The Garden of Last Days (12 page)

“I can’t let you leave without signing a release.”

“Fine.” Her soiled tennis shoes were side by side on the floor and she pushed one foot in, then the other, sitting on the bed to tie them. She was breathing hard and sweating a bit, but it felt good to breathe, to move.

“Mrs. Hanson?” the young nurse said. “Your insurance probably won’t pay for this now. You should know that.”

For once her voice wasn’t too loud or condescending. She simply sounded concerned, and Jean touched her hand briefly. “I have more money than I know what to do with, dear. Money’s not my problem.”

The nurse nodded and smiled, looking mildly embarrassed. “I hope someone’s picking you up, though. You can’t drive with the medication I gave you.”

Jean glanced down at the bedsheet, the two pills lost in its folds somewhere. “I have to take a cab anyway. I appreciate your concern, dear. I really do.”

Jean sat in the rear of the cab as the driver drove too fast up Tamiami. He was an older man, maybe ten years younger than she, and he wore a bandanna around his head, a short gray ponytail in back. He chewed gum and had turned on the radio as soon as they’d gotten under way, a jazz station. It sounded like Chet Baker. Harry had loved jazz, and if she recognized any of its music it was solely because of him.

How strange to be sitting in the back of a moving taxicab with nothing—no purse, no driver’s license or credit cards, no cash, no car keys. She could be anyone going anywhere and when she got there who knows what would become of her? Her dress was still unbuttoned at the back of her neck and she let it stay that way; tonight her entire life felt unbuttoned. She couldn’t remember if she’d ever done anything like she’d done just now, disobeyed people in charge of her, unhitched their tethers and just did what she damn well pleased.

Again, there was the resurfacing thought that she’d lived such a safe and small life, her years before Harry taken up with caring full-time for her ailing father, who, like her husband, had left her comfortable and in need of nothing. Until she met Harry at a symphony fund-raiser when she was thirty-six, she’d filled her time serving on boards conserving trees and wildlife in far reaches of the country, establishing a fund for the widows of policemen and firefighters, building a new wing onto the Children’s Hospital; she went to lunches with friends, read classic works from Proust to García Márquez; she spent occasional Sunday afternoons at the Chicago Museum of Art taking in what she could, though she was drawn largely to the Impressionists, especially Monet.

Baker’s voice was high and melodious as a woman’s. It was sweet to hear as they drove along the black water. On the other side of it, a quarter or half mile, were the lights of the houses on Siesta Key. Palm trees leaned out over lawns and lighted docks where boats were tied. Beyond these was the public beach where April took Franny nearly every day to play in sugar sand and swim in the Gulf. Franny had asked Jean many times to come with them and April had smiled and echoed her daughter’s invitation but Jean had always declined, certain that April was just being polite and would rather she not come.

“Sir, when we get there, you’ll have to wait while I run inside for my wallet.”

He glanced in the rearview mirror at her, a flash of concern in his eyes.

“I took an ambulance. Didn’t have time to grab anything.”

He turned down the radio. “You all right?”

“Oh, I believe so. They told me themselves I hadn’t had a heart attack.”

“
Heart
attack?”

“Yes.”

“You have chest pain?”

“Oh yes.”

“It go up your arm and all that?”

“Yes, it did.”

“You sure you didn’t have a heart attack?”

“It was a different kind of attack. I get them sometimes.”

Now on the radio were strings and a tenor saxophone, Charlie Parker, it sounded like. As they drove north the cabbie was studying her in his rearview mirror, and Siesta Key ran itself out into the black Gulf just before the southern tip of Lido Key, Rex’s Marina there, its parking lot crowded with luxury cars, the entire nautical structure beyond lit up in a soft turquoise light. She and Harry had eaten there years earlier. She remembered the bottle of Pinot Grigio they’d shared, his shrimp scampi, her fettucine Alfredo.

“What’s one of those like?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your attacks. Mind if I ask what they’re like?”

“Oh. It’s silly really. Every little detail gets big as a barn and it feels like they’ll all just fall down on you and crush you to death.”

He nodded. His curiosity seemed satisfied, and he slowed at the traffic light and turned right onto Buena Vista without signaling with his blinker. He flicked the radio back up, the horns and drums of a band of men from sixty years ago. Jean pressed her window button and let in the warm air. She could smell boat fuel and the Gulf and grilling meat from somewhere. She was suddenly famished, but eating would have to wait: she began to see herself driving to the place where April worked, walking in and finding that house mom, packing Franny up and taking her home.
Home
.

APRIL HELD BOTH
snifters in her left hand. She stuck the foreigner’s change into her G-string, grabbed the chilled neck of the opened Moët, and made her way through the hazy lights of the VIP. Business had picked up a bit and she had to scoot by the new girl dancing badly for one of Sadie’s regulars. There were other girls dancing for other men and April hurried past them all, the Rémy Martins sloshing gently in their snifters, the Moët cold against her leg.

