Baggage Check

by M. J. Pullen

  After a while, Rebecca came up with a sorting system. If a bag or box was obviously trash, contained anything perishable, or had a strong odor of any kind, it went to the Dumpster. If it was in good condition, somewhat clean, and had clear value, she did one of two things: things she recognized from her childhood went down the hall to Cory’s room to be looked at again later; things that must have been recently acquired went out to a tarp she’d spread in the front yard for donation to charity or a garage sale, whichever seemed easier when the time came.

  On one of her trips to Cory’s room, she found an old stereo that still worked and plugged it in by the front door—the only outlet she could reach. Three stations came in well—country, classic rock, and the station that featured only church sermons. She alternated between the first two every hour or so, and after a while was surprised to find that she had been working for nearly six hours. Her stomach growled, so she stopped to survey her progress.

  The living room was not yet clean, but the path through it was close to five feet wider than the sliver of carpet it had been before, and the surrounding trash mountains not nearly as high. Her arms and legs were sore from bending, reaching, and carrying. She put her gloves on the front porch, washed her hands in the bathroom, and went out to her car and applied three layers of hand sanitizer before eating the peanut butter sandwich she had packed for lunch.

  Rebecca leaned against her car while she ate. Nothing had ever tasted quite so delicious as this particular peanut butter sandwich. She had promised herself she would stay until noon, and it was now nearly two. Beating her own goal made her feel more exhilarated than she had in a long time. Her body trembled with tiredness, but she was not ready yet to give up for the day. She would work until four, she decided. The sky seemed exceptionally blue and bright today, and Rebecca rested her head on the roof of her car, watching a hawk make lazy circles overhead.

  Richard stopped by at the end of his route, still wearing his blue USPS uniform. He looked at her neatly organized piles on the front lawn and smiled at her. “Maybe we should have asked you to do this years ago.”

  She laughed. “I guess you could say this is my special talent.”

  “You have lots of talents, Becky.”

  “Right. I can’t sing. I’m not a writer. I have no eye for art.”

  “I’d be willing to bet that last one’s not true.”

  She gestured at the mess on the lawn. “This is it. This is my masterpiece.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Want some help for a bit?”

  “Sure.”

  “I can’t stay long. Sonia has something at the church tonight we’re supposed to go to.”

  “That’s fine, Daddy.”

  They worked for a while in silence. She was surprised that even though her father owned half the house, he deferred to her for decisions about most things. The couple of times she wondered aloud if he might want to take something with him—a toolbox, old football games on VHS tapes—he just shook his head. Rebecca supposed he had already collected everything he wanted to keep when he’d left. A little after five, he tossed a box of broken Christmas lights into the Dumpster, dusted his hands, and gave her a kiss on the cheek.

  “I’m sorry I can’t do more,” he said.

  “There’s nothing to apologize for, Daddy.”

  “We’re okay?”

  She hugged him. “We’re fine. I love you.”

  “Love you, too, Rebecca Rockstar.” He gave her a gentle knock on the arm. “Never think you’re not talented, okay? You shouldn’t sell yourself short.”

  Rebecca nodded and watched him pull away in the gray-and-burgundy pickup truck he’d been driving since she was in college. They waved at each other, and she went back to work, wondering momentarily what was going on at church that night.

  If Rebecca had been waiting for Alex to drop by, she did not admit it to herself, even though she began glancing up and down the street for the patrol car each time she made a trip outside. By the time she was too exhausted to lift another box, it was nearly eight and getting dark. She had been at the house for nearly twelve hours, three times the goal she had set for herself.

  She covered the items on the lawn with a second blue tarp, tucking the edges loosely under, and waved at Mrs. Pindergrass watering her lawn across the street. Her old neighbor gave her a tentative wave back and stared at the tarp with apprehension. Rebecca put an old beach towel she’d swiped from her father’s linen closet across the driver’s seat in her car to protect her leather seats from the grime and drove back to the little rental house. By nine o’clock, she had showered, fallen into bed, and was sleeping the deepest sleep of her life.

