by J P Barnaby
The kid shrugged and followed him into the store, where they sat at the front counter and ate quietly while they waited for Sandy. It took less time than Patrick expected. Around nine thirty, a huge tow truck pulled into the lot and stopped behind the crippled Mustang. Anthony’s eyes widened as he stared out the store’s plate-glass windows.
“Are they going to take my car?” The defeated anguish in Anthony’s tone made Patrick walk over and put a hand on his shoulder as they stood watching the truck.
“That’s my friend Sandy. We went to high school together. She’s a mechanic, and I asked her to come and take a look at your car. See if she could get it working.”
“What, are you going for sainthood or something?”
Patrick had to smile at that. “Yep. Come on.” He squeezed Anthony’s shoulder before dropping his hand away. “I’ll take you to meet her.”
Anthony led the way as they headed outside but then he stood back, away from the truck, and waited for Patrick to approach Sandy first. Her sleeveless T-shirt exposed sharp, vivid tattoos and the muscled biceps of a woman who spent her days pulling apart cars. She’d pushed her spiky, black hair back with a worn red bandana, and her ice-blue eyes bored into them both. The whole package of Sandra Caldwell scared the piss out of grown men. Too bad for Anthony he didn’t know she was harmless as a kitten.
“Thanks for coming.” Patrick pulled her into a hug.
“Can’t turn down a lost kid,” she said, keeping her eyes on Anthony as Patrick drew back.
A grin broke across Patrick’s face. “Oh, so I could be dead on the side of the highway, then?”
“Depends. You got Triple-A?”
Patrick snorted and pulled Anthony forward. “This is Anthony. I found him in my parking lot this morning. Anthony, say hi to Sandy.”
“Hi to Sandy.”
“Oh, I like this one.” Sandy’s fierce grin brought a slight smile to Anthony’s face. “Okay, tell me about the car.”
“I… I drove here from just outside of Chicago. It started slipping out of gear some and then got worse when I pulled off here to get gas. I turned around in that cut-over thing there”—he pointed to the small turning lane off Woodward Avenue—“and it caught one last time, and then I heard a loud noise and coasted into the parking lot. I tried the gas after that, but it just revved and nothing happened.”
“Shit.” Sandy shook her head. “That sounds like a blown transmission. I’m going to need to take it back to the garage and take a look.” She gave Patrick a meaningful look over Anthony’s head. If her diagnosis proved true, it would be expensive. He read every dollar sign of it in her gaze.
“Do you have anything in there you need?” she asked Anthony, who stood looking shell-shocked and empty. “Kid?”
“Sorry, I…. Everything I own is in that car.”
“Okay,” Patrick stepped in. “There’s an apartment above the store I use for storage. You and your stuff can stay up there until we can figure out what’s up with your car. It may be at the garage for a few days.” Patrick returned Sandy’s look and read the word weeks across her lips. The kid probably didn’t have a dime, so if he refused to call his parents, he’d be around for a while.
Shit. He’d just adopted a teenager.
Five
“I CAN do the labor for free, but a new tranny is going to cost between eight hundred and a thousand dollars. While I was under there, I also noticed you needed new rotors and pads on your brakes. They’re shot to fuck. I can’t believe someone let you drive around like that. So, with tax and shipping, we’re probably looking at twelve hundred for a rough estimate.”
Sandy’s words a few hours later dropped a car-shaped bomb onto Anthony’s life. He watched his options flitter away in the early afternoon light.
“I’d… I…. Jesus.” He took a long, slow breath and leaned hard against the liquor store counter as the room shifted beneath him. “I don’t have that kind of money. I don’t want to call my parents. I just… I can’t.”
He stood up and wandered to the display window at the front of the store, staring out over the parking lot and the street beyond. He’d e-mailed Jay from the computer in Patrick’s office, but in the two hours since, he hadn’t heard a word. Was he hurt? Sick? Did his parents find out about their plan and put him on lockdown? Was he abducted by aliens? Anthony could use a little help right about now. Aliens didn’t sound like such a bad idea—way better than calling the parents he’d stolen from, the ones who had his life all planned out whether he wanted to live it or not. The parents who’d left him in the basement until he could no longer stand the transparent bars on the windows.
