by Linda Sands
She began dating the guy at her father’s firm that they called The Golden Boy. She went on trips and dined in fine restaurants. She did everything you do when you’re falling in love. She tried to move on, forget Peter. But it wasn’t that simple. Men don’t just go away. Hearts don’t really heal. Especially the heart of the dumpee.
Angel caught herself imagining the doctor still in love with her, still wanting her. She imagined him calling and asking her to dinner. She played out the scenarios: telling him to go fuck himself, or meeting him and rejecting him publicly, doing something that would hurt his ego. She even took the imagining to a dark place, a place she’d never go. A place where Doctor Peter disappeared forever.
She remembered, in the beginning, praying for a do-over. Asking God to give her back that day. She’d change everything by going on the tour with the girls. And Peter would find another girl to share Belgian beer with on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, a girl he’d leave his wife for. She’d love him better than Angel ever could. She’d know how to be perfect. She’d be younger, prettier, stronger, sweeter, kinder, more of the most tender things.
Angel wished she could wipe it all away. That day and everything that followed. If only there was a bleach pen for regret.
She finished the cigarette and tossed it out the window, exhaling the last of the smoke through her nostrils as she wiped the tears from her cheeks.
“Fuck you, Doctor Peter Hazard. Fuck you! It’s your loss. I have Jimbo. I’ve always had Jimbo.”
She pushed the BMW’s speedometer to the three-digit mark, screaming, “No one leaves Angel. No one!”
Angel didn’t see the dog until it was too late. Not that she could have stopped in time. Not with the ice and the snow and the curving roads. Sure, if she’d been asked, she would have admitted she was going too fast, and yeah maybe she’d reached over the seat to grab a tissue, but no one was asking and no one was watching.
She hesitated, having come to a skidding halt a hundred yards down the road, and finally said, “Fuck it,” as she turned the car off and reached for her red parka.
She shrugged into the coat, tugged on her boots, and trudged back down the road to where the small yellow dog lay. She nudged it with her foot. When it didn’t move, she unclipped its collar and went back to the car, wrapping the leather around her fist.
She turned up the heat and pulled back onto the road, driving a little slower. Not because she was sad or sorry or worried, but because she was in New Hampshire, the land where yellow dogs wandered, husbands disappeared, and God had planted way too many trees.
Chapter 33
CRASH INTO ME
Barbara had never been a very good driver. In high school her teacher had said she suffered from road wander. Barbara, then Buffy, asked if that meant she’d do a lot of traveling in her life. She figured she only passed the driver’s test because of the way her pale skin and red miniskirt had stood out against the black leather of her daddy’s Cadillac.
There were some things beauty could still buy.
She hated that she might have passed that idea on to Chamonix, a girl who learned early that charm was not to be wasted on the Santa at the mall or a grandmother who was bound to love you regardless, but to be used on parents of friends who delivered hand-me-downs and birthday gifts, on teachers who graded papers and presented awards, on fathers who wanted all the best for their children all the time.
When Chamonix turned sixteen she went to find Barbara in her bedroom, closed the door, and said, “I need to get away for a little bit. Could you get me a hotel room for the night for my birthday?”
Barbara wondered where her daughter had picked up such a notion—that she needed to get away from her life and that you could do it at a local hotel, that that was even acceptable.
“Sarah’s mom lets her,” she said.
Sarah’s mom was known to have a different man every month, a man who usually worked too little, drank too much, and always ended up making an ass of himself in public.
“You would if you loved me . . .” Chamonix said.
“Baby, why would you want to spend your birthday alone?”
One look at Chamonix gave away the answer. She wouldn’t be alone. There would be the boyfriend. A smart-mouthed kid from a wealthy family that Chamonix had met at some school event, a long-haired kid in torn jeans and a blazer who showed up in his dad’s Porsche one day but wouldn’t let Chamonix ride in it until she changed her clothes.
