by Nikki Knight
If you’re writing about a suburban mom with a secret life, it helps to be one.
No, I’m not a consecrated poisoner (hired killer, if you prefer) like Grace the Hit Mom, but I do have an unexpected existence away from the drop-off line.
On any given school day in my suburban Connecticut town, I look like any other mom driving through the traffic circle in a sensible sedan, with hair up in a clip and a grubby sweatshirt, turning my tween loose to wander to the door with his buddies. You’d never know that on Saturday, Sunday, and most major holiday mornings, I’m an anchor at a top news radio station in New York.
From the time I first started hanging out in the corner of the elementary school portico, called the pickup pen, I felt different. As long as the conversation stayed on kids, the weather, and the town controversy of the moment, I was fine.
But when the mommies — and in suburbia, they’re still usually mommies — started talking about their plans for weekend activities and parties and whatever, I would just mumble something marginally appropriate.
Too weird and awkward to explain that I spend the weekend sleeping on trains, writing about homicides, and reading the news to a million or so people. The moms might not even believe me.
Imposter syndrome is real.
Eventually, when I had to say something, I’d explain that I work a 3 a.m. shift Saturday and Sunday mornings.
Usually, people guessed nurse.
One time somebody guessed prison guard. (Maybe – I’m very tall and I suppose I could be intimidating under the right circumstances!)
Nobody got radio anchor.
Still, everybody believed me and thought it was pretty cool.
The experience, though, of keeping quiet about a secret existence entirely removed from the pickup pen stuck with me. It was the kind of thing writers love: that little germ of an idea that keeps popping into your mind when you’re doing something else.
What about a suburban mom with a secret life?
Not something tawdry and tiresome like an affair, but a secret job. A secret profession. Maybe even a secret calling.
There was definitely something there.
Even more if that secret calling was really serious and dangerous.
I thought about spying because I do love a good James Bond movie. But writing spies takes a particular mindset, and I just don’t have it. For better or worse, I’m a mystery writer.
So, what if my nice suburban mom with a secret life was a killer?
The idea was immediately appealing, at least to me.
A hit mom.
It would work, too, because a nice suburban mom is pretty much the last person you’d think of as a hired killer. I know I wouldn’t hire any of the other moms to take out somebody.
Or would I?
After a couple of years of talking about the weather in the pickup pen, I knew that nobody is what they seem. And nobody’s life is the light little domestic comedy many of us try to pretend it is. Every once in a while, you see flashes of something else: when somebody misses a few days for an illness, makes a small but significant offhand comment about their now ex-spouse, or shows up with eyes red from crying they don’t want to explain.
My hit mom would be no different.
But she’d be more fun.
Real-life hit people aren’t fun, I’m sure. I’ve spent enough time in newsrooms to know that. But a fictional killer mom, trying to maintain a presence as a nice lady while periodically sneaking off to take somebody out?
That could be some serious fun.
And indeed it is!
We know Grace Adair poisons creepy men a couple of times a year and that she may have to remove any number of other people to keep her secret. The other characters, though, only know she does the school run, walks the dog, and has a little editing and fact-checking business.
Much of the fun with Grace is watching people completely underestimate her, and her wry frustration when it happens. Grace’s secret life not only gives her a unique ability to catch a killer, it makes her a more interesting narrator, because she – and we – are in on a wickedly dark joke.
Sometimes, when I’m sitting in the pickup line, I imagine Grace doing the same and think: if people only knew…
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Thank you so much for giving my “good friend” Nikki a chance to talk about her new book!
This was fun I could see a Mom hit man