by A. J. Downey
“That don’t look work related!”
“Just lookin’ something up real quick, Sergeant,” I called back, x’ing out of the google search screen. I went back to the intake form and heaved a sigh.
“That’s what I thought,” he grumbled, and I fought not to roll my eyes. Dude could be a real asshole sometimes.
I had no intention of telling Elka where we were headed on Saturday, but I did need to text her and tell her when I would pick her up.
The shift dragged bad when you wanted to do something and couldn’t, and I tried not to let it put me in a bad mood. Still, between my sergeant and some of the inmates, they were a testin’ me. I didn’t let it show. It was one of the worst things you could do, letting either one of them get to you like that.
“Hey, man, what’s it like bein’ locked up in here with us day after day?” one of the inmates asked me. “It’s almost like your dumb ass is in jail too, am I right?”
I looked over. “Yep, you got me there, buddy. Every damn day right up until I clock out, go home, and fuck my girl,” I told him deadpan. The rest of the inmates in line fell out laughing at dude’s expense, and the look on his face was pretty priceless.
“Man, that’s why you don’t mess with Jones,” one of them said, still cuttin’ up. “He’s quick!”
“Alright, alright, you jokers! That’s enough.” Miller, one of the good dudes on my team, escorted this freshly turned batch back into the next holding area right before they went to their cell blocks. I gave him and Dewey, who was bringing up the rear, a nod and threw the switch to close the gate behind them.
I shook my head and jotted things down for the paper trail, my mind wandering not to my ex-wife, but to Elka which was both odd and wasn’t. I mean, Elka, by far, wasn’t even close to being ‘my girl’ and probably never would be, but the attraction was there and was pretty real.
I sighed.
I still felt like a perve getting hard every time I thought about her body pressed to mine. Hell, the smell of vanilla was enough to drive me nuts, now. I couldn’t remember where I had encountered it between Saturday night and today, but I remember I’d breathed it in and had started low-key looking for her.
I think I was starting to realize how the rest of the guys felt when they’d latched onto their ‘one.’ I just hoped to hell that Elka wasn’t mine. The girl didn’t deserve any more heartache than she’d already been handed, and I was afraid it might be all I was good for. Handing out heartache and disappointment. I didn’t want to or mean to even be that guy. It just was what always seemed to happen.
“You alright my man?” I looked up.
“Yeah, Miller, why what’s up?”
“You just seem extra distracted today.”
“Shit, man. I’m sorry. How much longer we got on this shift, anyway?”
“Something like about an hour, what’s going on?” he asked. He crossed his arms and bounced on his feet, rocking from heel to toe and back again. It was just a ‘Miller’ thing to do and I smiled.
“Thinking about a girl, if you can believe it,” I said.
“Oh yeah? That’s awesome!” he said, and I frowned and shook my head.
“I’m not so sure all the time.”
“Oh yeah? How come?”
“You remember that shootout I got caught in the middle of a while back?”
He frowned. “Yeah, what’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.
“Girl is the sister of the civilian that got killed.”
He sucked in a sharp breath and said, “Ooo, I can see why that might be complicated. How’d you get involved?”
I told him the story and he laughed and shook his head. “You kicked down her door?”
“I had it fixed the same day, but yeah. Her pops seemed really worried about her.”
“And an unlikely friendship was born?” he asked.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He nodded slowly, the gears turning in his head.
“You’re a good man, Jones. I think she’s lucky to have a friend like you in her corner.”
“Yeah?” I asked surprised. “You really think that?”
He slapped me on the back of the shoulder. “I really do, but the rest of us are going to need you to leave that shit at the door.”
I nodded. He was right. Distraction was the fastest way to get hurt or killed in this profession and not just yourself, either. The other guys around you had lives and families too.
“You’re absolutely right,” I agreed.
