Love in the Present Tense

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  Way later he said another thing to me and it made me laugh. He said, “I never did something like this before.” He said it in this mushy voice from deep inside his chest. He had a hairy chest. Talking so deep inside it, that made me think even more that maybe he would love me.

  “What?” I said. “You never did sex before? I can’t believe that.” I said, “Now don’t start lying to me, just when everything was going so good.”

  “No, not that,” he said. “That’s not what I meant. Sex, yeah. Just not with somebody, you know. Your age.”

  Maybe he was lying about that. I’ve wondered lots of times. I think about that a lot, was that a lie or was it the truth? Did he really want a younger girl all those years and not do that? Or was that just something you say? A lot of what I have heard in my life was lies. So I really wondered about that. Looking back, it seems a shame that I killed him when I did, and now there’s no way I ever get to find out.

  After that he got kind of funny and young, like he wanted to play. He even tickled me some, like I was a kid, only we were naked in Rosalita’s bed. No place for a kid there. Then he got real serious and brushed the hair off my face and looked me right in my eyes. “I’m so glad I met you.” That’s what he said. Right into my eyes, he said that. And I thought, this is how love feels. I know that now. Happy birthday to me.

  Then he looked over my shoulder and there was a clock back there. “Shit,” he said. “I gotta go. I gotta get home. Shit.”

  That feeling, that thing I thought was love, I just watched it blow away. I thought, you spend so much time looking for it but then it blows away so fast. I wished I had known.

  I got up and walked into the kitchen. Rosalita’s very clean kitchen. I was feeling bad because I knew I was wrong about the love. He was getting dressed to go away and he wasn’t never going to come back with any flowers or wine. He was just looking for something to do for that night only. If that’s love, you can keep it.

  I was starting to get mad.

  His uniform jacket was hanging over the kitchen chair. Under it was the big belt with his gun. I was holding his pants on account of I’d picked them up off the bedroom floor. I was folding them neat to hang up. All I was going to do was hang them up with his jacket. My thought was never to steal nor to kill nobody. It was not supposed to come down like that. Maybe I just took the pants because I hate things to be lying around the floor. Or maybe I wanted him not to be so fast to go. But then there was his wallet. I could feel the lump in his pocket.

  Usually I would never take something. I’m not a killer nor a thief. But I was mad at him and I thought I should take enough to buy a birthday present, since he was not it, like I thought.

  He came out in the kitchen with no pants on and looked at me funny. “You need money?” he said. “Just ask. I’ll give you a few bucks.”

  I guess he meant it nice. Looking back I think maybe he meant it nice. But at the time I thought he was catching me as a thief and calling me a whore in the bargain. I am not a whore. What I do I do either for love or what I think might be love. If I am wrong, I am wrong, but I am no whore.

  He was walking at me so I took up his gun.

  I guess I thought, he has caught me stealing. I’m in trouble now. I pointed the gun at him. It was heavy and big. This all happened really fast. He still had this sweet look on his face, only now he looked sweet but also worried. Scared. Like I might really shoot him. But I never thought I would. But I flipped the lever that lets the gun really shoot, to make him think I would. I was just saying keep away.

  But then he reached out fast like lightning and grabbed my hand. The one that had the gun. And it hurt, because it made the metal of the gun press too hard on the bones in my hand. So I pulled really hard, to get my hand and the gun back again. Just to make sure if he got it he wouldn’t be mad and use it on me. I was afraid to let him take it. And then there was a big sound. It scared the life out of me, but at first I didn’t even know it was the gun going off. I don’t know why it went off. I guess when I pulled my hand back I squeezed too hard, but I don’t know. It happened fast. Like I said.

  Then I was all surprised, because I shot him. I didn’t know that was about to happen. Also I was surprised when that little spot came up between his eyes. I thought the gun was aimed straight, at his belly. I guess when I pulled my hand back I pointed it up. Or maybe he was trying to point my hand up so I wouldn’t shoot him. Which I never thought I would do. But I don’t really know what happened. Just that it all happened fast.

