The hotel was huge, new construction that sat next to the onramp for 295. The lobby was all marble and dark woods and dramatic lighting. As I approached the front desk, I wondered if the jerk who’d bothered Kimber would be here. I was surprised that time I’d met him that he was working the front counter. Perhaps it was his daddy’s way of trying to teach him thankfulness. It obviously didn’t work.
He was nowhere to be seen. I wasn’t sure if that was good or disappointing. I wasn’t in a patient mood. Beating the shit out of him sounded nice. I hadn’t fought in years, but I handled myself well. It was mostly about confidence. That was easy.
I paid for a room. Luckily, they had space. I hadn’t thought to make a reservation.
It wasn’t until I was in the elevator that I realized the girl who’d checked me in was very attractive. Something was seriously wrong with me.
I had three days to figure it out. I wondered if I could make it three days without sex, if I would make it. Perhaps I’d visit the young lady in the lobby. I hadn’t had sex just for me in a long time. Part of me wanted to do it just to defy Penny.
The extra money I spent to be on the top floor was worth it. I opened the door to the room and headed straight to the balcony that looked out to the lights of the mall. The people on the sidewalks blended together like water in a stream. Christmas lights twinkled as they wrapped lampposts—I hadn’t noticed them as I walked right by.
The view was nice, calming, far away.
I turned and went back inside, dropped my bag on the bed, and looked around the room. The colors blurred with the lack of light.
I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. I hadn’t really thought about it. I wasn’t used to having to think about what I was doing. My days were structured by appointments. I’d just wanted to get out of there for a while—to think, I supposed. The question was, to think about what?
I lay down on the bed and folded my hands behind my head. Cotton sheets. I missed how they felt, soft but not so slick, more substance to them than silk.
The ceiling had an orange peel kind of pattern on it. I tried to find pictures in it, like Penny used to do with the clouds when I was a child. She’d take me on picnics at the park down the street from her apartment. I loved those picnics. She’d let me run around all I wanted. I couldn’t do that in her small apartment. It had only one tiny bedroom, which she gave to me. She never let me realize how much she sacrificed for me, for a child who shouldn’t have been her responsibility.
I took a deep breath and sighed.
She deserved better. As soon as she turned eighteen, she fought to gain custody of me. I remembered how happy I was to be out of the foster homes, to be with my sister. Even with how little I was able to see her, she was my favorite person, the one person who treated me like she cared. She was my best friend. I missed that.
I used to tell her everything, about school and my friends and how mean or funny the teachers were.
And now I wasn’t talking to her—all because she hired someone who was difficult for me to be around.
I was an asshole.
Still with my backpack at my feet and without bothering to get under the sheets, I drifted off to sleep.
My dreams were erratic and fuzzy, like trying to see thorough a waterfall.
When I woke, the sun was falling through the windows. I turned my head on the pillow and looked out to the mall. It was still bustling with people and cars, as if they had been going all night.
I pulled myself out of bed and headed for the shower, my one shower for the day. A full day without appointments sounded like a lot of time to fill. I had an idea of what to do with a little of it. I was going to go shopping on Christmas Eve. Yes, there was definitely something wrong with me.
Chapter 12
My Sister
I left my backpack in the hotel room and walked back toward the mall. I wasn’t sure what to get for Penny. I usually gave her something nice, but this year, I wanted it to be special. I just wasn’t sure if I knew her well enough anymore to be able to make it special.
Careful to stay clear of her shop, I browsed the mall. The outer edges held the bigger stores, the places where I bought my jeans and shave cream, but not where my clients shopped. I delved deeper into the mall, into the barrage of high-end specialty shops.
I stopped at the window of a jewelry store whose name I couldn’t pronounce, always a clear sign it was expensive. I could read some French but had never learned proper pronunciation.
In the window display, there was a ring. The cut and setting sparked a memory. I was maybe seven or eight. Penny had a friend over to the apartment. I remembered liking that she was having a nice time and was trying to stay out of the way. I passed through the living room into the kitchen. She and her friend were sitting on the couch flipping through a catalog that had come in the mail.
Penny looked up, a smile on her face. I liked her smile. “Do you need something, Heath?”
“No, I just wanted some water. I can get it.” I’d have to stand on a chair to reach the cups, but I was perfectly capable now of doing it myself.
“Okay, sweetie.”
She stopped calling me that shortly after this memory. I guessed she thought I might be embarrassed by it or something.
She went back to looking at the catalog. I wished she could buy something out of one of them for once. She never bought herself anything.
I came back through the living room just as she flipped the page. She gasped and pointed at one of the pictures. “That’s the one I want,” she said to her friend. “If a guy ever wants to marry me, he has to give me this.”
Her friend leaned closer, surely looking at the price. “When you meet him, introduce me to his brother.”
They both giggled.
Penny never did get married.
She hardly ever dated. I hoped when I left home for school she might loosen up and have some fun, but that was when she opened her shop. She worked just as hard at it as she had at being a mother to me.
The next day, I’d found the catalog in the trash. I hid it in my room and decided one day I’d get her a ring like that.
