by Nancy Adams
I smiled and kissed his neck before picking out a suit. Then we spent most of the day in and around the pool, the emotional turmoil of the flashback dissipating slowly as I drifted through the sunshine of my time with Josh. It had been a day of turnaround in our relationship. Because today it had been he who had offered me comfort from my past, and not the other way around.
SARAH
“Sarah?” Lucy called through the bathroom door.
“Yeah?” I replied from under the shower.
“You nearly done? Because I’m taking Troy to Theresa’s after I’ve dropped you and Kay off, and I promised to be there by ten thirty.”
“Okay, okay.”
Ten minutes later, my hair still damp, I was sitting in the back of the Prius with Troy and Kay, Lucy driving. It was a rather gloomy Saturday morning, a sheet of cloud like the luminescent skin of a fish graying the sky. We were on our way to the food bank. It was only my second Saturday back there since the accident, and I was now able to lift things, the strength in my legs growing by the day. During the night there’d been a thunderstorm, and the great skin of cloud represented its lingering remains over the city. The streets were still wet and gleamed prismatically where the sunbeams broke down through the gaps. It didn’t overly bother me, the gloom, and I actually enjoyed these shadowed, melancholy days. There was something somber and real about them. No pretense, a mere representation of the sobering mood of life.
“Oh my!” Lucy exclaimed gently when we pulled into the street of the community center.
I turned away from the clouded sky and out the windshield, Kay looking up from her book, Troy merely playing with a toy. There, parked up outside the community center, was the long trailer of a truck. As we drove to the back of it, we saw a forklift carrying out pallets of food stacked higher than a man, placing them on the sidewalk outside the center. It was like a supermarket delivery.
“Are they lost?” Kay inquired.
“I don’t get it,” Lucy remarked as we pulled up outside the center to the rear of the truck.
We got out of the car, and while Lucy stayed back with Troy, Kay and I approached the trailer, where a man inside the long container slid the pallets to the tail lift at the back.
“Excuse me,” I called up to him.
“Hey there,” he said back, coming to the edge of the lift and looking down at me, sweat dripping from his face.
“What are you doing here?” I asked him.
“Delivering food, what does it look like?”
“But surely you’re in the wrong place.”
The guy dipped his hand into his back pocket and produced some crumpled papers. He had a quick glance at them before handing them over to me. I immediately began scanning the papers. I saw that it was an invoice for a large quantity of food to be delivered to St. Peters community center. He appeared to have the correct place.
“But I don't get it,” I said to him. “Who sent for it?”
The guy looked over my shoulder and pointed to something behind me.
“That guy,” he said.
I turned around and saw Josh standing there with a gentle grin on his face.
“Now I hope you’ll accept this one,” he said.
I couldn’t have felt happier than I did then. As fast as my healing legs could carry me, I marched up to him and threw myself into his arms, kissing him all over, so much sparkling elation surging through me that I was lost in admiration for a moment. As we kissed, my sisters looked on.
“You did all of this?” Kay asked him.
“I guess,” he managed to get out between my kisses.
“That’s amazing,” she said back.
“Not in front of the boy,” Lucy remarked.
I stopped kissing Josh and merely held him.
“I managed to get back 75 percent of the money on the Dior,” he said to me. “Then I added another seven and a half grand and spent it all on groceries for your food bank. I hope you’ve got enough space in there. It’s all nonperishables or long-life, so it should be good if you don't get rid of it for a while.”
“This is the best present I’ve ever received,” I couldn’t help gasping at him, before brushing my lips to his once again.
That day we couldn’t even find room for it all. When we opened the doors and let everyone in, we were still breaking down the pallets and storing the food where we could. We had enough to keep us going for at least two months. At the end of the day, we had to leave a lot of it in the aisles between the shelving; you almost couldn’t move for food, even after we’d had over three hundred people come through our doors and walk away with bags of groceries.
When we switched the lights off to leave, all us volunteers smiled at the colossal mass of food, something we’d never seen there before. Empty shelving, many times. But never not enough space. Vacant space had always dominated food, not the other way around. Josh had stayed on after the delivery and had helped all day, many of the women swooning over him. He appeared to have a natural charm with people and was always more than willing to show a jolly, happy side that I would have never dared associate him with that lonely night two months ago when I punched his smirking face.
As a matter of fact, there was a slightly awkward moment when Holly had arrived with her two boys. She was as shocked to see him there as I had been that morning, and she immediately threw her arms around him. It had been a very poignant moment.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she’d sobbed into him. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
He’d looked a little embarrassed and gingerly placed his own arms around her. Once she was parted from him, Holly continued to gaze into his eyes, her two sons standing next to her, unsure what to make of it, clearly having not recognized Josh.
“You see this man here,” she’d said down to her boys. “This man here is our hero. He’s the man that carried you to safety. None of us would be alive today if it wasn't for him. We should always pray for this man. Say thank you, boys.”
“Thank you,” they’d both said in unison.
“Hug the man,” their mother had insisted.
