by Sofia Grant
Which was what this man apparently was. New London had a few bums already, mostly war veterans who couldn’t work on account of being shot up, but Margaret had never seen this stranger before.
“Big day, huh, Caroline?” he said, and Margaret gasped—he really did know her mother. But how could that be?
“Now listen here,” Caroline said, taking two steps forward and brandishing the coffee can full of flowers, her hands shaking. Margaret couldn’t tell if she was frightened or only very angry. “You turn around and go. You’re not fit for public.”
“Not fit,” the man echoed, and burst into laughter that ended in coughing. He worked up a gobbet of brownish spit and hawked it on the ground between them. “Ha. You’re the one who’s not fit, Caroline. You and Hugh.”
“That’s a lie and you know it.”
“You belong in hell for what you did.”
“You had your say,” Caroline said. “It was all settled a long time ago. You’re just trying to blame your troubles on someone else. You’re nothing but a lazy drunk.”
Across the grass, Margaret could see Mrs. Baker hurrying back with Pete DeLong, the brawny owner of DeLong’s tavern. “What’s going on here?” he bellowed.
The bum looked at Caroline bleakly and started to speak, then muttered something indistinct and turned to go.
“If you ever come back here, I’ll kill you myself,” Margaret thought she heard Caroline say—but surely she’d been mistaken, because the Piersons had everything, and the man had nothing, and why would it even be worth her mother’s trouble?
Chapter Seven
Growing up in Dallas, Katie had learned that the phrase Bless your heart could be a stand-in for all kinds of sentiments. It had once been a staple of Katie’s vocabulary, handy not just for expressing affection but also for pity and condescension and even contempt.
Hearing it come out of her own mouth after all these years was a surprise, and as Katie stood in the security line, she replayed the events of the last hour and wondered what to make of them—whether her words had been an omen. Because at some point between the mad dash to Rex and Lolly’s brownstone—where a very sleepy Rex eventually answered the buzzer and called an Uber and gave Katie seventeen dollars, which was all the cash he could find—and arriving here in the crowded terminal, the warm glow of admiration for her husband’s moment of heroism had faded.
The Uber had showed up in what seemed like thirty seconds and Katie gave Liam a careful kiss, avoiding the welt from the gun. Rex wished her luck from the foyer as he stood shivering in his bare feet. Inside the Prius it was warm and smelled like incense, and once they were on their way, Katie realized that being in an Uber without her phone was a strange experience, as foreign as if she found herself riding on a camel. Blessedly, her driver didn’t speak except to ask her which airline, and when he pulled to the curb she made the dash to the terminal and felt, for the second time that morning, the strange lightness of traveling with virtually nothing.
It felt unexpectedly indulgent, like a vacation—more like a vacation than their vacations felt. Their last trip—Vineyard, house share with people they didn’t like all that much, beach bonfires and rainy days browsing in the overpriced boutiques—had required a suitcase and a duffel and Katie had still felt like she had nothing to wear.
Now, she literally had only the clothes on her back and Rex’s crumpled bills and loose change.
She couldn’t help feeling a little smug when it was finally her turn with the screener. Whenever she traveled lately, it seemed that carry-ons had become a sort of battleground, her fellow travelers packing them with military precision and guarding overhead bin space zealously. She’d been one of them—she’d paid a small fortune for the suitcase that had been stolen that morning, for its cleverly engineered innards that promised precious extra cubic inches of packing space. No, ma’am, she had not checked a bag like some kid going to summer camp; but the sour TSA officer with her hair pulled back so hard it stretched her eyebrows was not impressed. She barely glanced at Katie’s license and scrawled a loopy orange squiggle onto the boarding pass that Katie had printed at a kiosk.
At the Starbucks, Katie scanned the menu and wondered how long she would have to make her seventeen dollars last. Liam had promised to wire money just as soon as he figured out how, and to pay down her AmEx so she could use it again, all of which seemed like it might take a long time. Wow—a small coffee was almost three dollars. Seventeen minus three . . . left less than the price of an arugula salad at Thymes Square.
