“You could probably get two regular cars for the price of that one.”
“Oh, is that what this is about? You’re thinking I should buy us both a car?”
I blinked and drew back, dropping her wrist. “What? Of course not.”
In all our time together, I had never asked her to buy me anything. She could easily have done so, and there had been times when it would have been very much needed and appreciated. But her money was hers, and even though I’d indulged in the occasional fantasy when she’d show up at my door with a set of keys to a new car and a “Happy Best Friends Day” card, I knew she didn’t owe me anything of the sort. “Viv, you’re the one who told me to help you stay strong.”
“Yes, but that was before the Crystal Frost racing model. Salem, come on! Don’t pretend this wouldn’t be an awesome tool for the agency.”
“Oh, we’re an agency now?”
“Hello? Where have you been? We’re working an active case at this moment.”
“We heard a story on the news and we’ve asked a few questions. We have no actual client.”
She gasped and narrowed her eyes at me. “It’s like you’ve completely forgotten your own grandmother. And Mario! Think of Mario. He’s out there, poor man, working his fingers to the bone and trying to provide a legacy for his family. A sitting duck on that highway, just waiting for those men to come and take everything he’s worked all these years for — ”
“Jeez-O-Peet,” I said. “Get a grip on yourself. I don’t think you can stretch this excuse any thinner.”
She gave me a hateful look, then frowned, dropping her gaze. She gave a deep sigh. “I guess you’re right. If I missed out on the limited edition color, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. And we don’t really need the super high performance model.” She looked at me, a touch chagrined, and put her hand on my shoulder. “Salem, thank you. I lost my head there for a minute, but you performed your duties, just as I asked you to.”
She headed back into the dining room. “Mr. Bernard, I appreciate your time and attention. I’m going to need a few days to think. I will definitely be getting back to you.” Then she turned to me. “Now, I hate to be rude but my physical therapist is supposed to be here in ten minutes and I need to get ready for him.”
“No problem, Ms. Viv. Just to let you know, there is one more of those special editions in Fort Worth, and I could get it by tomorrow morning if you want it.”
Viv froze, gave me the side-eye, then turned back to him. “Well, I’ll still need a couple of days to consider. That’s a lot of money to just be throwing around on a whim.” Which I supposed was a safe assumption even though she had no idea how much money it actually was.
As she walked us to the door, she stopped at a side table and picked up a pen, talking the entire time about how grateful she was to both of us. She scribbled something on the brochure and handed it to Bernard. “You can take this one back, and I’ll keep the coupe book to look through a little closer. That’s more my style, and probably what I’ll go with, if I go with anything.” She patted the catalog now in Bernard’s hands. “You hang on to that one, now, and give it a good look through. There is some very interesting information in there and I’m not sure you’ve even read it all.”
He gave a confused nod and allowed himself to be shooed out with me.
As we rode the elevator down I nodded toward the book. “You know she left you a note in there, right?”
“What?” He flipped open the book and scanned the pages. “Wait — ” He lifted it to peer closer. “Wait five minutes and then come back up. I want that car!”
“Told you,” I said.
“What do you know,” he said with a laugh and a shake of his head. “These crazy old coots. They cannot resist their Cadillacs.”
“So, this will be your last monthly appointment with me,” Maggie said. She hiked up her pants and sat with one foot curled under her in her big office chair, as she always did when I visited. She reached across and rubbed at the base of Stump’s ears. “Are you excited about that?”
I nodded, smiling. “Yes.” Then I frowned. “Actually, no. I thought I would be excited. I feel like I should be excited. But mostly what I feel is nervous.”
She nodded and spread her hands. “Perfectly normal. A lot of people say the same thing.”
“I seriously don’t know if I can handle it. I mean, knowing there’s somebody watching over me to keep me on the straight and narrow — that’s a pretty big motivator.”
“Are you still going to meetings?”
“Every week.”
“Go every day for the next few weeks. Then every other day.”
