Читать книгу Every Little Thing - Pamela Klaffke - Страница 12

It isn’t until I pull up in a taxi in front of my mother’s apartment in North Beach that I remember I have no cash and no emergency credit card. It’s just past ten in the morning—once Anchorman started it was my turn to fall asleep. I woke up this morning on Janet’s couch with a blanket draped over me.

We dropped Seth off first, at his place. I am beyond tired and am tempted to draw the blinds, turn off the phones and hide from the world, sleep until the legal/taxes thing is sorted and I’m free to go home. And this time I swear I’m never coming back, which obviously won’t matter to anyone here because Janet is practically middle-aged and Seth has Diedre and Rob and probably all kinds of other friends I no longer know. Plus, I’m sure he’ll be hanging out with Janet and Victor since they’re clearly all so close.

But before that, I need to deal with this taxi situation. I rummage around in my bag looking for something I know I’m not going to find. The fare is twelve dollars plus tip. I am fucked.

“Excuse me,” I say to the cab driver in my best sweet voice. “I can’t find my wallet. Would you mind waiting here for a minute—I can run up and get some cash.” My mother had to have kept some cash somewhere.

“You leave your purse,” the driver says in heavily accented English.

I’m not sure what to do. If I leave my bag and I can’t find the cash then I’m fucked. If I leave my bag he could just drive away with it and then I’m fucked. I could leave my bag and go find the cash and he could give me back my bag and everything could be fine. But what are the chances of that? Since when does anything ever go my way?

I take a moment to think and weigh my options and the inevitably dreadful outcomes. I stare out the window. There’s a man sitting on the steps of the building. He’s wearing sunglasses and he looks familiar. Shit.

“Just a sec, okay?” I say to the driver. It’s not a question. I grab my bag and wedge myself out of the taxi, leaving the backseat passenger-side door open to the street.

“Hey, Mason.” Aaron says.

“Hey.”

“I’ve been waiting for you. Are you ready to go?”

“Look, do you happen to have fifteen bucks?” I try to say this like it’s not the most humiliating thing in the world to have to ask your ex-stepbrother who you barely know but have kissed to lend you money.

Aaron stands and digs a hand into his pants pocket. He pulls out his wallet and out of the wallet, a twenty. I snap it out of his fingers and dash over to where the taxi is idling. The driver smiles and roots around for change. “Good time to see your boyfriend,” he says.

“He’s not my boyfriend,” I hiss at him and slam the door. He can keep the goddamn change.

I walk slowly back to where Aaron is standing, grinning and looking like an idiot. “Thanks,” I say. That’s all he’s getting from me. There’s no way I’m getting all ooh, you’re the best, you saved my life, what would I have done without you?

“No problem. Glad to help. I tried to call you at the hotel, but they said you checked out.”

“Oh.”

“Did you know that your mother’s address is in the white pages?”

This doesn’t surprise me. “She wasn’t a very private person.”

“I didn’t think she’d be listed.”

“Oh.” The last thing I feel like doing is talking, to Aaron or anyone else. What is he doing here?

“So are you ready to get out of here?”

The words are like magic. All I want is to get out of here. I nod.

“Great. We should get going. You packed?”

I stare at him, puzzled. Packed? Shit—Montana. I honestly, truly forgot. I need a calendar, maybe a PDA.

“Edgar’s hired a plane. They’re waiting.”

“Give me a couple of minutes.”

Aaron is sitting beside me on the jet and I’m drinking champagne and eating grapes and trying to look like it’s something I do every day. Edgar and his wife, Candice, are here, too, as well as Candice’s friend, Amanda, and her husband, Joseph.

When Aaron excuses himself to use the washroom, I stare out the window and try to block out the drone of Candice and Amanda. They’re debating the pros and the cons of various private preschools. Both women have one-year-old twins, though no one would guess it judging from their superfit, skinny bodies. Plus, neither of them is thirty. I wonder for a moment where their children are, who they’re with, and decide that twentysomething mannequin mommies with deep fake tans are neglectful shrews destined to get some sort of skin cancer nobody yet knows is caused by excessive use of spray-tanning services.

Joseph is reading the Wall Street Journal and Edgar is staring at me. I keep catching his eye and it’s making me self-conscious so I stare out the window, pretending to be absorbed in thought.

