Stranger (40 page)

“Excuse me,” I told him. “But I don’t exactly think you’re the dude to be giving me advice about getting along with my father.”

Sam said nothing, and instant regret flooded me. We stared at each other across the room.

I hadn’t stopped wanting him to put his arms around me and make me feel better.

He cracked open the fridge and pulled out another beer. It was my turn to make a bitchface. There was no way he could’ve missed it. I felt the frown on my mouth and the corners of my eyes.

“Get off my back,” Sam warned, though I hadn’t said anything. Defiantly he unscrewed the bottle top and drank. “Your dad wanted to give you money. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“The big deal is,” I said, “that he was giving it to me to pay for you.”

Sam’s bottle paused at his mouth. “Come again?”

“My dad thinks I hired you.”

“For what?” Sam put the bottle down, finally.

I sighed and crossed to him. “Because he found some stuff on my computer that made him think you were a gigolo.”

Sam laughed. “Why would your dad think I was a gigolo?”

“Because,” I said with another sigh, “I spent a lot of money on rentboys and he found out, and he assumed you were one.”

Sam’s smile looked strained. “You spent a lot of money on rentboys.”

“Yes.”

Sam went back to drinking his beer. I leaned against the kitchen table, directly across from him. He moved his legs so we didn’t touch.

“What does that mean, exactly?” he said at last.

“It means that I used to hire men to go on dates with me.”

Sam took a long, silent pull on his bottle and put it down. Another dead soldier. He wiped the back of his mouth. “Just for dates?”

“Sometimes.” I put my hands flat on my stomach, wishing I didn’t feel so much like I might vomit. Or scream. Or cry.

“And sometimes…?”

“Why don’t you just ask me what you want to know, Sam.”

“Grace,” Sam said. “Why don’t you just tell me.”

“Yes. I fucked them sometimes, too. More than just sometimes. A lot of times.”

Sam pulled another beer from my fridge. The last one, I thought. He rolled it in his palms before opening it. I really hoped he wouldn’t, but he did after a minute.

“That guy you were with at the Firehouse?”

“Jack. Yes.”

“Fucking hell.” Sam looked sick. He hadn’t started on the beer, at least. “For how long?”

“A few months.”

I could see him turning the idea over in his mind. He drank silently. I pulled a cola from the fridge to drink myself, hoping it would settle my stomach.

“Jesus,” he said after some long minutes of silence. “You’ve been fucking him since we met?”

“Since after we met. Before him it was a few others. But Sam,” I said, pleading, “not since we’ve been together.”

He pulled his arm away when I tried to touch him. “You just said you started with him after we met.”

“But we weren’t together—”

“We were together the first night we met!” he shouted.

Sam is big. Angry Sam was bigger. He loomed over me, and I shrank back instinctively though I wasn’t afraid he was going to hurt me.

Sam was also smart. “That night. I didn’t just get lucky.”

“No. I was there to meet an escort. A stranger.”

He muttered something in disgust and pulled away from me, turning. “Fucking hell, Grace. What the fuck? Why?”

“Because it was safer!” I shouted. “Safer than picking up a real stranger!”

“Safer than having a real boyfriend?” he retorted.

I’d been quivering with rage earlier, but now I shook with a combination of anger and dismay. “Yes.”

“So what happened?” Sam challenged. “Why pay for the milk when you can fuck the cow for free?”

“It wasn’t like that!”

He shrugged and drank, and I wanted to slap the bottle from his hand. “I’m a lot cheaper.”

“Stop it, Sam.”

He finished the last beer and put the bottle in the sink. “So tell me, then, why?”

“You kept calling me.” It sounded lame. “And I liked talking to you.”

“So it was easier for you? I get it now.”

“No! You’re not listening. Or maybe you’re too drunk,” I added.

Sam bristled. “You don’t think it was fate that brought me to you? The fact we met in a bar and had sex, then you turned out to be the person burying my dad? You don’t think that was some sort of…destiny?”

“I don’t believe in fate, Sam.”

“No,” he said slowly. “I guess you don’t.”

He went for the door and I watched him get there before I found my voice. “Where are you going?”

“Out.”

“Sam, don’t go. Please.” I tried to snag his shirtsleeve, but once again he pulled away from me.

