by Chris Lynch
• • •
When we wake up—well, when Junie wakes up, since I never fully fell back to sleep but lay there smelling her hair—she speaks first.
“I’ll getcha back,” she says quietly.
When I remain speechless, she rolls over to regard me up close. If my face is not lying, it speaks of puzzlement.
“Okay,” I say. “It seems to me there are a number of ways to take that statement. Could be ‘I’ll get you back,’ like when one person pays for lunch or something and the other one pledges to return the favor. Or there’s the more intense ‘I’ll get you back,’ like when one person does something foul and reprehensible to another and then there is the possibility that it’s more along the lines of, ‘I’ll get your back,’ like, ‘If you’re ever in need, I’ll be there.’
“Anyhow you look at it, that’s a hell of a thing to wake up to, Ms. Blue.”
She slap-claps a hand over my mouth, kisses my nose, and says, “It was absolutely not the second one.” Then she climbs over me on her way to the bathroom. I hear the magnificent shower get its third outing of the day.
My phone rings, and I cross the room all spritely to answer it. I answer with a very silly, “Yell-o.”
“Well, that’s my first question answered. Congratulations, boy.”
“Maxine, what are you doing on my mother’s phone?”
“It was the first one I saw when I woke up.”
“And where did you wake up?”
“Your living room.”
“You guys slept over at my house?”
“I did. I don’t know if the other two have gone down at all yet. Lots of art going on in this house, and lots of chatter. Ronny even made a raucous appearance on your front lawn, until your father made a phone call that made Ronny disappear. That was cool. Wish I had that number.”
“My dad called the police?”
“Didn’t look like police to me.”
“Is my dad there now?”
“Come and gone again. Awfully businesslike, that man.”
“That would be him, yes. Are you calling me for any special reason?”
There is an uncharacteristic Maxie silence on the line.
“Max?”
“I believe her, O. In fact, everybody in this house right now believes her. But nobody gives a shit what we believe. And perceptions, some places more than others—perceptions matter. People think she’s hiding something, and with certain people there is nothing, like nothing, that sets them off more than that feeling. And she’s too tough for her own good, uncompromising, pig— Well, you know.”
“Oh, do I know.”
“Right. So . . . best keep her away just yet. Keep her away. At least another day.”
“Done.” I say, bravely accepting the happiest assignment of my life. “What then, though?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Another day? Then another day after that? I don’t know. All I know is today. All I know is I love the crazy little freakin’ bat, and you need to keep her today. You can do that.”
“I can.”
“All right. I’m gonna go check on the other bats and see what’s goin’ on here. Don’t be surprised at all the batshit you find when you come home.”
“Charming,” I say, and she hangs up on a laugh.
“Who you braggin’ to?” Junie says as she comes out of the bathroom. “Guys. Don’t even wait for the testicles to cool down before they’re waving them around town for all the other rutting pigs to see.”
I know how she can be, but still.
“That was appalling,” I say.
“You’re damn cute when you’re appalled,” she says, “but I have to go.”
“What?” I jump up when she drops her bathrobe, revealing herself fully clothed in shorts and a button-down short-sleeved shirt. “We’re just getting started.”
“I have things to do, O. I have to work. Real world returns, guy.”
“Well, just make it go away.”
“Careful,” she says in a voice and with a pointedly pointed finger that suggests I’d really better be. “You’re highlighting our, ahem, situational differences again. I gotta work, I told you. I can’t just make it go away. And you know what else? I want to work.”
“The shop? Christ, you can’t go into the shop, not today.”
“I got no idea what you have against the shop all of a sudden, but it ain’t the shop today. It’s the dogs. I got four different houses that are going to be craptastic by the time their owners get home if I do not fulfill my obligations. And I, junior, am a woman who takes her obligations seriously.”
I had not planned for this. I had not, actually, planned for any bumps in my glowing yellow-brick road.
“But we’re booked for two nights,” I say.
“So, unbook one.”
Rats.
“Ah, we’ll lose that second night’s money.”
She sly-smiles me. “I thought money didn’t exist here, in our world, on our planet?”
Mopping the floor with me, she is.
I walk to the big window and watch the boats in the harbor. I do not doubt for a second that, like the fancy boats under the stars last night, the dashing vessels under the glorious sunshine today are all just part of what a place like this can arrange for aesthetic purposes. It’s all about money. Of course it is. Everything is.
Suddenly her arms are around my waist, and she’s looking at the same all-that-glitters as I am.
“I can’t let you lose what you paid,” she says. “I just can’t do that. One more night.”
O-kay. Lyin’ O’Brien pulls it off. Just.
I turn around and hug her.
“Can I say something?” I ask.
“Oh, God,” she says, and squinches her eyes tight shut.
“I’ll drive you,” I say.
After a brief hesitation she opens her eyes and lets out an awkward laugh of relief.
“What?” I say. “What? What were you afraid I was going to say?”
“Huh? What? I don’t know. Nothing. I don’t even remember. Let’s just get going.”
