“Hunter’s got plenty,” Michele says, reaching for the envelope of cash by Chase’s side.
“Hunter had about twenty from his grandmother,” Chase says as if he’s talking to himself. “Now it’s like a thousand.” Chase’s eyes are barely open and he’s trying to focus on Michele. She slides her hand over his face and it’s warm and dry and he closes his eyes again.
“Maybe Hunter’s the one who should be leaving,” she says.
“And you lied to me about San Diego,” Chase says. “Isn’t there something you’re forgetting? Isn’t there some step you’re skipping?”
“Go to sleep.”
“Suddenly you’re taking trips alone to San Diego?” Chase starts breathing deeply. “That wasn’t part of the summer plan.”
“Plans change.” Michele leans over and kisses his forehead.
“I know they do,” Chase says, falling away. “Now you give a shit.”
He remembers: a spot opened up on the couch in the living room. He remembers walking downstairs and looking around for Michele. He remembers the conversation by the pool with Bailey and Rush. He remembers that he had fallen asleep on Bailey’s bed. But now Chase is awake and leaning back and drinking Grey Goose, staring at silent black-and-white images flickering on a white wall. It’s Bailey’s movie: kids careening down a waterslide; kids at a skate park tumbling to the concrete; kids at the mall; kids in a hotel suite half-dressed and dancing to music you can’t hear. And then Chase loses consciousness again until he hears Michele calling his name from somewhere. The living room is completely dark, the blackout curtains drawn and the candles burnt out. Everyone has left. He has no idea what time it is. “Chase, come here,” she calls out.
“Where are you?”
Chase finds her on the stairs. She has been crying and her breath reeks of Captain Morgan and as she leans closer he can smell her hair and feel the warmth from her skin and Chase wonders if she’s going to kiss him and he swallows hard and thinks maybe he’ll let her.
“Easy,” he says. “Come on.”
She presses her hand over his mouth too hard. He pushes it away.
Michele tells him she saw a coyote in the street last night. “I turned a flashlight on it and it froze. Bailey wanted to shoot it.”
Chase doesn’t want to hear this. He wants her to try to kiss him.
“I thought Bailey would help me,” she says. “I was scared and I thought he would help me.”
“But that’s not the deal you made.”
“What about the other night with Julia? I mean, fuck you, Chase. There’s an appropriate and respectful way to handle things and treat people you care about.”
“There is.”
“Telling stories to your girlfriend about me and what I happen to be doing right now or what you think I’m doing—which, by the way, is not even one tenth of my life—is completely inappropriate and it’s you being a disrespectful asshole.”
“Okay,” Chase says softly and takes her hand.
“You suck,” she says. “You really do.”
She tries to pull her hand away but he doesn’t let her.
“Look, I’ll be around tomorrow,” Chase says with a sudden rush of sadness.
“I don’t care,” she says. “I don’t care anymore.”
“Let’s hang out,” he says. “We’ll just get lunch or see a movie.”
“Leave.”
Julia calls in the morning and tells Chase that New York looks like a possibility.
He’s confused. “For the summer?”
She pauses. “No. Permanently.”
He pulls out into traffic on Boulder Highway.
“Are you still coming this weekend?” Julia asks.
Chase remembers he said he might go see her in San Francisco. But he has seven rides scheduled for Saturday, each noted neatly in red ink in his Bosca planner. It’s only Thursday.
“I’ve gotten so little done.”
“Come for a night.”
“I can’t hear you.”
She raises her voice and asks if he can hear her and he says he can and she tells him not to worry about this weekend. She’d barely be around anyway. He apologizes. And then Julia says that New York is looking good because the San Francisco office may not be the best fit. Again, Chase can barely hear her because the wind is so strong and he’s doing sixty-five with the top down and trucks are roaring past and he has to tell her that she’s hard to hear and can they talk when he gets home and she says of course and “Isn’t it kind of exciting though? New York? I mean for you. I mean I’m excited about New York for you.”
