Lovesick (18 page)

WE PULL into Paige’s driveway. Parked in my spot is a tan Mercedes I’ve never seen before. It’s a sedan, probably from the 1970s. I can now make out the green bumper sticker across the back fender:
POWERED
100
%
BY VEGETABLE OIL.

Paige unbuckles her seat belt and leans over to kiss me softly on the lips. I can hear Lara’s obnoxious laugh from here. We aren’t even through the front door before Lara screams, “Finally! He was about to leave.”

Tyler Rich stands up to greet us. He is unshaven, and taller and thinner than I remember. But maybe he’s always looked that way. Despite his crunchy-looking exterior, a few details divulge his inner richness: jeans ripped in just the right places, a designer T-shirt, that perfect auburn tan, and plenty of hair product. I wish I had Tyler Rich’s shiny black hair. But the tiny patch of hippie whiskers under his lower lip I can do without.

“Pay Day!” he cries with joy.

Paige protectively reaches for my hand.

He steps closer, lowering his voice. “I don’t know what to say. I came as soon as I heard.”

Gregory died two weeks ago.

“Where
were
you guys?” Lara asks, as if we’ve done something wrong.

“Tyler, this is Andy,” Paige says, raising both our hands together in the air like I’m a prizefighter. “This … this is the man who kicked your scrawny little ass in the contest for my love.”

She doesn’t say that last part.

Tyler reaches over to shake my right hand, but Paige hasn’t let go, so I’m forced to reach out to him with my left hand and squish together his fingers all unmasculine-like.

“Hi, Tyler Rich.”

To Paige and Lara, he’s Tyler. To me, he’ll always be Tyler Rich.

“Andrew was two years behind us,” Lara jogs his memory. “You remember senior year: he was there when Manny Milken creamed Paige in the face with that football.”

“It wasn’t Manny’s fault,” Paige corrects her. “And Andy got hurt, too.”

Enough about me.
I squeeze her hand tightly.

“Nice to see you again, Andy. After all that, who would have thought you two would end up together,” Tyler Rich concludes. “This really is incredible news.”

“It’s really not news at all,” I inform him. “Paige and I have been dating for, like, ten months and a week.”
What am I, three and three-quarters years old?
I want to add that we’re engaged, but I’m not sure we are.

“So how long you back for?” Paige wonders out loud.

“Maybe for good,” he informs us.

“Tyler’s renting a luxury houseboat at the marina,” Lara coos.

Lame-o-rama.

“A forty-footer,” she adds. “He gave me a walk-through this evening.”

I’m sure he did.

“What’s the boat’s name again?” Lara begs.

“The
Lobsta Mobsta,”
he crows.

Lara thinks that’s hilarious.

“Does it run on vegetable oil?” I ask him.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s just I saw your veggie machine in the driveway and I didn’t think forty-foot houseboats were exactly eco-friendly.”

“Go Andy Altman,” Tyler cheers. “Just for that, I’m going to buy some carbon credits online. You know it’s important that we all take steps to minimize our carbon footprint.”

Lara nods.

This guy is full of greenhouse gas.

“You three are invited over for dinner anytime. I’ve got plenty of room. The place sleeps six,” he says.

We’ll pass, cabin boy.

I grab Paige’s wrist with my free hand, and I extricate my crushed hand from her death grip. She doesn’t even seem to notice.

“I’d love to,” Paige says. “Right now, though, we have so much to do, settling Dad’s affairs and all.”

Lara shakes her head. “Sis, you’re being a bad host. Sit!” Lara directs Paige. “The guy’s been waiting here for you for like an hour.”

“More like thirty minutes,” Tyler Rich corrects her.

Tyler Rich tells us about how he dropped out of Cal State Sonoma after his sophomore year to work as a copywriter at an Internet startup company in San Jose called Sort. The company invented a search engine that could list your search engine results starting with the most recently added links. It was such a good idea that Google gobbled up the company laying off—but paying out—all of its employees.

Tyler Rich has never had to worry about money but Sort’s golden parachute gave him permission to spend a few years roaming the Earth. As I listen to him babble on about months of living off the fat of the land, sleeping in the wilderness, and hitchhiking through Washington State, he sounds less like a mountain man and more like a homeless one. And still, the Day sisters are completely enamored with Tyler Rich’s au naturel lifestyle.

