“I told you that I have dreams.” He studied his table, rubbing a finger over a spot on the glass. “I used to get worried in crowds, that somehow, they would be there. It’s silly.”
“No, it isn’t. I felt the same way.” I should have found him and told him sooner. “But the guys who were there that night…you don’t have to worry about them.”
“What guys? The ones who shot me?” Connor’s eyes narrowed. “I thought you said that you didn’t see anyone.”
“I know that you don’t have to worry about them hurting you again, or anyone else. Ok? You don’t need to worry,” I repeated.
“How do you know this?” he asked me. “The police never had any leads or named any suspects, so how do you know?”
The words stuck and I couldn’t get them out. Instead, I said, “I would have heard, right? Around the neighborhood. I’m sure it’s fine, that’s all I was saying. I’m not worried at all.”
“Great.” He looked at me steadily, and my nerve failed me. I looked away.
“Jared and I better get going,” I told him, standing up jerkily. “I’ll get us a car.” I walked to my brother and looked down at him asleep, his face soft and sweet like it had been when he was little. I remembered picking him up after his naps when he would cling to me and rest his warm cheek on my shoulder. I felt an overwhelming, all-consuming need to keep him safe.
“I’ll drive you,” Connor said.
“I don’t want you to come down to my neighborhood so late. I shouldn’t have let you drive us out here, but I didn’t mean to stay so long,” I told him.
“It’s ok for you to go, but not me?”
Yes.
“No,” he answered himself. “I’ll drive you two, and I’ll walk you up to your apartment so you don’t have to go in and check if it’s safe. Jared told me,” he explained, when I looked at him. “He notices what you do for him, even if he isn’t saying thank you.”
“He told you a lot,” I said. My throat felt tight.
“I think he’s lonely,” Connor said simply. Then I had to turn away, and go stand in the bathroom for a little while, so that neither of them would see me cry.
∞
“Wow, Lia,” Amy marveled at the office the next day as I sat in the chair across from her desk. “Thank you for telling me. To answer your question, no, I don’t want us to place another order. I don’t even drink coffee—is that a normal amount to use? It seems excessive! We were spending that much money each month?”
Yes, the bookkeeper Dayana had been spending that much. Ordering it had been under her purview and she had been pissed when I had come across an invoice and asked her where that volume of grounds had been going, because even if she sucked it down all day long from a stock pot, she couldn’t have drunk that much coffee. Maybe I hadn’t worked in an office before, but I had been around enough people stealing from restaurants to know it when I saw it.
“You guys should just use the coffee shop across the street instead of ordering your own to make here. It’s a huge waste.”
She looked apologetic. “I thought of it as a perk for Dayana. I don’t really want to make her angry when I stop buying it.”
Dayana was taking advantage of her, and whatever plans I might have for Amy helping me in the future, I didn’t like to see that happening to her now. This was a total cush job, and that Dayana woman didn’t need any more perks. She also didn’t need ten pounds of coffee per week. “You can just tell her that that she shouldn’t order any more. In fact, I can let her know.”
“You don’t think…” Amy trailed off. “Ok, I should tell you that I have this weird history with a former boyfriend lying to me, and I get a little paranoid sometimes that people are taking advantage of me.”
Yeah, I had pegged her right away as a sucker. “What did your boyfriend lie about?”
She laughed a little but she looked embarrassed. “Anything and everything! Such crazy stuff, too. Like once, he told me that he was late to dinner because a flock of swarming Hercules moths blocked the highway.”
“I don’t know what those are,” I said.
“Well, they’re giant bugs that live only in Australia and New Guinea, and we were in Arizona. He said the police had made everyone turn off their phones because the light from the screens was attracting the moths, and that was why he couldn’t call me.” She sighed deeply. “There were a lot of stories like that and I believed them all.”
“Wow.” Amy was even more gullible than I had thought. “Well, if you love someone, of course you trust him,” I soothed.