I nodded, although I knew that wasn’t going to happen. I tried not to look at Stump because sometimes I felt like she could tell when I was feeding someone a line. I looked quickly out the window, as if I’d seen something.
Maggie did this deep breathing thing she did sometimes that made me think she had just decided not to say what she was thinking. Which was fine by me, but made me kind of curious, still.
“You are finished with your visits to me, Salem. But you’re not finished with needing a support system. I would encourage you to honor all the hard work you’ve done so far by maintaining that support system and leaning on it all you can in the coming weeks. You might, of course, even think about being the support for someone else. That helps, believe it or not.”
“Oh, I believe it,” I said. “I just have a hard time finding anyone who needs help more than I do.” I laughed.
She laughed, too, but as is always the case with Maggie, I didn’t think she was really feeling my humor. “You haven’t looked very hard, then.”
“I guess that’s true.” I needed to talk to someone, I decided, about how nervous I was, and Maggie was not that person. I knew who was, though.
I stood and held out my hand, clumsily tucking Stump up against my hip with the other arm. Stump grunted. “Well, Maggie, it’s been fun, but I hope I never see you again unless we happen to run into each other at Target.”
She laughed again in that humorless way. “Salem, I can say exactly the same thing.”
On the elevator, I pulled my new phone out and started to flick through the icons to find Les’ phone number. I saw that cloud symbol, though, and looked around the elevator, although I knew perfectly well I was the only one on it. “Windy,” I said, feeling like a fool. “Call Les.”
“Okay, sweetie,” Windy said. Her little cloud waves floated.
Les didn’t answer, but after four rings his voice mail picked up.
“This is Les. Leave a message. If it’s an emergency, please call this number and somebody will find me.” Then he rattled off the number for Exodus Ministries, where he spent the bulk of his time working with people fresh out of prison.
“Les, it’s me. I just got out of Maggie’s office. For the last time! Ever! Ever in my life. I’m kind of freaking out, actually. I thought I would be happy but that call from my mother has me freaked out. Call me back.” I started to click the “End Call” button, then put the phone back to my ear. “Oh, and it’s not an emergency. Just call me back when you have…”
I stopped, because I had come out of the elevator, out the front door and into the parking lot. Where Les stood beside his ice cream truck, holding a big bunch of balloons and a little bundle of flowers. His wife Bonnie stood beside him, holding a homemade sign that said, “Congratulations on your Graduation, Salem!”
I burst into tears.
“Oh no!” Bonnie said, tossing the sign onto the top of my car and coming to me for a big hug. “We didn’t mean to make you cry!”
“Then you shouldn’t have sucker punched me like that!” I wailed, hugging her neck and then Les’. “This is so sweet. But kind of pathetic, too. Congratulations, you’re off probation! Woohoo! I mean, it’s not like I graduated from Harvard or something.”
“Hush,” Les said. He took Stump from me, then opened my car door and deposited her in the driver’s sea
t, rolling the window down so she could raise up on her front legs and hang out with us. Then he tied the balloons around my wrist like a six-year-old having a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. “We all have our lessons to learn and it’s a smart person who learns them where they are. You can tackle Harvard next semester.”
“This is a big deal, Salem, and you have earned the right to celebrate it.”
I dried my tears and told them about the final visit to Maggie’s office. “Seriously, I never want to see her again. I mean, she’s nice enough, but seeing her again will mean failure. Plus, she never gets my jokes. I don’t know how to relate to anyone who doesn’t get my jokes.”
“It’s okay to think in terms of ‘never again,’ but I want you to focus on the right now for just a little bit, okay? How’s your head right now?”
“Freaked out,” I said.
He nodded. “Okay, what do you need to do when you’re freaked out?”
“Talk about it. Take care of myself. Face one day at a time.”
“Good girl. Are you getting enough sleep?”
