Sally’s voice remained deadpan and flat. She said, “Thank you for that, Lowell. Just tell Claw at the bar that you’re here, and we’ll get things taken care of.”
I tried to call Sven one more time, and I had the same result as earlier. The phone rang six times, and there was no answer. I grabbed a light jacket out of my closet, and headed out the door.
It was an unusually cool evening, but the sky was cloudless. The moon was nearly full, and it made me think of the dinner on the beach with Sven. I smiled to myself while I climbed into the car.
The Toolbox was a short drive from my apartment building. It was not even ten minutes away. When I arrived, there was ample parking on the street nearby. It was early on a week night, so only the bare bones regular customers would be drinking.
Claw was working the bar like Sally mentioned. I was used to receiving a cheerful welcome, but instead he just gave me a solemn nod and said, “Sally and Blake are waiting for you in the office.” He added the comment, “I think you know where it is.”
I did know where the office was, but I hadn’t set foot in it before. I knocked on the door that contained a plaque that read “Private.”
Blake pulled open the door and reached out a hand to shake. I was surprised that he didn’t offer me a hug. As I shook his hand, he said, “Lowell, come in.” Then he pointed at an empty chair and said, “Have a seat.”
Sally said, “I think we’ve met once or twice, Lowell. You are one of our regular customers.”
I was nervous and sat on my hands to try and avoid fidgeting. I answered. “Yes, I’m here regularly. Blake and I are good friends.”
Sally said, “Yes, I understood that which is one of the reasons I’m so surprised I have to talk to you about what I’m about to bring up.”
I cocked my head to the side with a questioning look and glanced at Blake before looking back at Sally. I asked, “There’s something bad going on?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Blake nod. He was always lighthearted and happy. I’d never seen such a morose look on Blake’s face.
Sally said, “I consider it bad. Adding up two different occasions, nearly $1,000 has gone missing from the Toolbox in the last week.”
I said, “Oh, that isn’t good.” Then I looked from one of them to the other, and the reason why I was called in suddenly occurred to me. In a choking voice, I said, “You’re looking at me. Why are you looking at me?”
Sally said, “There is evidence that you might be involved. Admittedly, it is circumstantial, but I thought you might want to shine some more light on the situation for us.”
I blurted out,”No,” and then I added, “Well, I would if I knew anything. I don’t know anything. I would never steal money. Why would I do a thing like that?”
Blake said, “You were back by the office the most recent night that we lost money. We don’t want to accuse you, Lowell, but we thought you might be able to help. Maybe you know something. Maybe you saw someone else back here.”
I tried to remember being near the office. I knew this was the first time I’d ever stepped inside, but then I remembered what Blake must have seen. The last time I was at the Toolbox it wasn’t very busy, and so I just poked around in corners I hadn’t seen before.
I said, “You are accusing me, and no, I don’t know anything. The last time I was here I was poking around some, but this is the first time I’ve ever been inside this office. Honestly, it is.”
Sally said, “We don’t want to call the police.”
I narrowed my eyes and stared back at her. “Why should you? I haven’t done anything. Maybe one of your employees took the money. Have you questioned them like you are questioning me?”
She said, “I did ask them, and they said they didn’t know anything. I trust my employees.”
“But you don’t trust your customers?” I stood up from the chair. “I get it now. You brought me in to accuse me of something I know nothing about.”
Blake reached out to grab my shirt. He said, “Lowell, wait…”
I tore away from his grip and said, “I don’t have any reason to wait, Blake.” Then I thought again about Sven not answering my calls. I stared at Blake and asked, “Does Sven know?”
He didn’t answer. He only looked down at his feet and shuffled them back and forth.
“Damnit! You told Sven when it’s not even true! I’m going home. Enjoy the rest of your interrogations.”
I stormed out the back of the Toolbox slamming the door behind me. Just after exiting, I leaned back against the wall trying to catch my breath. I slowly tried to piece everything together.
It was another of those damned random events. I happened to be spotted near the office on a night when money disappeared. They didn’t have any leads, so they pinned it on the guy who’s different from the others. I kicked at the concrete of the sidewalk.
My next thought was wondering why the hell they told Sven. Why did he need to know anything about it when they didn’t even know it was true?
I wondered if Sven would assume that it was true. I wanted to trust him, but trust hadn’t worked particularly well for me in the past. Trusting people always seemed to eventually bite me in the ass somehow.
I climbed into the car with my hand shaking as I stuck the key in the ignition. I decided against going home. I wasn’t ready to just be by myself alone in the apartment.
Instead, I decided to drive across town to a straight bar that I knew. If it wasn’t a gay bar, I was unlikely to meet anyone at all that I knew well. I thought about Sven and tears started to roll down my cheeks as I pulled away from the curb.
At the first stoplight, I wasn’t paying attention to the red light and nearly caused an accident in the middle of the intersection. I could feel my pulse pounding, and my breath quickening.