  I thought all these different things at once. I thought, that did not make a mess at all. I thought it would make a mess. Then he crumpled down with that same look on his face and I saw the curtains behind, and what was on them. I thought, oh, shit. This place will never get clean, never again. I thought, this is bad, what happened. I thought, Rosalita won’t let me live here anymore. I looked down at his face and he still had that sweet look on his face. I thought, what if he really did love me?

  I took his credit cards and his money and his gun.

  And I went to look for Mama in that last, awful place.

  I found her there, too. It was this house, this boarded-up house. But I knew how to get in the back. The people there are terrible but they will not do you no harm. They are too loaded to care. Mama was in the kitchen, leaned up on this stove that something had dripped all down. Like spaghetti sauce that nobody bothered to clean. How can people live like that?

  “Hi, Baby,” she said, but the words kind of ran together and her chin nodded around.

  There was no place clean I could go. Rosalita’s would never be clean and this place neither. But I wanted to stay with Mama now that I had found her. I was feeling strange.

  I went down to the corner store and bought a roll of paper towels and that kind of cleaner you spray from a plastic bottle. With the money out of Officer Leonard’s wallet. Some of it anyway. I took it back to that awful house and made a clean spot on the kitchen floor near her.

  Then I felt better, on account of I was cleaning. I did not want to think too much but I thought real simple things. I thought in the morning I would go see Little Julius and sell him the credit cards and the gun. By thinking things like that I did not think too much else.

  Mama passed out before it was clean. So I took her by her coat and I pulled her over into my clean place and I lay beside her. Lay down in the clean and tried to get some sleep. I can’t sleep if it isn’t clean. I tried not to think about what was right outside that little circle of clean.

  I had a baby in me. Just as of that night. Just that night it had happened, and I knew it.

  Now, in the time that passed between then and now I have told that to a few people. They said I am crazy and I am wrong. They said you can’t know that so soon. They said if a woman could know that so soon they wouldn’t sell the little tests you pee on. She would just know. I don’t care what they say. I knew there was a baby in me, and I knew a baby is somebody who would always love me. Forever love, that’s what you get from a baby. He does not look at the clock and say oh shit. I better go home.

  I made up my mind I would love him forever right back. That would be my whole job in the world.

  So, that was my present. After all.

  I went to sleep with my head on Mama’s coat.

  MITCH, age 25: phone calls from the top

  I was in a singularly bad mood that morning. I was standing in the middle of the goddamn street trying to flag down the FedEx truck, because my faithful so-called employees had forgotten to arrange the pickup. I was standing there waving my arms like a jackass in the middle of the goddamn street. I don’t know if the FedEx guy didn’t see me or just pretended he didn’t. But he swung around the corner and he was gone; one way or the other, I was pissed.

  I was thinking, fire somebody. I have got to fire somebody. This is no way to run a fucking business. I was thinking, this is why you shouldn’t hire your friends. Because you can’t bring yourself to can their asses in a pinch.
I was thinking, you start a business out of your home, they forget this is real. Think it’s a game. Not to me it isn’t.

  Then I heard this voice, this funny little voice. “Hello, down there.” I looked around. It was weird. If it was one of my people playing a joke, it wasn’t so goddamn funny. I was in no mood. “Up here,” it said.

  “Who is that?” I said.

  “It’s me. Leonard.”

  “Leonard who?”

  “Leonard up here.”

  I looked up at the second-floor window of the house next door, and there was this little kid waving to me. Like he thought I was waving my arms at him, so he was waving back. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how wrong he was, and all that rage just slipped out of me even though I needed it to stay.

  I walked over until I was standing in the grass under his window. “Hello up there,” I said.

  “Hello down there,” he said.