  21

  Rebecca woke after an astonishing amount of time: twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. It took several moments to remember that she was in a strange house, rather than the strange hotel room that was her usual occupational hazard. Every muscle in her body ached and burned as she pulled herself out of bed and into the tiny bathroom. She had not been this sore or tired since her first week of training in high heels at the airline. She noticed while brushing her teeth that she had forgotten to charge her cell phone the night before, so she had to stand hooked up to the outlet in the tiny kitchen while the coffee brewed to check her messages.

  There was a message from her dad, a generic “checking in” message that was out of character for him, at least for the past several years. The second message was from Marci. “I just wanted to say thanks again for everything, and to ask you to give me a call.”

  Torn between curiosity and ravenous hunger, Rebecca made toast and ate it standing in the kitchen while she dialed Marci’s number. It seemed she was taking all her meals standing up these days. It felt very primitive somehow, but she didn’t mind.

  “Hey,” Marci answered on the second ring. “How are things going in Alabama? I hope I didn’t interrupt you—I know you have a lot to do out there.”

  “No, mmm, that’s okay,” Rebecca said, swallowing. “I was thinking of taking today off anyway. I’m super sore from all the work I did at Mom’s yesterday. I can barely move.”

  “Ah,” Marci said. “Well, I wanted to ask if you are going to the Stillwells’ on Monday?”

  Jake’s parents hosted a July Fourth picnic every year at their large old home in Atlanta’s prestigious Buckhead neighborhood. It was Kitty Stillwell’s pride and joy, and it seemed like half the city turned out for it. They always invited Rebecca, and on the years she’d been able to go, she’d enjoyed it.

  “I hadn’t thought about it, honestly. I sort of lost track of the days.”

  “Oh, okay,” Marci said. “Well, if you decide to go, I wondered if you’d be up for drinks after the fireworks? Just us girls. Dylan is going to be out of town, and after all day with Jake’s entire family, I think I’m going to need a break.”

  Rebecca had not thought about when she would be back in Atlanta, but she supposed the weekend was pretty reasonable. For the first time in her life, she had no schedule to keep, no boss she needed to check in with. At least for now. “Sure, I think I can do that.”

  “Great,” Marci said, sounding uncomfortable. “I think I owe you an apology. I’d like to buy you a drink.”

  “No apology is needed,” Rebecca said. “But we can go out for a drink.”

  Rebecca hung up with Marci, blow-dried her hair, and stretched her sore muscles. She wondered what to do with the day off she had given herself. She sat on the couch for a bit and flipped through the channels before snapping off the TV. In her apartment at home, sitting quietly on the couch and watching Atlanta go by below her was one of her favorite activities. But here, the quiet was too quiet. Her father’s house had few windows, and the ones that were there were dirty and viewed only the dirt driveway in front of the house or the thick woods on the other three sides.

  She paced around the tiny house, opening and closing cabinets and drawers and finding many of them empty or partially so. Either he had not brought much with him when he m
oved out of her mother’s house, or he had moved much of it to Sonia’s, or both. There were a few books on the shelves, mostly the spy novels that had always been his favorites. She selected one called Deadly Games and flopped back down on the couch.

  She was two chapters in, following the main character through a harrowing scene in the South American jungle, when a knock at the door startled her. Being alone in her dad’s house in the middle of nowhere made unexpected visitors a nervous thing to say the least. Her heart was still racing when she got to the peephole and saw Deputy Alex Chen standing outside, in frayed cargo shorts and a T-shirt. He apologized as soon as she opened the door.

  “I should have called you first,” he said. “I don’t have your number in my phone.”

  Reflexively, she smoothed down her hair. “No problem. What’s up?”

  “I’m off today, so I went by your mom’s to see if you needed any help.” He gestured at his clothes and she saw he also wore construction-style work boots. “You weren’t there.”

  She smiled. “No, I’m not. Where were you yesterday? I worked my ass off by myself. I’m taking the day off today.”