“See.” Miller gave me a dazzling smile, his blue eyes sparkling. He ran his hand over his silver-frosted short haircut, his hairline receding, but still lookin’ good over all on him. “Told you, you’re one of the good ones around here.”
“Why, because I can admit when you’re right?” I asked with a half-grin.
“Which is pretty much the exact same as admitting that you’re wrong. Not every guy can do that.”
“Thanks, Miller.”
Surprisingly, the short talk with Miller helped a ton. In that I was both able to put this thing with Elka away for the time being and that I felt better about it. A lot better.
I made it through the rest of my shift and hit the locker room to go change. I checked my phone, pleased to have a waiting text from her.
Elka: Okay, I’ll be afraid, but I’ll do it anyway. What do I need to wear?
That’s my girl.
14
Elka…
“Baby! What are you doing here?”
Contrary to how it sounded, my dad was happy to see me, folding me into a tight embrace before I could even get through the front door.
“Hi, Daddy.” I hugged him back tightly. “I told you, remember? I wanted to go through a couple of boxes of Mia’s things. I think I’m ready now.”
“Well, sure…” he said kindly. His worry for me lingering in his eyes. He stepped aside and I entered into the little townhome Mia and I had grown up in. Our pictures along with pictures of our mom scattered along walls and over every available surface.
“The boxes are in your old room, upstairs,” he said, shutting the door tightly against the soothing summer night outside. He locked the door out of habit, and I drifted toward the bottom of the stairs.
“I picked up pretzels from Hans’ Delicatessen,” he said and I turned with a brave and brittle smile. Hans’ was the German deli on the edge of the city and had been a family favorite since I was a little girl. When Mamma had been pregnant with Mia, she had craved the big, soft baked pretzels from the little German deli and my dad’s cheddar beer sauce to dip them in.
One of my very first memories was sitting on my daddy’s lap at our kitchen table, happily munching on pretzel pieces, my little fists smeared with cheese sauce, my mother laughing.
The tradition had been born before my sister, but whenever things got rough, any kind of heartache or discord among the family, a trip to Hans’ would be made, the pretzels brought home in the white box tied with cotton string, and Dad would stand in the kitchen making the cheddar beer sauce, pouring the beer, drinking the rest, while Mom set the table with napkins and prepped the pretzels for the oven.
Music would play, then there would be dancing in the kitchen, and before long we would be at the table indulging, laughing, and telling stories… we would be a family and the pain or whatever we’d been fighting about would be forgotten.
Pretzel nights had been a fairly common thing when we were teenagers. It broke my heart that Dad and I were the only ones left to carry on the little family tradition and it hurt even more that he’d been about to indulge in it all alone.
“Why didn’t you call me, Dad?” I asked him.
“You showed up here and beat me to it,” he said, waving me off.
I nodded. “Looks like it was meant to be, huh?”
“Looks like,” he agreed, hugging me around the shoulders. “I’ll get the sauce going.”
“I’ll get started upstairs, it shouldn’t take me too lon
g,” I said.
“A little at a time,” he agreed. “Steady as she goes. Nothing has to be done all at once. You take what you like, and we’ll get it all sorted, eventually.”
I nodded and he let me go with a pained look. Like he felt so guilty and I smiled bravely. I hadn’t expected him to go through all of Mia’s things. Just the weight of them in the rooms above him must have been an incredible thing. Bearing down on him, weighing him down. I went up the stairs and drew a fortifying breath, wiping at silent tears gathering on my bottom lashes as I stopped outside the familiar bedroom door.
I could barely get the door open, the boxes stacked and piled like they were. I squeezed through the gap and past the few boxes just inside and let out a shuddering sigh.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day…” I reminded myself. Likewise, the rubble couldn’t be easily disposed of or carted off any sooner, either.
I rooted through a few open boxed of curios and things stacked on top and sighed, flipping on the overhead light so that I could see better.