“I can’t believe you thought I was a whore,” he said. “I can’t believe you never told me.”

“It wasn’t any of your business.” I knew at once it was the wrong thing to say.

Sam spoke without turning. “For months I called you. You knew I wanted to take you out.”

“But you didn’t, did you!” It was my turn to shout. “You’d call and flirt and then I wouldn’t hear from you for a week! You’re acting like we had this great thing going, Sam, but the fact is, I never knew what the hell was going on with you!”

“For months, Grace. And all that time you were paying some punk to get you off. All that time and you were fucking some other guy!”

“It’s not like I was cheating on you!” I cried.

“Well, that’s how it feels!” His hand turned the knob.

“You didn’t even know me, Sam.”

He turned to look at me at last as he opened the door. “I don’t think I know you now.”

I would not beg him to stay, so he didn’t. He left without closing the door behind him, and I watched him without following. I muttered a curse to an empty room and closed the door.

I tried calling Sam on his cell and at his mother’s, but nobody answered at either number.

For three days I tried before I stopped. On the fourth day, he called me.

“I’m at the police station.”

I’d just changed into my pajamas and popped some corn. I was going to indulge in a sappy chick-flick fest. It was already past 8:00 pm.

“What happened? Are you all right?”

“DUI,” Sam said after a pause. “Can you come pick me up? And post bail?”

I spilled my popcorn. “Yes. Of course. Oh, Sam—”

“Don’t. Please. Just come.”

Sam had been there for me once, when I needed him, and had come without question. I heard the same desperation in his voice. I was already looking for a pair of jeans and a T-shirt.

“Of course. Tell me what I need to do.”

He named a sum high enough to make my checkbook scream and gave me the address. I could make it in half an hour, and I prayed I wouldn’t get a death call.

Sam looked like hell and smelled worse. Dark circles shadowed his eyes and he looked as if he hadn’t shaved in a few days. His hair was matted and rumpled and not in the sexy, just-rolled-out-of-bed way I liked so well. They let me take him after I’d signed away practically my whole life and the lives of my unborn children.

He was quiet in the car and sat hunched in his seat, arms crossed and shirt collar pulled up high around his throat.

“Want me to turn up the heat?”

He shook his head. A few more miles down the road he asked me to pull over, and he got out of the car to be sick on the side of the road. The sound of retching made me gag, too. I didn’t get out to help him.

I didn’t take him back to my place, but rather to his mom’s. The dark house showed no signs of occupancy, and I remembered Dotty Stewart had gone on a cruise with her sister.

He didn’t ask me to come inside, just stumbled out of my car and into the house, but I followed. He went straight upstairs and into the shower. He was in there for a long time. When he came down to the kitchen, I’d made coffee. For myself, mostly, but he took some and sipped it as if he thought it might escape his stomach if he drank it too fast.

“They pulled me over on the way to the Firehouse,” he said, though I hadn’t asked. “Gave me a field sobriety test, which I passed, by the way.”

He put his face in his hands, the heels of his palms making cradles for his eyes. “Then they gave me a Breathalyzer. Which I didn’t.”

I held on to the edge of the table, tight, to keep myself from tumbling into the huge abyss that had suddenly yawned between us. “Why, Sam?”

Sam’s laugh hurt my ears. “Because I was drunk.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

He looked up then, into my eyes. “Because.”

“You couldn’t just talk to me?” My voice cracked. I was on my feet without realizing I’d stood, but I still gripped the table.

He didn’t nod or shake his head. He just looked away. “I lost my apartment in New York because I couldn’t make the rent. I had to ask my dad for money. He told me to come home if I had to. I didn’t come home until he was dying. When it was too late.”

I put my hand on his shoulder, and he didn’t pull away. Beneath my fingers his bones poked, sharp. The edges of his hair brushed the back of my hand.

“You can’t blame yourself.”

He looked up at me with an awful smile. “Yes, I can.”

I said his name like calling on a talisman, but this time it didn’t work. Sam got up from the table and poured his coffee down the sink. His shoulders hunched as he gripped the counter, facing away from me.

“I fucked up. I never got to show him I could make it, Grace. I never told him I was sorry for disappointing him. Nothing.”

