“You know what? If you and your dumb-ass brother had a bit of competition you might raise your game. Might be good for you. What do you think?”
Then he turned and headed back along the drive and out to the road. The lawyer checked inside his envelope to see if he’d missed anything then nodded goodbye and went down and got into the silver sedan. Marla slammed the front door so hard the glass rattled.
We lay on her bed and I held her as the light outside the windows softened into late afternoon. I knew what this eviction meant to her. She had no family of her own, no hometown to go back to for Christmases and birthdays, no childhood repository of happy memories. This house had become all of these things for her and losing it would rob her of the largest piece of the life she had managed to create for herself.
She threw her head back and sighed. “I thought I’d end up buying this house. It’s the one thing, the
“You don’t know this Tripp guy outside of the other night, right?”
“I never saw him before in my life.”
“Then this is getting weird.”
I told Marla about his visit to the warehouse, how he’d poisoned the plants and driven our customers away. “He was obviously trying to hurt our business. Now, for some reason, he wants to hurt you too. I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Maybe it’s a man thing, like he has to destroy the whore he slept with.”
“But buying a house to do it?”
“Yeah, I’d have to be a monumentally bad lay.” Marla tried to smile at her own joke but just ended up looking sadder.
I stayed at her place as long as I could before I had to pick up Stan. When I left I asked her to come with me but by then she was so thoroughly depressed she’d curled into a ball on the bed and wouldn’t move.
In the pickup, on the way back from Rosie’s house, Stan had a smirk on his face and kept giving me sideways looks.
“Okay. What is it?”
He turned toward me and smiled painfully. “I did it.”
“Did what?”
“With Rosie. We had sex.”
I’d known it would happen at some point, but now that it had I didn’t really know how to react.
“Wow… That’s pretty big.”
Stan must have mistaken my hesitancy for disapproval because he spoke quickly. “It’s all right, she can’t have babies.”
“I know. Her grandmother told me. It’s okay, dude. I don’t think it’s wrong or anything, I’m just, you know, taking it in.”
“It was my first time.”
“I figured. How do you feel about it?”
“I feel good. I mean, gosh, Johnny, it makes your head spin round. It’s good to be that close to someone.”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah…” Stan nodded softly to himself as though he was turning over the experience, running the truth of it between his fingers. “Yeah… it makes you feel different.”
CHAPTER 18
Monday was pretty much what most of our working days had become. A few hours servicing existing Plantasaurus customers and installing displays for new ones, the rest of the time back at the warehouse looking after our plants and doing whatever office work the business required. Including private houses, we had about fifty clients now. That was really only enough work to fill three and a half days a week but I spread it over five to create the illusion for Stan that Plantasaurus was a regular, full-time concern.
He was thriving in his new role of “businessman,” but he dealt with only one side of the operation-the making up of plant displays and the maintenance visits. What he wasn’t involved in was the constant juggling of finances, the balancing of outgoings and income, paying invoices for plants and soil and containers, issues of tax and insurance. He knew about these things because I talked to him about them, but that kind of information was too complex for him to hold in his head long enough for it to become real.
In a way this was a blessing because it prevented him from seeing the real direction the business was taking. I’d done some calculating and though we were just about covering costs now, we were still a long way from the total number of customers we needed for the business to be financially stable. This probably wasn’t unusual for a new company but the rate at which we were acquiring new clients was beginning to fall. If our rate of growth slowed further, or some catastrophe struck and we actually began to lose clients, long-term survival would not be possible-we couldn’t go on indefinitely running an enterprise that didn’t pay us a wage.
It was late afternoon when Bill Prentice pulled up outside the warehouse. The day was warm and we had the doors open a little for air. When Stan saw the car he jumped up from the planter he’d been working on and called out happily, “Hey, Johnny, it’s Bill.”
He went to the doors and yanked them apart. Bill stood in the opening, staring into the warehouse.
Stan gave him a mock salute and said, “Hiya, Bill, long time no see.”
For a moment Bill didn’t register him, his eyes were locked deeper inside the building, on me. I hadn’t told Stan about the confrontation Marla and I had had with him outside the Black Cat cafe and Stan frowned as he followed Bill’s gaze, trying to figure out what was going on. He turned back to Bill and waved a hand in front of his eyes.
“Hey, Earth to Bill.”
Bill Prentice looked at Stan then and nodded tiredly. “Hello, Stan.”
If Stan had been a puppy he would have bounced. He grabbed Bill’s sleeve and pulled him over the threshold. “Look at the place, Bill. Check out all the plants we’ve got.”
Bill pulled his arm away and looked grimly around the warehouse. I could see Stan was hurt but he tried to hide it and ran over to where we’d stacked the empty planters and the sacks of potting mix.
“See how we have it organized? All neat. I told you I could do it.”
Bill closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose as though he was fighting off a headache. “Yes, Stan. I see what you’ve done.”
The overhead lighting in the warehouse brought out the hollows of his cheeks and the bags around his eyes. He’d lost weight and the linen jacket he wore was loose on him, but there was more to the way he looked than just the loss of a few pounds. He seemed somehow to have fallen in on himself, as though some dreadful cancer or parasite was eating him from the inside out.
Stan cleared his throat and grinned nervously.
“Seen any more bears, Bill?”
But Bill was not there to reminisce. He pulled two sheets of folded paper from inside his jacket and held them out to me.
“I want you to leave. This will cancel the lease agreement. You can just go, you won’t be liable for anything. You’ll get back all the rent you’ve paid.”
“What!” Stan screwed his eyes up and shook his head rapidly from side to side. “What? This is our place! You said it was. You said-You said-Johnny, what is he saying?”
I took the papers and skimmed them. Two copies of the same document, confirming that we agreed to cancel our lease on the warehouse. Bill had already signed in the space next to his name. While I was reading he turned to Stan and his face softened a little.
“I’m sorry, Stan, but I need the warehouse back.”
“You said we could use it.”
“That was before Pat died.”