  He looked at her thoughtfully, and then up at the sky. “Any plans?”

  “Just reading,” she said cautiously.

  “Go put on some good shoes,” he said. “I have an idea.”

  * * *

  The waterfall was a fifteen-minute drive from her dad’s house. Alex drove them, chatting easily about the area as he navigated down the hilly two-lane highway and a few mildly scary narrow roads. Alex seemed to know everything about St. Clair County, Alabama, from when the railroads had come through to which industries and crops had been prominent at various times in the state’s history. Rebecca closed her eyes as she listened. Both windows were down, and she liked the morning sun on her skin and the breeze in her hair.

  He parked in a shady gravel lot next to a couple of pickup trucks and an RV with a motorcycle strapped to its rear. There were running shoes and bottles of water in his trunk. He quickly changed the boots and handed Rebecca a water. A trail map behind the wooden fence showed various trails marked in bright colors. “Do you still run?” he asked her. “You ran cross-country, right?”

  “I can’t believe you remember that. No, I don’t. I haven’t much since college, anyway.”

  He pointed to a curvy blue line on the map. “Well, there’s an easy path here to the bottom of the falls, for city girls with sore muscles who don’t want to chip a nail. It’s paved, so if you hurt yourself I could bring a wheelbarrow up for you.”

  “Or?”

  “Or we could take my jogging path—the yellow trail. It goes out through the valley here and then works up the back side of the ridge. You actually get a better view of the falls from this peak. Six miles, round trip. If you think you could keep up.”

  Rebecca looked at the opening in the trees where the trail started and could see the point about a hundred yards ahead where the yellow blazes split off from the paved path. It was a shady trail with the sun filtering down through the trees, which seemed to curve inward to make a tunnel. The scene looked enchanted, and she wondered how she had never been here before. “Six miles?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You know what? It’s okay, we’ll do the short path. I know you’re tired from cleaning.”

  She knew he was baiting her, but it worked anyway. She smacked him lightly on the chest and hoped her sore calf muscles would not snap as she took off running for the first time in years. “Try to keep up,” she called back at him.

  Alex had no trouble whatsoever keeping up. After a half mile of running next to her, he went full speed ahead when she stopped to walk, clutching at her side. She wondered briefly if he’d left her, but found him just around the next bend, coming back toward her down a steep hill like a mountain goat. He was not even sweating. “Show-off.” She scowled.

  He grinned and returned to her side to walk next to her. “I know, I’m sorry. Cute girls have always had that effect on me.”

  “I forgot you were in the army,” she said. “You could probably do this run in your sleep.”

  “Well, not asleep maybe, but I did it drunk once,” Alex said.

  “What?”

  “For the record, I do not recommend it. I think I sprained both ankles that night. Of course, that was for a cute girl, too.”

  “Was she impressed?”

  “I think so. She married me. Of course, it helped that I had knocked her up a few months before that.”

  Rebecca had many questions in response to this, and settled on, “So, you’re divorced?” Thank you, Captain Obvious.

  “Yes. For a long time. My ex-wife, Shondra, had a pretty serious drug problem. Still does, I imagine, if she’s still alive.”

  “You don’t know where she is?”

  “No one does. Not even her parents. Last time any of us heard from her, she called from Chicago six years ago to ask for bail money. I didn’t have it to give her even if I’d wanted to, and my in-laws were just done with it. Not that I blame them. She swore she would never speak to any of us again. So far, it’s the first promise she’s kept.”

  “That’s awful,” Rebecca said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “I knew she had some problems. But she had been clean for a while when I met her. Then our daughter Honey was born, and I don’t know. I guess the stress was too much for her. I was still in the army then, and got deployed, and Shondra moved back in with her parents. She was trying to finish nursing school and work at the same time, and … babies are really hard. I know it sounds stupid to say that, but I just don’t think Shondra was wired for motherhood, you know? She started doing amphetamines, I think to stay awake and study, but then she moved on to crystal meth and it just spiraled from there.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me, too.”

  “So Honey lives with Shondra’s parents?”

