by Zahra Girard
His hands leave my arm and slide around my shoulders. In a gentle moment, he pulls me into a hug. A hug that makes my heart swell. “Thank you,” he whispers.
Side by side, we return to the car. For the first time in too long, I feel appreciated. Accepted. When he looks at me, he sees a brilliant woman who can think her way through anything. Maybe, if I hang around him long enough, I’ll think that about myself, too.
Blaze shifts the car back into gear and we merge back into the flow of traffic, joining the gentle tide of late afternoon commuters in Torreon.
It’s not long until we pull up to his mother’s house. It’s an unassuming two-story home with a steep roof and lots of windows. The paint job is faded to an indistinguishable beige. The yard is overgrown, a dusty-dry mess of knee-high grass and shrubs that have wilted beneath the unforgiving desert sun.
“I haven’t been here in a while,” Blaze says. “Would’ve cleaned it up, otherwise.”
I open the door and step out.
Blaze stays put. His eyes locked on the front door.
“Is something wrong?” I say.
He shrugs. “I love her, but it’s been a long time, and she doesn’t know I’m coming. Doesn’t approve of some of the choices I’ve made in life, either.”
“Well, I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you. And she’ll probably appreciate the help, too.”
In response, he takes a deep breath and shakes his head. His eyes don’t leave the front door.
“You might not think it from the state of her house, but my mom has a lot of pride. She’s a smart woman, like you. Taught English Literature at Torreon Community College for almost thirty years. Bought this house herself, raised me on her own after my dad died; she was fucking wonder woman,” he says, then he swallows. “But I didn’t find out about her money problems from her. I found out from a debt collector who called me because they weren’t having much luck harassing my mom and need another way to get to her.”
There’s a second where I can’t help but smile imagining the look on the hapless debt collector’s face who got ahold of Blaze.
“She’s your mother, Blaze. She still loves you.”
“I’m not so sure.”
“Well, I’m here with you. And we’ll figure this out. Together.”
He stands and shuts the door behind him. Then he flashes me a smile that makes me blush. “Thanks, Tiffany.”
Side by side, we walk to the front door. Blaze only hesitates a moment before knocking on the door. First once, then again, then twice more. It’s silent inside the house.
“Maybe she’s not here,” I say. I don’t know if I’m hopeful for that. Part of me wants to sink my teeth into this problem so I can experience the rush that comes with analyzing a problem and developing a plan to solve it; part of me feels the same reluctance as Blaze. What kind of woman could make her own son be afraid to talk to her?
Finally, the door opens. Just a crack, just enough for an angry face to peer through with menace.
“Declan, what in God’s name are you doing here?”
“I’m here to help, mom.”
She snorts. It’s harsh, derisive. Denigrating. “If you want to help me, you’ll turn your ass around and go back to whatever hole it is you crawled out of.”
“Don’t say that, mom.”
“You reap what you sow, Declan. And you have sown failure and disappointment your entire life. Now, leave before I call the police on you.”
My eyes dart in shock from the malevolent, wizened old face visible through the slit of the open door, to Blaze — this bitter woman’s son — and the look of heartrending pain on his face. I can’t speak, my voice stolen by the sheer monstrosity of the old woman.
Blaze puts one hand on the door, beseeching. He loves this woman with all his heart and soul, even if she doesn’t share it. “I know about the money problems you’re having. All I want is to help you out. Please, mom, let me help you.”
She snorts again. I’m certain she would spit on us both if the door weren’t in the way. “You don’t know a damn thing. Leave.”
I see her hand shift its grip on the door. She’s going to slam it shut.
That’s when I act.
That’s when I shove my crutch in the opening.
And push the door with all my might.
Chapter Eight
Blaze
The door is about to slam shut; this isn’t the first time my mother’s shut me out, probably won’t be the last, either. And this woman spits the kind of venom that kills me on the inside. I can’t fight her; from anyone else that language would get themselves shot but, from her, it reduces me, turns me in to the shrinking child that I used to be all those years ago.
Until Tiffany acts.
Crippled, fierce, stick-up-her-ass Tiffany Santos shoves her crutches into the opening of the door and forces it open with a mighty shove. And she doesn’t stop there.
She barges through the open door. I follow.
It’s a mess inside. Piles of boxes, mementos and garbage all stacked in hills of debris, filling the entire living room that, in all my childhood memories, was always kept pristine. This isn’t the house I remember.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” Tiffany snaps. “You’re fucking up your own life and you turn away your own son when he comes to help you? Jesus Christ, lady, you are messed up.”
My mom blinks in surprise. Then she screws her face up into something angry. “Do you know what he did? I loved him, worked myself to the bone to keep a roof over our heads after his father died, and I was so proud of him when he became a firefighter. And then he turned it all to ruin.”
“What does it matter? You’re in trouble, he’s here, I’m here, and you’re spitting in both our faces.”
My mom laughs. It’s sharp, grating, the kind of laugh that runs up and down your spine with menace. “He hasn’t told you what he did, has he?”
“It doesn’t matter what he did. People make mistakes. Things happen, or things happen to them, and sometimes it’s not their fault,” she says, and there is a second of silence while she steels herself. “What matters is that he is here and he is offering to help you.”