“Nice view, isn’t it?” Edgar says, sliding into the seat beside me.

I nod and turn my head slightly, looking at him out of the corner of my right eye. He’s still staring at me. Is there something on my face? I casually touch my cheeks and give a quick rub under my nose. There doesn’t seem to be any snot hanging from it. “I have to apologize, Mason—I don’t mean to stare.”

“No, it’s fine—I mean, I didn’t even notice.”

“You’re so full of shit,” Edgar says this to me in a whisper. I can’t help but laugh, but am horrified when it comes out as more of a high-pitched giggle. Candice and Amanda stop yammering for a second while they whip their heads around to see what is so funny. Edgar ignores them and continues talking with me. “It’s just so good to see you after all this time. Surreal, isn’t it?” I nod again and this time turn to fully face him. He’s not wearing a suit today, but jeans and a soft sweater. I notice the black Doc Martens on his feet. He notices me noticing and brushes his leg up against mine until our feet are touching. I’m wearing my clunky Doc ankle boots which I now realize I should have polished or at least wiped down with a cloth. “Great minds think alike,” he says, again in a whisper, like we’re co-conspirators or in on the same joke. It’s a cheesy thing to say, but I let it go and simply grin.

It takes me a moment to realize that Aaron is standing there, hovering, waiting for his brother to move and relinquish his seat. He’s clasping the stems of two more champagne glasses between the fingers of one hand and balancing a fruit plate with the other. He must know Edgar has people to do those sorts of things—there are two flight attendants for the six of us.

“Sorry, mate,” Edgar says, as he stands.

The men swap places and I snatch a glass of champagne from Aaron before he can even get settled. I raise the glass to Edgar before taking a sip. He winks. “I’m glad you’re here, Mason. It’s going to be a stellar weekend.”

“He can be such a prick sometimes,” Aaron says under his breath, obviously irritated. If he dislikes his brother so much, why are we here? He’d better hope he didn’t drag me out to Montana to spend the weekend watching some ridiculous male pissing contest. I take a deep breath that when I exhale escapes as laughter. Edgar and Aaron did used to have bona fide pissing contests when we were little, on the long, paved driveway leading up to the Sonoma house—I’d draw a line in chalk and they’d take turns standing behind it and peeing out as far as they could. Then I’d measure the distance and record it in the notebook we kept as a diary of their various and frequent competitions. I can’t believe I used to measure their piss.

“What’s so funny?” Aaron asks.

“It’s just—never mind.” I decide to keep that particular memory to myself.

Still, I can’t erase the image right away—especially that look Aaron would get on his face when Edgar inevitably beat him. Edgar was older and he always won the pissing contest, but that never kept Aaron from trying and he never once cried when he lost.

* * *

After dropping our bags at Edgar’s place, Aaron and I borrow one of his vehicles and head into town. We visit a few art galleries that are surprisingly good. We chat with gallery owners who seem to be from anywhere but here and when Aaron gives them his card they know who he is. We lunch at a busy place on Callender Street that could easily be mistaken for one of the many fusion tapas places you find in Los Angeles. I scan the room. Aaron says the restaurant is owned by the brother of a famous writer I’ve heard of but whose work I don’t know. Patrons are outfitted in casually chic clothing: jeans, sweaters, leather jackets. It’s that subtly expensive look; no big logos or blaring designer names, but it’s the details—the cut, the perfect topstitching and pure cashmere sweaters that don’t pill—that give the price tags away. Who are these people?

“A lot of writers and producers from L.A. have places here—and novelists. Edgar told me that guy—what’s his name? The guy who writes those satirical novels? He lives near here.”

I nod. “Oh, that guy, yeah.” I have no idea who he’s talking about.

“Yeah, yeah. And that other guy—Edgar says he writes really ‘male’ books, but he’s really famous—he lives around here, too.”

Again, I nod. “People love his stuff.” Just because I work in a bookstore doesn’t mean I read the books or have any clue which writers Aaron is referring to. But he has answered my question about the restaurant’s clientele without me having to ask. We must be in one of those weird hybrid towns I’ve heard about—the ones where a bunch of L.A. people buy up half the property and live there on weekends, the kind of place you’d find in a “Stars Without Makeup” issue of one of those trashy supermarket tabloids I sometimes secretly buy.