The last CD had ended some time ago, but Kyle hadn’t put on any more music. Sometimes he enjoyed the silence, though he knew that drove Gary crazy. Gary would rather listen to country music than work in silence—and he hated country music. Gary was going home for lunch, however, and for the next hour Kyle would have the place to himself.
“You want me to bring you anything?” Gary asked before he left.
Kyle shook his head. “I’m good. Got a sandwich and an apple in the fridge.”
“You sure?”
“I’m fine.”
“See you in a while.”
Gary walked back through the store and out the back door to where he’d parked his car.
Behind the register, Kyle sat down in the used office chair he’d bought at auction when Mandy Clegg’s travel agency had gone out of business two years ago. He stared out at the street, saw few cars and fewer pedestrians—no pedestrians, in fact—and wondered how much longer he was going to be able to last, how much longer any of the old downtown businesses were going to last. All of the action was at the other end of town by Wal-Mart and Safeway. If Brave New World were located in the Safeway center, he might have a chance at survival, but the rent was so high for those spaces that half of them were empty.
He picked up the Charles Williams book he’d been reading. One of the advantages of owning your own store. Hopefully, the lunch hour would bring in a few customers, but until then…
The quiet was conducive to concentration, and within minutes he was completely enveloped in Williams’ world of small town crime.
The stillness of the store was shattered not only by the ringing of the bell above the door but by the muttering of the man who stepped through it. Dirty, heavily bearded, wearing what looked like Aqualung’s coat and smelling of long-layered sweat, the man parked himself in front of the counter and stared unblinkingly at Kyle. “Did you eat it?” he asked in a gruff rumble.
Montgomery didn’t really have a homeless problem, and the few displaced individuals who resided in the area were generally well-known to local residents and, in a weird way, part of the community. But Kyle had dealt with this guy before, and he was no quirky eccentric. He was mentally ill and genuinely menacing.
“You need to leave,” Kyle said, politely but firmly.
The man grinned, his remaining teeth stained brown. “You need to eat it.”
He wasn’t about to get sucked into a conversation by asking, “Eat what?” He’d made that mistake last time, engaging in a dialog with the man, who had proceeded to start yelling before throwing a shelf full of books to the floor and running out.
“If you don’t leave,” Kyle said, “I’m calling the sheriff.”
“I’m the sheriff!” the man shouted, spittle flying from his mouth. “The other police are pansies!”
Kyle picked up the phone, dialed 911.
“You have to eat it!” the man insisted.
And then he was gone.
Kyle hung up the phone before it was answered. The bell above the door rang as the homeless man shoved it open and staggered across the sidewalk into the street, where a too-fast pickup truck honked and swerved around him.
“Fuck you!” the man yelled at the departing pickup.
Kyle watched him knock on the front window of a store across the street, then stumble down the sidewalk out of sight. Sitting back down, he attempted to return to his book, but the mood was gone, and he couldn’t get into the story. Luckily, a customer came in, a woman he didn’t recognize. He smiled at her, asked if she needed any help, and when she said, no, she was just browsing, he nodded and then put on some music.
2
Anita went to the nursery at lunch.
She hadn’t intended to go back at all, at least not by herself, but the text Steven had sent her had been a little too Fatal Attraction for her taste, and she felt the need to meet in person and put a definitive end to all of this. It was her own fault for not doing so earlier. At every juncture, she’d either continued onward or left things ambivalent. Even yesterday, standing him up, she hadn’t clearly put on the brakes.
Mostly because she hadn’t wanted to.
She wanted to now, though. She wasn’t sure when the epiphany had come, but this morning, helping Iris Jensen pick out a new pair of glasses, Iris Jensen who had been her eleventh grade biology teacher, Iris Jensen who had been married to Coach Thomas for over thirty years, Anita realized that she couldn’t lose what she had, that she was lucky to have the life she had with Kyle, with Nick, and it would be crazy for her to throw it all away. What had she been thinking? How had she ever let it get this far? Maybe, between financial problems with the store and the tribulations of raising a teenager, they had let the romance gradually slip away, but that was no reason to start something with someone else. Kyle wasn’t hitting on young women buying used copies of Fifty Shades of Grey. Why had she succumbed to Steven’s flirtations?
No matter. She was stopping it now, before things went too far, before what happened could not be forgiven. She loved Kyle, and if their life together wasn’t a passionfest, that was on her as well as him. It was a cliché trotted out by every fake-credentialed relationship adviser on every daytime talk show, but the two of them needed to talk. They needed to communicate.
There were no other cars in the nursery parking lot when Anita arrived, and that gave her pause. She’d been hoping to talk to him when others were around, wanting the safety of witnesses, and she almost decided to drive away and come back later, but at the last minute, she parked in the gravel next to the open gate and shut off the engine. She waited, hoping he might come out, hoping she wouldn’t have to leave the car, but when he didn’t emerge after several minutes, she grabbed her purse, got out, and walked into the nursery. The register was unattended, and the potting shed behind it was empty.
“Steven!” she called. She looked around, not seeing him among the vegetables, bedding plants, shrubs or fruit trees.
“In here!”
Her eyes looked toward the greenhouse where the nursery grew exotic and indoor plants. She hesitated, thinking it might be better if he came out, but then dismissed her concerns as paranoia, and walked over to the small building.
Steven was misting some orchids at the far end of the room. He put down the mister as she approached. “Hey,” he said.
“I told you, I don’t want you texting me,” she told him.
Steven smiled, held up his hands. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to overstep my bounds. The loving hubby didn’t see it, did he?”
“And I want you to stop calling him ‘the loving hubby.’”
Steven frowned. “Hey, hey, hey. What’s going on here? I’m getting kind of a vibe.”