“He put people in the hospital because of his savagery. He went to prison. Through his own choices and his own staggering stupidity, he got sent to prison, lost his job, and nearly killed two people.”
“So what? I know Blaze—”
My mom laugh. “Oh, Declan has you using that gang name too, huh?”
“Shut your wicked old mouth, you bitch. I know Declan, Blaze, whatever the hell he wants to go by, and, even though he makes some incredibly dumb decisions from time to time, his heart is in the right place. But you? You seem like you don’t even have a fucking heart. You’re just some foul-mouthed old bitch.”
I step forward, put myself between the two of them. Even if she deserves it, Tiffany did just call my mom a bitch. “Hey, calm the fuck down, all right?”
“You will both get out of my house this instant or I will call the police,” my mom says.
“Oh, really? You’ll call the police? Sure, fine, do it,” Tiffany rages. “You want to know what’ll happen? They’ll come out here and they’ll remove us, sure, great, your petty old ass will win that round. But, while they’re making their report on what happened, someone will realize that you’re in massive fucking debt and you’re close to being evicted, or foreclosed on, and that’ll just speed up the inevitable. And then, you won’t just be a toxic old bitch, you’ll be a homeless, toxic old bitch.”
My mother’s eyes flare, her lip curls in a snarl, and she moves toward the old corded phone that’s mounted on the wall of our living room, navigating past a chest-high stack of magazines.
“I don’t care. I don’t want either of you two awful people here. If it costs me my home, that’s an insignificant price to pay to get rid of you. I’m calling the police. Now.”
She picks up the receiver. Her withered fingers start pressing buttons. And
I lose it. Tiffany’s stuck her neck out to get us in there, she’s defending me, and now it’s my turn to act — I can’t let either of us be taken by the police. With one fist clenched, I charge forward and hammer the phone to bits.
My mother’s eyes go wide with shock.
“Put that shit away. Mom, your situation is fucked. Totally fucked. Hate me all you want, fine, I deserve plenty of it. I have never shied away from admitting that I fucked up and got my own dumb ass fired from the smokejumpers, but you need to own up too; you have yourself in one terrible mess with your finances and you need help. You’re drowning. Drowning so fucking bad that debt collectors called me; people who should’ve taken one look at my credit history and run for the fucking hills reached out to me. I love you, mom, and I’m trying to help. But you need to tell me: what the fuck happened?”
She takes some time to recover. Time to fight back the shock and tame the acid burning on her tongue. “I really don’t know, Declan.”
Tiffany comes closer, taking her approach easy and cautious, as if my mom is some kind of rabid dog. “Declan came to me about your situation because he knows I work in finance. I studied it at Stanford. He cares that much about you to look up a total stranger, someone he hasn’t seen in years, just because he is concerned about you.”
When my mom isn’t looking, I give Tiffany an appreciative smile. It’s a white lie — well, bigger than a white lie — but I’m grateful for it; it sure beats telling my mom the truth: that I was brandishing a gun and holding people hostage.
“She’s right,” I say. “I didn’t have much to tell her other than what the debt collector told me. But I convinced her to come down to help. Tiffany cares about doing the right thing. And helping you is one of them.”
“Now you have a conscience,” my mom mutters.
“I always have. You taught me. Just like you taught me to love my family and do everything I can to make sure the people I love are taken care of. It isn’t easy facing you, it isn’t easy hearing you call me out for all the shit I’ve done, but I’ll do it a hundred times over if it means you’ll let me help you.”
She looks down. I see her Adam’s apple work over her surging emotions. When she meets my eyes, I see the tears shine in hers. She takes two hesitant steps forward and then puts her arms around me in a hug. I shut my eyes and hug her back. Hold her tight. My heart swells with the first scraps of motherly love that I’ve felt in years.
“Thank you, Declan,” she whispers against me.
I’ve missed this. I’ve been parched for her love for years. And now that I have even the smallest bit of it, I don’t want to let it go. I hug her for all I’m worth. Hug her for as long as I can hold on.
A hand touches my shoulder. Gentle. I look to the side and see Tiffany smiling at me. “Thank you,” I mouth to her.
She nods.
Then our hug breaks. And Tiffany clears her throat.
“Let’s start over, shall we?”
My mom nods.
“Mom, this is Tiffany Santos. She attended Torreon High, just like me. If you don’t remember her, she was valedictorian. She went to Stanford. She’s fucking smart. And she’s here to help, which is something that I am grateful for,” I say. Tiffany is beaming. She holds out her hand, and my mom takes it. “Tiffany, this is my mom: Eleanor Dunne.”
“Nice to meet you, Eleanor,” Tiffany says. “Now, we should get down to business because, regardless of what the problem is, the sooner we can get started on it, the better. These things never get better by waiting — there’s always interest, fees, and other punitive penalties. So, can you show us to where you have the loan paperwork?”
Everything about Tiffany right now impresses me. She’s assertive, confident; it’s like that stick up her ass has turned into a backbone.
Eleanor nods. “I can show you the paperwork. It’s upstairs in my office. Follow me.”
