by Robb, J. D.
“Don’t forget to get to the free clinic as early as you can,” she continued. “The baby at least needs his vaccinations and they all need flu shots.” Aldene had mentioned having a visa more than once, but Natalie never asked to see it. So just in case, she added, “They don’t ask questions. It’s important. And Mr. . . . ?” Emerging from the small bedroom, she made eye contact with Aldene’s uncle Luis.
“Pena. Luis Pena.” When she smiled and nodded acknowledgment, he added, “Thank you. For the night here. For what you do for Aldene and the little ones.”
“You’re welcome. But I’m afraid you and your sons have to leave as soon as you’ve eaten something.” She was heading for the door again. “Mr. Fish is a good guy but my lease has a maximum occupancy of three, and while he and I have agreed to squish all the kids together to make one large adult, I do, unfortunately, have a couple of neighbors who are sticklers for district ordinances and feel it’s their civic duty to complain,” she said, explaining their bigotry as kindly as possible. “And I’m already in a little trouble with my—”
“But no. Do not leave,” Aldene interrupted, emerging from the kitchenette, moving quickly, pushing at the children to get dressed. “We will go. You will sleep here. This place belongs to you.”
“No, no. I’ll be fine. Eat. Go to the clinic.” She opened the door and looked back at the family of eight as they stood watching her, saying little, asking for nothing. “Good things are coming our way, you’ll see. There’s a women’s shelter with transitional housing and free child care that might have room for you soon.” Closing the door, she added, “We can talk later.”
Back in her storage unit in the basement, she locked the gate from the inside and used clothespins to hang the bedsheet on the outer wire wall. She unrolled an old yoga mat, covered that with a well-worn runner rug, and covered that with two of the Mylar blankets she’d bought in bulk—or salvaged from stretchers at the hospital. She hated waste. Wrapping herself in another shiny blanket, she then tucked herself into a lovely warm cocoon with her comforter, put her head on the pillow, and turned off her mind.
This was not her first sojourn at Chateau de Cage.
CHAPTER THREE
She heard a voice but didn’t open her eyes until the gate of her coop rattled.
“Come on now,” said Henry Fish. “Your friends have gone out. Go upstairs to your bed. You’ll rest better.”
“Hey, Mr. Fish.” Natalie’s voice was hoarse with too little sleep. Clinging to her blankets, she struggled to a sitting position, contorting her back to work out a kink. “What time is it?”
“Half past one.”
“And they just left?” Hours had passed. Aldene and the children would be in line at the clinic for hours, she thought, climbing slowly to her feet.
“No, they’ve been gone for some time now. I just didn’t know you were down here until I came for my ladder to change the lightbulb in ol’ Ms. Lenty’s kitchen.”
She smiled. Henry Fish was maybe fifty-five and just a little chubby, but he wasn’t five foot four unless he stretched out his spine as far as he could and stood on his monkey wrench. Where a more average-sized man could have managed with a chair, the high ceilings in the old building were a challenge for him.
“It seems to me that you help Ms. Lenty a lot. I think she’s got a little thing for you,” she said, grinning as she unpinned one corner of her sheet to see him.
He harrumphed and pointed a finger at her. Ms. Lenty wasn’t a day less than eighty years old. “It’s the old ones that keep me busy, not to mention employed. Besides, blue is not the color of my true love’s hair . . . This month she’s trying a rusty brown with sulfur-colored stripes, streaks she calls ’em. The top of her head is . . . is a . . . well, she’s like some dazzlin’ exotic bird, that one. And she promised long ago that she’d peck my eyes out if I strayed, and I don’t trust her not to.”
Natalie chuckled, her eyes twinkling with humor. She unlocked the wire gate and stepped out, clutching all her linens close, holding them high off the dirty concrete floor. She started fumbling with the latch. “How’s she feeling? Is that chest cold passing on its own? So many people at the hospital have ended up on antibiotics.”
