Текст книги "Pretty Baby"

Автор книги: Mary Kubica

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Текущая страница: 2 (всего у книги 24 страниц) [доступный отрывок для чтения: 9 страниц]

HEIDI

When I wake in the morning, Chris is gone. Beside me, on the distressed wooden nightstand, is a mug of coffee, tepid and likely filled to the gills with hazelnut creamer, but still: coffee. I sit up in bed and reach for the mug and the remote control and, flipping on the lifeless TV, stumble upon the day’s forecast. Rain.

When I finally wobble down the hall to the kitchen, bypassing Zoe’s school portraits from kindergarten through seventh grade, I find her standing in the kitchen, pouring milk and cereal into a bowl.

“Good morning,” I say, and she jumps. “Did you sleep okay?” I ask, and kiss her gingerly on the forehead. She congeals, uncomfortable with the mushy stuff these days. And yet, as her mother, I feel the need to show my affection; a high-five—or secret handshake as Chris and Zoe share—simply won’t do, so I kiss her and feel her pull away, knowing I’ve planted my love for the day.

Zoe’s dressed already in her school uniform: the pleated plaid jumper and navy cardigan, the suede Mary Janes that she hates.

“Yeah,” she says and takes her bowl to the kitchen table to eat.

“How ’bout some juice?”

“I’m not thirsty.” Though I see her eye the coffeemaker nonetheless, a door that she previously opened and I firmly closed. No twelve-year-old needs a stimulant to get going in the morning. Yet I fill my mug to the brim and douse it with creamer, sit beside Zoe with a heaping bowl of Raisin Bran and attempt to make small talk about the anticipated day. I’m inundated with yeses, noes, and I don’t knows, and then she scampers away to brush her teeth, and I’m left with the silence of the kitchen, the steady percussion of raindrops on the bay window.

We head out into the soggy day, bypassing a neighbor in the hall. Graham. He’s pressing at buttons on a snazzy watch, the gadget letting out various beeps and bleeps. He smiles to himself, clearly pleased.

“Fancy meeting you here, ladies,” he warbles with the most decadent smile I’ve ever seen. Graham’s longish blond hair flops against a glossy forehead, strands that will soon be fully erect thanks to a generous supply of gel. He’s wet, though from rain or perspiration, I honestly can’t say.

Graham is heading home from a morning run along the lakefront in his head-to-toe Nike attire, an overpriced watch that tracks mileage and splits. His clothing matches entirely too well, a lime-green stripe in his jacket to match the lime-green stripe in his shoe.

He’s what one would call metrosexual, though Chris feels certain there’s more to it than that.

“Morning, Graham,” I say. “How was the run?”

Leaning against the wheat colored walls with their white wainscoting, he squirts a swig of water into his mouth and says, “Incredible.” There’s a look of euphoria on his face that makes Zoe blush. She glances down at her shoes, kicks invisible dirt from one shoe with the toe of another.

Graham is a thirtysomething orphan, living in this building because the unit next door to theirs was left to him in his mother’s will when she died years and years ago, and Graham, consequently, made out like a bandit, acquiring not only his mother’s inheritance, but hundreds of thousands of dollars in a hospital settlement, as well, money that he’s slowly squandered away on fancy watches, expensive wines and lavish home decor.

Graham planned to put the home on the market after his mother died, but instead he moved in. Moving vans replaced all of her eclectic furniture and belongings with Graham’s modern ones, so sleek and stylish it was as if he’d climbed from the pages of a Design Within Reach catalog: the crisp lines and sharp angles, the neutral colors. He was a minimalist, the condo sparse but for sheets and sheets of computer paper that littered the floor.

“Gay,” Chris assured me after we’d stepped foot in Graham’s new condo for the first time. “He’s gay.” It wasn’t only the home decor that caught Chris’s eye, but the closets full of clothes—more clothes than even I owned—that he left purposefully open so we would see. “Mark my words. You’ll see.”

And yet women came to call quite regularly, stunning women that left even me speechless. Women with bleach-blond hair and unnaturally blue eyes, with bodies like Barbie dolls.

