In the room, I said, “Would you prefer I call you Angie? Or Dominique?”
“The question is which one do you prefer?”
“I like ’em both.”
“Both it is.”
“Hey.”
“Yeah?”
“How can we wreck the sheets from over here on the dresser?”
“Good point. You got me?”
“I got you.”
After we’d dozed to the distant honks and beeps of rush-hour traffic ten stories below, Angie propped herself up on her elbow and said, “This was crazy.”
“It was.”
“Can we afford it?”
She knew the answer, but I said it anyway. “Probably not.”
“Shit.” She looked down at the white sheets with their high thread count.
I touched her shoulder. “Every now and then, we should get to live a little. D-S pretty much assured me they’d hire me on permanent after this job.”
She looked up at me, then back at the sheets. ” ‘Pretty much’ isn’t ironclad.”
“I know that.”
“They’ve been dangling this fucking permanence in front of you for—”
“I know.”
“—too long. It’s not right.”
“I know it’s not. But what am I going to do?”
She scowled. “What if they don’t make a real offer?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“We’re almost out of money.”
“I know.”
“And we have an insurance bill coming up.”
“I know.”
“Is that all you can say? ‘I know’?”
I realized my teeth were gritted hard enough to snap. “I’m sucking it up, Ange, and doing jobs I don’t like for a company I’m not terribly in love with so that eventually I can get hired permanent and we can get insurance and benefits and a paid vacation. I don’t like it any more than you do but until you finish school and get a job again, I don’t know what else I can do or fucking say that will change things.”
We each took a breath, our faces a little too red, the walls a little too close.
“I’m just talking about it,” she said softly.
I looked out the window for a minute, felt all the black fear and stress of the last couple of years crowding my skull and revving my heart.
Eventually, I said, “This is the best option I see on the table right now. If Duhamel-Standiford keeps playing carrot-on-a-stick, then, yeah, we’ll have to reconsider what I’m doing. Let’s hope they don’t.”
“Okay,” she said and it came out riding a long, slow exhalation.
“Look at it this way,” I said, “the debt’s so big and we’re so financially fucked that the bonus money we just blew on the hotel room wouldn’t have made a dent.”
She tapped her fingers lightly on my chest. “Ain’t you sweet to say?”
“Oh, I’m a helluva guy. You didn’t know?”
“I knew.” She hooked a leg over mine.
“Pshaw,” I said.
Outside, the horns grew more insistent. I pictured the strangled traffic. Nothing moving, nothing even appearing to.
I said, “We leave now or we leave an hour from now, we’ll get home the same time.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“Shameful, shameful things.”
She rolled on top of me. “We have the sitter till seven-thirty.”
“Ample time.”
She lowered her head until our foreheads touched. I kissed her. It was the kind of kiss we’d taken for granted a few years ago—deep and unhurried. When we broke it, she took a slow breath and then leaned back in and we tried another one.
Angie said, “Let’s have a few dozen more of those . . .”
“Okay.”
“And then a bit more of that thing we tried an hour ago . . .”
“That was interesting, wasn’t it?”
“And then a long hot shower . . .”
“I’m sold.”
“And then go home and see our daughter.”
“Deal.”
Chapter Three
The phone call came at three the next morning.
“You remember me?” A woman’s voice.
“What?” I was still half-asleep. I checked the caller ID: PRIVATE NUMBER.
“You found her once. Find her again.”
“Who is this?”
Her words slushed through the phone line. “You owe me.”
“Sleep it off,” I said. “I’m hanging up.”
“You owe me.” She hung up.
The next morning, I wondered if I’d dreamed the call. If I hadn’t, I already had trouble remembering if it was last night or the night before. By tomorrow, I assumed, I’d forget the whole thing. On the walk to the subway, I drank my cup of Dunkin’s under a low, clay sky and ragged clouds. Brittle gray leaves stirred in the gutter, waiting to fossilize in the first snow. The trees were bare along Crescent Avenue, and cold air off the ocean hunted the gaps in my clothes. Between the end of Crescent Avenue and the harbor itself was JFK/UMass Station and the parking lot beyond. The stairs leading up to the subway station were already thick with commuters.
Even so, a face appeared at the top of the stairs that I couldn’t help but be drawn to. A face I’d hoped never to see again. The weary, embattled face of a woman who’d been passed by when life was handing out luck. As I drew close to her, she tried a hesitant smile and raised a hand.
Beatrice McCready.
“Hey, Patrick.” The breeze was sharper up top and she dealt with it by burrowing into a flimsy jean jacket, the collar pulled up to her earlobes.
“Hi, Beatrice.”
“I’m sorry about the call last night. I . . .” She gave a helpless shrug and looked at the commuters for a moment.
“Don’t mention it.”
People jostled us as they headed for the turnstiles. Beatrice and I stepped off to the side, close to a white metal wall with a six-by-six subway map painted on it.
“You look good,” she said.
“You, too.”
“It’s nice of you to lie,” she said.
“I wasn’t,” I lied.
I did some quick math and guessed she was about fifty. These days, fifty might be the new forty, but in her case it was the new sixty. Her once-strawberry hair was white. The lines in her face were deep enough to hide gravel in. She had the air of someone clinging to a wall of soap.