“Here.” He reached forward to snap the padlock closed for her. “She’s better, but you’re not thinking all this chitchat is distracting me from the rent you still owe, are you?”
She grimaced. “Not entirely. I mean, I am glad your wife is feeling better.” She smiled. “And I do think Ms. Lenty has a little thing for you.”
“And . . .”
She sobered and sighed. “And my whole paycheck will go to rent next Friday. I swear.”
“That will cover the month before last. What about last month and this month and next?”
“No, no. I have some overtime coming. Enough to cover half of last month,” she said brightly, dimming when the disparity between what she would have and what was still overdue roared and reverberated in the air between them.
“And when I am forced to turn off your electricity and you must eat cold food in your cold apartment? These things are not in my hands, dear girl. I must answer to others same as you.”
“I know. I know.” And she did know. Henry approved of her undertakings and admired her devotion to those less fortunate. It pained him to have to enforce the rules she’d contracted to obey, simply to do his job. Over and over he’d pushed the limits to breaking for her. It wasn’t fair. It was not her intention to help some people at the expense of others. “And you shouldn’t have to be answering any questions about me. I’m sorry. And I will pay you—before the New Year. All of it. I promise.” Her intent was sincere, but perhaps not feasible.
The small inheritance her parents had left her was gone—but gone in a way in which they would have approved, she believed. She’d either sold or consigned nearly everything of any real value that she owned and had pressed her foster brother’s charitable nature to its limit—or so it would seem by the annoyed impatience in his voice whenever she called him lately.
“I’ll get the money, Mr. Fish. It’s flu season, there’ll be lots of extra shifts at work and—”
“And you must give to yourself before you give to others, young lady,” he broke in, trying to sound stern. “You’ll soon become one of them, and then how will you help?” He nodded sagely.
“I know.” Her shoulders drooped in defeat. “That’s what Miles says, and deep down I know it’s true, but I don’t know what else to do. I . . . The people at my church are great, you know? They do so much—the food and clothing drives, hot meals three days a week, raffles to make money for the free clinic—so much. But there are still so many holes left open. I can’t sit in my nice warm apartment without wondering what those people are eating the other four days of the week . . . or wondering about the ones who don’t know or can’t get to the church or the clinic. I’m awake all night in my nice clean bed worrying about the parents who might not know about the Takes-a-Village shelter, about the children.”
Her gaze caught on his; on the hazel-green eyes filled with understanding and sympathy even as his more personal concerns loomed large and heavy before him. She smiled at him fondly and snaked a hand from her layers of warmth to pat his arm.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Fish. It’ll be fine. And you’re right. I won’t have anywhere to freeze and store my soup if I don’t pay my rent. First things first, right? I’ll get you the money. There isn’t a better time in the year to make extra money. Flu season and Christmas.” She started shuffling backward toward the metal door protecting the stairwell. “Everyone’s looking to take on temporary help—I was a pretty good waitress in high school, you know, and . . .” And for years she’d given every job she’d come across, temporary or otherwise, to those who hadn’t seen a paycheck in quite a while, who needed to feed their families and put a tiny patch on their pride. “I’ll figure something out. I can cook more than soup, you know. I’ll have the extra money in no time.”
/> She let the heavy fire door close before he had a chance to say anything more and took a moment to lean against the inner wall, discouraged. There was never enough money to go around—and goodwill did have its limits. Even her old friend at the service center wanted cash now to replace the battery and alternator in her car because she’d used up all his patience months earlier on the repairs to someone else’s car that had been more dire, more expensive, and more of a necessity for his new, hard-won job—just another unexpected, unavoidable, and overriding circumstance that seemed always to be lying in wait for her.
Truth be told, they weren’t that unexpected anymore.
Reluctantly, she rearranged her mental budget to put off the repairs on her car for another month or two—three months if she wanted service for her cell phone sooner rather than later. She was missing the luxury of instant communication.