Graham had arrived when Zoe was still a toddler. She took to him like fruit flies to a bowl of browning bananas. As a freelance writer, Graham was often home, staring blankly at a computer screen and overdosing himself on caffeine and self-doubt. He came to our rescue more than once when Zoe was ill and neither Chris nor I could miss work. Graham welcomed her onto his tufted sofa where together they watched cartoons. He is a go-to when in need of a cup of butter, a dryer sheet or someone to hold the door. He’s also top-notch at expository writing, helping Zoe with English homework when neither Chris nor I could. He’s an expert at dressing a turkey, something I learned that I couldn’t do three-quarters of the way through cooking Thanksgiving dinner for in-laws.

In short, Graham is a good friend.

“You two should join me sometime,” Graham says about the run. I see the multitude of water bottles harnessed to his waist and think we best not.

“You’d be sorry if I did,” I say, watching as Graham tousles Zoe’s hair and again she blushes, this time the rosy tint having nothing to do with his sexual innuendos.

“What about you?” he says to Zoe, and she shrugs. Being twelve has its advantages, the fact that a shrug and a shy smile can get her off the spot. “Think about it,” he says, flashing that decadent smile, the teeth lined in a row like well-behaved school children, impeccably white. The insinuation of facial hair where he has yet to shave, the downturned eyes, which Zoe avoids like the plague. Not because she doesn’t like him. But because she does.

We say our goodbyes and head out, into the rain.

* * *

I walk Zoe to school before continuing on to work. Zoe attends the Catholic school in our neighborhood, nestled beside a cumbersome Byzantine church, with its gray brick exterior, its heavy wooden doors, its heavenly dome that reaches to the sky. The church is entirely ornate, from the golden murals that run wall to wall, to the stained-glass windows and marble altar. The school sits behind the church, tucked away, a regular brick school building with a playground and a mass of children in matching plaid uniforms hidden beneath multicolored raincoats, their backpacks too obese for their tiny bodies. Zoe slips away from me with barely a goodbye and I watch, from the curb, as she unites with other seventh graders and hurries from the waterlogged street into the dry building, staying away from the little ones—those clinging to parents’ legs and vowing that they don’t want to go—as if they have some communicable disease.

I watch, until she is in the building, and then continue on my way to the Fullerton Station. At some point along the way, the rain, with all of its urgency, turns to hail, and I find myself running, gracelessly, down the street, my feet stomping through puddles, splashing dirty rainwater upon my legs.

The girl and her baby come to mind and I wonder if they, too, are somewhere out there, being pelted by rain.

When I arrive at the station, I use my fare card to unlock the turnstile, then dash up the slippery steps, wondering if I will see them: the girl and her baby, but they are not there. Of course I’m grateful that the baby and her mother are not on the platform in this atrocious weather, but my mind begins to wander: where are they and, more important, are they safe? Are they dry? Are they warm? It’s the definition of bittersweet. I wait impatiently for the train and, when it arrives, I get on, my eyes anchored to the window, half expecting to see the two appear at any second: the army-green coat and lace-up boots, the vintage leather suitcase and sodden pink fleece blanket, the baby’s exposed creamy head, with faint, delicate plumage, the baby’s toothless smile.

At work, a third-grade field trip arrives at our literacy center. With a handful of volunteers, we read poetry to the students, and then the students try their hand at writing and illustrating some poetry of their own, which the more adventurous of the bunch share with the group. The students coming to the center are mostly from lower class, urban neighborhoods, mostly African-American or Latino. Many are from low-income homes, and a smattering speak something other than English—Spanish, Polish, Chinese—in the home.

Many of these children come from families where both parents work, if both parents are still around. Many are from single-parent homes. Many are latchkey kids who spend their afternoons and evenings alone. They are overlooked for more pressing matters: food and housing, to be exact. A morning at our facility is about more than literacy and developing a love of sonnets and haiku. It’s about the doubt that overtakes the children when they walk in our doors (quietly grumbling about the task at hand), and the fortitude with which they leave after a few hours of hard work and the undivided attention of our staff.

But once they’re gone, thoughts of the girl and her baby return.

The rain has quieted to a needless drizzle when lunchtime comes. I fasten my raincoat and head outside, careening down State Street while feasting on some healthy granola bar in lieu of lunch, heading to the library to pick up a book I have on interlibrary loan. I absolute love the library, with its sunlit atrium (though not sunlit today) and grotesque granite gargoyles and millions and millions of books. I love the quietness of the library, the gateway to knowledge, to the French language and medieval history and hydraulic engineering and fairy tales, learning in a very primitive form: books, something that’s quickly giving way to modern technology.

