Ace smacked the metal bench with his hand. “Natalie, you’re an angel! Pick me up right here. Five o’clock on Sunday.”
“I was hoping we could meet again before then.”
“Then it appears your hopes are dashed.” He stood. “And wear something sexy.” I must have given him the stink eye, because he rushed to say, “Not for me. But if the other players decide to stare a little at something other than the table, or bet a little higher to show off for the lady in the room, it’ll only help us.”
“Help you, you mean.”
“Me, us. We’re a team!” He gave me a thumbs-up. “Okay, Natalie, I’ll see you Sunday at five. Bring the money you still owe me.”
As he started to walk away, the strangest question came to me. Maybe it was the sunglasses, but I still couldn’t get a bead on him and I wanted to. “Do you live with your kids and wife and everything?”
He stopped walking. “You mean am I a family man?”
“I guess. Yeah, a family man.”
“Is that something you truly want to know?”
“It really is.”
He removed the sunglasses. His eyes, I was shocked to learn, were beautiful. Light blue, large and expressive. I would even go so far as to say they were caring eyes, intelligent eyes.
He said, “You think if you knew that my oldest kid played first-chair violin, that my youngest went through chemo a couple of years back, that my wife is a cardiac care nurse at Robert Wood Johnson, it might give you a different impression of me? Show a different side?” Without the sunglasses, his voice had lost its edge. His tone now seemed born of something besides hostility, something more like pain, and for the first time since meeting him I imagined that the hours we were going to spend together might actually yield something meaningful.
Of course, I couldn’t say any of this. “I was just curious, is all,” I said.
Almost imperceptibly he shook his head.
“What?” I asked.
He held my gaze a moment longer. “Zero kids, Natalie. Keep the ten.” He replaced his sunglasses, turned away from me, and walked in the direction of the sun.
8
A paralegal from Brock’s office returned my message late Wednesday only to tell me in a bored, lock-of-hair-twisting voice that Brock would call me by the end of the week, which he didn’t do. On Saturday night I did a bachelor party for some middle-age, second-marriage deal in Morristown. (“Would you believe the ex never even let me have a bachelor party?” the groom made a point of telling me twice.) I decided not to perform Target Practice. Otherwise, the set went unremarkably. My audience’s only regret seemed to be that I wasn’t a stripper.
Afterward, one of the men kept invading my personal space while I packed up and I got out of there quickly. No, honestly, I’m really not hungry at all.
I arrived home starving and walked the two blocks to a Chinese place that stayed open late.
It was almost one a.m. when I returned to the apartment with my carton of lo mein. I let myself into the narrow landing and shut the outer door behind me, thinking of dinner and bed. That’s when I heard the low snarl.
From the shadows at the top of the narrow wooden stairway leading to the upstairs apartment, something was suddenly charging/skidding/falling down toward me, its nails clicking like a massive raccoon’s or a wild boar’s, something driven by hunger and rage.
The sound I made wasn’t human either.
I dropped my carton of food, and having just shut and locked the outer door, I now slammed my body against it. The doorknob jabbed my spine, and I gasped as the animal—border collie mixed with dragon—catapulted itself from the bottom stairs. Instinct caused me to pivot to the side and crouch a millisecond before the dog sank its teeth into the calf of my pant leg.
“No no no no!”
The denial came from upstairs. Harley bounded down the staircase and grabbed the dog by its collar. The dog released my leg, and Harley knelt down to the brute’s level, putting her face dangerously close. “No biting!”
The dog shook itself free, sniffed the lo mein carton, and clicked its way back upstairs and into Harley’s apartment.
“Did he get you?” Still on her haunches, she examined my pant leg.
I unlocked my apartment door and limped inside. Harley followed with the lo mein. I shut and locked the door behind us, switched on the light, limped over to the loveseat, and fell into it.
My pencil pants were torn and bloody. “Why the hell would you open your door this late at night?”
“To tell you about the dog,” she said. “In case you heard him upstairs.”
I rolled up the pant leg. My face felt cold. Harley was headed toward the kitchen. She returned with a wet dish towel. “Hold this against your leg.” She worked at an animal hospital as a vet tech and knew how to keep animals alive and maybe people. “Did you have a show tonight?”
“You can’t have a dog here!” My leg throbbed.
“Mustard really isn’t a biter.”
My pain and anger worked against any attempt to control my breathing. If I got stuck in the hospital because of that damn dog and had to miss my trip with Ace tomorrow … My vision was getting swimmy, same as when my father would come home after getting beaten up and I’d have to see his angry, swollen face. “You can’t have him,” I said.
“You have birds,” she said.
“The birds are in my lease.”
“But the shelter was going to put him down.”
“The shelter should have put him down.”
Harley had moved in last summer, and until now I’d always thought of her as one of the saner tenants to occupy that apartment.
“Let me see,” she said. “Move the towel.” She knelt down. “It’s a puncture wound.” She stood. “I have a good first-aid kit upstairs. I’ll get some gauze and antibacterial. You lie down and elevate the leg.”
“Do
