Tom puts his hand back on Lane’s shoulder and leans in close, the burnt coffee acidity of his breath curdling the contents of Lane’s stomach. “I might be able to pull some strings. Get you some holiday shifts.” Tom flicks his name tag again and smiles.
“Assistant store manager . . . nice. Moving on up.” Lane grabs the purple pillow off the shelf, puts it under his arm. “This is what I was looking for. Uh, perfect.”
Tom steps to Lane again and delivers his main point before he can slip away. “Us guys gotta stick together. This place is getting overrun with homos and beaners.”
“Don’t worry, Tom. Lake City’s not catching up with the modern world anytime soon.”
“You’d be surprised,” Tom says, ditching any veneer of humor. “If it were up to me, I’d check ’em all for drugs and green cards. Send ’em back to wherever they came from.”
Lane waits until Inez slips up and makes eye contact. “Thanks again for your help. See you soon?”
Inez turns her back and fluffs another pillow.
SEVEN
“I TOLD YOU TO KEEP your head down.” Nina pushes on the back of his neck, trying to fold him in half. The seat belt fights back harder than he does. Lane unbuckles and slides into the passenger-side footwell, the pillow still clutched to his chest.
As they pull to a stop at the edge of her driveway, she drapes her jacket over his head and secures it with a tuck between his shoulder and the car door.
“We’ll finish this conversation in five.” She removes a sleeping Jordan from his car seat and carries him over her shoulder, up the steps and into the corner-lot new construction. “Don’t go anywhere.”
While tempted to rifle through the glove compartment and find out if there’s anything under the seats, Lane stays put. He counts his age. He counts from his age back down to zero. The smell of the leather interior reminds him of Mia and their cross-country move to New York in her Range Rover. Every mile they traveled east, every mile closer to their new life together, Lane felt one step closer to his destiny.
At least five minutes pass. Probably ten. Or fifteen. He raises his head and peeks out from under the jacket to admire the house: a three-story box built of cement, metal, composite paneling, dark-stained tropical hardwood accents and numerous balconies with frameless frosted-glass balustrades. He isn’t sure, but it looks like the place has a decent roof deck or two with million-dollar views of Green Lake.
Nina passes inside the house’s front window. He drops back down into the footwell, only to rise up again. Now he sees a second woman, the Asian woman from Nina’s photograph, carrying the sleeping child—his head leaning against her neck.
The two women pace their front room. Nina wrings her hair with her hand, as if squeezing the water from a dish sponge. Her wife grips Jordan to her chest with her one arm and slices at the air in front of Nina’s face with the other.
They use some sort of remote to lower the automatic blinds. Nina spots Lane and mouths “Get down” as the blinds drop past her face. As her wife steps to the last open window, Lane plummets below the edge of the door and holds his breath.
Before he can count to his age and back again, Nina opens the driver’s-side door and gets in. She doesn’t say a word. She starts playing with her phone and PalmPilot, resting them on the dashboard.
“Don’t worry. She didn’t see me,” he whispers from under the coat.
No answer.
“It’s really none of my business, but doesn’t your wife think it’s weird that you’re back out here?” he tries again.
Nina dials a number on her phone but never hits call. She puts the phone to her ear and keeps facing out the windshield. “In my wife’s world, even drinking from plastic water bottles’ll give you cancer. And she’s even more allahu akbar about smoking ’cause it’s corrupting Jordan. I’m out here like every fifteen minutes.”
“Allahu akbar means ‘God is great,’” Lane says.
“Yeah, thanks. I get it.” She clears her throat. “What’s up with the pillow-thing anyway?”
He considers it for a moment. “Strategy. Like a prop. Maybe if you’d let me get a word in edgewise before I coulda explained what—”
“I take it you bought that pillow instead of my smokes?”
He slips three dollars and some change next to the stick shift.
“Not inspiring a lot of trust here, Lane.” She uses her free hand to search the car for a loose cigarette.
“Well, I—I talked to her, which is already more than I said I’d do today. OK?” He squeezes the pillow tighter.
