Loyal Albert said nothing.
“I’ve got to cash my paycheck before the bank closes at five,” Matt said. “I’ll be back in fifteen.” It wasn’t his break, but no one cared anymore. They stood in a small, shocked group, trying to absorb Page Turner’s announcement.
Matt returned ten minutes later, his eyes black with rage.
“My paycheck bounced.”
“There must be some mistake,” Albert said.
“There’s no mistake,” Matt said. “The bank said there was not enough money in the account to meet the week’s payroll. The man’s closing these stores for a reason.
They’re losing too much money.”
This didn’t sound right to Helen. She was ringing up plenty of book sales. The Las Olas store had to make money. Where did it go?
“Page Turner and his family are worth millions,” Albert said.
“You don’t think the payroll comes out of his personal checking account, do you? It’s the store that’s broke, and he doesn’t give a rat’s rump.” Matt took off his bookseller badge.
“Where are you going? You have another two hours,” Albert said.
“Good-bye. This rat is leaving the sinking ship,” Matt said.
“You can’t just go.”
“I’m already gone. So long, sucker. I’ll get my things out of my locker.”
Albert looked stunned. “What will I do if my paycheck bounces? My health insurance is due this week. I have to pay Mother’s and mine.”
Albert never understood the careless cruelties of the rich.
Helen, who had once made six figures, did. If you’d always had money, you didn’t know what people like Albert suffered for three hundred dollars. Page would order a three-hundred-dollar bottle of wine to impress his author friends.
But he wouldn’t bother to cover a three-hundred-dollar paycheck for a faithful employee.
Helen saw tears on Albert’s face. “Are you OK?” she said.
“If I can’t take care of Mother, I’ll kill myself,” he said.
“You’d be better off killing the man who did this to you,” Matt said as he headed out the door.
Chapter 5
Helen found a solitary bagel in her fridge. It was speckled with green-black mold. She tried to scrape off the mold, then decided the bagel wasn’t worth packing and tossed it.
The low-fat mozzarella, which was supposed to go on the speckled bagel, was worth saving. It went into the bag of groceries, along with a jar of pasta sauce, half a stick of butter with toast crumbs, and the other discouraging contents of a single woman’s kitchen. Helen had to pack up everything edible in her apartment, even Thumbs’ catnip toys. Margery had warned her not to leave any food behind when the Coronado was tented for termites.
“All the food has to go, or it will be contaminated,” her landlady said. “Remove all your medicines, cosmetics, body scrubs, spices and herbs. The gas kills everything that breathes oxygen, so all the plants have to be out of there or they’ll die.”
Helen’s illegal cat and Peggy’s forbidden parrot also had to go. Helen understood now why Margery was giving the Coronado residents three days at the beach. The tenting preparations were time-consuming and tedious.
Helen checked the last cabinet. She threw out some stale graham crackers and stuck a jar of crunchy peanut butter in the bag. That was it. Her clothes were packed. Thumbs was meowing in his carrier. She lugged her suitcase, food bag, and cat carrier out to Margery’s big white Cadillac. Her own car needed eight hundred dollars in repairs. It could rust in the Coronado parking lot until she won the lottery— and Helen didn’t buy tickets.
Margery and Helen were the last to leave the Coronado.
Her landlady was about to drive off when Helen said, “Wait! I forgot a suitcase.”
“And there goes the damn phone,” Margery said. “We’ll never get out of here.”
Helen hastily opened her closet and pulled out the old Samsonite suitcase wedged between the wall and the water heater. Inside was a discouraging bundle of old-lady underwear. At least, Helen hoped it would discourage any thief.
Under that stretched elastic and snagged nylon was all the money she had in the world: $7,108 in cash. This was also where she hid the untraceable cell phone she used to call her mother and sister.
She was almost ready to leave when she remembered Chocolate, her teddy bear. She picked him off the bed, felt around inside, and pulled out eleven bucks. Chocolate was indeed a stuffed bear.
Helen threw the Samsonite in the backseat just as Margery came out. “Your boyfriend called. He couldn’t stay on the phone. He’s got emergency surgery on a Lab.
The dog was hit by a car and it’s in bad shape. He’ll be with it all night.”
Instead of me, Helen thought. Whoa. What is the matter with me? I’m jealous of an injured dog.
The lights were just coming on at the Coronado. White lights twinkled in the palm trees. The pool shone like a sapphire. Floodlights showed the old building’s swooping curves.
“This is the first time the Coronado has been empty since Zach and I built it in 1949,” Margery said. “It was right after the war, when we were first married. We had such plans.”
That was about fifty-five years ago, Helen calculated.
Margery would have been twenty-one years old. She tried to imagine Margery as a young bride.
“It’s a beautiful place,” Helen said, hoping Margery would talk about her plans and her long-dead husband, Zachary. But Helen could almost hear the door slam on those memories. Margery said nothing on the drive to Hollywood beach. The farther they got from the Coronado, the more she seemed to shrink and fade. The purple outfit she was wearing was so old and washed-out, it was almost gray. She didn’t light up a cigarette, either. That should have made Helen happy, since she hated cigarette smoke.
But Margery didn’t seem the same without her dragon wreath of smoke. She didn’t even seem to notice Thumbs’ racket. The unhappy cat howled nonstop in his carrier.
When they turned off A1A, Helen saw the moonlit ocean. “It’s gorgeous,” she said.
Margery still said nothing. She pulled in at the Beach Time Motel, a 1950s two-story L painted pink and green.
Plain, clean, and cute, it reminded Helen of the places she stayed on family vacations.
“We’re here,” Margery said. “If that cat carries on like that all weekend, you’ll be sleeping on the beach.”
Helen’s room had a sagging bed with a harvest-gold spread and a kitchenette barely big enough for a coffeepot.
But the ocean view was spectacular and the sound of the surf was soothing. Thumbs calmed down once he was liberated from his carrier. He gave himself a bath on her bed, sending fluffs of cat hair into the air.
By the time Thumbs was settled with his food, water, and litter box, it was six-thirty. The termite tenting party had started. Cal the Canadian was barbecuing in the motel courtyard, flipping burgers and turning hot dogs. Peggy arrived with a salad of sliced celery, chicken, and sesame seeds.
“Birdbrain here kept going after the sesame seeds,” she said. She put the salad on a picnic table and went over to give Cal a hand at the barbecue. Pete sat solemnly on Peggy’s shoulder, so unsure of his surroundings he hardly squawked, although he eyed the sesame-seed salad.
Sarah, a friend of Helen’s who used to live at the Coronado, brought baked beans swimming in molasses and bacon and a platter of fried calamari. As Sarah’s generous figure attested, the woman had no fear of food. Cal immediately abandoned Peggy and the barbecue grill to cozy up to Sarah. He laughed loudly at her jokes and tried to entertain her with stories of his own.