It was hard, sorting through the shattered pieces of a life taken too soon. Through the shards of my broken heart. I sat cross-legged on the woven oval mat between our twin beds and pulled a box marked ‘purses’ closer and opened the top, sliding the flaps of cardboard against each other where they’d been woven and tucked to stay closed.
“God, Mia. Why am I not surprised?” I sighed. It really was nothing but handbags and purses. From clutches to bags that could be more gym bag or tote than a purse. I picked a big, brown leather affair out of the mess and sorted the rest into two piles, a much smaller one to keep for myself and the rest back in the big cardboard box they’d come from.
I rooted around the night table between our childhood beds and came up with a marker from the drawer. Uncapping it with my teeth, I tried it against the flap of the box and was glad to discover it worked.
I x’ed out ‘purses’ and wrote ‘donate’ on the box and sighed.
“One down, half a million to go,” I muttered and looked around. I hadn’t made much of a dent at all in the big purse box, but then again, I didn’t have a whole lot of room at my apartment, and whatever I did take I had to carry on the bus tonight, so some would have to be set aside for later and I would have to find something to carry everything I did take tonight in to get it home. That, or I would just have to wear it and sweat. It was hot out and humid. An oppressive heat outside the townhome’s walls.
I rubbed my temples and set back to the task at hand, going through a few boxes until I found the one I was looking for.
“Ah!” I made a triumphant noise and opened the top, pulling a couple of layers off the top until my fingers encountered the slick leather of my sister’s coat. An expensive fashion piece for her, but I was hoping to get some functionality out of it.
“Knock, knock!”
“Yeah, Dad, what’s up?”
My dad poked his head around the door and asked me, “You ready to take a break kiddo?”
“Yeah, Dad, I am.” I looked up at my dad who frowned down at me a mix of sympathy, empathy, and worry on his face.
“Sauce is all finished. Come on down and let’s get into these pretzels.”
I smiled wanly and nodded, pushing to my feet.
“I still want to do a little more,” I told him and he nodded.
“After pretzels,” he said.
“After pretzels,” I agreed, casting a look back at the mounting pile of things I wanted to carry home that night.
“So, uh, what are you doing this weekend? Going anywhere or doing anything?” my Dad asked once we were seated at the dining room table. I smiled a little ruefully at the careful hesitation in his tone, the halting lilt as he asked his question, as he both hoped for and dreaded the different answers that would come from me.
“Actually,” I said, tearing off a bite of soft pretzel and dipping it in the ramekin of cheddar-beer sauce Dad set on the plate, “I have plans to go out.”
“Oh, yeah?” he asked with a gusty sigh of relief. His voice tinged with surprise as he sagged with the former emotion in his seat. It broke my heart that I worried him so much and I didn’t know how to tell him that it was okay… that I would, despite the excruciating pain of losing my only sister, be alright and that I wasn’t going to do anything to myself.
I set my bite down in the sauce and leaned the pretzel against the side of the ramekin and looked over at my dad and sighed.
I didn’t know how to tell him except to just… tell him. It was uncomfortable talking about such a painful moment of my past, especially dropping it in the caustic solution that was currently swirling in my heart over the murder of my sister, but I had to fix this – no matter how draining it was.
“Dad, I know it doesn’t look like it, and I know things are really, really bad right now but when it comes to… that… I promise, I’m okay. I’m not going anywhere.” My voice cracked on ‘anywhere’ I couldn’t help it. “Okay?”
He sniffed. His eyes welling with tears and he reached out a hand over the top of the table and I grasped at it without a second thought.
“Okay,” he agreed, squeezing it a couple times but not letting go.
“Okay,” I reiterated, a little more strongly this time.
“I love you punk-in.” He smiled tremulously and we both sat and drowned our pretzels in the extra salt of our tears.
“I love you, too,” I said and thought if it hadn’t been for Oz, for this damn ride coming up this Saturday, I wouldn’t be here right now. My dad would be suffering alone, in this big empty townhome by himself. Eating pretzels and cheesy beer sauce – his wife gone, his youngest daughter gone, and feeling out of touch, out of reach of his oldest daughter… and that slayed me.