From a distance his mother looks young. She sits alone in the booth at Denny’s smoking a cigarette, watching an older couple at the counter try to calculate 15 percent, handing the receipt back and forth to each other. She looks small in her floral-print sundress with her blonde hair in a ponytail. From across the restaurant she could pass for thirty-five, maybe forty. But now that Chase is across from her in the booth he can see the darkness under her eyes and the two deep creases that run across her forehead like scars.
“You should be in bed,” she says after Chase asks the waitress if the coffee is fresh and she says she’ll check. “But you know this may be our last breakfast together for a while.”
“Mom, please.”
“You’re not going to fly back once a month to have breakfast at five in the morning with your mother.”
“Do you need me to?”
“I like it.” She takes a drag off her cigarette and waves some of the smoke away.
Chase hands her seven pieces of paper, monthly balance sheets of her projected income and expenses. “I did it through the end of the year.”
His mother studies the pages with a serious expression on her face.
The waitress brings coffee that tastes bitter and old.
“Have you ordered?” Chase asks.
His mother shakes her head, still studying the sheets. “What about my Vanguard?”
“Put a little more in each month. Julia says another mutual fund, too.”
“So no trips to San Francisco to see my son?”
“That’s covered.”
“She looked so beautiful.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Even in the restaurant with the music piped in through speakers over their heads they can hear the bells and ringing of the slot machines. Chase stares at his mother as she watches the older couple finally figure out the tip. They walk slowly out to the casino floor and disappear.
“I’ll be fine,” she says.
“What do you mean?” Chase asks. “Of course you’ll be fine.”
“I can see that look. I can see that expression on your face.”
Once a month, on Sunday mornings at five when she finishes her shift at Treasure Island, they meet for breakfast because that’s when she’s most vulnerable. This is the loneliest time for her. This is the time when she used to gamble. At her worst, his mother would leave work and walk the Strip in the blackness of early morning to the Mirage or Bally’s. She played until eleven or noon and as soon as she got home she’d walk quickly to her bedroom and sleep until four or five. She would wake up and take a shower. She ate whatever was left over—cold pizza, KFC, maybe pasta if Carly had cooked it. She would ask them if they had done their homework or heard from their father. She would stare at the television, at whatever Carly and Chase had on, her eyes unfocused, until eight, when it was dark again and she’d get dressed and leave for work.
“You’ll have beautiful children,” his mother says. “Mixed kids are always so attractive. That singer, what’s her name, she’s mixed isn’t she?”
Chase’s phone rings, and since he doesn’t recognize the number, he takes the call.
The call during breakfast was from a girl named Aubrey. It’s three now and Chase waits in front of the Palace and waves off two different valets who he doesn’t recognize. They tell Chase he has to move the Mustang if he’s not a guest but then a girl says his nam
e. She is thin with red hair and looks sixteen but because of the orange tan could be older, maybe even twenty.
“Come on.” Chases pushes the door open and Aubrey gets in.
They are going to a town house in Green Valley Ranch for a one-hour “massage.” (Michele booked it. Bailey knows nothing about this booking. This is the way things are starting to work.) But Aubrey has no massage table—only a huge leather purse and a bottle of baby oil and a vibrator that she shows him. It’s blue. Chase decides she’s closer to sixteen than twenty. Aubrey is into the rave scene and all her friends spin. Chase didn’t even know there was still a rave scene. She says she’s from just outside San Diego—a place called El Cajon. She moved to Henderson when she was nine because her mom wanted to be close to her aunt, who had a house near Nellis Air Force Base. She weighs eighty-seven pounds. Her favorite food is an Egg McMuffin. Aubrey smokes two cigarettes and makes three phone calls during the fifteen-minute drive from the hotel to Green Valley Ranch. There is no one at the town house in Green Valley Ranch and Chase asks Aubrey if she’s sure about the address.
“Michele gave it to me.”
Aubrey calls the client again but gets voice mail and says, “I’m here, outside, waiting for you. Call me back, sweetie.”
Ten minutes pass. Aubrey smokes another cigarette. She asks Chase if he has a girlfriend. She asks Chase if he’s ever been to L.A.
“Michele says you did some modeling?”
“Web sites,” Aubrey clarifies. “This photographer for some architecture magazine paid me ninety dollars an hour to pose, and paid for the hotel, and some are for his personal Web site and the others were for whatever.”