I had known some of his regrets about his dad, but not how deep they went, or how he’d been trying to relieve them. “Maybe you need to talk to someone about this.”

Sam’s laugh broke in the middle. “Why? It won’t bring him back.”

“It might make you feel better than drinking does.”

“And it won’t get my ass tossed in jail, right?” He turned. “Won’t make me fuck up yet again, right?”

I didn’t answer that. I didn’t want to fight with him again. “I know how hard this must be for you.”

“Right. Because you see it all the time? Because it’s your job to make people feel better about death?”

“Because I care about you, Sam.”

He shook his head. “I can’t do this right now. Go home.”

“No.”

“Go home,” Sam said. “I don’t want to see you anymore.”

Of all the things I’d imagined might happen, that wasn’t one. “Why not?”

“Because it’s too hard,” Sam said without a trace of mockery or irony in his voice. “It’s too hard to disappoint you.”

“Why would you want to?” I cried, hating the tears in my voice.

“Because I’m really fucking good at it!” Sam turned again.

“Sam. Don’t do this. I love you.”

It was the first time I’d said it to him, and even I knew it was too late.

He shook his head, not turning. “You don’t really know me, either.”

“Why did you call me instead of Dan?”

“How do you know I didn’t try him first?”

I scowled. “Because even though your brother gives you a hard time, I know he would’ve helped you out. Why’d you call me, instead?”

“Because if my brother came for me, I’d have to pay him back. If you bailed me out, I figured I could work off the debt. Isn’t that how you like your men? Bought and paid for?”

“Fuck you, Sam,” I answered evenly.

“Did you cut the coupon out of the Sunday paper? I’m running a special.”

I crossed my arms over my chest. “That’s not funny or clever.”

“Damn,” Sam said. “There goes my career in stand-up.”

“Would it make you feel better if I’d fucked them for free?”

“Yes,” he replied. “I don’t know why, dammit, but yes.”

“I’m sorry it upsets you so much.” I sighed, exasperated.

“But not sorry you did it.”

“No, Sam. I’m not sorry I did it.”

He sighed, too, and bent to splash a few handfuls of cold water on his face. Dripping, he blew out water in a fine spray and hung over the sink for a minute. Then he cupped his hand to drink some water before turning off the faucet. He looked at me with water streaming down his face.

“Why did you do it? Why pay for it?”

“Because I’ve watched too many people crying, Sam. Because I didn’t want that to be me.”

“Good, then. You can go back to it now. Hell, I need some cash. Maybe I can get a job.

Use you as a reference.”

His words hurt, but I tried not to show it.

“Why did you spend all that time?” I didn’t really want an answer but asked anyway.

“Why bother with me? Was it a challenge or something? Why did you keep coming back all that time if you’re just going to throw it all away now?”

“I thought it would be worth it,” Sam said.

I had to swallow hard before I could answer. “And now you don’t? Because of decisions I made before I even met you?”

There was more to it, I was sure. More about his dad. His music. My sweet Sam was a bundle of issues he didn’t want to share.

“Look at it this way,” he said at last. “I’m giving you what you wanted. Now you don’t have to worry about crying.”

“It’s too late, Sam. I already am.”

For a minute, I thought he’d take me in his arms. That everything would be all right. I thought we’d work through this and come out stronger for it.

“Just pretend I’m still a stranger,” he said, and that was when I left.

I
t would be dramatic to say the earth stopped turning for me, or the sun stopped shining. I could say I plunged into a deep depression and couldn’t get out of bed, but that would be a lie. I didn’t have time not to function. Jared’s internship had ended and he’d passed his license test.

He’d accepted the job I’d offered him and would start after a month’s vacation. Good for him, bad for me. I still hadn’t decided about offering him a partnership.

Shelly, however, had quit. She and Jared had fought horrifically about the whole partnership thing, and she’d broken up with him. I hadn’t heard if she’d gone back to a smug and formerly forsaken Duane, but I was sure to find out sooner or later.

I stopped hoping each phone call I answered would be Sam after the second week, not because I didn’t want him to call, but because I had to force away the sadness and concentrate on my life. I cried, sometimes, but even the urge to do that faded every day.