Reluctantly, Katie stepped out of the line.
She felt ridiculous buying a newspaper that was actually printed on paper, as though she was attacking an old-growth forest with a chain saw, but no one appeared to notice. But two dollars for a newspaper—when had that happened?
By the time Katie boarded and got to her seat—aisle, blessedly, though two-thirds of the way back—the sense of adventure and lightness had evaporated. It took forever for the flight attendant to come with the beverage cart, and when Katie asked for two cups of coffee—because they were very small and who knew when the flight attendants would return—she was rewarded with a frosty glare.
Katie drank both cups of coffee, skimmed the headlines, spotted a sale at Lord & Taylor and forgot for a moment that she didn’t have any money currently, considered putting on the free headphones and watching the movie, and then fell like a stone into a deep sleep.
GEORGINA HAD AGREED it would be silly for Katie to come to her condo before driving to New London, because Pecan Ridge Estates was half an hour out of her way in the wrong direction, and after a perfunctory half-hour visit Katie would have to get in the car and go the other way, which would mean that she might not get to New London by dark, and oh my God why did old people think that if you drove in the dark the gates of hell would open up and swallow you forever?
“I need to calm down,” Katie murmured, out loud, but very softly. She was next in line at the Hertz counter, but the man in front of her was taking a long time, or maybe it was the clerk, who had extraordinarily long fake nails that made typing practically performance art. Eventually the clerk handed the man his sheaf of papers; he snatched them as though she might change her mind and drove his suitcase to the exit like a bat out of hell.
“Next.”
Katie proffered her license, her AmEx (thank you, mugger), and her best, patient smile to show that she wasn’t like that other guy, who was clearly a dick, a businessman with no patience for what the rest of us go through every day, but the clerk did not seem impressed. Tapping, tapping, silently tapping with those long nails (a tiny diamond appeared to be glued to the tip of each), and then a speculative, distrustful stare.
“Decline.”
Katie waited, confused. “Umm . . .”
“De-cline,” she enunciated in a voice laced with irritation. “Your card, it’s declined. You got another maybe?”
“But my rental should already be paid for. My husband—”
“It’s paid for, but not the authorization hold. You got to have two hundred dollars for the authorization hold. You near your limit?”
Well, of course she was near her limit, Katie thought, feeling her face get hot. But only because she put all her secret—her discretionary—purchases on it, and only because she had been planning to put her entire bonus toward paying it down. A bonus which she would not be receiving now, unfortunately, due to circumstances (fucking Arthur Salisbury and his fucking rightsizing!) beyond her control.
“Oh,” she said meekly. “I mean, yeah, but—”
“’Cause we need another card with at least two hundred dollars’ credit on it before I can give you this . . .” She tapped some more. “Jetta.”
“I can call my husband,” Katie said. “I mean, can I borrow your phone? He can read you off the credit card information for another card. I was—we were mugged this morning. It was . . .” She swallowed, dangerously close to tears. “It was terrifying. He had a gun.”
The clerk looked at her with renewed interest. “How did you get on the plane? If he mugged you and all?”
“He let me keep my license and this card,” Katie admitted uncomfortably, knowing how unlikely it sounded. “I mean, he took the cards that had room on them.” Obviously.
“Uh-huh,” the clerk said, drawing out the syllables so that they seemed to encapsulate an entire conversation. “Well, I’d have to see that card. Like, in your hand. And there’s folks waiting behind you, so . . .”
Katie whipped around, mortified to see that a line had formed while she’d been talking to the clerk: three hostile and impatient-looking fellow travelers.
And yeah . . . if it had been her, she’d be pissed too.
“Okay,” she sighed, taking back her license and useless, no-good, embarrassing credit card. “I’ll go and, and, make some calls.”
“Mmmm-hmmm,” the clerk said, her eyes already on the next person in line.