“And?” She produces the nail clipper from her pocket and searches in vain for more white in her nails to trim.
“And what?”
She motions toward Jordan’s empty car seat. “In a work situation, you see, you report back to your employer.”
“Not much to say. Like you told me, she’s pretty scratchy.”
“Listen, Lane: You ever felt like the most important thing in your world might slip between your fingers? Disappear forever?”
“I’m assuming Lonnie filled you in about all of that too.”
She gives up on the nail clipper, picks a butt out of the ashtray and struggles to straighten it out enough to light it.
“For some reason, I have trouble picturing you as an I-was-born-to-be-a-mom type,” he pries.
“I can make my company happen. I can achieve all these successes.” She waves the cigarette stub at her house. “But don’t I also deserve to have a regular life with a family, like everyone else out there? People who are otherwise totally unremarkable get to take that shit for granted. I’ve had to fight for every bit of it. And if we lose Jordan, I don’t see how my wife can recover. How we can recov—Shit, here comes Tracey.”
“Who?”
Nina pulls the pillow out of Lane’s arms and punches it down on top of him, forcing him further into the footwell.
She opens the window some three inches, signaling to the cigarette smoke and her phone call as the obstacles to normal communication.
“Jordan’s down,” Tracey says, straining to see inside the car. “I’m sorry I made you rush back like that, but I just feel so freaked out. So overwhelmed. Like we have no control.”
Nina holds her palm over the phone’s mic and presses her lips toward the open gap at the top of the window. “Don’t worry, we have more control than you think.”
“Come back inside, sweetie,” Tracey says.
Nina arches her eyebrows and nods to the phone with her head. “The lawyer. Gimme a minute.”
“This late?”
“High priority . . . Gimme a minute.”
“Tell him I want—Tell him we need results. Right now,” Tracey says as the window rolls up. She continues to talk at Nina through the glass, “I swear to God my head will explode if he says ‘my hands are tied’ one more time.”
Neither Nina nor Lane speaks a word until the house door closes behind Tracey.
“I canned that lawyer the other week. Got a new one the next day and already dumped her too. I don’t tolerate inefficiency. And I don’t lose. Ever.” She continues to fake-talk into the phone. “In forty-eight hours, you’re gonna show me some progress or I’m going to have to move on. Got it?”
“That’s maybe, I dunno, a little fast.”
“I’m sure—if you really want to—you can find a way to convince someone with a marginal IQ to do something in their own best interest. And in the best interest of a young child.” She gives him twenty bucks. “Get a cab. Not here.” She uses her index and middle fingers to simulate a person running.
Dramatic measures, Lane thinks as he exits the car.
“Take this thing with you.” Nina tosses the pillow out on the pavement before she closes the door.
EIGHT
GETTING HIS JOB BACK AT Fred Meyer should be easy. In terms of paperwork and such. But emotionally, it would be one of the hardest things Lane has ever undertaken.
He waits for Tom at the
edge of the parking lot and tries to intercept him on the way to his bus stop. After blowing the first night and a few hours the next day standing out in the cold, he resolves to go inside and pretend to shop until he locates his target.
“I knew it,” Tom shouts down the aisle as Lane browses the candy section. “Lame-o wants his old job back.”
Lane laughs at the ridiculous comment. No way. He’s on winter break. Shopping for candy. For his nephew.
“I hope that kid doesn’t grow up to be a liberal bookworm gay-ass too.” Tom pretends to knee Lane in the thigh. The ol’ charley horse. A Tommy Tucker classic.
Lane conjures a final stilted laugh and, after a few moments of quiet, mentions that the store does seem a bit understaffed. He knows how things get around Christmas. If Tom twists his arm, he’d be willing to pick up a couple of holiday shifts. But as a favor to Tom. If he needs him. And only through New Year’s.
“AA folks call that ‘backsliding.’” Tom sucks something out from between his teeth.
Lane has tried to prepare himself for this. He’s repeated it over and over in his head. This whole thing is another step toward becoming the Bill Clinton of Lake City Way. The “Comeback Kid” Clinton in the “Hope” TV ad from ’92, not the ex-president who nutted all over his own narrative.
