“Welcome to the neighborhood.”
She shrugged and her brown shoulders gleamed in the sunshine.
“Wanna come in? Have a drink or something?” I asked.
“I got to go. I’m late for class.”
Loyola Marymount University was right nearby. She didn’t look like one of those stuck-up Loyola students. Stupid Jesuit school. I’d been destined for it starting at about, oh, maybe two years old, but that was another way I’d disappointed my mother. Too dumb to get into Loyola.
“Not LMU?” I asked her.
“Over to the aviation college. I’m gonna be a flight attendant.”
“See the world.”
“Exactly.”
She got in her car then and drove away and I was glad to know she’d be back. I left the coffee table out, but I pulled it off the sidewalk and onto the edge of my lawn. Just in case she wanted it for her mother. Then I went into the house and sat down on the couch. I could see the table through the big picture window. I could see her brother’s house across the street. Later, I’d be busy doing other things and I’d walk through the room and look out the window and see her struggling with it. I’d come out and lift it into her car. Then she’d have to take me over to her mom’s with her so I could help her get it in the house. We’d have fun and then she’d be a flight attendant and fly away.
And one day, awhile after that, I’d see her on an airplane. I’d be sitting in first class, in a really nice suit, blue, no, maybe dark charcoal-gray, and I’d be flying on my way to some big deal and there she’d be.
“Would you care for a beverage?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
And of course she would and she’d be so impressed and she’d look great in her cute stewardess outfit like a military uniform and we’d go right to the airport bar after and talk and talk and talk. Every tired businessman in his wrinkled old suit that came in would be jealous and looking at me, and she’d be looking at me too.
I practiced walking through the living room and glancing out the window. The phone rang and I lost my concentration and I realized I might actually miss her coming to pick up the table if I wasn’t watching every minute. I got the phone out of the kitchen and sat down on the couch with it.
“Hello?”
“Gabe? That you?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“How they hangin’?”
“Who is this?”
“Who the fuck do you think it is?”
Guess I was concentrating so hard watching for her to return that I wasn’t listening very well. It was Marcus, of course. He was my one buddy left from high school, the only other kid I knew who didn’t graduate. He had his own apartment and some kind of import business.
“I got some more work for you.”
I didn’t want to work right then. I was waiting. If I left and went to his office and did something, I might miss her.
“I need you, Gabe. And don’t tell me you don’t need the money.”
Of course that got me thinking. If I had some money, I could ask her out someplace, not just over to the house. I hadn’t showered in a few days or changed my clothes, so I told him I’d be there in a while.
“Hurry,” he said. “It’s important.”
I drove my mother’s car over to his office on the south side of the airport. I went past Dockweiler Beach, the noisiest oceanfront in America. I pitied the tourists who parked their RVs down there for some fun in the sun and then had to shout over the planes coming and going all day. When I was a kid there were houses nearby, but the land had been bought up for the airport expansion. Now it was just weeds growing through cracked cement-the roads were there but the houses, the streetlamps, everything else was gone. It was the driveways that gave me the creeps, parking for no place.
Marcus’s shop was in an industrial park. Row after row of white industrial buildings, like carryout boxes stacked on a metal shelf. They all looked the same except for the company logos. Marcus’s shop was the only one without a sign, just a glass door up three cement steps. I always told him he needed to hang something up.
The same old tired secretary, Kimberly, was sitting behind the desk. Her hair had gotten blonder and more and more like broom straw over the years. She smiled at me and I saw how her maroon lipstick was bleeding up into the wrinkles over her lip.
“Hey, Gabe.”
“Hey, Kimberly.”
I sat and waited. Actually, it was nice to be someplace other than the house. I’d been to the funeral home, of course, and the funeral, but other than that I hadn’t been anywhere. The brown-and-beige-flecked carpeting was soft under my feet. I could feel the glass grit from the broken poodle coming off my soles into the fibers, and I felt bad, but I was glad to be rid of it. Marcus had someone come in and clean anyway. I shuffled my feet back and forth, back and forth. Kimberly looked up at me.
“I like the new carpet.”
She nodded and went back to what she was doing. Whatever that was. I sat on the same beige Naugahyde couch Marcus had always had. I think his parents had it back when we were in high school-in the den. I picked up a magazine off the end table. It was about golf. I tossed it back on the table.
“What the hell you got golf magazines for?” I asked Marcus when he came out.
“Come on,” he said.
I followed him out the door and around to his little storage unit in the back. The sun glared at me, reprimanded me, and I hadn’t done a thing wrong.
“Do you play golf now or what?”
“Pay attention.”
“Golf is a loser game.”
“Will you shut up?”
He unlocked the garage door and lifted it open. I liked the way it looked flat when it was down and then folded like a paper fan when he opened it. I ran my hand over the part I could reach. You couldn’t even tell it would fold.
“Gabe. You with me?”
“Jesus, Marcus. You act like I’m an idiot. “
“This is important.”
“My mom died, but I’m just the same.”
“Your mom dying’s got nothing to do with it. This is all you.”
“That’s right. One hundred percent prime American man.” I laughed. He gave a snort.
Behind some boxes there was a square silver metal suitcase that looked like it held equipment of some kind.
“Grab that,” he said. “Put it in your car.”
It was lighter than it appeared. I’d expected the weight of a piece of machinery. “What’s in here? Hundred- dollar bills?”
“I’m donating to Toys for Tots.”
I laughed. Marcus wouldn’t donate a rotten egg to his starving mother. I carried the case back around to my car. I opened the trunk.
“Don’t put it back there. Put it in the backseat.”
“It’s a fuckin’ suitcase.”
“Backseat.”
“Yessir.” I closed the trunk, walked around, and threw the case on the seat.
“Shit! Be careful.”
“It’s a metal case.”
“I told you it’s fragile.”