“It’s okay,” Josh had uttered with embarrassment when the boys had approached him. But before he could protest in any real sense, they were wrapped around his waist, and he merely patted them softly on the head, giving me a bewildered look as he did. This humble moment had kept Josh rather quiet until the end, and now that we were leaving, I took the time to talk to him about it on the sidewalk.
“You seemed a little taken aback by Holly,” I said to him.
“The whole crash thing seems like some distant dream,” he admitted. “It felt weird to be reminded of it and to see a woman cry over it. To feel the strength of her gratitude.”
“Has anyone else you rescued gotten in touch?”
“Yeah. Several have sent letters to my father’s apartment or my college. They’re real nice letters from family members. One of the guys had a pregnant wife, and she wrote to me thanking me because she’d just given birth and he’d been able to be there to see it.”
“That’s wonderful. Did you write back?”
“I wasn’t sure what to say.”
“Have you written back to any of them?”
“None. Should I?”
“Yes. It’s nice to acknowledge their gratitude.”
He smiled and looked so serenely handsome under the cloth of gray sky in that moment that I reached my lips forward and met his own. I then looked deep into his eyes.
“There’s so much goodness in you, Josh Kelly,” I said to him in a dreamlike tone. “So much goodness.”
His meek smile grew bolder.
“When other people look into my eyes,” he began, “they always tell me what they see but never get it right. They always see more of themselves in my eyes than they do of me, their own soul’s reflection, I guess. My father sees cunning, girls greedily see handsome wealth, my friends see a player, others see a cold asshole, and even Holman has distrust for any
thing positive he sees reflected in my eyes. But you, you see the light hidden in the dark. You don’t muddy the waters by placing yourself in what you see; you merely see what is there. You see all the bad, but among it you see the goodness too. You see the conflict present, the shadows and light dancing around each other, locked in a duel.”
“I do, I do,” I couldn’t help letting out like the end of a prayer.
“You see that goodness buried in there, and you bring it out with your own look. This good thing that I did today made me feel better than anything—a natural high far outweighing the flimsy chemical ones that I’ve become accustomed to. It made me feel better than the look I saw on your face when you opened that Dior box. First it was your reaction that filled me with joy; then it was the happiness of all the people working there, and all those poor bastards coming in just to feed their families. All of it filled me with joy.”
“And you wanna feel it again?”
“Yes,” he said so firmly that it struck my heart like a flaming arrow.
Again I kissed him, so proud did he make me feel.
“Look, I gotta get back,” he informed me once our lips had separated. “It took all my skills of persuasion to get all day out here, but I’m expected back in an hour. So I gotta leave, I’m afraid.”
“You’ve got to do what you’ve got to do.”
“Yes, I have. So… it’s been a pleasure.”
We kissed once more and he went on his way, saying his goodbyes to Kay and the other volunteers as he walked past, all of them waving and watching him go as though Jesus Christ himself were walking back to his car having fed the five thousand.
JOSH
I won’t lie. The food bank felt good. I drove away from there soaking in the waters of the purest exuberance, and I wore this feeling around my heart for the next week as I continued to stay away from Terry and Kane, continued my studies, and continued to keep Sarah’s true identity away from my father with the help of Holman. Sarah’s presence had been successfully introduced into the house, and it was now time to introduce her in person to my father.
That first week she’d come around, he’d remained away on business in New York, so we were afforded the luxury of his absence while Sarah got used to the idea of being at my home, her flashback having been a one-off occurrence and not one that had repeated itself. When my father returned from New York, I decided that it was time to causally present Sarah to him. It was out of necessity really, rather than any desire to show him my girlfriend. He was involved in some hefty real-estate deal here in the city, so he would be permanently at the apartment for at least two weeks. And I certainly wasn’t willing to be away from Sarah for two whole weeks. So I decided that now was the time to introduce Dad to my girlfriend: Miss Sarah Kline!
I didn’t want any fuss made, so I never prewarned him, merely had her show up unannounced. When Holmes introduced that Josh’s lady friend, Miss Sarah Kline, was here, my father looked at me from across the breakfast table with an incredulous look creasing his features.
“Your ‘lady friend’?” he uttered, peering at me with his sharp eyes.
“Yes. Sarah, my girlfriend.”
“You never said she was coming this morning.”
“I didn’t see the need to,” I nonchalantly replied, not meeting his gaze and simply looking at the newspaper. “I’m sure that at least Holmes has told you that she’s been visiting regularly this past week.”
“Well, he has, but I was waiting for you to have something more formal set up, like lunch. I’m still in my bathrobe!”
“Then go get changed. She’s only coming by to have a little breakfast, and then she’s gonna help me study. I’m going through a lot of stuff on business law, and she can help.”
“Is she a lawyer or something?”
“She’s a public defender.”
“A public defender!” my father scoffed. “Wow! No wonder she’s latched on to you. What does she make in salary? About as much as a school teacher if she’s lucky!”
“It’s honorable,” I stated.
“Ha! Honorable! There’s no honor in poverty.”
