Shelter (24 page)

23

             
Alma was roused from sleep by the feel of a hand settling on her hip. A bristly chin grazed the side of her neck, lips tickled at her skin. She stirred and pressed back against the solid, warm body behind her. “Carlos,” she murmured, and that was when the dream dissolved and she woke, truly this time.

             
She rolled over onto her back and reached across the bed. It was empty, save for her, the sheets around her cool. The neighboring pillow smooth – no indentation to indicate that her lover had been sleeping beside her.

             
Where once she had dreamt of Sam sliding into bed behind her, the dark figure who came to her in her sleep was Carlos now. She rationalized by saying that her body missed him and that, in sleep, she forgot his monstrous offense. But most of her dreams weren’t even sexual. They were in front of the TV, or eating dinner, or just riding around in his car. She missed him, and that frightened her.

             
First light was just brushing the undersides of the clouds – she could tell, even from her bed, that it was going to be a gloomy, winter day – and even though she didn’t have to go into work, Diane was coming over to help with the nursery again.

             
Her mother hadn’t said a word about Carlos: no
I told you so
, no disapproving glances. And Alma hadn’t elaborated. The shameful truth was not something she’d ever be willing to discuss. She had only one avenue now: earn a living for herself and prepare for the arrival of her son. There were no options: get tough or die trying.

             
When Diane knocked on the front door at ten – she refused to use the carport entry – Alma was surprised to find that she wasn’t alone.

             
A tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed man who looked about her own age stood behind Diane on the front stoop, looking more than a little uncomfortable with his hands jammed in his pockets. He had the chiseled features of an Abercrombie model, and though Alma couldn’t place him, she thought he looked vaguely familiar.

             
“Hi, sweetie,” Diane greeted. She gestured over her shoulder. “You remember Jamie Henderson.”

             
“No I don’t.”

             
The guy, Jamie, twitched in obvious discomfort.

             
“Yes you do. You two went to high school together.” Her glare said
you better remember him
. “We need strong male arms to help us hang the mirror today.”

             
Alma searched her memory banks and thought that she might have remembered a Spanish or Algebra or English class with this just-like-all-the-others pretty boy in a Polo shirt. She smelled a rat: a big one. She shrugged. “Um, Mom, where did you happen to run into Jamie?”

             
“At Target,” she said brightly. “He was with his father – you remember Mr. Henderson from our Christmas party last year – and we were catching up and turns out, Jamie had the day off from work, so I asked if he’d be ever so polite and help us out today.”

             
An image of Diane dragging this poor dude out of Target, all the while regaling him with tales of her beautiful, pregnant, single daughter popped into Alma’s head, and it was all she could do not to roll her eyes. “Come on in,” she stepped aside and held the door open. “Jamie, can I get you anything.”

             
“Uh…” he took an obscenely long time wiping the soles of his casual boots on the front mat. “Nah. Nah, I’m good.”

             
Diane breezed through the living room. “Even better if you hadn’t run into her,” Alma muttered under her breath, and his baby blues goggled out of his head. “Sorry,” she told Jamie. “But you have no idea what you just signed on for.”

**

Carlos kept busy one-hundred percent of the time. The loss of the Flannery’s gig wasn’t impactful because he had thrown himself into his Good & Green job, his workouts, his dealings with Sean and all the travel in between.

             
He didn’t think about Alma, because that was a level of pain that would leave him huddled on the floor, drowned in liquor. He had shoved her away into a locked compartment in his head, didn’t let her name run through his thoughts, didn’t conjure up images of her in his mind, didn’t wake in a cold sweat in the middle of the night after a nightmare in which he’d stumbled across her broken, lifeless body in a puddle of blood. Nope, he didn’t think about her at all.

             
Today, his Good & Green crew was laying sprinkler system at Dolman Plantation. By all rights, they should have been done with the subdivision weeks before, but their foremen were stalling, dragging things out, using the weather as an excuse. It upped the hours, which upped the pay considerably. And Carlos didn’t care. As he pushed thin PVC pipes through the dirt with gloved hands, he could have been doing just about anything so long as it didn’t involve a lot of mental effort on his part.

             
“Where’s the pump?” Salvador asked from a few feet away as he pawed through the soft earth they’d tilled up.

             
“Over there somewhere.”

             
“Where?”

             
“Salvador!” Carlos snapped before he could stop himself. He didn’t even feel bad as he torqued around and glared at his fellow landscaper. “Can you not just shut the fuck up? Huh? Figure it out for your goddamn self!”

             
His coworker blinked, face blank. “Dude, are you gettin’ high off your own supply? What is
with you
?”

             
As always the dipshit couldn’t keep from bringing up the drugs when he shouldn’t have. In his lame attempt to be cool, Salvador was gonna get his ass canned. “Shut it,” he hissed.

             
There was a pause, and Carlos thought maybe he’d finally gotten through to the other guy, but then he heard boots thump over toward him, and when Salvador next spoke, he was right next to him.

             
“You know what I heard? Dolman, as in
Dolman Plantation
Dolman, he’s big in the trade, bro. You know,
your trade
.”

             
Carlos whipped his head around and saw that the guy was grinning like a cat with a canary.

             
“That it? You workin’ for the big boss man?”

             
“Leave me alone,” he said, and resumed his task, but his pulse thumped loud in his ears.