  He nodded. “It started out as a temporary thing, while I was deployed. But then when I got out of the army, I started working for the sheriff, and with the crazy hours and the risky job and everything … it just seemed easier if they had primary custody. Honey needed stability, and they had lost their daughter. I couldn’t take away their granddaughter, too. Not when I wasn’t even sure I could raise her alone.”

  “That’s a hard choice,” Rebecca said. “Brave.”

  Alex scaled a large boulder that jutted out into the path from the side of the mountain and held a hand down to help her up. She glanced at the path’s walk-around option, which would take her a good twenty feet to the left and back again to where he stood. She gave him her hand to help her scrabble up the rock.

  “You have to do what’s best for your kids,” he said. “Even if it’s hard for you.”

  “Do you miss her? Honey, I mean. Do you wish she lived with you?” she asked.

  “Sometimes, yeah.” He ducked beneath a low-hanging branch and held it up for her to pass under. “They’ve been great, though,” he went on. “My in-laws. Ex-in-laws. They love Honey and she loves them, and I see her pretty much whenever I want.”

  “That’s nice.” This was so outside her realm, Rebecca was unsure what else to say.

  “I take her camping and fishing and go to the Daddy-Daughter dances with her. I try hard not to miss the big milestones. It’s not perfect, but she’s a great kid. Young woman, really. She’ll be a freshman this fall. Softball. Volleyball. Honor roll.”

  “You sound really proud of her.” Rebecca thought of Jake and little Bonnie, and found it was hard to imagine that wobbly little round-cheeked toddler as a “young woman.”

  “I am,” he said. “What about you? You ever wanted kids?”

  “Is that your one question for the day?”

  “What? You’re still counting? You just asked me like forty. I thought we were just having a normal adult conversation.”

  She laughed. “Fair enough. No.”

  “Just no?”

  They were cresting the top of a rise now, a
nd Alex stepped aside to allow her over the top first. “No,” she repeated as she passed him. “Does that make you think less of me?”

  Without waiting for an answer, she hoisted herself up and gasped. Before her was a gap in the trees through which she could see the rolling green hills and farms below. They created a hilly little patchwork that made it look like God had spread a quilt over the earth—all shades of green stitched in black asphalt and rusty clay roads. The little river that must flow from the falls to their right emerged to the south and wound through the hills before disappearing on the horizon. “It’s beautiful.”

  “Great, huh?” Alex said behind her. “It’s why I’ll always come back here.”

  He led her a few feet along the ridge to a spot where a rock outcropped over the trees and they sat, drinking water and gazing into the distance. She stood and stretched, her left calf twinging, and inhaled deeply of the morning air. She let it back out as a long, slow sigh. “I can’t remember the last time I felt so peaceful.”

  “That’s got to be a good thing,” Alex said. He took off his shirt, rolled it up under his head, and lay back with his eyes closed to soak up the midmorning sun. Rebecca stole a quick glance at his bare chest before turning back to the landscape. She blushed at the memory of shirtless Alex the other morning in her hotel room. Now she could see more clearly. There was a tattoo on his left arm, lettering she could only assume was Chinese, and he had just the merest suggestion of a late-thirties belly, softened by too many nights drinking beer and singing karaoke. Otherwise, his upper body was smooth and muscular, nearly perfect.

  Stop it, Rebecca. This guy has a teenage daughter and lives in the middle of nowhere. Worse than the middle of nowhere—it’s the last middle of nowhere I want to be.

  Still, she had to admit the beauty of the landscape was alluring. She picked her way to the edge of the rock and sat carefully so that her legs dangled over the side. The scene before her was like a painting, or a perfect photograph, except that it was not entirely still. Birds flitted and chirped, and every few minutes, she heard a distant motor of a truck or tractor scaling one of the large hills across the valley. The breeze came periodically and lifted the baby hairs on the back of her neck. She lost herself in thoughts of her mom, her dad, and even poor fluttering Sonia. She wondered idly how crazy Valerie was making whoever was subbing for her at the airline.