“Well, just Jane then,” he said.
“She’s married, you know, but I’m sure she mentioned that.”
“She mentioned that she’s recently separated.”
Ivy blinked, then took a deep breath, feeling as if she’d been pushed back by the force of his words. So that was what Jane was hiding. “I’m sure they’ll work things out,” she said. “They’ve been together a long time, and he’s a really nice guy.”
Rex shrugged and pressed his lips together, and Ivy felt the urge to slap him hard across the face. Would that scar Lucky somehow? Watching his mother slap a stranger at the door?
“I’m sure he is,” Rex said. He met her gaze, then looked over her shoulder, presumably at Jeremy.
She understood now that he thought he’d caught her in the middle of something illicit. This wasn’t her husband. She was in her robe. But the baby on her hip disproved him, didn’t it? How could she carry on an affair with a baby on her hip? “I’ll tell her you stopped by,” Ivy said, “if I see her today.” Then she turned around and said, “And I’ll see you later, Jeremy. I really need to rest my leg.” She ushered both men out at the same time, then shut the door and leaned against it, pulling Lucky into her arms and kissing the warm top of his head. Outside, she heard the murmuring of conversation and she strained to hear what these two people could possibly be saying to each other, but was unable to make out any words other than “Jane” and “baseball.”
Back in her bedroom, the yellow tray sat on her skewed, blue sheets like a raft adrift at sea. She sat beside it and fed the last piece of cantaloupe to Lucky, then drank the tomato juice and gazed out the window behind the bed. It seemed fitting that the white-haired neighbor had broken up her morning with Jeremy, that one conniving man had reminded her to be careful of another, or to be careful at least of her instincts and feelings, no matter how seemingly natural.
Of course, she didn’t know if Rex was actually conniving. Jane had told him she was separated after all, but wasn’t he married? More importantly, why hadn’t Jane told Ivy that she had left Adam? Wasn’t that the sort of information you imparted to your best friend?
Ivy lay back on the cool sheets and pulled Lucky close to her. What if her mother was watching the house right now? What would she think about the parade of strange men arriving at her daughter’s door? She would not bother explaining anything to her, Ivy decided. Let her think that I’ve turned out badly, Ivy thought. Let her think the worst.
JEREMY
It was standing outside Ivy’s house, having just been kicked out, that Jeremy knew he needed to break it off with Gretchen. The decision came to him with perfect clarity, and he realized he’d known for weeks that it was the right thing to do.
The tall, white-haired guy was still standing beside him. Neither of them had moved since Ivy shut the door, and they heard the lock click into place, as if the two of them were a pair of criminals.
“So,” Jeremy said, turning to the man. Rex, that was his name. “Jane, huh? You dig her?”
“She’s interesting,” Rex said. “I like her.”
They turned away from the door at the same time and began walking toward the sidewalk, in step.
“And you’re in love with Ivy,” Rex said, as if stating a fact.
“Me? No, man. She’s married. We’re just old friends.”
“Right,” Rex said, making it obvious with his sarcastic tone that he didn’t believe this.
“Well, I guess I do still love her, a little bit, but it doesn’t matter.” He couldn’t say why he was telling this to a stranger, but he kept going. “She was my first real girlfriend, and we were close, you know? Things happened then that connected us and probably always will, but she doesn’t want anything to do with me, and Frank’s a good guy.”
Rex nodded. They stopped together in front of Jeremy’s car. This odd-looking person was familiar, Jeremy realized. “Hey, did you used to play baseball for Vegas?”
“Yep,” he nodded. “A long time ago.”
“I used to go to the games after I graduated with a friend whose brother played. Manny DeVetas?”
“Sure.” He nodded, smiling. “Good old Manny. He got kicked off, you know, senior year.”
“I know,” Jeremy said, remembering it had something to do with drugs. “A shame.”
“Well,” Rex shrugged. “You have to follow the rules. But he did have a great arm.”
The rules. So he was that type of person, Jeremy thought.