  He was kind of Asian looking, somewhat. Kind of melting pot multiracial I guess. He smiled, and his front teeth weren’t all the way grown in. He had this dark, really jet-black hair that was noticeably unruly. It stuck up on his head like a spiky little weed patch. Shiny, like somebody had been trying to slick it down unsuccessfully. I was trying to remember what I’d just been all pissed off about because right at that moment I thought I still wanted it back.

  “Leonard what?” I said.

  “Leonard Leonard. Just Leonard. That’s all the name there is.”

  I figured he was playing a game with me, but it was an okay game, really, far superior to what waited for me back inside. “That’s the whole name, huh? Just Leonard?”

  “Yuh,” he said. He was wearing these really thick Coke-bottle glasses with heavy black frames, and the way he was leaning out the window, I was positive they were about to fall into the grass at my feet.

  “You’re going to lose those glasses,” I said.

  “No way. Look.” He turned his head over so he was nearly looking at the sky, and I could see a wide black elastic band holding them in place.

  “Pretty cool,” I said.

  “Yuh,” Leonard said. “I know.”

  When I got back inside, Cahill was holding the phone receiver for my private line. “For you, Doc,” he said. With this funny look on his face.

  “Don’t tell me, let me guess. It’s a little kid.”

  “Right you are, Doc.” He seemed to feel better, knowing all this at least made sense to me.

  I took the phone. “Leonard,” I said, tucking the receiver between my shoulder and chin.

  “Hi, Mitch. It worked.”

  “You did good, Leonard.” I sat down at my computer and settled back to the task in front of me, sorting through a slough of HTML code on a Realtor’s Web site, to see why we were getting complaints about bad links. They looked okay to Graff, which wasn’t saying much for them.

  “What should we talk about?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. What do you talk about when you call total strangers?”

  “I dunno,” he said. “Stuff.”

  I was feeling distinctly less like canning somebody. “Okay. Talk to me about stuff.”

  Oh boy did he. For nearly an hour. All kinds of stuff. He talked about moon races on the way up from L.A. and borrowed cars with the keys left in. The race came out a tie and by the way he was five years old. And a lady named Rosalita who he thought was his grandmother but really it turned out he didn’t have any, and how they visited Rosalita in jail. He told me he got “borned” too soon, and that his mom’s name was Pearl and she left L.A. with him because she thought they’d be safer here, and that he didn’t have a last name. And that he had to spend tons and tons of time at the clinic. He told me it was really clean over there because his mom liked it that way, and that Mrs. Morales who owned the house liked the way Pearl kept it clean, only now Pearl was out at somebody else’s house, cleaning over there, too, and Mrs. Morales was supposed to look in on him every few minutes to see he was okay, but then she fell asleep in front of the TV and never did. He said when he got big he was going to get a great big dog like the one that gets walked down this street every day at six in the morning; did I ever see that dog?

  “Six a.m.,” I said. “I am always snoring at six a.m.” And he laughed.

  Then he told me a lot more stuff.

  After I got off the phone I looked up and Cahill was staring at me. “What was all that about?”

  “Oh, that kid next door.”

  “There’s a kid next door?”

  “I didn’t know it either until just now.”

  “How’d he get your private number?”

  “I read it off to him while we were talking just now. We were talking out his window. I had him dial it right then while I was reading it off to him. Then I taught him how to hit redial.”

  Cahill just stared at me for a minute. He was even younger than me, and I was only twenty-five at the time. He had one of those haircuts shaved on the sides but long on top. That morning he had this mean cowlick near the back. He was definitely having a bad hair day. “Why?” he said.

  “Shit, I don’t know, Cahill. Why not? He’s over there all by himself. Dialing up total strangers. If he’s going to talk to a total stranger, I figured it should be me.”

  Cahill had a big mental filing cabinet of my eccentricity and unreasonableness. I watched him silently file this new evidence away.

  Ten o’clock that night the phone rattled me out of sleep. I don’t usually go to bed nearly so early but I’d gotten only two hours the night before. It’s a long story.