I pause beside a homeless woman leaning against the redbrick building, and set dollar bills in her outstretched hand. When she smiles at me, I see that many of her teeth are missing, her head covered in a thin black hat that’s supposed to keep her warm. She mumbles a thanks, inarticulate and hard to understand, what teeth she has blackened from what I take to be methamphetamine use.

I find my book on the holds shelf and then take a series of escalators up to the seventh floor, bypassing security guards and elementary school field trips, wandering vagrant men, and women with other women, talking too loudly for the library. The library is warm and calm, and entirely welcoming as I make my way to the literature aisles in search of something enjoyable to read, the latest New York Times bestseller.

And it’s there that I see her, the girl with her baby, sitting cross-legged on the ground in the midst of the literature aisles, the baby laid across her lap, its head elevated by a knee. The suitcase sits on the ground beside her. The girl, it appears, is grateful to be free of its weight for the time being. The girl pulls a bottle from the pocket of the army-green coat, sets it into the obliging baby’s mouth. She reaches for a book from the bottom shelf and—as I sneak into the nearest aisle, yanking some sci-fi thriller from the shelf and flipping to page forty-seven—I hear her voice softly reading aloud from Anne of Green Gables while stroking the underside of the baby’s toes.

The baby is utterly calm. I spy through the metal shelves as the baby consumes the bottle, down to the residual bubbles at the bottom, and as she does her eyes become too heavy to keep open, and they slowly, slowly drift closed, her body gravitating to dormancy, perfectly still with the exception of involuntary twitches here and there. Her mother continues to read, continues caressing the tiny toes with a thumb and forefinger and suddenly I’m eavesdropping on a very personal moment between mother and child.

A librarian appears. “Can I help you find something?” she asks, and I jump, clutching the sci-fi thriller in my hand. I feel guilty, flustered, my coat still dripping with rain. The librarian smiles, her features soft and kind.

“No,” I say quickly, quietly; I don’t want to wake the baby. I whisper, “No. I just found it,” and I hurry to the escalators and downstairs to check out my new book.

* * *

I stop on the way home from work at the video store and rent a movie, a chick flick for Zoe and me, and a box of microwave popcorn, fat-free. Chris has always been a road warrior. As a young girl, Zoe was adversely affected by her “here one-minute, gone the next” father. When he traveled, we would invent fun things to do when we couldn’t be with daddy: movie nights and sleepovers in the big bed, pancakes for dinner, inventing stories in which Chris was a time traveler (much more entertaining) instead of a traveling investment banker (boring).

I take the elevator up to the fifth floor of our vintage building and as I walk inside I find it eerily quiet, strangely dark. Generally it’s the blaring sound of Zoe’s stereo that greets me. But tonight it’s silent. I flip on a lamp in the living room, call out her name. At her bedroom door, I knock. I can see the light leaking out under the door, but there’s no response. I let myself inside.

Zoe, still in her plaid uniform—which is a rarity, these days—is sprawled across the creamy shag rug that lines the hardwood floors. Her uniform is usually discarded for something graphic, something with sequins or rhinestone studs the minute she walks in the door. I can tell she is breathing—asleep—and so I don’t panic. But I watch her, hugging that yellow notebook in her arms, lying aimlessly on the floor as if her body suddenly became too heavy to hold. She’s wrapped in a plush blanket, her head propped on a throw pillow that reads Hugs & Kisses. Her space heater, which Chris bought after Zoe’s many complaints that her bedroom was too cold, is set to seventy-nine degrees. Her bedroom is a furnace, an oven, and Zoe, lying two feet away, is being cooked. Her cheeks are flushed; it’s a wonder the blanket didn’t catch fire. I hit the power button and turn the thing off, but it will take hours for the room to cool.

My eyes deviate around the room, something Zoe would bark at if she were not asleep: the exposed brick walls that appear at random throughout the condo, the reason, Chris deduced, that Zoe’s room was so cold; the unmade canopy bed with the patchwork quilt; the posters of teen celebs and tropical paradises mounted to the walls with putty. Her backpack is on the floor, spilled open, the granola bar I thrust into her hand before school for an after-school snack lying untouched. Balled up notes from classmates are scattered upon the floor. The cats lie beside Zoe, embezzling the feverish heat for themselves.