“Right,” I say, heading to the bathroom with my clothes to pull myself together. “I’ll drop you out there and then pick you up again later.”
“Great,” she says as I close the bathroom door.
I burst like Bugs Bunny through the sliders. “I do love you, though,” I say, and then slam them again quickly and cowardly.
“Dammit, dammit,” I hear her say, and for whatever reason this gives me wonderful satisfaction.
• • •
When I drop her off at her first assignment, she hands me a folded sheet of eight-by-ten paper, on which she has drawn a fairly convincing map of the neighborhood. On it she has highlighted all the addresses where she has dog contracts, and circled the one where she will be finishing the day.
“I basically have to do two loops. Each stop, I check on ’em, make sure they are fed and watered, walk them, then move on to the next place. Then I do it the same for all the others, double back around, and walk them all once more. It’s more than it sounds, actually. Takes a few hours.”
“Great. I will meet you there, at four. I’ll pick you up and take you home with me.”
My delight at saying this is too obvious for my own good.
“Maybe we should think about getting a dog of our own,” I add.
She closes the passenger side door and leans back in on the window.
“You know we’re just playing house, O.”
“But what a house, huh?” I say, pointing at her.
“And what play, huh?” she says, pointing back. She’s probably just being kind. I probably don’t care.
I drive away, bobbing my head along with a jazz radio station my mother apparently likes, my smile and my agenda firmly in place.
• • •
I knock on the door.
“Malcolm, what the hell are you doing here?” I say.
He stares at me.
“You look like a fool, boy,” I tell him.
He stares at me.
“In training for that gig you’ve always dreamed about—tennis star in the daytime and gangster doorman at night?”
In a snap Malcolm disappears from my sight, yanked out of the way as Ronny appears.
“And you want . . . what?” he says.
“What were you doing at my house last night?”
“What were my women doing at your house last night? And today?”
“Is something atrocious going to happen to me if my answer is ‘Demonstrating good taste’?”
He smiles. The smile of a man who does not wish one good tidings.
“You got friends, little man. That’s nice.”
“You’ll find that most good people have friends.”
“And you will find that no matter how many friends you have, if you make one more wiseass remark to my face, on my doorstep, I don’t care what happens, you’re gonna wind up with your nuts in your mouth.”
I thought I had something going there. I actually felt ascendant.
He leans my way, stares bug-eyed. “Response?”
I take a deep breath. Fortunately, my wiseass just broke.
“Leave Junie alone.”
Even the air has come to a standstill here.
“Rules must be followed. Respect must be paid. If your little girlfriend is too ignorant to work that out, then she’ll pay some other way. She’ll get no grief from me. But she’ll get no help from me neither.”
He makes a washing-hands gesture, then spits, on his own step, between my feet, before slamming the door in my face.
• • •
I smell incense mixing with the usual flowers as I walk up the path to my house. That same jazz station is filling the air inside.
I walk around inside quietly, just to see what I can see without being seen.
I see Maxine asleep on the couch, so I don’t bother her. I go from living room to kitchen to dining room, where I find an absolute riot of artwork. Sketches, pastels, watercolors, some tacked up on the walls, several canvases propped on easels, some charcoal drawings laid out, on different sheets, lined up like moveable puzzle pieces on the dining room table. Much of this work is recognizably Mom’s, but much of it is way, way outside the regular track. It’s figurative, and not, and it reminds me of the Leonardo Da Vinci Grotesques exhibit Mom saw a couple years ago and raved about for . . . a couple of years. She spoke about it with admiration and awe and excitement and abject fear. Never, to my knowledge, attempted to go there with her own art before. I get a full-body chill and have to leave the room.
I look out the kitchen window, and there, side by side in the dirt, are Mom and Leona, gardening.
“I’m never leaving here,” Max says, making me nearly leap through the window with shock.
“Jesus, Maxine.”
“I love this place. Love, love, love your mom.”
“You know you have part of a tuna sandwich stuck to the underside of your arm?” I say.
She doesn’t even move it. “I love tuna,” she says.
“Are you stoned?” I ask, laughing.
“No,” she says firmly, smiling. “I’m blissed. And blessed. This place is blessed.”
I walk past her, heading up to my room to get a few things. She follows behind.
“It does have a certain vibe, I guess,” I say, “though I’m not sure it was exactly here before you guys showed up.”
“Good. How’s June?”
“June is aces. She is just working for a few hours, and then I’ll be picking her up again.”
“Working? Aw, Christ, not the dog thing. I’ll tell you what, if it turned out she did win the lottery and was still picking up animal shit with her hands, I would personally beat her to death with a rawhide bone.”
I pause from stuffing clothes and toiletries into an overnight bag. “There’s that vibe again, huh?”
“Seriously, though. The vibe exists. Maybe when things cool down, bring June back here. We’ll all live here—you, me, your mom, my mom, Junie. It’ll be like a commune. Like a true feminist paradise, and the men can just all go to hell.”
I zip my bag closed with all the manly gusto I can manage.