Putting one tired, lead-footed step in front of the other, she started up the stairs, weary with the fact that life was always so . . . complicated. Oh, she knew if it was perfect or easy it would have no meaning or purpose or value. But couldn’t there be a happy medium in there somewhere?
A FEW NIGHTS LATER, AS A LIGHT RAIN TURNED TO A FREEZING drizzle, Miles got wind that Natalie’s soup was being served under the bypass bridge off Market. But not by Natalie.
It was his custom to make a drive-by whenever he heard she was out—usually twice, three times if he had the time—until he was certain she’d packed up and gone home for the night. Nights he didn’t hear about her, nights he knew there was no meal being served at her church . . . those nights he worried and almost always found some lame excuse to drive past her apartment building to see if her car was parked in the back.
He was pathetic. He admitted it freely. He’d tried dating women his own age: ambitious women, interesting women who weren’t constantly throwing themselves into danger’s path—he’d found them ordinary and boring. Natalie, on the other hand, was impulsive, reckless, unpredictable, contradictory; too good, too young, and too trusting . . . not to mention a freaking fiscal disaster, and she was constantly on his mind.
“No, she’s fine and dandy,” said Jack Poser, who, along with his wife and a deceptively timid young woman named Lynie Morris, were Natalie’s most frequent partners in crime—breaking zoning laws right and left and flouting town ordinances every other night by feeding large numbers of people outdoors. Miles knew him to be dependable, banked on him to look out for her, and yet hadn’t exchanged more than several dozen words with him at a time, ever.
“She’s taking a few extra shifts at work. Helping out,” he said, and then reconsidered, rubbing his near hairless head beneath his cap. “Probably more than a few because I haven’t seen hide nor hair of her in more than a week.” He smiled at Miles’s frown. “No worries. She calls Janice near every day from the hospital to check on her stragglers . . . the folks who take a little longer to find us; she frets about them.”
Miles nodded absently, observing and cataloging every face in the crowd—male, female, and child—lined up peaceably around the two women and a second man he’d seen before who came to assist sometimes. The children all seemed to be attached to an adult, not nervous runaways he was going to have to chase down.
He tipped his head at the weary gathering, saying, “Tell those with the kids that I’ll come back around later if they want a ride over to the family shelter.”
“They get under your skin, don’t they?”
“The kids? Yeah.”
“No. The women. Our women. The ones we love.” Miles turned his head slowly and looked at Jack more directly, his expression as guarded as it was tolerant. “They dig in and get under your skin so deep they can make you do any number of things you’d never think to do on your own. Me? I used to think being out in a cold rain feeding strangers when I could be warm and dry at home in front of my television was crazy . . . Well, technically I still think that. And when my wife did her charity work at the church for all those years, and let me be a couple nights a week to watch my programs . . . well, hell, it was worth every penny she shaved off our budget—which she didn’t think I knew about—to use for this good reason or that good deed.” He barely took a breath. “Still doesn’t know, I bet. But it doesn’t matter, never did. I could see the peace it gave her, doing what she could for others. It made her happy. And you want that for them, don’t you? To be happy. So I was fine with it, until she took up with Natalie and headed out into the streets . . . out here in the heat and the blizzards . . . with God knew who, doing God knew what. And all you know about it is what you read and hear, isn’t that right?” He paused. “Worried me sick. Of course, we’d been married a thousand years by then so I knew better than to forbid her to come out here, so there you go . . . I had to drag my ass up off the couch and out the door to keep an eye on her—protect her like I promised on our wedding day.”
“Oh.” Jack made such a production of looking suddenly shocked and confused it could have been a Broadway play. “I forgot. You’re not married to her.”
“Who?” Jack smiled, his eyes dancing with intelligence and awareness—and Miles looked away. He bounced a little to keep his blood moving, to stay warm, and hunched his shoulders against the rain-damp chill in the air. “Protecting is my job. I took the oath.”
