37
I wake up the next morning in a darkened room, shafts of bright morning sunshine slanting through the blackout shades. The clock reads ten thirty. I passed out around midnight.
Ben is still asleep in the other bed, and he looks sweet, all curled up around one of the pillows. I take a minute to stretch, letting my muscles ease out of the crampedness of twenty-four hours in the car.
“Hey,” Ben calls, his voice sticky with sleep. “What time is it?”
“Ten thirty.”
“Are you ready for today?”
The pizza box is still on the dresser. It seems crazy that last night—in another room that Bradford might recommend, right in his backyard—I was able to forget why I’d come here. But now there’s no forgetting. No denying. I am hot and cold and sick to my stomach. I’m not ready. I’ll never be ready.
“Ready,” I tell him.
He stares at me a long minute. Watches me as he peels off his nicotine patch and puts on another one. “You don’t have to do this,” he says. “I’ll be just as happy if we turn around right now.”
It’s a nice thing to say. But we already aborted one mission. That one didn’t matter. This one does. I shake my head.
He puts on a shirt. “What’s your plan of attack?”
“I thought we’d stake out his house all day, like we did . . .” I don’t finish. Ben gets it.
“But you said he worked at one of the casinos,” Ben replies. “They don’t have regular shifts. He could work the graveyard.”
I hadn’t thought of that. “It might be a long stakeout.”
Ben looks at me for a minute. “What’s the name of the place he works at?”
“The Continental.” We drove past it yesterday. It made me shiver in the afternoon heat to think of being that close to him. If he had such a strong effect on me over the computer, with all those miles and false identities between us, what is he going to do to me in person?
Ben opens the phone book and leafs through the pages.
“What are you doing?” I ask, but before he answers, he’s dialing. When someone answers, he starts talking in a kind of a hick accent: “My buddy Brad Smith works there. I don’t mean to hassle him, but I went and locked myself out of my house and he’s got my spare keys. Can you tell me what time he’s on today so I can come grab ’em?”
There’s a brief pause as he’s put on hold. He looks at me and winks. The voice comes back on the phone. “Oh. Right. Course. You know what time he gets off? I can swing on by and grab my spare set off him.” More silence. “Five? Great. I’ll have to manage till then. Thanks. I will. You too.”
Ben hangs up. “His shift is over at five.”
“Five,” I repeat.
“So assuming he goes straight home, five thirty or six.”
“Aren’t you a good detective.” I smile at him.
Ben doesn’t smile back. He’s all business now. “I say we get to his place early to sniff it out, and then you do your thing.”
“My thing?”
“You have a thing, right?”
“Of course I have a thing.” I’ve spent the long hours of the drive working out exactly what I’ll say to him. Like lines in a play. More pretend. Pretend to be Meg. Pretend to be suicidal. Pretend to be strong enough to do this.
“Okay, so that gives us”—he looks at the clock—“six hours.”
I nod. Six hours.
“What do you want to do in the meantime?”
Throw up. Run. Hide. “I don’t know. What is there to do here?”
“We could sit by the pool, but I stuck my hand in it last night and it was warm as piss.”
“Too bad I left my bathing suit at home.”
“We could hit one of those all-you-can-manage dollar-ninety-nine buffets.”
“I’ll bet you can manage a lot.”
“And I’d kill for an iced coffee. It’s, like, a thousand degrees. You’d think they’d ice something other than the beer. We can grab breakfast at a casino, and then gamble.”
“I’m gambling enough on this trip; plus, I have no extra money. What I really want is to zone out. Like, at a movie or something.”
“Okay. Buffet and movie. It’s a date.” He stops himself, even blushes a little. “Not a date, but, you know.”
“Yeah, Ben,” I say. “I know.”
x x x
We don’t find iced coffee, but we do find a buffet, at which Ben eats an absurdly huge amount of eggs, bacon, sausage, and various other meat products, as if trying to store up for the vegan life back home. I manage to get down half a waffle. After, we find a Cineplex in town, and watch one of those ridiculous movies about machines that turn human. It’s part three or four in a series we haven’t seen before, but it doesn’t matter. We groan at the terrible plot and share a tub of popcorn, and there are whole minutes when I forget what I’m doing today. By the time the film lets out, it’s almost three o’clock.
I go back to the motel to change. I’m not sure why, but I’ve brought one of my nicer outfits, which happens to be a skirt-and-top ensemble I wore to one of Meg’s many memorial services. Ben and I pay for another night at the Wagon Wheel, deciding, rather than leaving tonight, to get up at the butt-crack of dawn and power through the drive home, doing it in shifts, rock-and-roll-tour style.
At the front desk we get directions to Bradford’s apartment complex. It’s not that far from here, about a half mile away.
“Let’s walk,” I say. We have time, and I’m too nervous to sit around waiting, so we walk along the dusty streets until we find a sun-bleached stucco building surrounded by dead grass, with a cracked cement pool.
But we’re early. It’s only just five. “We probably shouldn’t hang out right here,” I say. So we walk back a ways toward a liquor store a few blocks away.
“What time do you want us to go in?” Ben asks.
“I should go at five thirty.”