I decided to drive the back streets as much as possible. I almost caused another accident. I yelled out loud, “Damnit, Blake! What the fuck were you doing?”
After what felt like an hour, I pulled up outside of the Drop, Bye bar. The lights were on inside, but it looked like the crowd was small.
Shortly after I walked inside, I realized that I’d failed at finding somewhere that nobody knew who I was. Billy Alvey was sitting at the bar wearing a leather jacket with his long black hair streaming down his back. He was snuggling up to a blond woman. He acknowledged me when I walked in with a nod.
If there was anyone familiar I had to see in my current state of mind, he was probably the best. Billy was even more of an outsider on the softball team than me, but he was our best player outside of Blake. I returned the nod and then asked the bartender for straight up Jack Daniel’s.
He slid the glass across the bar to me, and I picked it up to carry it off to a dark corner. I sipped at the Jack, and then I pulled my phone out and set it on the small table. I stared at it and tried to will Sven to call me.
I whispered, “Please, Sven, call me. You trust me. You don’t believe I would steal money. I need money, but I wouldn’t steal money. Please, Sven, call.”
21
Sven
I couldn’t focus at work for the rest of the day. I cancelled the rest of my meetings and sat in my desk chair staring out at the city. I didn’t want to believe that Lowell could do what Ian suggested, but Lowell told me time and again how concerned he was about his financial situation. It was possible that he could do something like that to ease the stress. I didn’t really know him that well.
He tried to call me when I got home from work, and I couldn’t think of what to say so I just let the phone ring. I knew that he needed to talk to Sally at the Toolbox first before I could share any information that I knew. I decided to turn the phone off for a few hours and focus on myself instead. It was only a few hours, and I knew that I could talk to Lowell about it later. No approach seemed perfect, but it seemed like a reasonable plan to avoid a huge emotional scene. I didn’t want to risk exploding something that could turn out to be small into a massive rattling uproar.
After
eating a sandwich and catching up with news around the city on the TV, I decided to make an inventory of the jobs that still needed to be completed around my house. Fortunately, no other disasters had appeared since I started dating Lowell.
I took three deep breaths when I thought about him again, and then picked up a small pad of paper and headed for the basement. I had a small leak in the basement on the wall underneath the stairs. I could trace the source of the water to a tiny crack. The moisture only appeared with heavy rainfall, and I was told that I didn’t need to have anything reconstructed, but it would require a professional patching job. I noted the problem down and inspected the rest of the basement.
After I was satisfied that there were no other glaring problems, I headed back up the stairs to the main floor. The dining room had a ceiling light fixture problem. The switch didn’t always work. I already changed out bulbs twice and determined that the problem had nothing to do with the bulbs themselves or how tightly they were screwed into the sockets. Instead the problem appeared to be in the circuitry somewhere. I added the issue to my list.
The roof leak was repaired. The problem was found in a seam where the roof changed direction, so that would not be added to my list. Instead, I still had the stain on my living room ceiling that needed to be patched or painted.
I continued my inventory throughout the house, and when I was finished I had eleven jobs that needed to be completed both big and small. I felt exhausted with the scope, but I was relieved that nothing new had happened in the last couple of months.
Returning to the kitchen to grab something to drink, I looked at my cell phone and then decided to leave well enough alone. I was feeling the most relaxed that I’d felt since having lunch with Ian, and I needed a few more hours distracted from the the issues with Lowell.
I sat down at my computer to enter my handwritten list into a to-do list app, and that’s when I saw the unfinished project I worked on the night before.
I wanted to surprise Lowell with an international trip together. I was looking at Costa Rica as a choice. I thought an exploration in the cloud forests with zip lines and hiking would be a perfect match for Lowell, and it would push me a little further in taking more risks. We had a recent conversation about passports, and he said that he had one that was still valid after obtaining it for a trip to Mexico just after college.
The trip was meant to be a surprise gift, so I didn’t say anything to Lowell in advance of working on it. So far I purchased plane tickets because they were on sale, and I knew the specific airline had a generous change of reservations policy.
I was looking at options for hotel reservations as the next part of the plan, and the screen was still up that I was searching the night before. Sighing heavily, I dug out the plane reservations, and I was set to cancel them when something in my gut said Not just yet. Hold off on that, Sven. Instead, I closed the window and ignored the trip plans while I typed in my list of household projects.
When I was finished typing on the computer, I noticed that it was only 8:00 p.m., but I was already exhausted. I decided to settle on the couch and turn the TV on. Before watching some random show, I headed for the kitchen to pull a beer out of the refrigerator.
I picked up my phone and turned it on briefly. It told me that Lowell had called twice more, but he didn’t send any text messages. I nearly pushed the button to call back, but I still wasn’t sure if I was ready to talk. Instead, I typed out a quick text message that just said:
Thinking about you.
I sent it and then turned the phone off again. I made a decision to make an effort at direct contact by either phone or text at 10 p.m. or when I decided to finally head upstairs to go to bed for the night.