“Mmm. Doesn’t matter. Even if you were married to her, you wouldn’t be able to keep her from doing exactly what she wanted to do. In the beginning, before I knew what was what, I tried telling my Janice not to do something, and for my efforts I got burned breakfasts, dirty clothes folded up nice and put back in my drawers, no gas in the car . . . not a drop. I’ll give her credit though, she didn’t hold back on the sex, not once—but there was a certain lack of enthusiasm that was disturbing. Very disturbing.”
Miles’s composure broke and he laughed out loud; then slowly he sobered and accepted that old Jack Poser had him nailed to the mat. Still, he was tentative. “Yes, she’s gotten under my skin.”
“Like a bad rash.”
He nodded. “An itchy one.”
“So stop your suffering, man. Scratch it.”
He looked directly at Jack, took a deep breath, and let it out. He’d never talked to anyone about Natalie before, not about his feelings for her anyway, and not about his reasons for keeping her at arm’s length . . . Well, he’d always intended to keep her at a distance, but the fact was she’d never come too close.
“We’re friends.”
“That’s good. That’s where most of the love comes from. That’s what makes everything else work right.”
“We’ve been friends a long time. So long she doesn’t suspect anything. She trusts me. Taking a run at her now would probably feel like an ambush. I don’t want to scare her off.”
“That young woman doesn’t scare easily, you know that. And women like surprises.”
Miles scoffed. “They do not. They can handle flowers and candy and gifts, maybe, but nothing that’s going to alter their lives in any monumental way.”
“That so? It’s been my experience that any time a man puts himself out there, puts everything he’s got on the line, especially his heart and including his pride, it’s generally taken kindly and held with great care.”
“Generally.”
The gray-haired man gave him a hard look. “You see that girl doing it different, do you?”
Knowing kindly and with great care defined Natalie, his shame had him lowering his eyes away. However Natalie received the news of his passion for her, she would be gentle with it.
Still, there was one more obstacle for which the old man would be hard-pressed to find an antidote: “I’m almost ten years older than she is.”
“Ah. I don’t just watch TV, you know. Sometimes I read. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Mark Twain, one of the wisest men to ever live, once said: ‘Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter.’”
“It does matter. I was in the army before she went to middle school. I t
old her once that I was ten years old before my mom got a microwave—she thought that was why I related so well to the poor.” He glared at Jack when he snorted. “I’m serious. Nobody could afford one before then—my mom was one of the first on our block to have one. Natalie has no perception of time; she never thinks about the future, her future . . . and her music makes my ears bleed. We have nothing in common. We’re practically from different generations.”
“You make it sound like you’re old enough to be her father. Yes, dating her when you were in the army would have been very wrong. But you’re both adults now. You have the safety and care of these people in common. Your history and your tastes in music are what you share, how you get to know and appreciate each other.” He bumped his shoulder to Miles’s. “She lives in the present, the now. How good are you at that?”
Maybe it wasn’t his best grammatical tense—present. He loved history. Not necessarily his own, but as a subject in general, it fascinated him. Natalie loved to cook and focused on what she saw and knew to be true in the moment.
And he was concerned about the future, nothing wrong with that. Not overly so, but he did spend time planning and preparing for something that might never happen—a reality for her that she’d faced and lived with every day of her life.
They were different, more like opposites. Not like magnets that attract one way and repel in another, but like interlocking puzzle pieces that fit.
“Compromise, too . . .” Jack was still talking. He talked a lot, actually—an odd thing to realize after all this time. Miles’s gaze traveled in the direction of the old man’s wife who, if they, too, were puzzle pieces, would be the quieter, less chatty of the two—like he would be if he and Natalie ever . . . “That’s the key to it. You have to compromise on everything. Let her have her creamy peanut butter if she keeps plenty of grape jam on hand. Let her have the bed when she’s sick and she’ll take the couch when you are, plus she’ll bring you soup and water and cold cloths for your forehead and give you backrubs with baby lotion—”