“I’ll ignore that comment and let you get changed out of that bathrobe. That is unless you want my girlfriend to see your wrinkly balls hanging out!”
My father quickly looked down at his lap and saw that it was a joke, his genitalia safely tucked away.
“I’ll get changed,” he said getting up from his stool and going off to his bedroom.
A moment or two later, Holmes brought Sarah in. It was a bright day and the sun shone radiantly through the tall kitchen window at the exact spot she came to stand in once she’d entered, casting her in a golden light so that for a second I imagined her as some Madonna sat upon the sun-splashed vanilla cloud of a Renaissance painting hanging in a gallery in Florence.
“Sit down,” I said to her once I’d gotten ahold of myself. “Get yourself some breakfast. There’s plenty.”
She came and sat down next to me. I glanced over to the doorway and saw Holmes still standing there. The sight of him angered me for some reason, and I felt the weight of his insectoid eyes gazing blankly at me from his beetle’s face.
“Hey, B, fuck off!” I said to him. “Go see master. He needs help getting dressed.”
“Very well, sir,” he replied.
I took my eyes off him as he disappeared from the doorway, and when I alighted them on Sarah beside me, I saw that she was a little shocked. I immediately knew why.
“I told you before, you shouldn’t talk to him like that,” she said. “He’s a man, not a machine.”
“He gets my humor.”
“It didn’t seem very humorous.”
“He’s got a sense himself, although you’d have trouble finding it. Like, for instance, I don’t like him calling me sir, but he goes right ahead and calls me it anyway, just to annoy me.”
“But that doesn’t give you the right to talk to him in the way you just did.”
“I don’t like him watching me. He reports everything back to my father, you know. He’s more insect than human.”
“Yes, that’s why you call him B for beetle. You told me.”
I smiled at her, and she returned me a frown. But I knew she wasn't that mad at me, and soon she went right ahead with breakfast, loading her plate with pancakes, bacon, scrambled egg, and a little sausage.
A silence descended upon our heads as we both ate, and it was as we did that Dad made an appearance, looking rather sharp in white cotton trousers and light-yellow Ralph Lauren polo shirt.
The moment his shadow cast itself across the kitchen, Sarah looked up and I observed her slightly worried look.
“You must be Sarah,” my father said, entering the room and offering her his hand.
Sarah stood up, approached him, and took it. As he held her waif fingers in his own clumsy paw, I watched him stand there as though transfixed, his eyes peering into her like he was seeing a ghost. My heart thumped, and I’m sure so did Sarah’s. I feared that everything was up; he’d recognized her.
“Have I seen you before?” he inquired.
“I don’t think so,” she spluttered, red roses blooming on her porcelain cheeks.
He narrowed his eyes, sharpening his gaze, like an eagle at the very last moment of its descent before it snatches up its prey.
“Which outfit do you represent?” he asked.
“You mean who I work for?”
“Yes,” he rasped in a suspicious squeak.
“I work for Callaghan and Burrell,” she answered, her voice trembling.
My eyes widened. I’d done my best to put her at ease these past days leading up to the introduction. Told her that he wouldn’t ask questions. But already she was under his spotlight. Not a second after he’d walked through the door than he had her by the hand and she’d been forced to lie, something I knew she’d hate—was hating.
“Callaghan and Burrell,” he tossed around in his head like a bad salad. “Callaghan and Burre
ll.” Then finally: “Ah! You mostly work with shoplifters and drug addicts. Is that how you met Josh?”
He grunted out a scoffing laugh at this last bit, and I grinned nervously at the joke. His countenance grew milder, and he let go of her hand, his whole body softening, allowing myself and Sarah to relax in the process. He took his seat opposite us, and Sarah retook hers next to me, though she looked rather flustered by the mini interrogation.
“You still look familiar,” my father said as he sat down, but with a smile this time, which made me think that he’d certainly not placed her anywhere near the name Dillinger. “I’ll figure it out,” he added joyfully, still grinning and pouring himself a fresh coffee.
Sarah began timidly munching on her toast, and I could see that her appetite had been stunted by my father’s appearance.
“So Sarah,” my father said after he’d sipped his coffee, “Josh tells me nothing, so I may as well attempt to prise it from your lips. How did you two meet?”
Again I felt for her. More delicate questions were pouring from his mouth. He was usually so quiet around my girlfriends, but something in Sarah provoked him to actually take an interest this time. I hoped it was merely her dazzling presence that caused his intrigue, rather than anything else. As for Sarah, she was so unprepared for lying, and my father was an expert in the field. She wouldn’t stand a chance if he suspected something. However, I was sure that he didn’t and was merely being polite.
“We met several months ago in a bar,” she muttered in a partial whisper, her eyes pointed at her lap.
It was a bad lie, I know, but we’d decided to keep it simple.
“A bar! Ah!” my father let out elatedly. “Of course. One of Josh’s favorite places. Well, along with the nightclubs, the dance parties, whorehouse—”
“Dad!” I shouted at him.
“Sorry!” he said, raising his hands. Then looking straight at Sarah, he added, “I didn’t offend you, did I, my dear?”