With the beer in one hand and the phone in the other, I returned to the living room. I set the phone on the coffee table and pointed the remote control at the TV while I sipped at my beer. The cool liquid was soothing, and the mindless nature of the TV helped me relax. In less than fifteen minutes, I curled up on the couch and fell asleep.
22
Lowell
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t actually formally accused of a crime. If that was the case, the police would be involved. They just interrogated me like I was under suspicion. I continued to stare at the phone and wished that Sven would call.
Just as I reached out to stuff the phone back in my pocket, it chimed with a new text message. It was from Sven. I held the phone up and read the words. The message said:
Thinking about you.
I stared at the message and wiped a tear from the corner of my eye. He wasn’t completely giving up on me, but I still didn’t know why he wasn’t answering my calls. I started to call again, but then I held back.
If he answered, it would be great, and perhaps I could gain some reassurance, but if he refused to answer, it would feel devastating again.
I considered replying with a text message, but I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what Sven was told by Blake and Sally, and I didn’t know if he believed my side of the story. All that I knew was that I was on his mind.
I stared out of the corner of the bar where I was sitting in near darkness and watched the small group of regular customers laughing and sharing stories. They made life look so easy, but I wondered if they had faced a similar string of random events like those that seemed to bedevil my life.
Sipping at the last of the Jack, I thought about Sven. His appearance was just as random as anything else, but he was sticking with me in some way. I was pretty sure that he knew about the allegations about me being a thief, and he still decided to send the text message.
In the past, I would run away at any sign that something was falling apart. I never wanted to stick around for the final act when it was all just about watching everything crumble to dust, but, at some point I needed to learn how to stay the course. I knew in my gut that was one of the things Sven was trying to teach me whether he was conscious of it or not.
Then the thought sank deeper into my brain. Sven was all about sticking with people, jobs, and even a shaky house to see it through for things to turn out good in the end. It wouldn’t make sense for him to just walk away after hearing the accusations from Sally and Blake.
It might look to Sven like I had a leaky roof or a crack in his picture of me, but there was no conviction. I wasn’t a thief, and I needed to fight back against the accusation. I wasn’t accomplishing anything by just sitting in the bar and getting drunk. If I wanted Sven, I needed to go after him.
If he wouldn’t answer calls, or he couldn’t answer calls for some reason, I needed to go straight to Sven. I dropped more coins for an additional tip next to my glass and headed out the door. I had to see if Sven was home.
I looked at my phone and saw that it was 9:30 p.m. It was getting late, but Sven wasn’t usually in bed yet. I put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb heading across the city to Sven’s house in Bayview, twenty minutes away.
The traffic was thin, and the drive took me even less time than I expected. Driving across the bridge from downtown, I glanced to the right and smiled at the lights of my home city. I didn’t know where it came from, but I had a sudden gut feeling that everything was going to be okay. It had to work itself out somehow. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I was being falsely accused.
Just before I pulled up to the front of Sven’s house, I realized that I was thinking the way that he would. I needed to stick with knowing that I had done nothing wrong, and trust that everything would work itself out in the end.
Sven’s car was in the driveway, and lights were still on downstairs inside the house. The upstairs was dark. I concluded that meant that he was still awake. He was likely watching TV, and he might even be wondering what was happening to me. I hadn’t tried to call him since over three hours earlier, and I didn’t answer his text message.
I turned off the engine of the car, and I sat alone in the darkness taking deep breaths and trying to slow my racing heartbeat. I peere
d out through the window of the car to try and see if I could see any silhouettes through the windows of the house. I couldn’t make out anything. The curtains were drawn.
I climbed out of the car and very gently closed the door. My legs felt rubbery as I walked up the driveway and then stepped on to the sidewalk that stretched around the side of the house from the front porch to the kitchen door.
I was thankful that he didn’t own a pet like a dog. If he did, it would surely be barking its head off as I approached the kitchen door. I gazed up at the gutter we repaired, and I smiled when I saw that it was still safely in place.
After three big, deep breaths, I pulled my hand out of my pocket, curled the fingers into a fist, pulled open the screen door and knocked on the solid wood kitchen door.
I waited for a response. I counted up to thirty, and then I knocked again. Still there was no response. I leaned my forehead against the window of the kitchen door. This time I counted to sixty for an entire minute to pass by before I pounded again.
When there was no response, I dispensed with any concern about being quiet in the neighborhood and yelled, “Sven!”
23
Sven
I woke up to pounding on the door. I stumbled off the couch and pulled open the living room curtains. Lowell’s car was out front. He was the one pounding at my door.
I was confused. I wanted to see him, but I was also worried about what might happen. I didn’t want to believe that he was a thief, but I was worried that it was possible.
At first, I thought I could just wait until the pounding stopped, but then it continued. I wasn’t sure that Lowell planned to leave until he coaxed me out of the house. I decided to call Ian for advice. I thought perhaps there was more information available about Lowell’s guilt or innocence.
Always Waiting: The League, Book 3 Page 13