I slip my arm around Tiffany’s shoulder and let her lean into me as we head up the stairs. With her this close, I smell the lilac in her hair and my heart pounds with need. Halfway up the stairs, she stumbles and I reach out and pull her against me to steady her. Every curve in her body — the shape of her plump ass, her perky tits, her sensual lips — makes me moan with repressed desire.
She looks at me. Raises an eyebrow. There’s mirth in her eyes, but understanding, too. She knows what I’m feeling. “Are you all right, Blaze?”
I nod. Now is not the time to tell the nerdy girl from high school that she’s grown up to be the hottest chicks I’ve ever seen. “Fine. Been a rough few days and catching you like that pulled a muscle.”
After I steady myself, I help her climb the rest of the staircase.
“It’s this way,” my mom says. She leads us down the hall, to a room where the half-open door reveals a floor covered in papers; they’re strewn everywhere — some in boxes, some in piles, some spilling out of open file folders — and cover nearly every square inch of the floor. Through one point of the monstrously disorganized mess, I spy a corner of her old desk. It’s the same desk she used to work at most nights after coming home from the Torreon Community College, the place where she’d grade papers or prepare exams. Countless nights she spent there, slaving away for a teacher’s pay, just to keep the lights on.
“Mom, what happened?” I say.
“I just lost track of things a bit, that’s all,” she says, offhandedly. “I’m afraid I have had little time to organize things. All the papers from the bank are near the desk. They should be at the top of the pile, but I can’t remember which one.”
“It’s OK, Mrs. Dunne, we’ll find it,” Tiffany says.
There’s a gleam in her eye; something that looks close to excitement.
“Don’t worry about it, mom. Just go downstairs and relax for a bit. Tiffany and I got this.”
“I’ll be in the living room if you need me,” she says. Then she nods and makes her way back downstairs.
I wait until she’s well out of earshot.
“This is a fucking mess.”
“It is.”
“It could take days to sort this hoarding shit out. I don’t trust that those papers are where she says they are. They could be anywhere in there.”
“Well, we need to find them.”
I step into the room. Papers crinkle underfoot. A tower — no, a mountain — collapses to my right in an avalanche of printer paper.
“Fucking hell. Do we absolutely need this?”
“We do.”
Just looking at the Himalayas of paper in front of me makes my throat and fists clench in frustration. “How much time do you think we have?”
I don’t like the look that comes over Tiffany’s pretty face as she analyzes my question; it’s too grim. She speaks with a matter-of-fact voice, like a cop reading the death toll off an incident report or a judge handing out a sentence. “If they’re already calling you — not her, you — for collection, we don’t have much time. At all. Banks don’t mess around when it comes to a lot of money like this. We’ve got days to get this sorted out or else you mom could lose everything.”
Chapter Nine
Tiffany
It’s obvious within seconds that there’s something deeply wrong with Blaze’s mother. Beyond her venomous attitude toward her son, the scattering of refuse and pointless piles of papers throughout her home hints at something deeper. Something that requires a professional’s help. But it’s also something that we do not have the time to even get into — somewhere in this mess are the records we need.
I look from the surrounding piles to Blaze’s face. Handsome, but lined with worry. I smile at him. After all he’s been through just to get to this point, and with all the things ahead of him — things that he doesn’t even know await him in this tricky financial world — I can’t afford to have him falter now.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Why the hell are you smiling?” He says.
I slide a stack of papers off of Eleanor’s rolling desk chair a
nd take a seat, sighing in relief at finally getting off of the crutches.
“Do you know anything about library organizational systems, Blaze?”
He snorts. “I mean, I’ve heard of that fucking Dewey system. But other than that, you take a guess, Saint Tiffany.”
I nod. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone has. But have you heard of Bliss Bibliographic Classification System? Or the Garside Classification Scheme? That’s the one that they mostly use at the University College in London. There’s also the Library of Congress Classification system.”
“What’s your point?”
I sit up straighter. Blaze looks both confused and hopeful; I never thought I’d be so proud to tell a man like him about my volunteering. “I used to volunteer at the library here in Torreon on the weekends. And then at the library up at Stanford. Can you imagine what the library return box looks like the day after finals?”
“It was full of a lot of books?” He ventures.
“Books? Yes. So many books. And pens. And student’s notes. And condoms. And beer bottles. And graded term papers. And, one time, there was even an inflatable sex doll. It was used, by the way. As a volunteer, it was my job to help organize everything and put it back on the shelves.”
His look of consternation turns to understanding, and — on a small level — pride. “So, you can do this?”
I pick up a stack of papers and flip through it. “I can do this hungover and coming off an all-nighter.”
“Fuck, you add a whole new level of hotness to librarians.”
“Thanks,” I say, my cheeks growing hot.
“Let’s get to this,” he says.
And we settle in to the monumental task in front of us. Blaze listens as I walk him through the basics of tackling the job: setting up multiple containers — some for trash, some for possibly relevant papers, and some for necessary papers. He listens attentively the entire time I impart to him the basics of organizational prowess that I’ve honed over years, and then we dive in.
