She seemed distracted. “Really, I’m fine.” He wondered if she was in a condition to understand what he was saying to her. Did she have some stash of drugs somewhere? Was she exposing him to the risk of arrest for having that sort of thing on his property? Don’t be absurd, he told himself. It’s not the homeless who are dealing and using.
His own full bladder reminded him of one excellent reason why she should leave the house right now. “What, do you pee in the sink or something? The water’s not hooked up yet, the toilets don’t flush. Haven’t you noticed this?”
Her face darkened. A flush of anger? Or embarrassment? She walked out of view.
Don stepped farther inside the house, to the foot of the stairs. He shouldn’t have spoken so crudely to her. Would he ever have spoken so bluntly to Cindy? “Look, I’m sorry.” The way Don was raised, you didn’t talk about toilet things with ladies. When had he stopped following that rule? “When you’ve had a kid you learn to talk about bodily functions.” Still no answer from her, but he didn’t hear her footsteps walking away, either. “I didn’t mean to embarrass you.”
Her voice came from directly above him. “Please just go on. I’ll be fine.”
He stepped up onto the third stair, where he could look up and see her leaning over the railing. “I can’t lock you in here. What if there was a fire?”
She leaned over the railing. “Then leave the door unlocked. I’m not going to steal anything.”
She had addressed one of his fears directly, so he might as well answer as plainly. “Everything I’ve got in the whole world is here.”
“Me too,” she said.
“But you’ve got nothing.”
The words seemed to sting her. “Yeah. And except for all your stuff, same with you.” Her eyes were dark with anger. And then she was gone, walking away from the railing. A moment later he heard her footsteps on the attic stairs. Fast now, clattery, not the stealthy creaking tread from last night.
Sorry if I offended you.
Again he closed the front door. Out of habit he already had the key out, poised to lock the deadbolt. He wasn’t going to trust her to protect his stuff, that’s what the lock was for. That’s how he did things.
His own words came back to him. If there was a fire, and she couldn’t get out, if she died, then his locking of this door would have been murder. Like murder, anyway, even if it wasn’t the fullblown crime. What’s the worst that could happen if he left the door unlocked? She could get some streetliving buddies to come over and help her steal all his stuff. There was nothing there that he couldn’t buy again. And if she robbed him, she’d have to move out, so he’d be rid of her. Worth a few thousand dollars to get rid of her without a fight? Probably not. Worth it to remain the kind of man who doesn’t throw out a homeless woman, who doesn’t lock her in an old abandoned house? Yes. That was reason enough.
He carried his shirt and briefs down the porch steps. On his way to the truck he caught a bit of motion out of the corner of his eye and looked over to see Miz Judea clipping the hedge while staring right at him.
Not clipping the hedge after all. Clipping the air near it.
Where was Miz Evelyn? Ah, there she was. Peering around the hedge, between the leaves and Miz Judea’s arms. Ashamed to be caught spying, apparently, as she ducked back out of sight. But Miz Judea wasn’t ashamed. She just kept on gazing at him, cold as you please, clipping the air.
What were they looking for? He didn’t have any secrets for them to uncover—nothing they’d learn by watching him go in and out of his house, that was for sure. Or was that business with the hedgeclippers a warning? Get out of that house or we’ll come after you with garden implements!
I’m surrounded by women, he thought. One upstairs, two—no, three—next door, all conspiring to take away my privacy, all wishing I’d just go away and leave this house to them. And where am I going?
To see another woman who might very well have her own plans for doing away with his privacy and getting him out of this house. But at least she wanted to give him something in return.
He got into his truck and headed straight for the truck stop. He wasn’t that hungry and he really needed to wash off the dirt and sweat of the day before. He also needed to do a load of laundry—it would have been really nice to have a clean shirt this morning. But there wasn’t time to get everything through all the washing, rinsing, and drying cycles before the closing.