“The whole time we were together, he didn’t work and I supported him,” she confided. “He was supposed to have been writing a book, but he never let me read any of it, and I’ve realized that probably wasn’t true, either. I mean, nothing ever got published after all these years.”
I just nodded, thinking that I could probably tell her anything and she would fall for it.
“So now, I get worried that I’m doing it again. It’s hard to trust myself sometimes, even though I realize why I believed Josef and all his bullshit. It was because I was afraid of being alone. I was afraid of living my whole life without love, without someone to love me.”
I jumped up from the chair, not willing to listen to any more about loneliness and being unloved. “I’ll go talk to Dayana and run down to the coffee shop now myself. Ok?”
On my way out of the office, I told Dayana that the coffee perks were all over and not to order any more, and also that I had talked to Amy about it. Her eyes narrowed, but I didn’t give her any more details about what had been said; I just let her stew for a while. I wondered how much longer Dayana would last working here now that I was watching her. I gave her about a week. It had been the same thing with the bartender at the pub where I’d worked in my second waitress job. A few days after a new general manager started, the bartender quit, and then there was a big deal about how many bottles of tequila were missing.
“Hold that elevator,” a voice ordered when I was heading back up to the office from my drink run. I had both my coffee and some kind of organic juice mixture for Amy that she had requested and that looked way too green and chunky to be tasty. A meaty hand shot out and grabbed the edge of the metal door as it slid closed. I stepped back with my drinks as a man got into the elevator with me.
Holy balls. I looked up into his frowning, angry face, the one I recognized from when he had sat at the head of the table at Atelier Anson the night I had spilled the champagne. This was the guy who had been at the business dinner with Connor, the one who owned the casino so Anson had comped their whole check to try to curry his favor. In other words, the guy who had gotten me fired.
He stared at me too. “Do I know you?”
“Nope.” But he kept staring, the wheels obviously turning inside his sweaty, shiny head. I was wearing another outfit very similar to my waitressing uniform, because that was really all I had. It must have rung a bell with him, or maybe I had just made that much of an impression when I had showered his friend and their table with more than $250 of liquid.
Suddenly he snapped his fingers, very close to my face. “I do know you. You’re that waitress.” He laughed. “The clumsy one.”
I didn’t answer and stared straight ahead.
“You look upset. Did Anson take our dinner out of your paycheck?” He laughed harder.
Anger poured through my body but I tried my best to keep my face absolutely frozen. What did I care what he said? I looked at the screen telling us that we were almost up to my floor and I didn’t throw my hot coffee at him.
“That was a fun night. Whitaker Enterprises would have paid for that dinner anyway, but I love to watch second-rate wannabes like Anson twist in the wind. If you worked for me, I would have fired you on the spot.” I must have reacted, made some kind of expression despite trying to remain totally impassive. “Oh, Anson fired you? Well, it’s for the best. You were a shit waitress.”
Finally we got to my floor. “Did y
ou enjoy your soup that night at Atelier Anson? It was carrot puree, the third course,” I reminded him as the doors opened. “Maybe it looked a little frothy?”
“What? What are you talking about?”
I stepped out. “Well, all of us back in the kitchen spat into your bowl and then stirred it in. It’s a good lesson to you not to piss off your waitress.” His mouth hung open and the elevator door shut in his face, and I walked off to give Amy her juice.
My desk phone rang a little later. “Amy Whitaker and Associates, this is Lia.” I had practiced that greeting.
“Hello, I’m looking for a former waitress, one who expectorates in soup?”
“Connor? How did you know that?”
“Because Rome Arschloch just left my office, and instead of us having a productive meeting about Whitaker Enterprises building him a new casino, he spent the majority of his time here going on about how our terrible waitress at Atelier Anson had spat in his squash soup.”
“It was carrot. And that wasn’t true, I didn’t really do that. I saw him in the elevator and he started laughing that I had been fired. He’s an ass-waffle, and it was either a jab in the stomach or the spit story.”