A deep well of gratitude opened up and swallowed me whole when I thought of Oz the rest of the week. I thought about it on the bus ride home, as I got ready for work, all while I cleaned a Dutch painting from the 1500s. Painstaking and downright terrifying work when it came to the shoddy conservation that’d been done to it sometime in the 1940s.
Still, I couldn’t stop thinking about Oz. About the changes he’d brought to my outlook on life, about how he was still coming around despite my near-permanent status as a bona fide misery muffin lately. About every patient moment, about every hard-won smile, and I realized that even if he didn’t realize he was doing it, just being around him was restoring me just as I was restoring the painting on my worktable.
It was a painstakingly slow process, to be sure, but he was here for it and even though the thought of getting on that bike tomorrow utterly terrified me… It was pretty much the only thing he’d asked of me in return for all of his kindness and it was so quintessentially him and what he loved above all else and in all reality, he was really asking me to be able to share that with him so as daunting as it was… as utterly terrified as I was… I would absolutely take his advice.
I would be afraid, but I would do it, anyway.
I felt a sort of satisfaction with that. Like I had made some sort of death-defying decision here and it honestly put something back that’d been taken out of my soul without my even noticing.
I felt myself sit up a little straighter, held my head a little higher, and felt somehow elevated… and I would not under any circumstances, listen to that foul little voice in the back of my head that tried to tell me that I was being foolish in my newfound strength and confidence because I knew that this time, it was utter bullshit whatever it had to say.
Instead, I rode the high of my newly mended relationship with my dad, and the feeling like some of the universe had somehow snapped back in place for me all the way back home after work where I fixed myself a healthy dinner, texted Oz that I was going to bed, and that I was sorry I would miss talking to him when he got off work, but that I would see him in the morning… and I slept well, for the first time in a long time.
15
Oz…
Her front door opened before I could even shut off th
e bike. I watched her turn and stick the key in the lock, twisting her wrist deftly to secure her apartment. I shamelessly took the opportunity to check out her ass in the tight jeans she wore. The medium wash denim fitting her like a second skin, tucked into knee-high, sturdy black leather boots that laced up in the front. They looked like some weird cross between riding boots and combat boots, but for getting on the back of an iron horse, they’d do just fine. She slung her neat little crossbody purse over her head, slipping her arm through and settling it against her hip, the strap laying neatly over the black leather jacket she’d gotten from somewhere.
I gave a low whistle as she came through the decorative little gate in front of her apartment and crossed the sidewalk coming toward me.
“Nice jacket,” I declared as she tugged on the hem a little bit to settle it, the built-in belt rattling in the front.
“Thanks, it was my sisters,” she said and shifted in her stance nervously.
“Fits you good,” I said and nodded in approval. I smiled and slipped my sunglasses off my face and asked, “Not having second thoughts, are you?” at the look of apprehension on her face, her warm brown doe eyes traveling from me, over the bike before her gaze flicked back to mine.
“No,” she said a little too hastily and I couldn’t help but grin.
I said, “Hop on up here and put your feet here and here.” I pointed to the foot pegs and she pressed her lips together and nodded. “I’m serious now, don’t do what my ex-wife did the first time she came for a ride. She took her feet off the damn pegs and melted off the sole of one boot on the pipes. It was a damn mess.”
She laughed and it was a good sound. Reggie had blown a gasket when the fellas and I had gotten a laugh at her expense. Not to mention, I’d had to replaces the boots and that bitch had liked designer everything, so it’d cost a pretty penny. It’d been a while before I’d lived the embarrassment down. As soon as the guys had figured out it bugged the hell out of me, they’d stopped, though. Not like Reggie. Reggie never knew when to quit.
“What’d you just think about?” Elka asked quietly.