“It Was So Fascinating! Here They Were, in My Little House in the Suburbs, Trying to Plan a Murder!”

"Doing what?"
 
"Anything."
 
"Killing people?"

"If I had to. I saw myself in a position where, if the guys needed a special job done … Sometimes the guys would bring in a worker from out of town. They’d call them ghosts, because no one would see them coming. I could be the ghost. I’d be this cute little girl at home, cleaning and taking care of the babies and cooking the macaroni … "     

"But if there was a job needed to be done … "

"Then I would help Philip any way I could."

"And people would know you were involved?"

”’Right.”

"Not just whispering in Philip’s ear?"

"But it wouldn’t be talked about."

Now we’re back outside, making our way to Brenda’s other main point of reference on Broadway — the local outbreak of Planet Hollywood, where she’s to be picked up by her shadowy housemate.

"You know what else is bad down here?" she asks out of the blue. It’s hard to imagine there’s any fault left to find, but Brenda’s warmed up all over again. "The bugs! I swear to Christ, some of ’em have pilots! They actually have cicada alerts — you’re driving on the highway, and there’s a three-inch blanket of dead cicadas driving over. The spiders are bad, too. There’s one called the brown recluse spider that’s really poisonous. Every year, people get bit and end up in the hospital emergency room. She gazes up and down the block taking in the tourists wandering through Planet Hollywood in search of more t-shirts, and then the rest of Nashville itself, this pitiful excuse of a place, and the pathetic moon hanging over it, and wondering how the Christ she’s ended up …

Suddenly, her eyes open wide.

"And snakes!" she says.