Chapter Nine
Tiffany
It’s obvious within seconds that there’s something deeply wrong with Blaze’s mother. Beyond her venomous attitude toward her son, the scattering of refuse and pointless piles of papers throughout her home hints at something deeper. Something that requires a professional’s help. But it’s also something that we do not have the time to even get into — somewhere in this mess are the records we need.
I look from the surrounding piles to Blaze’s face. Handsome, but lined with worry. I smile at him. After all he’s been through just to get to this point, and with all the things ahead of him — things that he doesn’t even know await him in this tricky financial world — I can’t afford to have him falter now.
He raises an eyebrow.
“Why the hell are you smiling?” He says.
I slide a stack of papers off of Eleanor’s rolling desk chair and take a seat, sighing in relief at finally getting off of the crutches.
“Do you know anything about library organizational systems, Blaze?”
He snorts. “I mean, I’ve heard of that fucking Dewey system. But other than that, you take a guess, Saint Tiffany.”
I nod. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the Dewey Decimal System. Everyone has. But have you heard of Bliss Bibliographic Classification System? Or the Garside Classification Scheme? That’s the one that they mostly use at the University College in London. There’s also the Library of Congress Classification system.”
“What’s your point?”
I sit up straighter. Blaze looks both confused and hopeful; I never thought I’d be so proud to tell a man like him about my volunteering. “I used to volunteer at the library here in Torreon on the weekends. And then at the library up at Stanford. Can you imagine what the library return box looks like the day after finals?”
“It was full of a lot of books?” He ventures.
“Books? Yes. So many books. And pens. And student’s notes. And condoms. And beer bottles. And graded term papers. And, one time, there was even an inflatable sex doll. It was used, by the way. As a volunteer, it was my job to help organize everything and put it back on the shelves.”
His look of consternation turns to understanding, and — on a small level — pride. “So, you can do this?”
I pick up a stack of papers and flip through it. “I can do this hungover and coming off an all-nighter.”
“Fuck, you add a whole new level of hotness to librarians.”
“Thanks,” I say, my cheeks growing hot.
“Let’s get to this,” he says.
And we settle in to the monumental task in front of us. Blaze listens as I walk him through the basics of tackling the job: setting up multiple containers — some for trash, some for possibly relevant papers, and some for necessary papers. He listens attentively the entire time I impart to him the basics of organizational prowess that I’ve honed over years, and then we dive in.
It’s a slog.
A slog through years upon years of neglect, a chaotic disorganization reflecting the depression nesting in his mother’s venomous mind.
Every semi-relevant sheet we find, we scan, we categorize, we set aside in either the garbage pile or the maybe-relevant pile. There’s not much that goes in the garbage pile. Other than a vague mention of a loan paper, we don’t know what we’re looking for, and anything even possibly related to Eleanor Dunne’s finances gets put aside. I’m starting to get a picture of her financial situation, and this picture was painted by Salvador Dali on acid.
Blaze takes a seat at my feet, grabs a thick ream of coffee-stained papers, and begins filing through them. “Where would you be if you weren’t here, helping me get a handle on this mess?” He says. “And you can’t say you’d rather be at work.”
“Work would definitely not be part of it. Because, for one thing, I don’t have a job. For another, I hated it there.”
“I think I recall you mentioning once or twice that you went to Stanford and studied finance. I think you’d be pretty at-home in working at a bank.”
I shrug. “I can do it. But it wasn’t anywhere near what I wanted. And it doesn’t matter any more, anyway.”
“It matters right now. I asked you a question, and we’ve got nothing but time.”
I give him a look that’s somewhere between ‘please stop talking’ and ‘leave me the hell alone’. Blaze doesn’t get the hint.
“Come on,” he says. “Tell you what: I’ll go first. If I wasn’t dealing with this mountain of bullshit, I’d either be riding the I-5 corridor in Central CA with Mack, Sarge, or Crash, or I’d be out hiking in the mountains.”
I frown. “Why the Central Valley? It’s ugly there. Just flat dry land and towns and cities all smaller than Torreon. There’s nothing to do. Or see. It’s just flat and gross.”
Surprisingly, he nods. There’s a mischievous smile on his face. “It is flat. And not much to look at. It’s not like the mountains, it ain’t somewhere pretty that you’d want to spend a lot of time at, but that flatness — that open road — lets you see for fucking miles and go so goddamn fast. Sometimes, we’ll cruise along — just going ten, fifteen over the speed limit — waiting for some cop to get it into his head to pull us over. The older ones know better, but the rookies? There are few things that make me smile as much as the look that comes over their fresh faces when we crank the accelerator and let those kids
