“I’m not judging, I’m—I need to know how bad of a guy he is, is all. Is he like dangerous?”
“Dangerous to who?”
“To me? To Inez?”
“Nah, not really.”
“Not really?”
“Not at all. I mean, he’s your run-of-the-mill burnout weed dealer. Probably never weighed a bag on a real scale or kept a P-and-L in his whole career.”
“Wait, I thought he was dealing oxy?”
“I didn’t say shit about dealing. He ain’t cutthroat enough for that business. I heard he went to Club Fed for selling eighths of schwag weed to hustle up cash to buy Similac and Pampers. Not the sharpest tool in the shed. Kind of an emotional cat.” Lonnie belches. “I even heard he borrowed from Frank Jr. and started crying when he couldn’t pay the vig.”
“Colacurcio? When?” Lane pushes close in on Lonnie’s face but retreats as he smells what he guesses to be Wendy’s in the burp.
“Like now. Around New Year’s.”
“Shit, man. Why didn’t you tell me that before?” Lane sits back down on his stool to think.
The band starts playing the same cover of Van Halen’s “Panama” as the last time they were at the Rimrock. “This fucking rocks,” Lonnie notes, and then continues, “I thought you wanted to know if he was dangerous, not pathetic.”
THIRTY-ONE
“CHRISTMAS AND NEW YEAR’S,” INEZ says through the trailer’s screen door. She’s wearing a bra with no shirt and holds a wadded bath towel over her chest to impede Lane’s view. “Can I invite you to my birthday so you can crap all over that too?”
“When’s your birthday?”
“Jordan and I’ll be long gone at that point.” She pulls a sliding bra strap back over her shoulder and tosses back her wet hair with a whip of her neck. “Asshole.” The cigarette she’s hiding behind her back starts to burn her finger. She chucks it into the sink and waves the smoke away.
Three to four days. He knows that’s how long oxycodone is detectable with a urine test. That’s what the computer at the library told him, anyhow. Nina only has a few more days unless she has some DEFCON 1 scheme up her sleeve like a hair follicle test. Lane knows Nina won’t miss her window of opportunity. Unless she can’t find Inez, that is.
“Look, I’m here to talk to you about something important. I mean it. About Kevin. I think you need to take off for a few days. Get out of town. Until the end of the week.”
“Sure, I’ll jump on a flight down to LA. No, Palm Springs. Chill out a few days.”
He starts to raise his voice. “I’m serious.”
“You have to be realistic to be serious.”
“You know the Colacurcios?”
“Uh. I used to be a bikini barista. In Lake City. What do you think?”
“I’ve got bad news.” Lane pauses long enough to let her imagination visit a few worst-case scenarios. “Kevin’s got debt with them. And he can’t pay.”
“And?” she laughs. “That’s his problem.”
“It’s to Frank Jr.” He wants to make sure she understands the implications.
“Those fat fucks ain’t Mafia. They’re old sleazeballs who own some strip clubs, happen to be Italian and watch too many movies.”
“You don’t want Kevin showing up here or at Fred Meyer all desperate, causing a scene. Taking your money. Or worse.”
“I can handle myself.”
“Can you? Can you handle yourself? And Jordan? And all of the legal stuff? Why don’t you go to Yakima for a few days? Take the Greyhound. Stay with your grandma. Until he sorts out his situation.”
“Sounds nice and all, but I can’t leave my job. Or my mom. Or my son. Or nothing.” She looks around the room for the time and finds it on the microwave. “I gotta get to work now.”
Inez leans forward to grab a shirt and pulls it over her head. She catches him looking.
“You like that?”
“Like what?”
“You think you’re all cool and know shit. But I can tell.”
“Tell what?”
“Right . . .” She lights another cigarette. “And stop judging. Smoking ain’t illegal, especially not in your own house.”
Schmidt cans litter the trailer. Lane asks if she’s drunk.
“A beer. Maybe seven. What? You never had a drink either?”