I waggled my head back and forth. “I kept waking up last night thinking about seeing my mom again. About another round of marriage and break-up drama. And I’m supposed to see her Saturday. Like, be face to frigging’ face. G-Ma and I are driving up to Amarillo to have brunch with her fancy-schmancy new friends. I thought I had a few weeks to prepare myself, but it’s starting already.”
“Are they really fancy-schmancy?”
I shrugged. “They have brunch.”
“I see. Is that what’s bothering you most? Do you feel intimidated by that?”
I leaned against my car door and rubbed Stump’s fat back through the window. “I don’t know, part of it, maybe. But mostly it’s just Mom. You know, we’ve talked about it enough. Remember that night when you had the bonfire at your place, and we had that ceremony where we wrote what we wanted to let go of, and then burnt it in the fire? That’s what I wrote about — my mom. Or not about her, exactly, but my resentment of all that. My wishing things could have been different, and anger with her that they weren’t.”
I remembered that night very clearly, along with the fantastic feeling of freedom and release when the paper curled and turned black, then disappeared into the flames. I had felt free. Tons lighter. Like a whole new world was opening up before me. I’d cried buckets that night, utterly convinced that I was free from all that forever.
That feeling had lasted until the next time I talked to my mom.
“I hate how bitter I feel, how bitter I sound. It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“Let’s just drop the ‘supposed to’ for now and deal with what is. How long has it been since you’ve seen her?”
I thought for a moment. “Two years, I guess.”
“So you haven’t been around her since you were sober?”
I shook my head. “Nope. I mean, she knows. I told her I was going to AA and I’d quit, but…” She didn’t know what a big deal my sobriety was to me, the transformation that I had been trying to live. She didn’t know I was a Christian. I had tried to tell her, but when the moment came I went with a less-definitive (i.e. more chicken) “I’m going to church now.” She’d warned me about being taken for a ride by sham preachers who only wanted my money or to control me and add them to their harem.
No need to worry about any of that. I had no money to be scammed out of, and I’d only actually spoken to the preacher to say, “good morning” and “amen” when he was passing out communion wafers.
“What time are you leaving on Saturday morning?” Les asked.
“We’re supposed to be there by eleven. So we’ll need to leave G-Ma’s by nine.”
“Okay, I’ll be at your place by eight-thirty, and we’ll pray before you go. It could be, Salem, that God is bringing her back into your life because He knows you’re ready to tackle this.”
I shrugged. “He has more faith in me than I do.”
Les nodded. “Oh yeah. He always does.” He hugged me again.
I opened the car door and sat down, wondering how I was going to make it back to Trailertopia with all these balloons.
Les helped me arrange them. “Now, rest your arm on the window here and let the balloons fly free. They’re tied on good, they won’t go anywhere.”
“You know what’s awesome? I paid my last fine payment today, too. So that means I can start saving for a newer car. I mean, I like this car and everything, but I’ll be glad to get something a little newer and put some money in the bank.”
Les gave me a proud smile. “You’re moving on up.”
“I just need this one to last about six more months, and that will give me time to save for a decent down payment on a new car.”
“Good girl. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” He patted the top of the car.
I took a deep breath and sniffed, touched again that he and Bonnie had known what a big deal this was and had been there to celebrate with me. I said a quick thank you prayer for Les, and turned the key.
The car rumbled and made a high-pitched whining noise. Then the engine caught, and it roared loudly to life. Much more loudly than normal. Like, waaay too loud. I reached for the ignition to shut it off, but before I could, something exploded and knocked so hard that the hood jumped. Then I smelled burning.
Chapter Three
Moral Crimes
It was, sadly, not the first time Les had towed me home with his ice cream truck. At least he refrained from playing “Pop Goes the Weasel” as we drove. “Seriously?” I groused to God as Les dragged me out of the parking lot and down the street. “A few months? You couldn’t help me out for a few more months while I saved up some money for a down payment? Why is it that every single plan I make and work towards fails?”
Love never fails.
