enough to make me consider going back to work, but then I found myself pregnant again. That settled it. Awash in ambivalence, alternately bored and entranced, full of both joy and despair, I joined the ranks of stay-at-home moms. At least for the time being.
    By the time we arrived back home from our debacle at the preschool, we were all sufficiently recovered from our ordeal to joke about it. Peter treated us to a dead-on imitation of Bruce LeCrone. Ruby and I invented a new game that consisted of pinching each other, shrieking “I love to gwab!” and then collapsing on the floor in giggles. By that evening our family’s failure to enter the social register of the preschool set was forgotten.
    After we had bundled Ruby into bed, and Peter had read that night’s installment of
Ozma of Oz
, we settled down for the night. Peter went to work in his office, a converted maid’s room at the back of our apartment, and I got into bed with my evening snack of ice cream and salted almonds. The calcium needs of my pregnant body provided sufficient rationalization for my astronomical icecream intake. A few almonds made my decadent snack a protein-rich necessity. Or at least that’s what I liked to tell myself. The increasing spread of my thighs I attributed to my body’s stockpiling fat in order to breast-feed.
    I flicked on the TV and spent the next couple of hours watching a movie about a woman with lymphoma whose anorexic daughter is sexually abused by a cross-dressing drug addict while a mudslide threatens their home (or something like that; I don’t really remember). I was in hysterical tears from start to finish. I love watching disease-of-the-week films when I’m pregnant. That extra burst of hormones makes for a delightful two-hour sobfest. After the movie was over, I was about to turn off the set when the lead-in for the eleven-o’clock local news caught my attention.
    “A prominent nursery school principal died tonight in an apparent hit-and-run. Angie Fong is live at the scene of the crash.”
    No way. It wasn’t Abigail Hathaway. It couldn’t be. After all, there were umpteen preschools and nursery schools in the Greater Los Angeles area. I stayed glued to the set through the commercial break.
    The perky, helmet-haired news reporter stood in front of a cordoned-off street corner. Behind her I could see a mailbox tipped over on its side and crushed. I could swear I saw a woman’s shoe lying next to it on the sidewalk. As soon as I heard Abigail Hathaway’s name, I yelled for Peter. He came rushing in to the bedroom, looking panicked.
    “What? Are you okay? Is it the baby?”
    I pointed wordlessly at the television.
    “Abigail Hathaway, the founder and director of the exclusive Heart’s Song School, was killed in an apparent hit-and-run outside of the school entrance this evening.Witnesses say a late-model European sedan, either gray or black, swerved onto the sidewalk, crushed the victim against a mailbox, and then took off at a high rate of speed. No suspect has been apprehended.”
    The news reporter turned to a man in a baseball jacket with long, stringy hair. He was standing next to a shopping cart piled high with empty cans and bottles.
    “Sir, you saw the accident?”
    “It was no accident, man,” he said. “This car comes speeding ’round the corner, goes up on the curb, bashes into her, and then takes off. I swear it was aiming right for her.”
    “And did you see the driver, sir?”
    “Nah, but I saw the car. Silver Mercedes or maybe a black Beemer. Something like that. It was aiming for her, swear to