“Look.” Sandy planted her hands on her hips. “We’ll leave it in the lot at the shop until you decide what you want to do. It’ll be locked up, but there’s not much chance of anyone stealing it.”
“Hey, it’s not a bad car. It’s a classic!” Anthony said, indignant.
Sandy glared. “I meant because it wouldn’t move on its own. Don’t take an attitude with me, kid. I’m trying to help you.”
All the fight drained out of Anthony. “Thank you,” he whispered, unable to make his voice any louder. He wanted to be strong and not let them see all his weaknesses, but it was just too much. Instead, he sat on a stack of Budweiser cases and put his head in his hands.
“Okay, Pattyboy. I’ll see you and Princess this weekend for dinner, right?”
“Don’t call her that, but yeah, we’ll be there. We wouldn’t miss your summer barbecues.”
“Sweet. Well, let me know what’s going on later.”
The bell above the door jingled, and Anthony watched Sandy walk past the front window, giving a wave as she headed back to her truck. The sun reflected off the steel bars in her ears and through her eyebrow. Anthony had always wanted piercings like that, but he couldn’t do them until he turned eighteen. His mother refused to let him get even one. Just another way she didn’t understand him.
Focus.
He could feel Patrick’s gaze on him but couldn’t make himself lift his eyes to meet it. The warmth in those blue eyes made Anthony feel things he didn’t want to feel. Chase broke something in him the night of the party, and Jay… well, Jay just took those pieces and ground them into dust. Hope just wasn’t something he needed right then.
“I don’t know what you’re running from,” Patrick finally said, “but I can’t let you just walk out of here not knowing if you’ll be okay. We lost our stocker last week when summer classes started. You can work here to make the money to get your car fixed. I’ll pay you nine bucks an hour and give you all the hours I can.”
Patrick moved from behind the counter, shuffled past the display on the end, and then leaned against the front. The move was casual, but out of the corner of his eye, Anthony read the tension in the lines of his body. “There’s… well, it’s not much of an apartment, but there’s that storage area above the store I mentioned. You can sleep there and be safe. I got one of those inflatable mattresses we used to use when we went camping. I think it’s already up there.”
Anthony lifted his head, which seemed to weigh a hundred pounds, and stared openly at Patrick. It took him a minute to find his voice through the chaos of words tumbling around in his mind.
“Why?”
“Why, what?”
“Why would you help me? You don’t even know me. What do you…? What do you want in return?” A sick expression passed over Patrick’s face, and Anthony looked away. The question needed to be asked. No one helped anyone without a reason. He’d learned that lesson more than a few times at parties where dealers traded sex for drugs. Nothing in life came free.
“Look, I don’t know what you’re used to, but I don’t have sex with kids.” Patrick’s voice only shook a little. “You can work here and sleep upstairs. You don’t have to pay for it with your body.”
“I’m not a kid.”
Patrick gave Anthony a long, appraising look. It wasn’t anything perverted, just resigned.
“No, you’re probably not. But that doesn’t mean I want to take advantage of your situation.”
“No? I have a tight little ass and a pretty good mouth. Isn’t that what guys want?”
That got a reaction of Patrick. “Jesus, Anthony,” he spat. “I’m not going to fuck you. I’m straight. I have a girlfriend. Why can’t you just take the fucking help? Why does it have to be a fight?”
Patrick pushed away from the counter in disgust, turning toward the office, probably to call the police and get Anthony the fuck out of his life. That’s what everyone did with him, just shoved him in the corner when they were done with him.
Patrick grabbed a cash drawer from the office and shoved it into the register with unnecessary force. He didn’t even make a move toward the phone. In that moment, Anthony made the only decision he could. He chose to take the offered hand.
“Thank you for helping me.”
Patrick regarded him with a closed expression. Then, with a sigh, he came out from behind the counter and held a hand up.