While they were still standing on the sidewalk, a car pulled into the driveway, and Frank stepped out. Jeremy couldn’t help but admire his athletic movements, even just emerging from a vehicle, the way he sort of leapt onto his feet, then strode over with purpose. “What’s up, gentlemen?”
Frank was taller than Jeremy by several inches, but still half a foot shorter than Rex, which made Jeremy feel better in Frank’s presence than he usually did. “I just dropped off some menus for the party,” Jeremy said, nodding his head toward the house.
“I’m Rex,” the other man said, offering his hand, which Frank shook. “We’ve actually met before, at open house. My kids go to Grant.”
“Sure, of course,” Frank said. “I thought you looked familiar. Calliope and Polyhymnia, right?”
Rex smiled, as if it were an automatic reflex in response to the names of his children. “Wow. Pretty impressive memory,” he said to Frank.
Jeremy fought the urge to roll his eyes. How difficult was it to remember two of the freakiest names you’d ever heard?
“I try,” Frank said, actually sounding modest.
Jeremy was used to the slightly mocking tone Frank typically used around him. It had to do with Ivy, he understood now. Frank singled him out this way to make a point—it wasn’t the way he spoke to every man. Why hadn’t he recognized this before?
“Well, I gotta run,” Jeremy said, then added. “See you tomorrow, Frank.”
He got into his car and started it up, while the two men continued to stand on the sidewalk talking. Frank laughed and shook his head, and Jeremy guessed that Rex was praising him again, as if Frank needed any more praise, any more affirmation that he had the better life.
But Jeremy wouldn’t want to be a principal, would he? He couldn’t even picture himself wearing a polo shirt like the one Frank had on right now, let alone standing on a blacktop greeting parents. In his mind’s eye the image he dredged up was ludicrous, and also apocalyptic: the never-ending blacktop, heat rising from its rough surface, the parents all white-haired giants like Rex, coming toward him like some futuristic race of humans. He shuddered and pulled away from the curb.
The day felt ruined now, but also filled with purpose. Gretchen would be home getting ready for work or studying, and he may as well get it over with. He had spent last night at her place, arriving late after the sweet sixteen party. They had lazed together on the couch watching a cooking show, then gone to bed and made love carefully before falling asleep. Everything had been fine last night, maybe even better than usual, but after seeing Ivy today he just knew. It wasn’t right.
Gretchen answered the door in her robe, though it was a little past noon, and Jeremy had a strange sense of déja vu, since Ivy had answered the door in exactly the same getup. The robes were even the same color, a pale, grayish blue that illuminated Ivy’s eyes but only served to make Gretchen’s skin look unhealthy.
“Hey.” She smiled and ushered him in, then leaned to kiss him. She tasted as if she’d just brushed her teeth, but her hair smelled slightly stale. “I’ve just been studying since I got up. I have an exam at four.”
“I thought you worked today.”
“After the exam. I’m going in late.”
“Oh.” He grabbed a glass and filled it with lemonade from the fridge, then sat down at the kitchen table, across from her. “What class?” he asked, nodding toward her open notebook.
“Finance.”
The word’s solidity, its sense of purpose, caught him off-gua
rd. He’d imagined hospitality management as a series of classes on taking orders, filling up glasses, and booking rooms, even though he knew this wasn’t the case. Gretchen was poring over a page of numbers and equations. “I should leave you alone,” he said.
“I need a break anyway.” She closed her book and refilled her cup of coffee, then sat on his lap. She weighed next to nothing, and he didn’t like the feeling of her light, birdlike form. He craved a more hefty weight, a plush curve of ass against his bent thighs.
Now, he told himself. Break it off now, then go.
She kissed his temple, played with the hair at the base of his neck. “I’m sort of nervous about this test,” she said. “It’s going to suck eggs.”
This made him smile and shake his head. She sounded like a teenager.“Rodney says just to do some breathing exercises right before, and not to smoke too much the day before.”
He almost asked who Rodney was, then remembered it was a guy who worked the front desk with Gretchen. “Why no smoking?”
She shrugged. “Limits oxygen to the brain or some shit like that.”