I run my hands through her long hair and quietly call her name once, and then twice. When she comes to, she sits up at once, her eyes wide, as if she’s been caught doing something wrong. Something bad. She jumps to her feet, the cats falling to theirs, and tosses the blanket to her bed.

“I was tired,” she reasons, and her eyes dart around the room wondering what, if any, transgressions I found. None. It’s nearly seven o’clock, and outside, somewhere behind the dark, plump clouds, the sun is beginning to set. Chris, in San Francisco, is likely sitting down to an outrageous dinner at some extravagant restaurant, studying Cassidy Knudsen across the table. I push the thought from my mind.

“Then I’m glad you took a nap,” I say, eyeing the creases across her cheek, her exhausted brown eyes. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” she says, snatching the yellow notebook from the floor. She clings to it like a baby lemur clinging to its mother’s fur.

“Was Mrs. Peters there?”

“No.”

“She must really be sick,” I say. The flu, it appears, is peaking late this year. “Same sub? The nag?”

Zoe nods. Yes. The nag.

“I’ll start dinner,” I tell Zoe but to my surprise she says, “I already ate.”

“Oh?”

“I was hungry. After school. I didn’t know what time you’d be home.”

“That’s fine,” I tell her. “What’d you have?”

“Grilled cheese,” she says and then, for good measure, “and an apple.”

“Okay.”

I realize I still have on my raincoat, my rubber boots, and my bag is still draped across my body. I thrust my hand excitedly into the bag and produce the movie and popcorn.

“You up for a movie night?” I ask. “Just you and me?”

She’s quiet, her face flat, no animated smile like the silly one on my own. I sense the no long before it appears.

“It’s just...” she starts. “I have a test tomorrow. Mean, median and mode.”

I drop the movie into my bag. So much for that idea. “Then I can help you study,” I suggest.

“That’s okay. I made flash cards.” And she shows them as proof.

I try not to be overly sensitive because I know there was a time that I was twelve—or sixteen or seventeen—and would have rather had dental work than hang out with my mom.

I nod. “Okay,” I say and slip from the room. And, as quiet as a mouse, she closes and locks the door behind me.

CHRIS

We’re sitting in a hotel room: Henry, Tom, Cassidy and me. It’s my hotel room. There’s a half-eaten box of pepperoni pizza (meat!) on top of the TV, open cans of soda lying around the room. Henry’s in the bathroom, taking a deuce, I think, because he’s been in there so long. Tom is on the phone, in the corner, with a finger pressed in one ear so he can hear. There are pie charts and bar graphs spread across my bed, dirty paper plates everywhere, on the table, on the floor. Cassidy’s plate is on the end table, the one with the pepperoni plucked off and left in a neat pile beside her can of diet soda. I snag a piece of pepperoni and pop it in my mouth and when she looks at me, I shrug and ask, “What? Heidi’s gone meatless these days. I’m becoming protein deficient.”

“The New York Strip steak didn’t satisfy that craving?” she asks. She’s smiling. A frisky sort of smile. Cassidy Knudsen is somewhere in her twenties, late twenties, right off an MBA. She’s been working with us for about ten months. She’s a freaking genius, but not the awkward, nerdy type. The kind that can use words like fiduciary and hedging and actually sound cool. She’s built like a lamp post, tall and thin, with a sphere at the top that glows.

“If I wanted my wife here, I would have brought her.”

She’s sitting on the edge of my bed. She wears one of those pencil skirts with three-inch heels. A woman of Cassidy’s stature does not need three-inch heels, which makes it all the more risqué. She runs her hands through champagne hair, a sleek bob cut, and says to me, “Touché.”

Outside the window the San Francisco skyline lights up the night. The heavy, hotel curtains are open. From the right angle we can see the Transamerica Pyramid, 555 California Street, and San Francisco Bay. It’s after nine o’clock. In the room next to us, the TV is loud, the sound of preseason baseball drifting through the walls. I pluck another piece of pepperoni from Cassidy’s plate and listen: Giants are up 3 to 2.

Henry emerges from the bathroom and we try hard to ignore the stench that follows. “Chris,” he says, offering his cell phone in an outstretched hand. I wonder if he washed that hand. Wonder if he was on the phone the whole time he was in the bathroom. Henry isn’t the classiest guy in the world. In fact, as he walks from the bathroom I see that the fly of his trousers is down and I would tell him, except that he just stunk up my room. “Aaron Swindler wants to talk to you.” I take the phone from his hand and watch as he gropes for another slice of pizza and quickly lose my appetite.