But when Cassie died, I threw out most of my things, including the old catalog. I was so pissed when I realized.
This ring in the shop window, I swore it was exactly like the one in the picture—platinum and a square cut diamond surrounded by rows of diamond chips.
I went inside and bought it. I barely paid attention to the price.
The sales girl wrapped it for me and put it in a fancy little bag, all while looking at me kind of funny. I probably didn’t look like their usual clientele, old jeans and a T-shirt, and I hadn’t bothered shaving this morning. It felt nice to be a little ratty-ass.
I took the long way around to the back of Penny’s shop. Christmas Eve was always nuts—I knew she and anyone else who was working would be busy out front with costumers. I could sneak in and out unnoticed.
As quietly as possible, I closed the heavy metal door behind me and slipped into Penny’s office, a tiny room barely big enough for a desk.
I flipped on the light, closed the door, and grabbed a piece of paper from the printer. I should’ve stopped and bought a card.
Dear Penny,
Please take it. I’ve never given you enough—I could never give you enough.
I love you.
Heath
I folded the note and set the box on top of it on the desk. Then I slipped out of the office, down the hall, and out the back door.
My walk back to the hotel seemed longer than last night. A carload of teenagers honked and jeered at me as I traipsed through the grass at the side of the road. I laughed. It’d been a long time since someone treated me like that, not since I beat the hell out of John Stevens in high school. That was when Cassie seemed to decide I wasn’t a nerd, or at least not completely nerdy. All of the guys wanted her, oftentimes the center of locker room talk. She was half Filipino, exotic, almost mysterious—you could never k
now for sure why she was smiling.
I was back in my hotel room before I realized where my thoughts had gone. I turned on the TV and sat on the end of the bed. I hadn’t watched TV in years.
The channels flipped, and I couldn’t seem to control my mind.
It was strange to me that I was attracted to someone so different from Cassie. Though I supposed they both had that mysterious smile. Kimber’s was just more implied, like a Cheshire cat lived in her expression, tweaking the corners of her mouth. She didn’t actually smile all that often. I wondered why. I loved her attitude, that she didn’t take shit from people, but now I wondered if there was more underneath that, something hidden.
Like I’d seen last Friday. She took my shit and didn’t fight back. She’d lain herself open to me, let me see a glimpse of that something hidden, and I stomped on her. When did I become such a monumental prick?
I clicked the damn TV off.
I managed not to hurl the remote at the screen and stood to pace the room instead. The urge to do something to make it up to her crawled up my spine, but what was I supposed to do? I couldn’t allow myself to get close to her. I’d get sucked in completely and then be damned to hell for wanting her, just like with Cassie. I couldn’t go through that again.
But I couldn’t hurt Kimber anymore, either. Usually, I was superb at keeping a boundary in place. I could be friendly with women, even regular sexual partners, and still not get attached. Perhaps the simple barrier of money was what made it easy—they paid me for a service. That was it.
Kimber confused me.
Maybe if I offered my services for payment, it would be easier. But I had the feeling sex with Kimber wouldn’t just be sex, not for me.
Son of a bitch. She was getting under my skin. I needed to shove her away.
Maybe I should just leave, move away. All this shit was too hard. I hated not being in control.
I paced the room for a while. Then I sat in the armchair in the corner. Then I stared out the window. Eventually, the sun fell, and the Christmas lights came back on. The cars that zipped up and down the road thinned, as did the parking lots.
I wished Santa Claus existed. Penny had helped me believe for a long time, even though she could never afford lots of gifts. That never mattered to me.
Life was simpler when I just wrote a letter to a jolly old man in the North Pole when I wanted something. Whether I received it or not wasn’t even the point, not really. It was simply that I asked, and then it was out of my hands. I could relax.
Maybe that’s why people were drawn to prayer.
I’d never been in church, had never even prayed. I knew Penny didn’t, either. I asked one time when I was little why we didn’t go to church, and she said she didn’t like the idea of someone else being in charge of her life. I didn’t understand at the time. Now I thought maybe I did. She equated giving up control to giving into mental instability. Like driving a car—if you don’t actively control it every second, you crash.
Penny had lived with our mother, just the two of them, until Penny was nine, old enough to understand much of what went on. Then our mother was institutionalized, where she remained until her death. Penny spent the next nine years in foster homes. I was born in a mental hospital, and no one knew who my father was.
I refocused on the view and realized almost all the cars were gone, except a few puttering along the road, surely headed toward holiday parties. I was suddenly incredibly lonely.
Penny and I didn’t spend Christmas Eve together anymore—she always closed the shop late, usually having let the employees go early, and went home to crash.
But I wasn’t usually alone tonight. Single women were lonely on Christmas Eve. Last year I was sort of a party favor. A group of four women took turns with me. By morning, I was so exhausted I slept through most of Christmas Day.
I felt lost without my time being scheduled, without a woman near to arouse me and cloud my thoughts. I was thinking entirely too damn much today, about all the things I didn’t want to acknowledge, kind of like a leak. The more you ignore it, the worse it gets, until your house is flooded.