“This was in L.A.?”
“Yeah. I’m going again.” She flicks the cigarette out the window. “He wants me and a friend to pose for three hundred an hour this time.”
“How did you meet him?”
“MySpace,” Aubrey says. “We’re going to try the beach this time. I keep suggesting it. But the hotel is by the airport so, you know, we never seem to get out.”
“Hermosa Beach is nice,” Chase murmurs to himself.
“I love to travel. I’m really into ancient civilizations.”
Aubrey went to Greece last year, alone. Her friends bailed because they didn’t have the money. “I cried when I saw the Coliseum.”
“Parthenon.”
“People were staring at me like, this girl’s crazy. But I couldn’t help it. I just started bawling right there at the sight of it.” She pauses, idly checks her cell. “I want to go to Belize next, but that’s harder to do alone.”
“Is it?” Chase asks, totally detached from the conversation. He hopes her cell will ring and it will be the guy and the guy will be ready for his appointment and things can get moving. Chase tells Aubrey to call the man again. There is no answer. She leaves another message for him to call her back and let her know within the next twenty minutes if this is happening or—and now the rehearsed line—she’s going home because she has a ton of homework to do. Chase can’t tell whether or not she pulled it off. Chase glances at her crossed legs and then looks away.
The homework line closed the deal. The man calls back. He’s ready. Aubrey leans over and grabs her purse and kicks the door open. She skips up to the house and rings the bell and looks back over her shoulder and smiles at Chase and the door opens and she disappears inside the house. A moment later the door opens and Aubrey skips toward the car.
“It’s okay,” she says. “He’s a magician.” She reaches for the pack of cigarettes she forgot. “He has a monkey.”
“Call me when you’re done,” Chase says.
She walks back to the house and Chase sees the silhouette of a man in the shadow of the doorway and watches the door close. In his leather Bosca planner Chase scrawls the name “Aub” and “GVRanch-2235 Sunburst Manor” and the date “6/9.”
The sky is pink and orange and the sun is dropping. The wind picks up. The street is empty except for a few cars parked in driveways. There are no people anywhere. Chase closes his eyes. He hears buzzing that grows louder and turns into ringing and then there’s nothing: no sound, just a dark, cold sensation and falling, plummeting down.
Aubrey slams the door and Chase jolts awake.
“How much did that add up to?” Chase asks, U-turning, then driving away from the house toward Green Valley Parkway and back to the city.
“It ended up being four.”
She couldn’t have gotten away with the lie even if she hadn’t hesitated. She’s skimming. They all do.
“You were in there for two and a half hours.”
“Right, four for each hour.”
“This is Michele’s call, right?”
Aubrey nods.
“Then don’t fuck around. Skim all you want from Bailey. Just don’t skim off Michele.”
Aubrey closes her eyes for a long time and then asks, “Do you know that little girl Rachel?”
“Are you high?” Chase asks. “What are you talking about?”
“A little bit. But do you know her? Do you know Rachel?”
“Why are you asking me about her?”
“Because she talks about you, like all the time, Mr. Chase.”
In front of a small apartment building on the outskirts of the Strip, Chase tells Aubrey to give him half the money.
Aubrey smiles lazily as she reaches into her bag and removes her wallet.
“You shouldn’t get high with the clients,” Chase says.
She hands the money to Chase and as she turns away she says, “And you should be careful.”
Chase was sitting in the kitchen on the Fourth of July eating ice cream sandwiches at noon, listening to Carly read his progress report from the summer semester. (Chase had to make up two classes he failed in the spring.) It was all about how Chase had a “keen intelligence” and was “a natural leader” but “his attitude doesn’t serve him well” and “he seems convinced that he knows better than his teacher.” The progress report wondered if there was “something missing.”
“Why are you such an idiot?” Carly asked.
Chase told her that if she went through his stuff again he would talk to Mom about statutory rape laws. “I think they’re pretty strictly enforced in Nevada.”
“But why are you such an idiot?”
“Do these guys know you’re sixteen?”
“The question, Chase, is: do they care?”
“You take too many chances.”