“Look, Gretchen,” he said, ready to do it now. “Um … I need to tell you something.” He had broken off relationships so many times, he ought to have a ready script, but suddenly his mind was a complete blank. A soft voice was essential. Vague reasons were better than specific ones. Still, nothing.
She was watching him intently, her green eyes only inches from his own. He liked her pale lips and paler skin, unbroken by a single mole or freckle, the clarity of her eyes when she was sober and alert, as she was right now. “Why do you look so sad?” she asked.
“I do?”
She nodded and smoothed his hair off his forehead. “Did something happen?”
He considered this. It felt as if many things had happened this week and were still in a state of unfolding. Also, he’d found himself thinking about his parents more than usual, the red and white checkered scarf his mother had worn on her head for years, like a kerchief from the old days. The clarinet she brought out once a month and played alone in her room. The boom of his father’s voice calling him to supper, his broad hands flecked with color after a day of painting other people’s houses. His rogue’s smile with the discolored front tooth. All of this felt too large and unwieldy to say out loud to anyone, especially Gretchen, so instead he offered, “Something sort of weird happened at the party last night.”
“Tell me.”
He turned away from her gaze, uncertain why he’d called the incident, if you could even call it an incident, “weird.” But it had been strange and unsettling. “There was this band playing at the party, this really awful sort of rockabilly band, and I didn’t see what set him off, but this kid sort of flipped out after one of the numbers. He was the guitarist and he screamed a bunch of curse words and threw the guitar on the ground, then stormed off, all crazed. The room was dead silent for about thirty seconds, then the party sort of resumed, but it was muted, you know, not quite a party anymore. Anyway, the weird part is that I saw him outside maybe an hour later, when I was loading up my trays. He was hiding in the bushes by the driveway and he scared the crap out of me. He stepped out of his spot and whispered, ‘Hey, food guy. Do you think they’ll take me back?’ He meant the people at the party, and I didn’t know what to say, so I asked him what happened.”
Gretchen was still listening intently, rubbing his neck. The movement of her hand was helping him to tell the story. The kid’s face came back to him now, those dark eyes lined dramatically in black, his soft, childish voice. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Some girl, was all he said, and I guess that was explanation enough, right?”
“So did you tell him to get the hell out of there?” Gretchen asked.
“No,” Jeremy shook his head. “I said he should go back and apologize, that they’d forgive him. So he did. He followed my advice. I watched him go up to the door. It was opened, and he said something, then was let back in.” Jeremy had been inside his Subaru, watching from the driveway through the front windshield. He’d been nervous, incredibly nervous, though he didn’t know why. This kid didn’t matter to him, not really. But that open door with the light coming through, the mother’s bulk in the door frame, her head nodding as she listened, then her hand on his shoulder, ushering the boy back inside, had made every part of his body ache.
After the door closed, he was relieved, so relieved that he’d been right: the kid had been forgiven, or at least allowed back into the party. Jeremy imagined him walking through the crowd and onto the makeshift stage, where his guitar, which hadn’t broken, would be lifted up and handed to him.
Of course he identified with the kid because he was in a band, because he was a troublemaker, but it felt like more than that. It had felt, last night in that driveway, as if his fate were linked to the boy’s.
“Wow, you’re like an oracle or something, dispensing wisdom and shit.” Gretchen smiled and hopped off his lap.
He wasn’t sure what she meant by oracle, but it sounded nice, so he smiled. “I’d better head out,” he said. “Good luck on the test.”
“See you tonight?” she asked. “After work?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll be here at eleven.”
JANE
The neighborhood she and Ramona drove to that morning was three blocks away from the university, and the address led them to a small apartment building made of beige stucco. Ramona parked across the street and cut the engine, then rechecked the address from the piece of paper in her lap. “Yep, that’s it,” she said.
They got out and crossed the street, found apartment number seven on the ground floor near the stairwell, then walked over to the small courtyard, shaded by palm trees and palo verde, and sat down on a bench to wait.