It’s no coincidence the prospective client’s last name is Swindler. I put on my best salesman voice and saunter to my own corner of the cramped hotel room. “Mr. Swinder,” I say. “How about them Giants?” though from the catcalls in the adjoining room I bet the Giants are no longer winning this game.

I didn’t always want to be an investment banker. When I was six years old I had all sorts of lofty goals: an astronaut, a professional basketball player, a barber (it felt lofty at the time, kind of like a surgeon for hair). As I got older it wasn’t so much about the career itself, but how much it paid. I envisioned a penthouse on the Gold Coast, a fancy sports car, people looking up to me. My mind leaped to lawyers and doctors, pilots, but none of those interested me. By the time college rolled around, I had such a penchant for money that I majored in finance because it felt like the right thing to do. Sit in class with a bunch of other overindulged kids and talk about money. Money, money, money.

That, in retrospect, is probably what enticed me the most about Heidi when we first met. Heidi didn’t obsess with money like everyone else I knew. She obsessed with the lack of money, the have-nots verses the haves, where all I was concerned with was the haves. Who had the most money and how could I get my hands on some?

Aaron Swinder is going on and on about derivatives when I hear my own phone ring from across the room, where it lies on the striped comforter beside Cassidy and now Henry, who, forty and notably single, is staring not so subtly at the sheer pantyhose on her legs. I’m waiting for an important call, one I can’t miss, so I motion to her to answer it, and hear her chant, “Hi there, Heidi,” into the receiver.

I deflate, like a helium balloon after a party. Shit. I hold up a finger to Cassidy—hold on—but since Aaron Swinder won’t stop talking about damn derivatives I’m forced to listen to a protracted conversation between Cassidy and my wife, about the flight to San Francisco, dinner at an expensive steakhouse and the goddamn weather.

Heidi has met Cassidy exactly three times. I know because after each and every one of these meetings I’ve been bombarded with the silent treatment, as if I had anything to do with her recruitment to our team or her good looks for that matter. The first time they met was last summer at a work picnic at the botanical gardens. I’d never mentioned Cassidy to Heidi. She had only been working with us about six weeks. It didn’t feel like the necessary, or prudent, thing to do. But as Cassidy sauntered near us in a long, strapless summer dress—where we hid in the shade of a maple tree on a ninety degree day, sweating and feeling totally gross—I saw Heidi grope awkwardly at a jean skirt and blouse, which she was clearly sweating through. I saw all shreds of self-confidence dissolve.

“Who’s that?” Heidi asked later, after the phony smiles and “So nice to meet yous” were through, after Cassidy had walked away in search of another happy marriage she could muddle. “Your secretary?”

I never knew what Heidi meant by that, if it would have been better or worse if Cassidy Knudsen was my secretary.

Later, at home, I caught Heidi pulling negligible gray hairs from her head with a pair of tweezers. Soon after, beauty products besieged our vanity, those laden with antiwrinkle agents and age defying vows.

This is what I’m remembering as I thrust Henry’s cell phone back at him, making sure to say, “Here you go, Henry,” in a powerful tone so that Heidi, back home in Chicago, knows Cassidy and I are not alone, and flee into the hallway with my own phone. Heidi is a beautiful woman, don’t get me wrong. Gorgeous. A person would never guess an entire decade sat between Cassidy and my wife.

And yet, Heidi knew.

“Hey,” I say.

“What was that all about?” she asks. I envision her at home, in bed, pajamas on, red flannel or maybe the polka-dot nightgown Zoe picked out for her birthday. The bedroom TV is tuned in to the news, her laptop spread across her legs. Heidi’s hair is pulled into one of those messy updos—anything to keep it out of her eyes—while she searches online for information on the slums of Dharavi or maybe poverty statistics from around the world. I don’t know. Maybe, when I’m not home, she searches for porn. No. I change my mind. Not Heidi. Heidi is much too tasteful for porn. Maybe she’s looking up some practical use for vegetarian meat crumbles. Cat food? Cat litter?

“What?” I say dumbly. As if I hadn’t noticed. The hotel hallway is covered with the most awful wallpaper, some kind of geometric red design that makes my head hurt.

“Cassidy answering your phone.”