“What if you get tested?” He thinks of Wanda’s descent from deadhead to diabetic drunkard.
“Like drug-tested?”
“Yeah, for booze. Or other stuff.”
“Ain’t gonna happen.” She rises to her tiptoes and turns as if she’s about to dance but thinks better of it. “I’m sorted.”
“This Kevin thing can change all of that. Believe me. Call into work. Tell them you have the flu, and I’ll drive you to the Greyhound station. My paycheck should be ready. Let’s go get it, and I’ll pay for your bus ticket.” He taps into the late-night self-empowerment infomercials that he feasted on during his first weeks at home. “This is your chance to change your life, to make things better for you. Not just you, but you and Jordan. Don’t let your past or those around you define you. Um, like search out the power within you.” He almost starts to buy his own bullshit and is no longer sure if he’s talking to her or himself.
She opens the screen door and hangs her towel on a mildewed nylon line under the awning.
Lane grabs the back of her hand. “Come with me. Right now. I’ve got a car. Let’s go get my check.”
She is quiet. Perhaps weighing the merit of his warning. There is some concern behind her bluster. He can feel it in the slackness of her arm. The desire to give in. To stop fighting. But she’ll require more convincing.
She tries to pull free of his hand.
He tightens his grip, then thinks better of it and lets her go. “OK, then. Stay here, and I’ll be right back to get you.”
“But I have my shift.”
“Call in sick. And, for God’s sake, don’t go anywhere until I get back.”
AS THE RED LIGHT ON Ninety-Fifth is taking its time, time that Lane doesn’t have, he cuts a right turn across the linoleum store’s parking lot and bails to the side streets. He can make up some time this way, so long as he doesn’t stop at the intersections.
He punches the dashboard as he thinks of how Mia controls all access points and continues to write the rules as they go. How is it fair that he can do nothing but struggle to adapt? Lane already tried to get back in touch with her a half dozen different ways. He *69ed her number from the deli landline, but it wouldn’t go through. He told Fred Meyer customer service that he misplaced the number for a new customer who wants “like eight Wings n’ Things party platters.” They got him the incoming call list, but her number showed as blocked.
He—Lane Bueche—is used to being able to accomplish whatever he puts his mind to. With the suspended sentence and loss of financial aid, Lane focused on what needed to be done and, even if it took a few extra years, he graduated. He’s already pulled himself up from nowhere. From nothing.
Lane has tried to take that same approach to the breakup. If he wants to fix it, he can fix it through sheer will and resilience. But his ongoing inability to contact Mia proves to him how little power he has. He is unsettled to the core of his being by the realization that no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries—even with this hiatus in Seattle—it all depends on her whim.
A Plymouth backs out of a wooded driveway. He swerves, missing the rain ditch by a couple of feet and accelerates through the gravel shoulder, or tries to accelerate but the station wagon picks up speed like a lawn mower. He rights the ship and blazes through the next four-way stop without pausing.
Nothing has changed. Lane feels the same frustration, the same sense of isolation and impotence as when he collect-called his mom from a pay phone near Gramercy Park and set the whole Seattle trip in motion. He pleaded with her to buy him a flight home for the holidays. To not ask any questions. That he’d pay her back. Lane didn’t cry un
til after he hung up.
He then dialed the toll-free numbers of every airline that flew to Seattle and begged for a bereavement fare for the supposed funeral of his father. He wasn’t able to produce a death certificate, an obituary, the name of the funeral home or the name of a funeral director, but he was able to convey enough of a genuine sense of bereavement that one sales agent took pity on him and offered a discounted one-way fare. One that was discounted just enough for his mother to cover the cost. He’d been hoping for a round-trip, but one-way was OK because he had to believe that if he stuck with the plan to lay low in Seattle, to be conciliatory and remove the pressure from his wife, that things would return to normal, achieve equilibrium, in time for the start of the new semester.