“You want a tour? You can start today if you want. Just remember that I can’t let you behind the counter. You can’t sell anything because you’re too young to get a license. Or you can get settled upstairs and start tomorrow.”
“No, I’ll start now.” It’s not like he had anywhere else to be. His brain spun at the rapid turn of events. Just two nights ago, he was on his knees blowing Chase at a party and trying not to think about the way his life had swirled the drain. Now, he had a place to live and a job at the mercy of a stranger, and Jay, the one who’d said he’d always be there, had disappeared.
With remorse that surprised him, he wondered if Allen knew he’d stolen from their parents yet. He wondered if his brother hated him. It had always been just the two of them, and Anthony had destroyed that in a profound fit of selfishness. Well, except Allen had destroyed it first by abandoning him in favor of Purdue.
Anthony dropped his backpack behind the counter and followed Patrick toward the sales floor.
“Okay, this first aisle is the big bottles of hard stuff.” Patrick pointed as he talked. “On the left, there’s whiskey, rum, and vodka. On the right there’s tequila, scotch, and everything else. The little bottles like pints, half-pints, and minis are behind the counter. The next aisle is the mixers and premade stuff. After that, we have wine, and then on the floor over there is the beer and such. We keep some cold, but most of the cases are there to stock the coolers. What you’re going to do”—he turned his attention to Anthony—“is keep the shelves stocked when you see open spaces, keep the coolers stocked from the beer on the floor, and keep the stuff behind the counter stocked.
“Now.” Patrick waved Anthony back behind the aisles to the same hallway between the coolers he’d taken to go to the bathroom. “Back here are the doors to the coolers. The back shelves should also stay stocked so we have enough cold booze for our customers. Any questions so far?”
“No, it’s pretty easy to follow.” Anthony shivered in the giant walk-in cooler. He made sure there were handles on both sides. The last thing he wanted was to get trapped in there and freeze to death.
He watched Patrick move through the cooler with careful ease. His blue eyes were darker in the dimness, but his cropped blond hair picked up even the stray ambient light from the giant glass-fronted refrigerator. Anthony could only guess at his age. Thirty, maybe. He had a good build, maybe a little soft, but strong arms and a broad chest.
“Good. Okay, now back here….” Patrick walked out and moved farther into the back rooms. “This is where we store the stock that doesn’t fit on the floor. Most of the beer stays out front, but the bottles are in the back, and this little room is where we keep the overstock of pints and half-pints.”
Patrick led him into a small room, no larger than an alcove, next to the bathroom. It held small bottles, smaller bottles, and teeny-tiny bottles.
“You’ve already found the bathroom,” Patrick said and then ushered him to another large room farther back. “This is where we keep the overstock of wine.”
Anthony nodded. “Okay, that’s easy enough.”
“Sweet.” Patrick grinned. “Let’s go back up and do your paperwork, and then you can clock in and get started.”
FOR THE next eight hours, Anthony played dumb as he worked the aisles of booze. Deep in his gut, he knew it would be a bad idea to tip his hand about his alcohol education. Not many seventeen-year-old guys knew the differences in vodkas, whiskeys, and rums quite like Anthony. He’d grown up on them. Instead, he asked inane questions and eventually got most of the store stocked. Around five, a guy came in through the front door and walked right behind the counter like he owned the place.
“Hey, Kevin, I want you to meet our new stocker.” Patrick motioned for Anthony to join them at the counter, so he set down the case of Jack he’d been putting on the shelf and shuffled over. “This is Anthony.”
“Are you hiring them right out of high school now?” Kevin asked, without so much as a hello to Anthony. The guy was older, older than Anthony or even Patrick, with a potbelly and receding hairline above limp, brown hair. His faded Lions T-shirt gave him the appearance of a jock in decline. He probably had a potbellied wife and two potbellied kids at home next to a refrigerator full of potbellied beer. They’d all sit around eating nachos and listening to daddy swearing at the television whenever his team lost a point. A real all-American, first-world-problem family.