“I may not be up here”—Carly held her hand over her head—“with you and all the other C-minus students, but I’m not stupid.”
He told Carly to be careful because the UNLV fraternity she liked to go to with Michele was notorious for parties that got out of control.
“We know, Chase.” Carly rolled her eyes. “We know.”
“But does Mom know?” he asked.
“Who do you thinks puts the condoms in my purse?”
That night they watched the fireworks bloom over the Strip from a suite at Bally’s. His sister stood near him, twitching and nervous and scratching her arms because she’d taken too many of the pills Michele had given her and she thought she might pass out. Carly had taken the pills earlier because she had to close Hot Topic—where she worked to get discounts on clothes—and there was no way she’d get through everything without the pills. When she got home from Hot Topic she cleaned her room and then cleaned Chase’s room and vacuumed the house and emptied out all the shit from their mom’s car and when they checked in to the hotel, Carly told Michele that her heart was about to burst and she was sweating and pale so they put her under the spray of cold water in the shower and wrapped her in a wet towel, and lying there sobbing, Carly promised to never take the pills again as everyone watched the sky explode.
The next afternoon Carly sat in their backyard with her legs in the water, slumped over, hands clutching the side of the pool. She was sixteen and so tired. The bruise on her chin from where it hit the asphalt leaving a par
ty three weeks ago had faded and her skin was as brown as the wall surrounding the yard. The crickets were loud but it was a soothing sound and the glowing aqua water of the pool looked warm enough. Carly wore cutoff shorts and her new white bikini top and stirred the water with her legs, watching the circles she made. It was quiet and calm and Chase liked that.
“You have to let some things go,” he said. He was now in the pool, treading water in front of her.
She said nothing but nodded.
“The drug shit goes nowhere. Where are you going to be in five years?” he asked. “Last night was scary, Carly.”
“I know where I’m gonna be in five years, Chase. Either dead from a DUI or a senior at UNLV.” She paused. “I don’t know which is worse.”
Chase scowled and swam away, switching to backstrokes, watching the darkness fill the pink sky like a spilled bottle of ink. When he looked back at his sister he saw the orange sun in the reflection on Carly’s sunglasses. It was dipping quickly below the mountains on the other side of the valley.
When Chase got out of the pool and reached for a towel Carly asked in a soft voice that surprised him, “Where are you going?”
“Inside?”
She stared at the clear water. Chase wasn’t cold standing on the lawn because the desert air was so warm and it kept washing over everything like a narcotic.
“Stay with me,” she said.
9
Chase is home, starting and stopping, erasing and starting over the charcoal sketches that will become the paintings for Devon’s show. After a few hours his hands are red and raw. Nothing he’s completed pleases him. It’s hopeless. He walks outside and lights one of the American Spirits that Michele left in the Mustang at some point. His cell rings. It’s Julia. He hesitates. Julia would laugh at the sight of him smoking. It might have suited Chase if Julia didn’t know him. He just stands there staring at the cell’s aqua display—Julia’s name and number—and he can’t bring himself to answer it. The reason he can’t answer the call is somehow tied together with the work he needs to finish for Devon’s show but has barely started. And he knows the conversation will end in an argument and he’ll snap and say something he may or may not mean about not ever wanting to go back to New York and that wasn’t part of the deal and how goddamn condescending it all was: her happiness for him was all about how the art world is New York and that moving there together would kill two birds with one stone. This begins to enrage him and he still doesn’t answer the phone. He goes back inside and starts again but it isn’t any good and by the time he realizes he should just take a break he’s sweating and covered in charcoal and it’s dark outside. He takes a shower. For dinner: a can of tuna and an orange. He gets dressed. Chase has three rides to give tonight, including driving Hunter to work because the Caravan is shot to hell and Chase knows where the money to fix it went. Chase pulls into the traffic on Boulder Highway. Trash and debris swirl in the air then dive down and tumble across the asphalt. Chase turns up old Dre and leans back a little, letting the loud thumping hip-hop move through him, and soon he is just drifting down the highway and he likes the way it feels. When he hits a deserted intersection on East Charleston he just lets the car roll through it.
The Delivery Man Page 14