“Mom, I’m on the pill, so don’t worry about that.”
“Oh. I feel better already . . .”
That was the beginning of the mother-daughter relationship change. From then on, Barbara felt like the kid, like she was the one getting a lesson. She listened, added information, and found herself wishing she had experienced a childhood like her daughter’s, that she had been blessed with a cool and understanding mom, that she had understood the world around her as well as Chamonix did at such a young age.
Over time, she and Mick found it was easier to let Chamonix have her way, simpler to believe her, better to just go along. Mick assured her they had a good girl, a daughter wise beyond her years.
“We should consider ourselves lucky,” he said. “Our little girl is so mature.”
It was more than that for Barbara. She knew children were supposed to grow up. It was just that she felt the cord had been wrongly severed by the baby, leaving her floating around stemless.
When Chamonix went away to art school, Barbara joined every volunteer group she could find that involved children. She filled the gap with borrowed daughters, none of them white, none of them pretty, none of them as beautiful, bright, or hopeful as her own.
By the time Chamonix moved back to Syracuse, Barbara felt almost nothing for her; she’d become a stranger. The baby she’d raised was gone. In her place was a cynical woman with her daughter’s eyes. She tried to renew the relationship by meeting Chamonix for lunch, helping her furnish her loft. But what her daughter needed couldn’t be found at any store.
When she asked Chamonix to paint something for a girls’ club, something sweet, something hopeful, Chamonix said she was sorry but she couldn’t, that wasn’t her vibe. Barbara knew then she’d lost her baby forever.
At a downtown community center, Barbara finished reading to the children. She said her good-byes, then left the building and crossed the street to reach a small café. She sat at a black iron bistro set in front of the window, wishing she still smoked. She had nothing to do with her hands. She glanced at the paper menu, pretended to have important business on her cell phone. She imagined herself in France, a place she had never been but knew she’d love. They’d watched taped episodes on the Travel Channel, so many in fact that sometimes she thought she really had walked the Champs-Élysées smoking a Gauloise and strolling in designer clothes with a white poodle on a thin gold chain.
She almost ordered an espresso when the waitress greeted her, but remembered her surroundings and her desire and ordered a glass of Beaujolais instead, thinking it still sounded French.
She thought of four-year-old Duane, the little boy she’d just left. His dimpled cheeks made him a shoo-in for those mommies looking for a little boy to love. Unfortunately his medical history and the large birthmark on his neck gave some of the “shoppers” pause.
It was hard to not think of people who came to the home in that way. Barbara wanted to believe that everyone was sincere, but there were a fair number of sleezebags swayed into fostering by government money.
In Barbara’s mind, in every poor household, in every family being run down by an angry drunk or failing because of an inattentive parent, there was a child who wanted to succeed and make a new start. A kid with the kind of attitude that had founded this great country, and on the days Barbara felt like her work didn’t matter, she chose to look for the Thomas Jeffersons and Benjamin Franklins, for the Einsteins, for the sad, misunderstood, left-behind youth that would save us from ourselves.
Barbara finis
hed her fourth glass of wine, paid her bill, slipped on her coat, and made her way back to the parking lot of the foster facility. She may have been distracted more than inebriated, but one thing was certain. Her ability to discern right from wrong had dimmed. Later she would wish for this moment back, a single stolen second of time that would make a difference—where she could replace a you-should-have-known-better grimace with a smile born of the right decision, the one that sounded like this: I am too drunk to drive and I have enough money in my purse, enough contacts on my phone that I don’t have to.
Barbara got into her car on the third try. She drove out of the lot, rolled through the first stop sign, and neglected the following traffic light entirely. A speeding sedan rammed into her front end, spinning her around and aiming her car into the path of two lanes of oncoming traffic. Barbara saw headlights as her slow brain formed one word: surreal. A word followed quickly by others: danger, fear, pain.