“Oh,” I say. “That.” I tell her about my phone call with Aaron Swindler and then change the subject as fast as I can, blurting out the first thing that comes to mind. “Still raining back home?” I ask. There can be nothing more mundane than talking about the weather.

It is. All day long.

“What are you doing up so late?” I ask. It’s after eleven o’clock back home.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says.

“Because you miss me,” I suggest, though of course we know it’s not the case. Chances are I’m not there more than I am there, as has been the case since we started dating. Heidi is used to me being gone. As they say: absence makes the heart grow fonder. That’s what she says anyway when I ask if she misses me. I think she secretly likes having the bed all to herself. She’s a stomach sleeper—and a blanket stealer—with a fondness for sleeping diagonally. For our marriage, me in a hotel room simply works.

“Sure,” she says. And then the expected: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Who said that anyway?” I ask.

“Not sure.” I can hear her fingers moving across the laptop. Click, click, click. “How’s everything going?”

“Fine,” I say and will her to leave it at that.

But she doesn’t. Not my Heidi. “Just fine?” she pries, and I’m forced to relay news of the delayed flight due to rain, followed by turbulence and a glass of spilled orange juice, lunch with a client at Fisherman’s Wharf, the reasons I don’t like Aaron Swindler.

But when I ask about her day, it’s Zoe she wants to talk about. “She’s being weird,” she says.

I chuckle. I slide down the red geometric wallpaper and have a seat on the floor. “She’s twelve, Heidi,” I say. “She’s supposed to be weird.”

“She was taking a nap.”

“So she was tired,” I say.

“She’s twelve, Chris. Twelve-year-olds don’t nap.”

“Maybe she’s getting sick. The flu, you know,” I say, “it’s going around.”

“Maybe,” she says, but then, “she didn’t look sick.”

“I don’t know, Heidi. I haven’t been twelve in a long time. And besides, I’m a guy. I don’t know. It’s probably a growth spurt, maybe some puberty thing. Maybe she just didn’t sleep well.”

I all but hear Heidi’s chin hit the floor. “You think Zoe’s going through puberty?” she asks. If Heidi had her way, Zoe would have remained in diapers and fleece footie pajamas for the rest of her life. She doesn’t wait for an answer. “No,” she says, deciding for herself. “Not yet. Zoe hasn’t even started menstruating.”

I cringe. I hate that word. Menstruating. Menstruation. Menstrual flow. The idea of my daughter wearing tampons—or me having to hear about it for that matter—fills me with dread.

“Ask Jennifer,” I suggest. “Ask Jennifer if Taylor is—” I grimace and force out the word “—menstruating.” I know how women are. A little camaraderie can fix anything. If Taylor’s going through puberty, too, and Heidi and Jennifer can call and text each other about emergent pubic hair and training bras, then all will be fine.

“I will,” she says decisively. “That’s a good idea. I’ll ask Jennifer.” Heidi’s voice quiets, the worried thoughts that consume her mind buttoned up for the time. I imagine her shutting down the laptop, setting it on my side of the bed: a snuggle buddy for the night. “Chris,” she says.

“What?”

But she reconsiders. “Never mind.”

“What is it?” I ask again. A couple walks down the hall, hand in hand. I pull my legs into me to let them pass. The woman, with a very grandiose tone says, “Pardon me, sir,” and I nod in reply. They must be sixty-five years old, still holding hands. I watch them, in their matching khaki pants and spring coats, and remember that Heidi and I rarely hold hands. We’re like the wheels of a car: in sync but also independent.

“It’s nothing.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We’ll talk about it when you get home,” and for the first time she decides that she’s tired. Her voice sounds tired. I see her drifting farther and farther under the covers, a stuffy duvet that makes me sweat even in the dead of winter. I envision the bedroom lights off, the TV off, Heidi’s glasses on the end table beside our bed, as is always the routine.

An image pops into my head, unsought and unwanted, and I force it out quickly, like a cannonball from a cannon. What does Cassidy Knudsen wear when she sleeps?

“Okay,” I say. From inside my hotel room, someone knocks on the door. I’m wanted. I rise to my feet and tell Heidi that I have to go and she says okay. We say our good-nights. I tell her I love her. She says “me, too,” as she always does, though we both know the verbiage is wrong. It’s just our thing.

As I return to the hotel room and spy Cassidy in her pencil skirt and three-inch heels, still perched on the edge of my bed, I can’t help but wonder: A satin slip? A ruffled babydoll?