There were only a couple of cars at the realty. Don pulled in next to one of them before noticing that it was Cindy’s Sable. If he believed in omens, he supposed that would have to be considered a good one. Getting out of the truck, however, his door swung wide and tapped Cindy’s door a little, and when he closed it he saw that a bit of the Sable’s paint was on the rim of his truck’s door, and there was a nick on Cindy’s door that didn’t rub off with his finger. What would that mean—if he believed in omens?
The realty wasn’t officially open, it was so early, but there was an agent inside. Don knocked on the door. The agent didn’t look up. Don knocked again. The agent raised a wrist, pointed to his watch, and then look down again. If Cindy was inside, she wasn’t where Don could see her from the door. Maybe she was in the bathroom. Don waited a moment, considering how important it was to get in right now. He had some phone calls he needed to make before they left for the closing, and why should he go down the street and feed quarters into a payphone when he could sit inside the office of a realty that was going to make some money from him when he forked over his check at the closing this morning? With the flat of his hand he struck the door three resounding blows.
Now the agent looked up angrily, saw it was still him, saw also that he was raising his hand to strike the door yet again, and rose to his feet so quickly his chair rocketed back against the desk behind his. He charged to the door, his face turning red, and unlocked and opened it. “We don’t open till nine o’clock!”
Don knew not to answer an angry man directly. “Is Cindy Claybourne here?”
“Does it look like she’s here?”
“Her car’s in the parking lot.”
“She walks home,” said the agent.
So that’s how she kept that girlish figure. Must be a good agent, too—all the neighborhoods within walking distance consisted of very nice houses on large wooded lots with winding lanes. Don had built several of those houses, back in an earlier life.
The man had been as helpful as he intended to be. “Now I’ve got work to do, if you don’t—”
“She wanted me to meet her here so we could ride together to a nine o’clock closing downtown.”
Don knew the magic words: Closing. Ride together. No matter how annoyed, a decent agent wasn’t going to queer a colleague’s sale. And this guy was a decent agent.
“Sure,” the guy said grudgingly. “Come in and wait.” As Don came through the door, the agent held out his hand. “Ryan Bagatti. I sit at the desk next to Cindy’s.”
To Don it sounded like grade school. I sit at the desk next to Cindy’s. “Lucky,” he said.
Bagatti rolled his eyes. “She should have been here to let you in herself.”
“Maybe I’m earlier than she expected,” said Don. “You’re pretty early yourself.” He also noticed that Bagatti had apparently not been sitting in his own place or Don would never have seen him from the door. Bagatti stopped at the desk he’d been sitting at, but only long enough to exit some program on the computer and return the chair to its place. Then he led Don back to Cindy’s desk, offered him Cindy’s chair, and sat down in his own, glum behind his professional smile.
“Think Cindy’d mind if I used her phone?” asked Don.
“Cindy’s real accommodating, if you know what I mean,” said Bagatti.
One of those. Macho pinhead who flirts with Cindy to her face, then pretends behind her back that he’s had an affair with her. Don toyed with the idea of entering the fray—are you the agent in her office that she calls Tiny?—but decided that would do Cindy more harm
than good. “It’s only local calls,” said Don.
“Be Cindy’s guest,” said Bagatti. “Everybody else is.”
This guy really needs to get beat up someday, Don thought. But not by me. Let it be some drunk who’ll get six months for assault, suspended. If I once started beating on somebody, I don’t think I could stop till I earned a solid manslaughter charge.
In his pocket address book, Don looked up the number of Mick Steuben at Helping Hand Industries. As he expected, Mick was already at his desk.
“Got a houseful for you, Mick.”
“That you, Mr. Lark?”
“Who else?”
“How many rats living in the couch?”
“Five couches. Place used to be an apartment building.”
“Oh, we moving up in the world.”
“No rats, or at least if there are any they’re real quiet and they don’t shit.”
“Man, I wish I’d married into that family.”