The man from the other car, an older-model Chevy, ran toward her, smashed his fist through the broken passenger-side window, flipped up the lock, and tore open the door.
“Lady, are you okay?”
He reached in, unbuckled Barbara, and pulled her out. In the process he banged her knees on the pavement, scraped her arms across the broken glass.
“Hey!” she yelled, slapping at him. “What the hell?”
But her voice sounded far away even to her own ears, and her objections senseless. The first of three skidding vehicles crashed into her car, pushing it into his. Windshields imploded, smashed bits of vehicle skittered across pavement as the sounds of crunching metal, blaring horns, and screaming people filled the night.
The stranger dragged her away from the road as both cars ignited. The last car in the line-up swerved to avoid the fiery heap, jumped the curb, and crashed into a pharmacy storefront. And Barbara, with blood dripping into her eyes from the cut on her forehead, slumped against the man who’d saved her. He smelled like pine and a little like her old dog, Samson, but that might have been the smells coming from where they were sitting and not the man, she thought. Barbara watched the flames grow in the car fire, felt the heat. She was confused, tired, so ready to say “You win, I give up. Can we go home now?”
The man mumbled, “That must have been how it was for my father. Only this time no one died. See? No one died. Right, lady?”
“That’s right,” Barbara said, as if he was one of the children she soothed all day long. “That’s right.” She reached for his hand.
She was too close to see all of him, only pieces. A strong chin, high cheekbones. He was an attractive, sandy-haired young man with the saddest, oldest eyes she’d ever seen.
He spoke quietly, staring off as if entranced. “He drove into somebody, just like I did to you. I never thought about how he felt, only me. He left me. He killed those little girls and never even knew. Didn’t have to go around hearing about it, paying for it, or living through it again and again. He was dead and gone. Fucking guy had it easy. Me and Mom? Not so much.”
Upon hearing the words “killed those girls,” Barbara tried to pull her arm from his grip, her fingers from his, but the man was caught up in his story, lost in a past only he could see. As she struggled he held her tighter, but when she said, “I’m going to be sick. Please!” he released her and Barbara lurched forward to vomit.
When she finally sat up, wiping her mouth, he was gone.
The cops had questions. A lot of questions. All she could tell them was that the stranger had nice eyes. Sad eyes.
Chapter 34
JIMBO/JAMES LIKED TO WATCH
Jimbo rubbed his eyes and shook himself awake. He glanced at the computer monitor, checked that he was able to see both registers behind the bar and the front door. Not that he thought anyone was ripping him off, or that he even cared about the money. He just liked to follow the progress. In and out. Money and doors. Open and shut. Some days he hardly remembered this wasn’t real. He almost forgot where he’d come from, who he truly was.
He let the chair drop into place, feet hitting the floor. It was getting louder downstairs, almost time for the bouncer to make a pass. Guy was beefy, bald, and mean-looking. As long as you didn’t talk to him, he was damn intimidating. Poor bastard had a voice like Tyson, complete with a lisp. Jimbo knew it was better to have someone else to do the dirty work, someone who could control himself and who knew the limits of his job. Especially after that episode with the two drunk assholes.
If Chamonix hadn’t shown up when she did, he wasn’t sure how it would have ended. Those kids owed their lives to her. Thing was, most chicks would have been disgusted by the scene, by the brutality of an alley fight, by the blood and broken bones. But not her. In a weird way, it seemed to turn her on. Jimbo had no problem with that. As the boys limped off, one cradling his arm and the other blubbering about calling the police or telling his dad—some big swinging dick in local government—Jimbo had simply brushed off his shirt and pant legs, and said “Sorry about that” to Chamonix.
“Don’t be,” she said, approaching him. “They deserved it. Maybe more.”
“You think so?” Jimbo said.
She reached out and touched his cheek. Even in the dim light of the alley, he could see the blood on her finger as she pulled it away. “Yeah,” she said, then licked her finger and met his eyes. It was a first for him: sex, standing up, in an alley, the deep bass beat of a jukebox song rumbling through the wall, a vibration he felt in a hand braced against the brick as he slammed into his waitress, again and again.