“Then I’m glad you went with the soup. I don’t want to have to bail you out.” There was silence. “Lia?” Connor asked. “Are you still there?”
Bail. My mind had stuck on the word. I had talked to Jared—yelled at Jared—about working for the guys on the street. “You’re going to end up arrested!” I had seethed aloud to him, but in my head, I knew it could be worse than that. I took a breath. “Yeah, I’m here,” I told Connor.
“Are you going down to the gym? Want to meet me there?”
“I’m going, but that place scared me, with everyone in their spandex looking so coordinated. It’s like a club that I wouldn’t be cool enough to join.”
“A gym gang,” Connor suggested, laughing.
A gang. I swallowed, because I thought again of my brother.
“I’ll stay right by your side, I swear,” Connor promised.
My heart leaped up at those words, which intellectually I knew he meant as a joke. But I hadn’t really heard that kind of promise from anyone before. I wondered if I could get it in writing. “Ok, I’ll meet you. I have something to show you, too.”
I heard Dayana saying goodbye to Amy, very sweetly. When she was gone, I walked by her office and noticed that she had taken some personal things off her desk. So she was already starting to clear out. I went into our bathroom to change into my own non-coordinated gym clothes and turned back and forth, wondering how I looked in it. I made sure that my whole back was completely covered by my t-shirt.
Something sparkled on the metal shelf under the mirrors and I picked it up. It was Amy’s gargantuan diamond engagement ring that she had left just lying there. I weighed it in my palm, feeling the heft of the stone. Maybe it really had made her hand tired. I carefully slipped it onto my own finger and held it up to admire how it looked. Wow. What if this was my life? What if I had my own ring, my own husband, my own business?
I closed my hand around the jewel. I didn’t want the husband, and maybe, someday, I would be able to buy my own rings. Jared and I were going to get there.
“Lia, can you come in for a minute?” Amy called from down the hall as the bathroom door closed behind me.
I slipped my hand into my sweatshirt sleeve, still feeling the diamond heavy on it. “What’s up?”
“Dayana was acting really strange just now. She wished me a pleasant good evening.” Amy made a face. “She’s always been pretty stern and this may have been the first time she actually said goodbye before she left.”
“Hm. I mean, I don’t know her very well to judge if that was strange. She’s never greeted me in the few days that I’ve worked here, either hello or goodbye, but it does seem weird that she wouldn’t speak to you. It seems like you should have people working for you who are nice to you.” I felt the diamond dig into my palm as I said it.
“That’s what Steve says, too. But as long as she does a good job, I can’t fire her just because I wouldn’t want to hang out with her after work.”
“I wouldn’t want to run into her in a dark alley after work,” I commented. She was mean, that one.
Amy just laughed. “Are you heading down to the gym?” When I nodded, she asked, “You changed up here? The locker room is really nice, just FYI.” She stood and stretched. “Hang on, I’ll go with you. Do me a favor and go on the treadmill next to me so I have someone nice to talk to.”
Someone nice. “Sure. Um, also, I found your ring.” I slipped it off my hand and held it out to her.
Her eyes got as big as the diamond. “Oh, my God! Did I leave it in the bathroom again? The band is a little too big and sometimes I take it off before I wash my hands so it won’t slip down the drain. I have to get it resized. Thank you, Lia!” She put it back on, and still chattering to me, we went to the elevator together.
Connor was waiting outside the gym and Amy smiled hugely and told me she’d see me on the treadmills after she changed. “What do you have to show me?” he asked after saying hello.
“Look.” I had taken a picture of what I had bought that morning after dropping Jared at school, using a credit card that I would be able to pay off with my new salary from Amy.
“You have a trunkful of glass?”
“I’m going to fix the windows in my house this weekend,” I explained. I swallowed when he just looked at the picture and didn’t immediately answer. “You don’t have to say it—I know you think it’s a stupid idea and I’m dumb for trying it.” Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure why I was showing him this at all, except that he was the only one besides me who had any interest in my home renovation.