“I’m closing on the house this morning so it won’t be mine to donate till after noon.”
“I’ll get a crew together.”
Helping Hand didn’t officially provide a moving service. Supposedly you had to have the furniture and appliances you were donating out at the curb. But Mick had figured out that when somebody was emptying a whole house, they weren’t going to pay for a crew to haul everything out just so they could give the stuff away. So he had a well-known but unwritten arrangement with several contractors who worked with old houses, that he’d get some volunteers from his pickup crew to do the hauling, as long as the contractor gave his workers some pretty fair tips. That way the contractor saved money on the hauling, and Mick got a houseful of furniture and appliances that otherwise might have been sold or junked. This amounted to aggressive marketeering in the help-for-the-down-and-out trade. “Mick, you’d be dangerous if you ever got into a business with money and power.”
“That’s why God put me in this place,” he said. “Seeya this afternoon, man.”
Don pushed a button for another line and called the city to make sure they were really going to hook up the water today. He was still on hold when Cindy arrived. He hung up and stood to greet her.
She looked good, walking the length of the office, and her smile was dazzling. But he saw her glance at Bagatti, saw how her jaw tightened a little under the smile. He wondered how she’d play it—kiss him openly to drive Bagatti crazy, or greet him formally like any other client because it was none of Bagatti’s business. There was no need to wonder. Cindy had class, and Bagatti was a bug. She greeted Don with a cool handshake. “Sorry I’m late,” she said.
“I came pretty early,” said Don, “but I hoped to exploit your free telephones.”
“Putting together another deal in Taiwan?” she said. She opened the file drawer in her desk and took out a folder.
“You know how it is, trying to keep all the time zones straight,” said Don. “But Mr. Bagatti here said that it was OK just to dial direct, the company would do anything for a customer.”
“Haha,” said Bagatti. “You only dialed seven digits.”
“See you later, Ryan,” said Cindy. “This way, Mr. Lark.”
Outside the door, Don let himself laugh. “Never thought he could count to seven.”
“He’s a neanderthal, but he sells houses to a certain kind of clientele.”
“When I got here he was sitting at somebody else’s desk, using the computer.”
“He’s a snoop but we all know it, so nobody leaves anything confidential lying around. He thinks he’s a real up-and-comer.”
They were halfway to their cars. Don slipped his arm around her waist, feeling like a teenager daring to assert a relationship. And like a teenager, he got slapped down. He felt her twist away just a little.
“Sorry,” he said, taking his arm back. What was wrong? Was she regretting yesterday’s kiss? Or had she already noticed the nick on her car door?
“Let’s take my car,” she said.
That had been Don’s intention, but now he wondered. “I can follow you, and that way you won’t have to bring me all the way back here after the closing.”
She had walked to her car door and was unlocking it. Don walked between their cars, positioned either to get into her passenger door or into his own driver’s door. “Don,” she said, “are you trying to avoid me?”
So what was he supposed to read into that look? If she hadn’t just rejected his arm around her waist, he’d suppose she was looking at him with hurt and longing, that sort of dreamy-eyed look that he remembered very well from high school, the look that girls eventually realized they probably shouldn’t use with guys unless they really meant something by it, because it had the power to make them hover but then they were pretty hard to get rid of. Come on, Cindy, which is it? But instead of having it out with her over the roof of her Sable on the way to a closing, Don decided discretion was the better part of valor and got into her car.
Once inside with the doors closed, she was full of businesslike talk about the closing, how the lawyer was so nice to fit them in before the start of his normal business hours; Don refrained from giving his opinion of lawyers and how “nice” they were, beyond saying, “No matter what time he fit you in, he’s still charging you, right?”
She laughed. “I guess you’ve got a point.”
By now the car was out on Market Street, heading downtown. It was a four-lane with no shoulder, but to his surprise she pulled the car tight against the curb and ignored the car behind them that honked and swerved around them, curses coming from the open window. She was too busy leaning over and kissing him deeply and passionately. Then, without a word, she took her foot off the brake and they pulled back into the flow of traffic.