“A few weeks back, it felt like it was time to come home,” he informs us.

I thought you rushed back as soon as you heard about Gregory.

Job-wise, Tyler Rich tells us he’s weighing his options: the
San Francisco Bay Guardian
is looking for a new “greener living” blogger, and the Bay Area cooperative, Rainbow Grocery, is accepting applications at its new Berkeley location. Tyler Rich has the
Lobsta Mobsta
through the end of August.

The phone in the kitchen starts ringing. Nobody makes a move.

“I should go,” he tells us, reaching for his jacket. “Lara caught me up on her life. We’ve hardly seen each other since …”

“Prom.” Lara remembers affectionately.

The telephone keeps ringing.

“I’d love to get an update on your world, Pay Day. But you probably have plenty of things to do … like answering that phone.”

“Andrew, would you do me a
huge
favor and grab that,” Lara asks politely. “We’ve received three hang-ups since I got home and there were four more on the answering machine. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

I fling her a curt “sure” and head for the kitchen, snapping up the phone seconds before Gregory’s answering machine does.

“Hello?” I roar into the receiver.

The breathing at the other end is slow and heavy.

“Hello?”

More breathing.

“This is the part where you hang up on me,” I remind the caller.

“Oh Andy sorry I got distracted,” Sid says, his voice shakier than usual.

“Hey, there. Everything okay?”

“Dandy. What’s with you?”

I peek into the living room. Tyler’s got the Day sisters giddy with laughter.

“I’m about to be blindsided for the second time tonight,” I mutter.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing. What can I do you for?” I stay as upbeat as possible.

“I’m fresh out of cholesterol medication and Cookie won’t give it a rest. Any chance I could persuade you to make a late-night run to the pharmacy?”

I’m about to say yes when I hear Gregory’s voice: dispensing medical advice or medication without supervision is a no-no for a pharmacy technician. I check my watch. It’s after 10:00
P.M.
Every thing’s closed.

“Gee, Sid,” I begin, studying the three of them in the living room.

“You’d really be helping me out,” Sid urges.

“What if I grabbed you
one
pill, just to get you through the night, but tomorrow we switch your prescription over to the Walgreens in Benicia. Okay?”

“Whatever you say, chief.”

“I can get to the pharmacy and back in, say, fifteen minutes?”

“Why don’t I meet you there? It’s a beautiful night and I could use some fresh air. Give me twenty minutes. I need to finish watching
Antiques Roadshow
—Cookie’s convinced the remnant collecting oil underneath our car in the garage is a priceless Navajo blanket. Are you sure you won’t be missed?”

“Positive,” I say, studying the reunion. “Good,” he adds. “We need to talk.”

THERE are boxes everywhere. The pharmacy was closed a full week before I realized Manny Milken was storing all of our deliveries at his mother’s condo. In return for subletting the space, the Milkens helped themselves to some of our inventory. Manny thinks I won’t miss the rolls of toilet paper, vials of mineral oil, or bottles of shampoo, but I will gladly add Manny to Lara’s collections list.

With the future of Day’s Pharmacy in question I figure it’s pointless to bother restocking the shelves. For now, I simply place the new toiletries in the appropriate aisles next to their displayed brothers and sisters. If I were a guessing man, I’d say we end up returning most of this stuff.

Our medicine shelves are bare. We’re fresh out of Sid’s cholesterol medication, but we may have a new sealed supply in the back.

Lara’s stink is everywhere. Along every countertop, there are small mounds of paper: Bank of the West, Bank of America, Citibank, GM, and MBNA—each one of Gregory’s credit cards gets its own pile. Some of our biggest debtors have stacks, too.

The largest pile is simply labeled “Dad” and includes all sorts of medical records, insurance forms, and doctor’s prescriptions.

I am no closer today than I was two weeks ago to understanding why Gregory wanted me to wait to ask Paige to marry me. I may never know. Maybe it had something to do with all his money problems, maybe he never thought I was worthy enough for his daughter, or maybe there’s a clue in this neatly assembled stack.

It feels less intrusive if I flip through his papers quickly. Nothing really jumps out at me. You spend ten months with a guy in a pharmacy and you quickly get to know what sort of pills he’s popping. Sprays, capsules, inhalers—Dr. Brandon Mills was prescribing Gregory anything he could to help the Mayor of Pomona Street breathe. Gregory was also taking Lanicor, which is no shocker: you can’t swing a dead cat in Crockett without hitting someone on anticholesterol medication.