  My first thought and my fondest wish was Barb, but I halfway expected it to be Leonard. If it had been, it would have been call number five for that first day. It was a girl. A young girl. Not Leonard young, but young. Teenage.

  “Who is this?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “No, that won’t cut it. You called me. You tell me who you are.” I hate it when people do that. Doesn’t anybody know phone etiquette anymore?

  “Why’s my son been calling this number? I hit the redial, see who he’s been calling. Who the hell are you?”

  “I live right next door,” I said. My voice softened a little. I couldn’t help it. It was kind of touching. It was what I wanted. Some proof this kid had a real momma lion on patrol for him. I told her, “If you were in the back room and my blinds were open we’d be watching each other make this call.” I was in my loft, upstairs. The whole downstairs had pretty much become the business.

  “Why’s he been calling you?”

  “Because I gave him this number. He was calling total strangers.”

  “He still is,” she said. “You’re a total stranger. To me.” Her voice hadn’t softened yet.

  “My name is Mitch,” I said. “Sometimes people call me Doc, though.”

  “Why? You a doctor?”

  “No. It’s just a joke. My initials are M.D.” No response. “It’s a joke.”

  “I don’t get that joke.”

  I sat up in bed. Reached over to pull up the blinds, but I reached over so far I almost fell off the bed. But I got the blinds up. I wanted to see her. She sounded so young. Maybe fifteen or sixteen. Maybe she was a lot older but just had a little-girl voice. I wanted to see who I was talking to. But all I saw was a glow behind white curtains. “You know,” I said. “That woman you rent from…I know you think she looks in on him while you’re gone. But she doesn’t.”

  I waited a long time, but the line just went quiet. Then I heard a little sound. Might have been a sigh, or she might have been crying. I couldn’t tell.

  “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” she said. “I gotta work.”

  “What’s your name?” Leonard had told me but I couldn’t remember.

  Barb always said I’m born to pick up strays. But Barb was not there. Then again, when was Barb ever there? If she had been available I might have told her that she should come around more often. Maybe I wouldn’t need the strays. She wasn’t around to hea
r that pointed complaint, though, which was the point.

  “Pearl.”

  “Pearl what?”

  “Pearl none of your business. Pearl’s all you need to know.”

  “Why don’t you try dropping him here while you’re gone?”

  “Oh, sure. With you. Great. How do I know you don’t molest little boys?”

  “Because…I don’t.”

  “Good answer,” she said. “You should run for politics.”

  “Look, I’m not the only one here,” I said. “There are four of us, minimum. All day. We’re working here. Doing software and Web design and stuff like that. He’s not going to be alone with anybody. He’s safer here, believe me. He’s going to fall right out that window one of these days.”

  I waited a long time for her to answer. I thought she was just taking her time. I never heard her hang up the phone. Until I heard that dial tone I didn’t realize she had.

  Twenty minutes after nine the following morning, I got a knock on the door. All of us were hard at work. Well, not all of us. Hannah and Cahill and me. Graff hadn’t found his way in yet. When did Graff ever fall in before ten a.m.? He’s the one I should’ve canned. Only he’s not the one who blew the FedEx pickup; that was Hannah. And I couldn’t fire her because she thought the sun rose and set on me. She’d have never been the same.

  “Come in,” I said without getting up. But nobody did. “Come in.” I said it louder this time. All of our customers—that is, the very few who care to drop by in person—know enough to just barge through the door. I was thinking, goddamn Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was thinking one of these days I’d have to tie those suckers up or hold a gun to their heads and make them listen to my views for a change. See how they liked it.

  I blasted out of my chair and over to the door. Threw it open. I was pissed.

  On my doorstep was this little girl. Maybe sixteen years old. Or maybe as young as fifteen or as old as seventeen or eighteen. Maybe part black but definitely Asian, with the sweetest, deepest dark eyes. She was one seriously beautiful little girl. Hanging off one of her hands was the irrepressible Leonard.