Katie walked away from the counter with her head down and searched for a bench, but of course there was no bench, because they designed the whole place to keep people moving like docile cattle into the trough-like food courts and the pen-like waiting areas, and God help you if you had an actual human problem and needed help. There were signs for the medic and the airport police, but Katie’s problem didn’t really fall into those parameters and all of a sudden she found herself noticing, as she had never really done before, the families huddled together on the floor, surrounded by luggage, speaking a dozen different languages and glancing uneasily up at the tide of travelers swarming around them. I am like them, she thought, and immediately felt even worse, because they were refugees fleeing real problems like genital mutilation and water-borne bacteria and being silenced by murderous regimes.
She was going to cry if she didn’t get her shit together.
“Okay,” she said out loud. “Okay!”
She took several deep breaths and considered the shops lining the aisle. There was a massage business (never, ever would Katie allow a stranger to touch her in public view like that) and a cheap jewelry shop and a Genuine Texas Souvenirs shop with rows of China-manufactured gimcracks lining the display shelves, and after considering each she settled on the jewelry shop because the young female clerk with the painstaking winged eyeliner looked, if not nice exactly, at least not cruel.
“Excuse me,” she said, approaching the counter with what she hoped was an engaging smile. “Is there, I mean, could I use your phone? Mine was stolen and I need to call someone.”
“Oh,” the girl said. Her upper lip was pierced by a delicate, tiny gold stud. “Like, there isn’t one. I mean, I’m not allowed to use mine while I’m working? And like, I literally can only call my boss or, like, the headquarters on the store one.”
Literally. A faint, shrill buzz had started somewhere behind Katie’s temples—as though her brain had been invaded by a horde of tiny, angry insects.
“Thank you,” Katie whispered; whispering seemed safer than trying to speak.
“You can use mine.”
The voice was very close to her ear; someone was speaking very close behind her. The clerk’s eyes widened and she shook her head almost imperceptibly. Katie turned and sure enough, the man offering his phone was wearing the outfit (stained Hanes T-shirt, fishing vest, plaid shorts, knee socks and sandals) and haircut (bowl, with bangs) and expression (just this side of voracious; mouth breather; roving eyes) of a serial murderer. Also: he smelled—like Listerine and body odor.
“Wow,” Katie said. “I just—I just remembered something.”
She ignored the phone (camouflage case) the man was holding out to her and dashed past him, into the throngs.
She didn’t have it in her to try again, to speak to another stranger. Her stomach growled, but the thought of food nauseated her. She trudged toward the baggage claim, searching for an information desk. Surely, someone there would allow her to use a phone; they had to keep one in the airport for—for old people, for children, for emergencies like hers. But by the time she’d walked the entire length of the baggage claim area, all she’d seen was an unmanned desk with a broken phone receiver dangling under a poster of a smiling woman riding a DART train, her eyes and teeth blacked out and enormous breasts inked over her sweater.
There was no way around it: Katie was going to have to find a way to ask her mother for help. She staggered over to a row of seats and collapsed into the only empty one. In a minute, after she’d collected herself, she would try again. The nice, grandmotherly woman to her left—or maybe the young mother with a toddler to her right—one of them would let her use their phone, would tell her that it would all be all right, would perhaps even laugh and offer an anecdote of her own. Oh goodness, that happened to me once, there I was, stranded without my purse or any way to call anyone . . .
The grandmotherly woman got up and joined two other elderly women making their way slowly to the exit. The mother scolded and the toddler began to wail. A man took the older woman’s place, flopping into the seat with a smile and a cheery apology.
“Hope you don’t mind,” he said. He was dressed in a suit—not a very nice one, shiny and too tight. His shirt was a bit gray at the collar from being washed too often. This was not a man who could afford to send his shirts out. Also, his accent was New York. Maybe even Queens. “There weren’t any tables free down at the food court.”
He held up a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper as evidence. Something fried—fried chicken, fried fish, fried shoe leather for all Katie knew, but it smelled delicious. Her mouth watered and her stomach started up the growling again.