If having this verse pop immediately to mind was meant to bring me comfort, it failed. It’s entirely possible, in fact, that I went a bit mad with the stress of it all. I decided as we crawled through traffic and I nodded, grinning maniacally, at the people who pointed and laughed at my broken down car and soaring balloon bouquet as we passed, that if God wanted me to love my way through this, fine. A-O-freaking-K! I would love my brains out, and we would see how things turned out.
When Les unhooked the tow rope on the car in front of my trailer, I laughed and offered to paint “Ice Cream and Full-Service Towing” on the side of his van. I hugged him after he looked under the hood and proclaimed the car “totally fried, not worth more than scrap metal now.” When we called the junk yard and they towed the car away, I held up the check for $200 they gave me and said with a big smile, “Toward the down payment on my new car!”
Les and Bonnie gave each other a worried look. I grinned on, my teeth starting to dry out, and proclaimed how much I loved calling each of my co-workers so I could ask someone to give me a ride to work. It would give me a great chance to get to know them better.
God met this with having everyone else be busy except for Doreen, a new bather who was also Flo’s cousin. Doreen was very sweet, but a walking bundle of anxiety. She hated driving in traffic so much that she drove to work an hour and a half early so she could avoid it. Seriously. To avoid the “traffic” in Lubbock. She waited in the parking lot for an hour and half. This was her knitting time.
So at dark-thirty Friday morning, I sat with a plastered-on smile and did my best to love Doreen, knitting away in the driver’s seat and talking nonstop about her Snow Babies collection just loudly enough to keep me from drifting off. Actually, it wasn’t hard to love Doreen, but I hated mornings in much greater measure. And I wasn’t that fond of Snow Babies, whatever the heck they were.
It was as if one of us — me or God, I wasn’t sure which — had thrown down the gauntlet. God was sure love wouldn’t fail. I was determined to show Him that no matter how much I loved, failure was gonna rear its ugly head and then He’d need to come up with some kind of amendment or something.
The first
thing I did when the shop was open was to arrange with Flo to take Saturday off. I expected a bigger fuss than I got, but Flo said I had been working hard and I deserved a day off. That was a small miracle in itself, and I took it as a sign from God that I really had to go to Amarillo even though I almost had a decent excuse not to.
To make up for this, he sent Butterscotch Reynolds, a 100-pound Labradoodle with hair so thick you literally couldn’t get a comb through it; Butterscotch had recently taken to crashing through the neighbor’s fence and rolling with glorious abandon all over the neighbor dog’s poo.
He sent McTavish, a foaming-at-the-mouth Scottish Terrier who had made the rounds through every grooming shop in town at least once, and been asked not to come back by most of them.
He sent Phoebe Harris, a cute little silver Poodle who might have been a good dog if she didn’t scream high-pitched, ear-bleeding screams every time anyone touched her. Or almost touched her. Or looked in her general direction.
I smiled. I gritted my teeth. I refused to harbor ill-will toward any of these dogs or their owners.
At two o’clock, God called my bluff.
My phone ding-donged.
“They’re here! The Handits! They’re coming down Clovis Highway right now and I’m not going to take it lying down.”
I smiled. I loved G-Ma. I loved the bandits.
“G-Ma, take a breath. Now tell me, what exactly do you see?”
“A white four-door sedan. Driving down the highway in broad daylight. Oh, these jokers are bold, aren’t they? Wait until they see what happens when they meet someone who’s not afraid to stand up to them!” I heard the whoosh of the door opening as she shouted this last bit.
“G-Ma,” I said as lovingly as I could. “Don’t pull the trigger until you see the whites of their eyes.”
“You Godless heathen can just — ”
She stopped abruptly. The door slammed again and the whooshing sound cut off.
“G-Ma?” I asked, concerned at the deadly silence.
“It was the cops,” she whispered. “I almost pointed a gun at the cops.”
Caught in the Crotchfire Page 7