In the last hour, clouds had been pulled across the sky like a dark curtain, and Jane wondered if it would actually rain. “How are you feeling?” she asked Ramona, both about sitting here waiting for her possible son to emerge from this depressing building and about sitting here potentially queasy with morning sickness.
“Fine,” Ramona said with a decisive nod. “A little bit anxious.”
“So you arrived in Las Vegas with no kids, and you might be leaving with two. An instant family.”
Ramona nodded again. “I guess I should tell Nash. About the baby, I mean.”
“How do you think he’ll react?”
She shrugged. “He’ll probably feel trapped at first, so I’ll tell him he doesn’t have to be a part of it and can just leave. Then he’ll storm out but come back two days later full of regret and apologies and we’ll have sex on the living room carpet, then make a bunch of promises that may or may not pan out.”
Jane laughed. “A fairy tale ending.”
Ten minutes later, the door of apartment seven opened, and Jane held her breath and reached for Ramona’s hand, which was clammy. A thin girl appeared, wheeling a ten-speed and wearing a purple helmet over long, silvery blonde hair. Her face beneath the helmet was sullen, concentrating on getting the bike through the door. “I wonder who that is,” Jane whispered, though they were far enough away that whispering was unnecessary.
“Maybe a daughter? My son’s half-sister?”
Ramona and Jane looked at the paper again. This was the last name on the list: James Dillman. That was the father’s name, but couldn’t it also be the son’s? Many kids were named after their fathers, adopted or not. The apartment number was right, so they settled back on the bench, watching as the girl, who looked to be seventeen or eighteen, slung a long leg over her bike and pedaled away, out of view.
“Your son’s girlfriend?” Jane suggested.
“I can’t even think about that,” Ramona said. “A girlfriend. But I guess most nineteen-year-old boys have girlfriends, don’t they? I’d better get used to the idea.”
“She was pretty,” Jane offered. “And I liked her bike.”
Ramona frowned at Jane just as another person emerged through the doo
r, a young man with caramel-colored hair and black glasses. He followed the path to the sidewalk then turned right and broke into a light jog. His legs were thick, almost stout, and he ran clumsily, as if it were a rare occurrence.
“That’s him,” Ramona said, standing up.
They tailed him around the corner to Maryland Parkway, walking quickly, then watched as he disappeared down a stairwell to the lower shops of a two-story strip mall. They followed him downstairs, but could no longer see him when they reached the bottom level. They were in an open-air hallway lined by various shops: Kinkos, Patty’s Pizzeria, Subway, The Word. The boy wasn’t anywhere to be seen.
They checked out Kinkos first, but saw only two Asian girls standing languidly behind a loud, humming copier. The man at the cash register was middle-aged and red-haired.
At Subway, they found a line of people waiting to have sandwiches made, but none of them were the boy they’d seen at the apartment building.
The Word was a coffee shop, and they entered to raucous punk music and the whirring of an espresso machine. A girl with fringy black hair sat in front of a laptop wearing white earbuds. Two men in suits leaned together over a square table, having an intense conversation. The woman working the coffee machine was pale as a ghost and wearing a bowler hat. The place was distinctly grimy, with purple pendant lights and posters of old horror movies framed and hung above scarred wooden tables. As she and Ramona stood surveying the scene, the punk music was suddenly turned down, then changed to something more grungy and mellow, and Jane guessed the manager had arrived and switched it up.
Ramona approached the counter, and Jane followed her, hoping they had time for a cappuccino, then she noticed the boy coming out of a back room behind the counter, tying on an apron. He stopped to consult with the girl in the bowler hat, pushing his black glasses up onto his nose as he spoke. Ramona turned to Jane and gave her a look that asked, What do I do?
Jane said, “Let’s get a drink and discuss things, over there,” she pointed to a table by the window.
At the counter, the woman took their orders, and Jane paid, then led Ramona to the table to wait. The boy was making their espresso, and Ramona was staring at him so intently that Jane took her hand across the table and pulled on it to get her attention. “Take it easy,” she said. “Don’t bore holes into him.”
Vegas Girls Page 20