“Nice to see you, too,” said Don.
“Sorry if it seemed like I was blowing you off back in the parking lot,” she said. “I just can’t stand the idea of Bagatti—you know.”
“I imagine he’d never let you forget it.”
“So if he was watching, what he saw was a client making a pass and the ice princess blowing him off. Sorry.”
“Fine.”
But was it fine? She could have explained herself right then. Bagatti couldn’t have heard. Instead she waited, she let him fret in silence until she decided it was time to let him off the hook. And even then, the kiss was her doing. Maybe she just wanted to be the one to decide when things happened between them.
Then again, what woman didn’t want to decide that? Most of them simply waited until after the papers were signed before they took control of the schedule. Cindy was honest enough to get the reins in her hands right from the start.
“All I could think about all night was you,” she was saying to him. “I told you I’m not that kind of girl, and that’s the truth, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t times I wish I were that kind of girl.”
It was hard to think how Cindy could have said anything better calculated to make a formerly-married-but-four-years-celibate man replace all conscious thought with pure adolescent horniness. “You shouldn’t say things like that to a man about to see a lawyer.”
“Oh, lawyers’ offices aren’t conducive?”
“Pure saltpeter.”
She laughed. “Well, we need to keep our friendship on a loftier plane anyway,” she said. “Since you’re not that kind of boy and I’m not that kind of girl.”
She knew exactly what she had done to him. And yet he couldn’t quite believe that she was jerking him around. Maybe she was being completely open with him, saying exactly what she thought and not even caring about the consequences. How could you tell, when utter honesty and cynical manipulation would each account completely for the things she said and did?
Despite the warm-blooded prelude, the closing went quickly and smoothly. For the first time, Don realized that most of the time-consuming silliness with closings was caused by the bank. The whole thing was done before nine-thirty. The house was his. It should have felt good, an
d it did, but Don had no chance to relish it because all he was thinking about was Cindy.
What made sense would be to take her to the house and talk about his plans and get her talking about her life or whatever came up until it was time for lunch. How could it hurt to revisit the scene of their first kiss the day before? But that homeless girl was there and he just didn’t want to have to explain the whole situation to Cindy. Not that she wouldn’t believe him; it’s how she’d judge him that mattered. Maybe she’d see him as compassionate, but that was hardly the truth, since he couldn’t wait to get the girl out on the street. And it was just as likely that she’d see him as a wimp, a doormat. Which he probably was. But he didn’t want Cindy thinking of him that way.
So the walk to the car was silent—the worst possible course of action, but how could he speak until he thought of something to say? Besides, she wasn’t talking, either. What did that mean?
They got to the car and Cindy punched in the code that unlocked all the doors. “So the real estate part of our relationship is over, I guess,” she said.
“I guess,” said Don. What else could he say? And yet he knew that he had to say something, because she had just talked about their relationship and tied it to the word “over” and he knew she was asking him for reassurance—but reassurance of what? He had no idea where she wanted things to go. Or where he wanted them to go. So all he said was “I guess” and that was the worst thing he could have said because it sounded like he was agreeing that things were over.
She slid into her seat. He ducked down and got into his. She reached up to get her seatbelt. If he left things with “I guess” then it would be over between them before it had a chance to begin and it would be his own stupid fault. Yet a part of him was already acquiescing, already saying, Well, nice while it lasted, but you belong alone anyway, better to have an uncomplicated life.
Something inside him might think like that, but it wasn’t the man he wanted to be. So, as she fumbled to slide the seatbelt into its latch, he reached down and took her hand and raised it up to put the seatbelt back in place behind her left shoulder. That put him face to face with her, and he kissed her. Letting go of her hand, he reached down and embraced her, pulling her close to him, holding her against him. It was a convincing kiss.