Jimbo stood before the one-way glass wall of his loft office thinking about that night, wondering if it might happen again. He scanned the scene below. A girl in a blue dress snorting coke off her friend’s watch, a geek beside the jukebox fixing his hair then adjusting his package—as much as possible—before he approached a girl standing near the exit. He watched two lesbian regulars at the end of the bar pretend they were bi, flirt with some jocks, probably trying to make each other jealous but ending up only more confused in the end.
Behind the bar, Chamonix pushed some bills into the communal tip jar. Roxie served a round of shots to a group of guys in biker jackets while Cress eyed them from the kitchen doorway.
The guys in the kitchen had it easy. The menu was bar food on the healthy side, if that was possible for an Irish pub. You needed to serve something salty so they’d order drinks to wash it down, and some carbs to soak up the booze, Jimbo knew. In his opinion, a bar should be about drinks, people, and ambience—not food.
Flannigan’s had plenty of ambiance. The decor, the lighting, the music. It all led to one thing. People hooking up, or in the case of the geek, trying to. The music was right, just loud enough that you had to get close to the person you were talking to but not so loud that you confused their words and ending up making an ass of yourself because you thought they said, “I think you’re hot,” when they were asking about your drink: “What you got?”
It was Friday night. That meant more drinking and a bigger crowd. Most weeknights they filtered out by midnight, but on days when there was an option of sleeping in and the potential of having someone to wake up to, the girls usually had to escort stragglers to the door at last call and sometimes usher them into a cab. Jimbo was strict about that. No one left his place driving drunk. No one. He didn’t care how much it cost him, or how many cabs he needed to place on retainer. Everyone that drank at Flannigan’s got home safe.
Even if they reminded him of his wife, Angel, or any of his girlfriends pre- or post- marriage—those broads who had been quick to remind him of his inadequacies. It seemed everyone returned at some point, like they needed to ram home one more time how fucked up he was, how much he’d ruined their lives, and on occasion, to impress upon him how wonderful their life was now that he was no longer in it.
That was exactly what he needed to hear. Another affirmation that he was a total loser.
It was one thing to have failed as a man in the procreation department
. It still felt strange, looking at all the bastard kids in the world—that he didn’t have one out there somewhere, given all the unprotected sex he’d enjoyed. If he thought about it, he might start believing there was something else wrong with him, something more than bad mojo, more than a feeling of being cursed. He knew he’d risked a few diseases, taken a few shortcuts. At least forty-one times. Okay, exactly forty-one times.
Some days, Jimbo pretended there was a little Jimbo VI out there and the cunt just hadn’t told him, because that’s how those bitches were when you told them the truth about their flabby ass, or they caught you porking their roommate in the bathroom at a party, or found out you’d been jerking off at work in the stockroom to pictures on your phone from some woman in Wisconsin you met on Facebook.
The shrink he’d seen when he was a kid told him he might grow up with alcohol issues. He couldn’t remember her name, only that she’d been nice—a woman who smelled like fresh-cut grass. She always wore red and black, like she was part sexy hooker and part serious widow. Many nights he lay in bed with one hand down his pajama bottoms thinking of shiny black pantyhose, tight red skirts, and the space under the desk of Doctor Part Sexy Part Serious.
During one of their sessions, Jimbo fell asleep and dreamed of her wearing nothing but a strip of black electrical tape over her privates. She kept asking, “What do you think?” and “How does that make you feel?” as she jammed a screwdriver into a wall socket to send waves of electricity through her body.
Jimbo didn’t think he had issues with alcohol. He had issues with loads of other things: sex, the size of his dick, women, the size of their tits, commitment, responsibility, money, planning, trust, guilt, religion, red meat, black people, honesty, porn.