“He was looking for a job, and we need a stocker,” Patrick growled. “Besides, I’m pretty sure it’s my dad’s name on the front of this store, not yours. What do you think?”
Anthony’s insides warmed at the man’s defense of him. It had been a long time since someone other than Allen defended him against anything.
“Whatever you say, boss. Will Junior be working the night shift, or is that past his bedtime?”
Anthony’s face heated, and he looked away, the huge windows at the front drawing his attention.
“He’ll be working days with me.”
“Whatever pops your cork.”
“Come on, Anthony. I’ll show you the apartment upstairs.” Patrick forestalled whatever Kevin wanted to say with a look so angry, Anthony never wanted it directed at him.
He followed Patrick back through the store to the far end of the pint-and-half-pint room, where they found a door Anthony had missed on their tour. Patrick pulled out two sets of keys, removed a single key from one of them, and handed it to Anthony.
“I’m the only person with the other key to this apartment, so you don’t have to worry about the other guys. Okay?”
Anthony nodded and followed Patrick through the unlocked door and up a flight of dank but sturdy stairs. The only light came from the room below, casting monstrous shadows in their path. When they got to the top of their climb, Patrick used the matching key to open the door and stepped through.
They entered into a stripped and unlived-in kitchen. Gaping holes of missing appliances cut between the dusty countertops. The floor sported myriad discolorations from sunlight and age. Anthony followed Patrick through to the main part of the large room, which was lined with dusty boxes, stacked precariously against walls that were cracked and peeling with neglect.
“The bathroom is through there.” Patrick pointed vaguely to the right, and Anthony peeked in to see an old, stained tub, toilet, and sink. Then Patrick walked over to a pile of boxes that looked no different than the rest. It took several tries, opening different ones at random, but he found the one he wanted. Anthony stepped forward and held the box as Patrick wrestled the inflatable mattress from inside it. He laid it on the ground, plugged in the pump, and started the process while Anthony watched.
“I don’t have any sheets, but there’s a couple of sleeping bags in those same boxes.” Patrick nodded toward them. “I think there may be some camp towels in there too. There’s no washer and dryer, but I’ve seen a Laundromat down on either Maywood or Sylvan, I don’t remembe
r which.”
“Okay.”
“There’s also a bunch of restaurants up and down the street here and a convenience store across Woodward in the gas station.” Patrick didn’t seem to be in a rush to get home. He just stood there watching as Anthony took in the offered information. Every so often, he’d run a light hand over his own stomach, as if brushing some imaginary thing from his shirt.
“I’ll be okay. You’ve given me a place to stay. That’s more than I could have asked for.”
“You have money? I can give you a little—”
“No, I have enough to get me through until we get paid that first time. I’ll be careful.” Anthony smiled at him, the first true smile since he’d first seen the run-down warehouse-like bookstore where he should have met Jay the night before.
Patrick gave him a small smile in return. “Okay. I’ll see you tomorrow… around eight. Wear something dingy. We’ll stop by the shop and get the stuff out of your car, and then I’m going to make you clean.”
“I’ll be there,” Anthony promised. Tension escalated in his chest as Patrick walked back through the door, leaving him alone in the tiny space. His life hadn’t stopped spinning since he’d left Chase’s car. It was like climbing up an eighty-foot drop just to find an all-day roller coaster over the crest. Now that he’d gotten off the ride, he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him up.
He pushed a few boxes out of the way and dropped onto a musty padded chair he found under a pile of dated magazines. Every part of him wanted to crawl onto that air mattress, pull his jacket over his head, and block out the world. But he’d become an adult in the last twenty-four hours whether he’d wanted to or not. He needed to eat, and he needed a plan.
Anthony set his backpack on the mattress and did the slap and tickle of his jeans to make sure he had everything. When his front pockets came up empty, his adrenaline spiked for a second before he realized he’d left his cell phone sitting at home next to the note he’d left his mother, and Sandy the mechanic had his keys. He dumped out the backpack and shoved the laptop and charger back in, stowing a sudden wave of sadness as he headed for the door.