Perhaps the problem is that he didn’t work hard enough. Left too much up to her and now she controls it all. If only he could be back in New York and with enough money in his pocket that he could meet Mia on even ground as a peer.
The car glides into the Fred Meyer parking lot, and Lane dumps it in a disabled spot by the loading dock.
LANE WAITS AT THE CUSTOMER Service desk to pick up his first paycheck. He tears off the perforated edges and cracks open the envelope. He knows it will be unimpressive. He missed some days because of his injury. And had to pay his lapsed union dues. But there has to be some sort of mistake. The check is showing him back down at minimum wage: $6.72 per hour, an amount he surpassed a few years back. He got time and a half for New Year’s Day, a full $10.08 per hour. After all is said and done, he’s still looking at less than two hundred dollars.
It has to be a clerical error, he repeats to himself. When he finds Tom in the detergents and toiletries aisle, Lane demands he accompany him to the Customer Service desk to help straighten things out. If not, Lane will go to the union. He paid a pretty penny for that right, after all.
“You’re my assistant.” Tom picks something out of his molars and wipes his hands on the front of his pants. “That’s what assistants make. The real value is more long-term. In the mentoring. The knowledge.”
“You’ve gotta be—I never agreed to—Dude, I worked the hot case. The fryers. Isn’t that worth like—”
“You’re lucky you’re still getting hours, Lame-o. You haven’t been applying yourself.”
He wants to drive his mom’s car full-speed through the glass front doors, down the aisle and right into Tom and his ratfuck mustache. Knock the smirk right off his face. Back the Chevy Celebrity over him again and watch his brain squeeze out the top of his skull like a Push Pop. But Lane has enough drama and has to get back before Inez goes and does something dumb like leaves her trailer.
He takes a deep breath and looks down the length of the aisle and sees someone who looks like Inez. No, wait, it’s her. He’s sure of it. She’s affixing her name tag to her green cloth apron. She’s walking past the end of the row, heading toward the Home Essentials section.
“THE HELL’RE YOU DOING HERE?” Lane pulls her into the walk-in and shuts the door behind her. The vapor from his breath cleaves around her face, wrapping behind her ears and still-damp ponytail.
“Starting my shift. What’s it look like?” she asks. “And you can’t drag me in here like that.”
“But I got the car. The check. You . . . you can’t be here.”
“I changed my mind. Anyway, I never promised you nothing,” she says, and tries to step around him toward the door. “Excuse me, Lane . . . Excuse me.”
“You need to do this. For you.” Lane returns to his doomed internal realm of melting glaciers, receding beachheads, burning forests, that familiar place where he watches all potential falling away in slow, unstoppable motion.
“I gotta do things for Jordan. Jordan and me, not just for me.”
“This is for him too. You gotta trust me.”
She exhales the word trust.
Lane knows when he needs to give a little. “Look, I’m sorry. I had a panic attack before. On New Year’s. I didn’t tell you, but I’m married. We’re going through a hard time. And I’m dealing with a lot of—”
“I’m supposed to feel sorry for you?”
“It’s that—You won’t understand. I’m misunderstood. By a lot of people.”
“You’re misunderstood?”
“Yes. Unfortunately.”
She tries to step around the other side of him. He blocks her again. “Get out of my way. Don’t make me fuck you up.”
“I can’t be misunderstood? ’Cause I’ve fought to make a better life for myself? I mean, I’m from up the street here too. I’ve had to do what I’ve had to do. To make the right choices. Hard choices.”
“You want to talk about misunderstood?” Inez says, “When Jordan was a baby he kept getting pink eye. Like all the time. I took him in. But I don’t have a car, you know. Did you ever try to take a screaming baby on the bus? You have any idea how other people look at you? Judge you? Think that they know better? Could do better? Anyway, the clinic gave me antibiotic eye drops. But after I used them, all that nasty eye shit came right back. No matter how many times I gave it to him, he couldn’t kick it. When a college girl caseworker came by she started accusing me of all this BS. She didn’t even have any kids herself. But, point is, we find out later that Jordan has allergies. Hay fever. Antibiotics don’t do nothing for that. But they already thought I was doing a bad job. I’m a negligent parent. Don’t care about my child’s well-being. Nobody’s gonna admit they were wrong.”