When Lane first saw that ad in high school, he found what he’d been missing: the role model, the father figure that he’d so long desired—a kindred spirit, born at the bottom, but who was also intelligent, hardworking and, of course, preternaturally charismatic.
Lane too could dream to make something of himself. And now, a decade later, he digs up a few lines from the Clinton ad: “I worked my way through law school with part-time jobs, anything I could find. And after I graduated, I really didn’t care about making a lot of money. I just wanted to go home and see if I could make a difference.” There. That was Lane. And this is the “anything I could find” moment.
The moment, with conditions. Lane explains to Tom he can’t work the deli counter—under any circumstances. That’s his proviso for picking up these shifts. He figures that, best-case scenario, he’ll do a couple of days in the back, get the line on Inez and have the whole thing sorted before anyone notices that he’s there. Worst-case scenario, Inez’ll require a few more days and he’ll end up making a few extra bucks at the store in the process. Like some political economist, probably Keynes, said, money is the link between the present and the future.
Tom listens to Lane’s pitch. “C’mon up to the break room. I’ll do your interview.”
“Really?”
“Next time, think about shaving. Men have standards in the real world.”
On the way upstairs, Lane thinks about running for the door, punching Tom in the back of his head or at least blackmailing the piece of shit to get out of jumping through all of these embarrassing and unnecessary hoops. After all, on Lane’s last day before quitting the deli to get married to Mia and move to New York, Tom took Lane out for drinks and started running his mouth. “Out for drinks” was a single can of Carling Black Label for each of them out on the loading dock. And Lane was pretty sure Tom had lifted the beers from the refrigerated aisle.
Thinking that it was their last time together, Tom unloaded on Lane about how he had lived with his mom since being released from jail for pandering. Lane assumed at first that pandering was another way to say panhandling. It seemed out of character for Tom, and he soon found out it was a bit more complicated.
Tom used to do the books and work the front desk at night at a North Lake City motel frequented by hookers. Tom said he’d been smoking a lot of base in those days and needed to generate some additional cash. He agreed to give the hookers free rooms by keeping the rentals off the books in exchange for a steady cut. It worked well for a couple of months until some other individual with more experience in the pandering industry tipped the cops to arrest him, but not until after he slapped the shit out of Tom and threatened his life. Since getting out, Tom’s been working his way through rehab, living at home, paying down fines and legal fees and working at Fred Meyer all the way up to his big comeback as assistant manager.
Even as Tom grills Lane about what makes a quality Fred Meyer employee, three ways to improve a customer’s day, how Jews are infiltrating the grocery union and a long digression-cum-debate about which part of a turkey deli slices come from, Lane doesn’t have the nerve to bring up any of the dirt he has on Tom. If he’s going to be the Bill Clinton of Lake City Way, he’ll have to know when to keep his head down and when to go for the kill.
THE NEXT DAY, HE FINDS her timecard in the metal rack in the hallway. First name. No last name. Printed in pencil. She’s here. Punched in late. But she’s here, for sure.
The clipboard hangs a few feet to the left on a nail between the hooks holding vinyl aprons and a mix of Burlington Coat Factory, Carhartt and Seahawks Starter jackets. Lane thumbs through the pages of printed spreadsheets, searching for her schedule. He found it when last in the store and remembers that it is about two-thirds of the way through.
He double-checks her breaks against the hour on the wall-mounted timecard machine and then spots her garish patent leather handbag.
He reaches inside the bag. Bills and tissues and a Chapstick. Lots of bills. Overdue bills. Electric. Phone company. Trailer park fees. Collection notices. Welfare statements. An overdraft charge from Washington Mutual. Lottery tickets. Food stamps. More lottery tickets. A pay stub from Fred Meyer: $6.72 per hour. Not a single photo of Jordan.
The jacket pockets yield a bus transfer and a box of Parliaments with four cigarettes left. He steals her smokes and buries them at the bottom of the wastepaper basket.