Which reminds me, I still need to find Sid that pill.

At the end of the aisle, I find lots more of Lara’s handiwork. She’s co-opted five new whiteboards from Aisle Two and hung them along the back wall where there’s room to walk. On each board she’s pasted dozens of insurance forms, co-payment records, and prescriptions. She’s drawn Magic Marker lines connecting people as if she’s mapping out some sort of terrorist network. I’ve seen Lara pace back and forth past this display, narrowing down her suspects. Lara is a determined woman. She’ll crack this case. Collar her old man. She’s already got some strong leads.

I study the scraps, scribbles, and dot-matrix printouts. I’m equally enamored and sickened by Lara’s masterpiece. I hate being the designated muscle around here: the guy charged with knocking over walkers, kicking out canes, breaking hips, sending a clear message to the community.

I grab a sealed, commercial-sized plastic bottle of Lanicor out of a box on the floor and head back down the aisle, inadvertently plowing into a delicately stacked pile of unopened packages. I inspect one. It’s one of those packages Gregory used to get, wrapped in brown paper, with no postage and no return address.

There is a large box nearby addressed to the pharmacy, in care of Sidney Brewster. Wrapped a dozen different ways with black electrical tape, the package is about the size and weight of a small boat engine. I slide it across the honeycomb tile floor with the side of my foot. The floor is uneven, and as it drops two inches, it sandwiches and crushes my flip-flop-exposed pinky toe. There is a short delay before the pain signal hits my brain.

“Son of a—” I scream.

“Gun?” Sid lip-synchs from the sidewalk, pantomiming a gun with his fingers.

The bell jingles as Sid pushes open the door. This is the first time we’ve both been back in the pharmacy since Gregory died.

I rub my toe in agony. He shakes his head.

“What sort of clown are you?” Sid asks.

“I dunno, the sad hobo type,” I guess. “It’s
your
freaking fault. Now my toe’s broken. This big, stupid package has your name on it.”

I hop over two aisles, grab an instant cold pack, and crack it in half. If only I could sue my employer for worker’s compensation.

“Who’s David Bloomington?” I yell as I bounce back over.

“You got me,” he says, putting his nose right up to the box to read the label. “Oh, you mean David
Wallingford
from Blooming-ton, Indiana.”

Like that helps. He kicks the box with his safely protected sneaker.

“I bought this for you,” he announces. “Get some scissors.”

I cut away all the tape, tear the box open, blindly jab both hands into the Styrofoam peanuts, and pull out a red GE canister vacuum.

“Seven bucks!” he exclaims, as I fish out the hose, nozzles, and dusting brush accessories. “You’d be amazed what some people auction online.”

“I thought Cookie cut you off from eBay?”

“Why do you think I shipped it here,” he says tapping his temple.

“Operation Jet Stream take two?” I ask.

“Bingo!” There still may be hope for our bladeless windshield wipers after all.

I hop behind the counter, drop the ice pack on the floor, and step on it lightly, to relieve the swelling. My pinky and big toe are about the same size now. It may be broken—it’s so hard to tell with pinkies.

I pop a single cholesterol pill in a small bottle, fasten the plastic
top tightly, and hand it to Sid. But before I let go, I warn him, “The first hit is free. But after that, you come to me. Got that, buddy? You want your fix,
you come to Andy.”

Sid is not entertained.

“Tomorrow we’ll call Walgreens in Benicia and get you the rest of your refill,” I say.

“What’s all this?” Sid asks, changing the topic.

He’s poking through one of Lara’s little piles of paper on the counter.

“Evidence from a crime scene,” I confess. “Lara’s on to you. Your tab and Cookie’s put you on Lara’s most wanted list.”

“I suspected this might happen,” he says. “Let me explain.”

“No need, I’m the thug tasked with collecting, and in my book, Brewster, we’re even Steven.”

“That’s not it, I want to explain about the hang-ups at the house.”

I’m confused.

“That was you?”

“No.”

“Oh, then you know about the creditors?”

“Those aren’t creditors. At least not all of them,” he says confidently. “I also know about what happened tonight on Eckley.”