“So, they’re wrong then.” He shrugs. “Don’t play the victim. Take control of your own life.”
“Yeah, they’re wrong. But their opinions hold a lot more weight than mine. I’m just a bikini barista with a drug problem.”
“What about your New Year’s resolution?”
“That’s why I’m here right now, huh?”
“I know you don’t believe me but I—I feel like I’ve gotten to know you a bit better and I do care about you. You and little Jordan.”
“Well, that’s worth about, let me think: nothing.” She gets around him and unlatches the metal bolt. She is chewing gum and smells faintly of alcohol. “Thanks for the pill, at least.”
“The what?”
“The one on my sink. The one that helped me to not cry my eyes out for being dumb enough to hope for something with you again. Numb enough to feel OK with starting off another year on the wrong foot. That was worth something.”
THIRTY-TWO
LANE SITS IN ON THE bench in the trailer. He takes the check out of the cabinet, reads it over a few times and looks out the window at the trees. There are three Douglas firs on and around his mom’s property. Each looks to be about twelve to fifteen stories tall and hundreds of years old.
Lane thinks about how the trees—the trees and the water—gave rise to this whole place. They cut down and sent the trees to build San Francisco’s Victorians, kickstarting Seattle’s industry. Bill Boeing founded his empire in Seattle because the trees provided the right wood for airplane wings. The surrounding waters saved him from having to build runways. The engineering culture for Boeing laid the groundwork for Microsoft, and Microsoft made the other tech companies possible here, in what was otherwise the middle of nowhere.
The tech boom delivered Seattle to the precipice of becoming the world-class city it had always wanted to be. But not here. All Lake City has going for it are still a few good trees.
He reads the check again. Inez didn’t seem to think the OxyContin was a big deal. She argued that it’s a prescription. It’s not a drug; it comes from doctors.
“If you got tested, you’d come up positive for opioids. Oxycodone,” Lane told her.
“Not gonna happen. I told you,” she said before slipping out of the walk-in and returning to work.
He understands that his problems are solved. It is soon to be a done deal. He can sit back from here. In seventy-two hours, he will be on a flight to JFK. A brick of cash in his pocket. Maybe he’ll have to put it in his carry-on. He’s never seen that muc
h money and has no idea what it requires to carry it.
Three days or less and this whole nightmare will start to come to a close. Sure, he will still have to work through some stuff with Mia, but he will be back in New York, back in school and—if need be—in his own place until things get sorted.
Lane is ecstatic. Absolutely ecstatic. That’s what he tells himself. The sensation is in the front of his brain. Behind the eyes. But it’s not in his chest. Not in his body. He knows that he’s excited. Or should be excited, at least.
He starts to explore the rest of his feelings but knows that he must not let insecurity get to him. Lane is disoriented and needs to cut himself some slack. It’s been so long that he’s developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome with his captives. He’s in a deep pit, and he shouldn’t expect to return to being his old self right away. These things take time. That’s all. It’s been a tough few months.
“Lane.” He hears a female voice calling from his front yard. “Lane.”
He pulls aside the lace curtain above the kitchen sink. Inez stands on his front lawn with a can of Schmidt in one hand and pulling Jordan by the elbow with the other.
Before he can get to her and tell her to quiet down, to put the beer away, to step around the side to speak with him in a civil voice, she shouts, “You want to make up Christmas to me? Christmas and New Year’s?” She takes a pull from the can, making no attempt to hide it.
He leaves the trailer and gets close enough to see the whorl of hair on the side of her neck. In a different life, he starts to think but chases it from his mind.
“How’d you find me here?”
“People at work. They talk.” She finishes the beer. “I gotta get my mom at the hospital. You want to make it up to me?”
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