**

“I don’t know what we would have done without you!” Diane exclaimed in a voice that Ava knew was all for effect.

             
Jamie, who Alma still didn’t remember, had just hung the wide mirror up along the far nursery wall, the purpose of which was to enable Alma to see baby Sam via his reflection without having to step into the room. She thought that was a poor excuse; really, Diane had just loved the mirror and wanted to give it to her. But no gift was ever a gift, it was always something practical.

             
Jamie blushed at the praise and stuck his hands in his back pockets, eyes swinging over toward Alma again like they kept doing ever since she’d brought him a Coke earlier.

             
“Mom,” she bit back a sigh. “Can you help me with something in the kitchen, please?”

             
“We’ll be right back, dear,” she told Jamie. “Why don’t you see if you can get that top shelf put up.”

             
The short walk to the kitchen made Alma wonder if the house was large enough to have a private conversation that wasn’t heard by all, but at this point, she didn’t much care. As she walked around her round table and put her back to the counter, arms folded, it was all she could do to lever some patience into her voice. “Mom.”

             
Diane wore a carefully blank expression, though she had to know what this was about.

             
“What, exactly, is going on here? You just bring a total stranger into my house? And on top of that, I think you’re trying to hook us up!” the last was said in an urgent whisper.

             
The façade dissolved and her mother sighed. “Not a stranger, Alma, don’t be dramatic. We needed someone tall today, admit that.”

             
She conceded with a tight nod.

             
“And, well, it’s difficult for a single mother to make ends meet - ”

             
“Oh, Mom!” Alma scolded. “Really?”

             
“You’re done with Carlos, you said so.”

             
“So that means I’ll just hop right into bed with this douchebag?”

             
“Language!” Diane pointed a stern finger at her. Then she sighed, shoulders slumping. “I try so hard to be a good mother…” she took a deep breath, closed her eyes and moment. When she opened them, the fire had bled out of them. “You were very…quick…to seek comfort in Carlos. I only thought…”

             
Alma felt her gut tighten, her pulse picked up. “That I was only lonely,” she said, no longer angry, but overcome with a stinging, heavy tidal wave of sadness. “That I was with him because I didn’t want to be alone.”

             
Diane gave a tiny nod.

             
She heaved a sigh. How could this be explained? How did she convey those lingering looks from her teenage years, one hot kiss out back in the garden, all those ways in which he’d been her connection to Sam? It wasn’t about Sam, though, not really.

             
“I don’t mind being alone,” Alma said quietly, more to herself than to her mother. This sudden realization brought with it a whole new kind of grief, one unrelated to death. “Carlos wasn’t just company, he…I love him.”

**

“Dolman?” Carlos demanded as Sean climbed down out of his Escalade that night, wool coat whipping around his legs like a cape. The Christmas lights along the gutter of the Rite Aid across the street were reflected in the SUV’s shiny surface. “
Marty fucking Dolman
?”

             
Sean’s response was a quick jab with a gloved fist that hit him along the side of his jaw, sent his head cracking to the side and had him landing on his ass in the street. “Get up,” the dealer hissed, grabbing his jacket collar the next second and hauling him to his feet.

             
The punch might as well have been a stray leaf brushing against him. Carlos was running off full adrenaline tonight, and he was surprised what kind of a high that was: almost as good as the real thing. His jaw, though, was feeling the effects as he struggled to get it working and form a response.

             
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he growled, straightening his jacket and brushing dirt off his ass.

             
A car whizzed past them, dangerously close, its headlights bathing them in yellow light, and Sean stepped between the back bumper of the Escalade and the car behind it. His expression was tight. When he leaned in close, his breath was hot on Carlos’s face. “I been real easy on you, Carlos, and maybe I feel bad about Sam, but you do not say shit like that all big and loud for the world to hear. You understand me?”

             
Carlos glared back at him. “Is it true?”

             
Sean’s eyes shifted over, then back. “Dunno.”

             
“You know what happens when the cops go after guys like Dolman? And they
do
go after guys like Dolman.”

             
“Shut the fuck up.”

             
“Problem, gentlemen?”             

             
Carlos glanced over toward the sidewalk, saw Sean turn to do the same, and hoped that Sal had just walked up, and that he hadn’t been standing there for the whole exchange.

             
“No,” Sean said as he turned toward the punk who was now his boss, the picture of suave calm now. The man was a fantastic actor, a trait which Carlos was a bit jealous of. “Good evening.”

             
“You two ready?”

             
Carlos trailed along behind them as they set off down the sidewalk, all with hands in coat pockets, shoulders hitched up against the bite of the December breeze that whistled along in front of the buildings.

             
They were amongst high-rise business buildings not too far from Centennial Olympic Park, though at this late hour, none of their fellow pedestrians were businesspeople: dinner-goers, shoppers, a varied mix of couples, groups and singles, all the layers of the socioeconomic scale displayed in clothes, shoes and accents. There were no offices on the ground level along the sidewalk, but lobbies and parking garages whose yawning maws were blocked by striped arms and orange cones, the offices above all shut down for the night. It was a little eerie: the kind of atmosphere that fostered vandals and evil-doers. Then, Carlos realized with a jolt,
he
was one of those evil-doers now. He was the kind of guy who frightened passersby now.