He was hoping to find a wallet or cell phone, although nobody in their right mind would keep their valuables here. The handful of lockers are monopolized by the store managers and union journeymen from the meat and fish departments.
But Inez is her real name. It’s on the pay stub and welfare statements. Inez Roberts. He snakes the pay stub so that he’ll have her address and phone number, just in case.
“Hey. Lame-o,” Tom shouts from down the hallway. “Don’t be late for your shift. No tardy slips here—just pink ones.”
IN THE GROCERY STORE KINGDOM, lunch meat is the lowest species of the esteemed meat phyla. Some would argue it’s closer to the grab-and-go snack foods than to an elite filet. It’s the meat with a sketchy, if not unknown, provenance. Meat product propped up with preservatives. We’re not talking about Katz’s or 2nd Ave Deli here. These are the wares of a regional superstore that sells as many or more bath mats and jumper cables. But it is still meat. Sort of. It’s lunch meat.
Lane works out his frustrations on the meat slicer. On the poor little pigs and turkeys and steer that have been mechanically separated, tumbled, pressed and colored into cold cuts that deliver a consistent look and uniform sandwich-eating experience.
He rams them into the spinning blade. Some unknown part of them. The carriage returning and returning in a hypnotic rhythm. He moves his hands in a practiced pattern around the knife’s edge. He is part of the machine. The machine is an extension of him.
He’s done this for years. Knows it better than riding a bike. Better than typing on a keyboard. Way better than driving a car. By late high school, he graduated from spraying down the meat department and carrying the bin of offcuts to the loading dock to be taken away and rendered. He started donning an apron and gathering a roller cart full of the different meats and cheeses for the preslice shift. There were roast beefs, honey smoked turkeys, oven-browned turkeys, York hams, Black Forest hams, turkey pastramis and a variety of deli cheeses running from Jarlsberg Lite to fluorescent yellow American.
Today, as he always does, he lays down the black rubber floor mats, sprays the deli slicer with bleach water, adjusts its gauge plate for ideal thickness for a given type of meat or cheese and sets the blade whirring at a vicious 530 rpm. He holds the meat with his left hand and reaches across with hi
s right to operate the push arm.
He sings “Miss Mary Mack” to himself while executing the complex hand routine around the revolving vorpal blade and inserting the paper sheet between each slice of the softer cheeses. When he finishes the shift, he reloads the roller cart and starts all over again. He was—he is again, at least, for the next few days—North Seattle’s Sisyphus of sliced sandwich meats.
“DILL, SON,” THE CUSTOMER SAYS, not taking his eye off the game of Snake II on his blue-and-silver Nokia 3310 brick. “And hurry up, I got business.”
“Lemme check,” the deli clerk answers, snapping on a powderless latex glove. He does an about-face, spinning on his all-black discount sneakers and calls to Lane in the back, “Biz?”
Lane already told dude not to call him that. Twice. This time he was going to straight-up pretend he didn’t hear him. When Tom introduced them at the beginning of the shift, he mentioned that they look like Bizarro Superman versions of each other. The guy started calling Lane “Bizarro” and then truncated it to “Biz” within five minutes. Lane assured him that they have nothing in common. Nothing. Even if they both have brown hair, blue eyes and a similar height.
“You got that Havarti back there? With the dill?”
And what’s wrong with “No, sorry, we’re out of that?” Lane thinks as he finishes cleaning the slicer, running the bleach rag around the edge of the blade on low rpm. Fuck this guy. He’s supposed to have Lane’s back, not make things more difficult.
On top of it, he already invited Lane to go to a Mars Hill megachurch service after work. Lane figures he’s the kind of kid, fresh off the bus from Idaho, Eastern Washington or Alaska, who refers to Seattle as “The City” and says shit like “Shut the front door” and “Cheese and rice.”
Little bothered Lane so much as a narrow-minded, earnest person with a poor sense of humor. Go ahead and be provincial or a philistine, but at least be funny. Most of Lane’s childhood friends were, in fact, hilarious idiots. And, on the other side, if you decide to shackle yourself with earnestness, at least come up with something interesting to show for it.
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