Makers

“You’re fucking kidding me,” Suza

“You waived it.”

She had. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal at the time. The distant owner of the condo she was renting in Florida hadn’t asked for one. “So I did. Now what?”

“You want to swear out a complaint against them?”

“With the police?”

“Yeah. Breach of contract. Theft, if they took the home theater. We can take them to collections, too.”

Goddamned marketing people had the collective morals of a snake. All of them useless, co

“Yeah, OK. And what about the house?”

“We can find you another tenant by the end of the month, I’m sure. Maybe a little earlier. Have you thought any more about selling it?”

She hadn’t, though the realtor brought it up every time they spoke. “Is now a good time?”

“Lot of new millionaires in the Valley shopping for houses, Suza

“Is it peaking?”

“Who knows? It might go up, it might collapse again. But now is the best time to sell in the past ten years. You’d be smart to do it.”

She took a deep breath. The Valley was dead, full of venal marketing people and buck-chasers. Here in Florida, she was on the cusp of the next thing, and it wasn’t happening in the Valley: it was happening everywhere except the Valley, in the cheap places where i

“Sell it,” she said.

“You’re going to be a wealthy lady,” the realtor said.

“Right,” Suza

“I have a buyer, Suza

“Jesus,” she said. “You’re joking.”

“No joke,” the realtor said. “I’ve got a waiting list for houses on your block.”

And so Suza

Before bed she posted a classified on Craigslist for a couple helpers to work on boxing stuff, emailed Jimmy to see if he wanted lunch, and looked up the address for the central police station to swear out her complaint. The amp, speakers, and A/V switcher were all missing from her home theater.

She had a dozen helpers to choose from the next morning. She picked two who came with decent references, marveling that it was suddenly possible in Silicon Valley to get anyone to show up anywhere for ten bucks an hour. The police sergeant who took the complaint was sympathetic and agreed with her choice to get out of town. “I’ve had it with this place, too. Soon as my kids are out of high-school I’m moving back to Montana. I miss the weather.”

She didn’t think of the marketdroids again until the next day, when she and her helpers were boxing up the last of her things and loading them into her U-Haul. Then a BMW convertible screeched around the corner and burned rubber up to her door.

The woman marketdroid was driving, looking crazy and disheveled, eyes red-rimmed, one heel broken off of her shoes.

“What the FUCK is your problem, lady?” she said, as she leapt out of her car and stalked toward Suza

Instinctively, Suza

“Fiona?” she said. “What’s happened?”

“I was arrested. They came to my workplace and led me out in handcuffs. I had to make bail.”

Suza

“What home theater? Everything was right where you left it when I went. I haven’t lived here in weeks. Tom left me last month and I moved out.”

“You moved out?”

“Yeah, bitch, I moved out. Tom was your tenant, not me. If he ripped something off, that’s between you and him.”

“Look, Fiona, wait, hold up a second. I tried to call you, I sent you email. No one was paying the rent, no one told me that you’d moved out, and no one answered when I tried to find out what had happened.”

“That sounds like an explanation, she said, hissing. “I’m waiting for a fucking apology. They took me to prison.”

Suza

The woman glared at her a moment longer, then slowly folded in on herself, collapsing, coughing and sobbing on the lawn.

Suza

But what can you do? She knelt beside Fiona in the grass and took her hand. “Let’s get you inside, OK?”

At first it was as though she hadn’t heard, but slowly she straightened up and let Suza

“I’m really sorry, Fiona. Why didn’t you answer my calls or email?”

She looked at Suza

“It’s really hard,” Suza

“Tom was on antidepressants, but he didn’t like taking them. When he was on them, he was pretty good, but when he went off, he turned into… I don’t know. He’d cry a lot, and shout. It wasn’t a good relationship, but we moved out here from Oregon together, and I’d known him all my life. He was a little moody before, but not like he was here.”

“When did you speak to him last?” Suza

“We haven’t spoken since I moved out.”

An hour later, the mystery was solved. The police went to Tom’s workplace and discovered that he’d been fired the week before. They tried the GPS in his car and it finked him out as being in a ghost mall’s parking lot near his old office. He was dead behind the wheel, a gun in his hand, shot through the heart.