“Oh,” she said, embarrassed. “I, um, didn’t eat on the plane.”
Without asking he tore the sandwich down the middle and handed her half. “I shouldn’t even be eating this,” he admitted, and it was true that he was a bit doughy and his shirt was straining across the gut. He couldn’t have been more than thirty, thirty-five tops, but he had the dissipated air of a man who’d been climbing the middle management ladder for decades: florid complexion, blond hair already receding halfway back his skull, neck squeezed unflatteringly by his yellow tie.
“I shouldn’t,” Katie said, then took a bite. It was chicken, with some sort of tangy, piquant sauce and slices of lovely ripe tomatoes. She moaned with pleasure.
“Almost worth flying through Dallas for that sandwich,” he chuckled. “Don’t tell my doctor, but I had a sausage biscuit for breakfast this morning in Henderson.”
“Henderson? Really?” She managed to get the words out between bites. “That’s near where I’m going. What were you doing there?”
He dabbed at his fingertips with a napkin. “Setting up shop, basically,” he said. “My company’s opening a branch there in a few weeks.”
“Are you with Amazon?”
“Naw, but I ought to thank them, I guess.” He dug in his jacket for a card and offered it to her with a little bow. “We’re in the waste hauling business. Construction sites, oil rigs, entertainment venues. ’Course, in New London it’s all going to be construction until that Amazon vein of gold dries up.”
Katie polished off the last of her sandwich while reading his card. “Well, Dan Daschauer, I’m Katie Garrett. Nice to meet you. And thank you—I might have starved without you.”
They shook hands formally, but Dan’s eyes sparked with interest. “Can’t have that,” he said. “Lady as pretty as you—it would be a shame to let you starve. Are you from New London?”
“Oh no—Boston. I’m just—well, I’m here for a funeral. My grandmother. We weren’t close.”
“Ah, that’s too bad,” he said. “I would have liked to watch you tackle a rack of ribs next. Or maybe a side of beef. Your appetite is . . . well, let’s just call it refreshing.”
Katie laughed. It felt good—not just to let go of some of the tension of the day, but to have grease on her fingers and not worry about the number of calories she’d consumed. She’d been watching her weight ever since
she and Liam started trying for a baby, a prophylactic measure recommended by friends who’d already given birth. “Less to lose later,” they advised.
Dan smiled. “Listen, I don’t know how long you’ll be in town, but I’ll be back Thursday night. How about I give you a call?”
“Oh,” Katie said, unprepared. “I’m, I just—I’m sorry. I don’t think that will work.”
Because I’m married, was the obvious conclusion to that sentence, but somehow it didn’t come out of her mouth. This sweet, rumpled, homely man was flirting with her, and God bless him for trying—it wasn’t his fault that her wedding rings were probably in some back-alley pawnshop right now, paving the way for her mugger to buy whatever his drug of choice was. Liam’s grandmother’s 1.8-carat rose-cut stone nestled between twin sapphires, traded for a mound of heroin that would be gone in days. Or weeks. Katie wasn’t actually all that clear on the details of the heroin epidemic.
Dan’s smile slipped a little. “No problem. Hey, I had to give it a shot, right? I mean, it’s not every day that a gorgeous woman mainlines a Chester’s Chicken Deluxe right in front of me. That smudge of barbecue sauce on your chin—a man would have to be made of ice.”
Katie’s hand flew self-consciously to her chin.
“No, no,” Dan laughed. “Kidding about the sauce.”
“Ha,” Katie said. “Listen, I was wondering—I’ve lost my phone. And my ride, actually. I mean, there’s lots of people I could call, I’m just trying to decide who.”
“Use mine,” Dan said instantly, handing her his phone.
Something occurred to Katie. “Damn. I have no idea what my mother’s phone number is.”
“Ah, yes,” Dan said philosophically. “Who knows any numbers these days? But maybe she’s listed? Personal information isn’t all that personal anymore.”