“Hey.” Connor reached out and took my hand and I let him hold it. “I never said you were dumb, stupid, or any other thing like that. I said I didn’t think you were prepared to redo an entire house by yourself. And you’re not, that hasn’t changed.”
I pulled my hand but he held on. “I understand what you mean.”
He shook his head. “No, you don’t. I mean exactly what I said. I think you should have new windows, not new glass. But if you want to put in new glass, I’ll help you.”
“You will?”
He nodded. “I will. We can make it work, somehow. Maybe. And maybe in five years, when you and Jared are happily living there, you’ll replace the windows with something that won’t let snow blow in.”
“I have to fix the glass now so it doesn’t look abandoned,” I explained. “I did listen to you about the other things. I have a guy coming out to see the foundation and give me an estimate. After I work for Amy for a while, I’ll have the money to do it. And I hope to do the other stuff, too.”
“You have a guy coming out? When?” he asked.
“Saturday morning. Tonight I’m going to the house to check on it, after I pick up Jared. I have to hide the glass somewhere in the garage rubble because it’s going to break if I keep driving over potholes so fast.”
“Then we’ll work on the windows on Saturday.” He talked a little about more supplies and the tools we would need. I took notes on my phone, just as I had done in my old notebook years before. “Sound like a plan?” he asked, and I said yes. He took my hand again, and we walked into the gym like that. I didn’t feel the urge to pull away from him, for some reason.
Amy had changed quickly and been watching us. In fact, she was standing on the sides of the treadmill, holding on, so that she could turn completely around and stare as Connor and I came in. She removed the towel she had draped over the machine next to hers and gestured to me to hop on. He let go and said to find him before I left, and then Amy showed me how to start the treadmill, because this gym stuff was so not my deal. “You and Connor…” she said, and then raised her eyebrows. “Right?”
“No. Not right,” I said, but I was smiling a little. It was nice that he was going to help me with the windows. Not because
I had tricked him or fooled him into doing it, but because he wanted to. I tried to remind myself that I didn’t know if he actually would. Just because someone said something, it didn’t mean there would be follow through, but based on his track record so far, I found myself believing it anyway.
“Ok, you can keep your secrets,” she said, and I quickly glanced at her. But she was still smiling, so it was a joke.
“No secrets, really. Do you, uh, know Connor very well?”
“I know him from some parties, events with my husband, seeing him here at the building. We’ve never really had a heart to heart, if that’s what you mean, but I’ve been asking Steve all kinds of questions about him. Steve’s not the best at getting information subtly—pretty much he’s not subtle at all,” she amended. “Like, I asked if he knew if Connor was seeing someone, and he said he’d find out for me, which he did by emailing Connor, ‘Are you seeing anyone?’ He forwarded the answer to me, and it was no.”
I wondered again about the picture of the blonde woman in Connor’s phone. “Yeah, that wasn’t very slick.”
“Steve isn’t slick at all. It’s awesome,” Amy told me, her smile getting even bigger. “And anyway, now that the other woman issue is settled, the way is clear for you, right? If you’re interested, that is.”
I wasn’t interested, for sure. Not at all. “Did your husband to find out anything else?”
“I can get him to. What do you want to know?” she asked eagerly.
“Nothing, I guess.” There was too much I was curious about for Amy’s husband to question him email by email. And really, Connor might have found that a little strange.
She looked disappointed by my lack of curiosity. “You know what happened, right? Connor’s accident? I’m not trying to gossip about him, but I think it’s pretty common knowledge.”
“Yes, I know.” I changed my answer. “I know some things. He said it took him a long time to recover.”
“I guess it was very, very hard,” she agreed. “Steve is all up on it because his own brother Alex was involved in a bad car accident and also had a tough time afterwards. I think that was one of the reasons that Steve wanted Connor to come to Whitaker Enterprises. He had seen how difficult the recovery was and how hard Connor had worked. I guess his heart stopped, he was dead,” she told me.
Fixing Lia Page 9