“I’m going to go now,” I say.
• • •
I drive back downtown, back to the hotel. As I pull up and the doorman rushes right over, greets me like an old pal, yet a superior one, takes my money and my keys, I have to confess I am feeling this.
Without that thing that June Blue brings to this situation, a thing I suppose some might call perspective, others might call shame, I start to enjoy this position I’m in.
I take my modest little bag toward the elevator, then have a brilliant thought. I go to the desk for a very crisp and lean conversation, like I was born doing this kind of thing.
“Flowers?” I say to the man.
“Excellent,” he says and smiles. “Roses?”
“Sounds about right.”
“Color?”
“What are the choices?”
“More than you might think.”
I shrug. “A variety?”
“Yes, sir. Would you like a dinner reservation?”
“Uh . . . don’t think so. Don’t want to push it. We’ll find something.”
“Subtlety is a gift, sir. Beautiful summer day, though, is it not?”
“It is.”
“Have we considered a harbor cruise?”
“We have not, but we are now.”
“Time?”
“Um, what time is sunset?”
“I will check, and I will book, and I will have the confirmation sent to your room.”
I am excited enough to really give myself away here. I must calm down.
“Where have you been all my life?” I say to the man.
“Right here behind this desk the whole time, Mr. O’Brien.”
“Ha.” I shake his hand and sashay on up to my room.
• • •
I am standing at my big window, staring out over the breathtaking bay, looking at all the fine watercraft coming and going, one of them coming for us. This is it, isn’t it?
“Are you nuts?”
I am thinking it, and saying it out loud, as if to prove the nutsness, as if it needs more proving.
Pointless ostentation, yup, that is the surest way to the heart of this woman. Show her the shallowness she has always expected like a trapdoor waiting to open onto the bottomless world of greed and awfulness.
But it’s a boat.
And flowers. Don’t forget flowers.
Okay. I do not know what I am doing. I am flailing, is what I am doing. I am so desperate to have Junie—the live and unharmed and here version of her—in my life, and all the way in, that there isn’t a notion so crazy that it doesn’t at least get to the interview stage.
But even if I interview them all, tomorrow is still coming. And when it does, what is all your money going to—
Jeeee-zuz.
What a moron. What a solid-gold, triple-A-rated fool have I been to not figure out the straightest, simplest solution to the source of everyone’s happiness, when it has been waving its aromatic tail feathers under my nose all the time?
That is a rhetorical question.
Some ideas are just too right, too perfect, to stop and think about them.
I hit the marble floor running, skittering across the lobby, out the front doors, left, and left again toward the financial district, through throngs of power-suited dopes and dopettes. I am sweating like a plow beast when I reach the front doors of my dad’s office building.
I take the elevator up to Dad’s floor, step off, and grin like a maniac at his receptionist, who tells me he is on a conference call, if I want to take a seat. I do not want at all to take a seat, because I am too anxious, so I go straight into nutty pacing mode, which is not nutty at all for me when I am feeling this way in my own house, but here and now, with me dripping sweat all over the n
ice burgundy carpets and practicing what I want to say to my father, surely has this poor woman on the verge of triggering whatever security gizmo she has back there, when my father comes out probably just in time.
“Oliver!” Dad says, genuinely surprised and thrilled to see me. We hug, and he hauls me down the hall to his office.
I should be able to do small talk here, or large talk, or at least humanity-based father-son talk, but I am a maniac on a mission.
“I have to ask a favor, Dad.”
“Oooo,” he says, leaning back in his chair, not serious, exactly, but definitely attentive. “You don’t often—”
“Ever,” I point out quickly, figuring this point may become rather vital.
“Pretty much never,” he says. “So, you’ve got my attention, Son.”
“Money,” I say.
“Money,” he says.
I nod. Nod, nod, nod, nod.
“All right,” he says, laughing. “Money. So . . .”
“Could you, if I needed you to, transfer some money into my account, like instantly, so I could write a check on it?”
I have no idea what is in this account, because I have never needed to know. Never wanted to either. I have one account that I can get cash out of with my bank card, that I consider my account. And then there’s the other account that he manages for me that is some kind of convoluted checking-savings-investment-interest-bearing spaceship of a thing that orders Chinese food for itself and keeps my room clean. I carry two of those checks folded up in my wallet for absolute-absolute emergencies, and otherwise we have nothing to do with each other.
“Well, not instantly exactly, but fairly quickly. Are you going to tell me what for?”
I smile and blink at him all coy and realize how lucky I am to be an only child so that this kind of thing might still work on him. Sisters would surely have killed this for the likes of me by this point in my life.
“Not if you don’t force me to.”
It’s not the coy. It’s because he loves me.
“No, I won’t be forcing you to. Are you going to—God help us—give me the figure? Agreeable as I would like to be, it would be hard to do this without that.”
I swallow hard, hear myself gulp, which makes Dad laugh sympathetically.
“Can I have that?” I say, pointing to his cube of notepaper with its own pen holder.