What to do with myself? I didn’t want to bother Penny, and my regulars were busy with their families.
Then an idea hit me—something that made the most sense to do tonight. There was a reason why I brought the book with me.
I’d role-played before—I’d been a policeman, a fireman, even a prison guard. Tonight I was going to be Santa Claus.
Chapter 13
Kathy
I grabbed the book from my backpack and walked down the hall to the elevators. The hotel was unsettlingly quiet. Perhaps it only seemed so because I felt so nakedly alone. Whatever. Santa Claus was alone on his big night, and he was still jolly.
From the elevator, I walked through the lobby. The same girl who checked me in was at the front desk.
“Holiday party?” she said.
I smiled, my charming though not wholly genuine smile.
“Your name’s Heath, right?”
My steps paused. I didn’t want to stop. I realized how excited I was about my impending adventure. “Yeah.”
“I’m Kathy,” she said. “If you, um, get lonely tonight, I’m here until six a.m.”
Damn could I attract them? It used to piss off Cassie.
I grinned, still not genuine. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Then I kept walking, out the door and down the street toward the mall. Before I could play Santa, I had to figure out where I was going.
The mall was deserted. I went in the shop through the front simply because the route was more direct, and I knew everyone was gone. I went down the hall and into Penny’s office. The ring and note were gone off the desk. Finally, a genuine smile curved over my lips.
I turned and opened the file cabinet. Shit. I didn’t know Kimber’s last name. I looked through the tabs one at a time, all the past and current employees. Baker, Blanchard, Carpenter…
Finally…West, Kimber. Of course, she’d have to be at the end. At least her first name was unique enough that I didn’t doubt I had the right file.
The address didn’t ring a bell. Though, admittedly, I hadn’t been away from this small area in a few years. The zip code was the Southside, not far from here, though certainly not within walking distance, not if I wanted to get there before morning.
I pulled the phonebook out of Penny’s bottom desk drawer and slapped it down on the desk. Hopefully, cab companies still ran on Christmas Eve.
They did. A very somber cabby pulled up to the shop a little while later.
“Sorry, man,” I said as he turned onto the main road. “I’ll give you a great tip.”
He glanced in the rearview mirror, and the caterpillars that were his eyebrows rose a bit.
He took the short jump onto 202 over to Southside Boulevard. Then he made the turn onto the access road. This area was a muddle of classes and cultures. On the east side of the road was Deerwood, an upper class yuppyish community, and on the west side of the road was a line of apartment complexes, all using the access road. Some of the apartments looked nice enough, not new but remodeled and well maintained, and then there were those that were not remodeled. That was where the cabby turned.
The entry to the complex was neat but no flowers or palms, only a wooden sign planted in mulch.
“What apartment again?” the driver said.
“209.”
A few seconds later, the cab stopped. I glanced around to make sure no one was around.
“Wait here,” I said.
“How long you gonna be?”
“About twenty seconds.”
He shifted into park. “Meter’s running.”
I opened the door and then paused and looked back at the driver. “Do you have a pen?”
“Twenty seconds?”
“Great tip,” I countered.
He produced a pen with a chewed-up end, and I jotted a note on the inside front cover of the book, without taking the time to make my ha
ndwriting nice. She got the same scrawl I used to write in my notebooks. Be lost in the pages. Never underestimate the value of allowing yourself to be lost for a while.
I handed back the pen, stuffed the book back in its Barnes and Noble bag, and then hopped out of the car.
Quietly, I took the wooden steps up to the second level exterior walkway. I walked past number 207 and then 208. I almost missed 209 because the doors were so close together. The apartments couldn’t be more than a couple rooms large.
On her door hung a small wreath, which looked to be homemade out of pinecones. I wanted to look around a little more, see if I could spy any more of her personality, but I stuck with my plan and hung the handle of the bag off her doorknob and then returned to the cab.
“What are you, Santa Claus?” the driver said.
I rubbed my bristly chin. “Don’t you see the whiskers?”
He actually smiled a little.
At a puttering speed, he drove back up Southside Boulevard and across 202 toward the mall. I knew he was taking his time for the sake of running the meter, but I didn’t care. I felt high, like when I’d write love letters for Cassie and she’d cry.
I imagined what Kimber’s reaction would be—hopefully not creeped out that someone knew where she lived. No, she’d just assume it was from one of her neighbors.
She’d wake in the morning and open her door, on her way to some family event, and see the bag. She’d think the inscription was cute and hopefully smile about someone caring about her. Maybe I could help make her feel good for the rest of the day. Maybe that would help atone for my behavior, at least in God’s eyes.
“Nice tip, huh?”
I looked at the driver.
“You don’t look like you can afford the fare, let alone a tip,” he said.
I pulled my wallet from my back pocket and counted out hundred dollar bills. “Will three hundred do?”
At the stoplight to get onto the main road past the mall, he turned in his seat and stared at the cash.
“Drop me at the hotel up the street,” I said.
Love Me Not Page 6