Her customer sat forward on the sofa talking fast and loud on a cell phone he pressed to his ear with two fingers. In his other hand was a smoldering cigarette, its ash an inch long. His cash lay on the table. Two or three thousand easy. He barely looked at her as she placed the cognacs and change in front of him, and he shook his head and said something in a language that wasn’t French or Italian or Greek, she knew that much. She stepped back out for the champagne she’d had
to put on the floor to get the door open, and because he was so preoccupied she cut down the hall and pulled the front door shut too, the music not so loud now, the air more muted than before.

He was still on the phone when she closed the door behind her. He nodded at whatever was being said on the other end, his eyes on her crotch and belly as she carried the full bottle, filled his flute and hers, and wedged it into the ice. Her skirt and blouse were neatly folded and lay across his arm of the couch. She didn’t like customers touching her costume like that, especially this one, and she wanted them back on her side of the sofa. He glanced up at her face. She smiled and sat on the edge of the cushion and took a long, cool drink of her Moët & Chandon.

He spoke more quietly on his phone now. So many of the sounds of his language came from his throat. April thought of Morocco, Algiers, Lebanon—places like that. He reached for his Rémy. She watched the bubbles of his champagne rise to the surface. There was her boss, Fuad, at the Subway shop in New Hampshire where she wore latex gloves all day and made sandwiches for businessmen and construction workers and a few women from the Empire across the highway. He was big and bald and would find an excuse to come behind the counter and pretend to look for something, pressing himself against her whenever he could. He knew she had Franny and was divorced, something she told him in her interview because he’d asked.

“Why did you leave this father?”

“I didn’t say I left him.”

“But what man would leave
you
?” He looked long at her, at her eyes, her hair, her breasts. He hired her at $7.50 an hour to work from ten to six-thirty every day while her baby stayed with her mother, who made it known she’d already raised her kids and wasn’t up to raising another.
This is just temporary, April, right?
And the strippers from the Empire never liked to be called that but there was this nice one who had to be thirty-five with the curves of a twenty-year-old—high fake breasts, firm legs, and long blond hair, fake too. Whenever she came in to eat, usually at five o’clock before her shift across the highway,
she smiled at April. She’d order turkey, lettuce, and tomato on a low-fat wrap with mustard—no mayo. She wore expensive gold rings and bracelets and she’d reach into a Gucci handbag to pay, always tipping April three dollars for a five-dollar meal. One afternoon in October she looked into her eyes as she handed her the money.

“I hope you know how pretty you are.”

April smiled. She knew it and didn’t know it. Not since Glenn and having the baby, and hearing it from this generous woman wearing so much gold, a woman it was hard not to stare at, felt good and she thanked her and went to making her sandwich. Fuad came out of his office then. He always did when the woman was there. He smelled like breath mints and he squeezed behind April to talk to the woman over the counter, his big body blocking April’s route to the lighted bins of sliced turkey and shredded lettuce.

“Hallo, Summer. Very nice to see you again.”

Summer chatted with him, smiling and brushing her hair back off her shoulder. April squeezed past Fuad to make the sandwich. He didn’t move and she felt him against her ass, him and the keys and coins in his pocket. She made the sandwich quickly. Soon Summer sat at her table by the window, Fuad rubbed by April on his way to the office, and April left the prep area and served her turkey wrap.

April turned to leave, and the woman touched her wrist. “If you’re gonna get treated like that, you should get paid for it, honey.” She nodded in the direction of the office. “I get fifty up front before I let ’em get that close. And look at you; Jesus, you could make a ton over there. A
ton
.”

It was dark already, the parking lot dimly lit by a few leaning streetlamps. On the concrete overpass was the speeding glare of headlights, and under it, on the other side of the highway, the purple neon glow of the club where Summer worked.

“What does your tag say?”

“April.”

“Look, April, you’d make a bundle over there, honey.” She bit into her wrap, chewed thoughtfully, shook her head. “More in one night
than two weeks working for that one.” She nodded in the direction of Fuad’s office. The door was parted, the bright fluorescent tube over the prep area buzzing. “I’m serious.”

April felt her face warming. She didn’t know what to say and was grateful when a group of high school kids clambered in. She smiled down at Summer, who smiled back, dabbing away a fleck of mustard from the corner of her lip. “My real name’s Stephanie. Think about it.”

April couldn’t
stop
thinking about it. What she’d said about money anyway. After her shift, she drove home to her mother’s in South Hooksett to the same house on Rowe’s Lane where she was raised. There used to be fields and woods on both sides of the road but now they were gone, sold off to developers who’d built dozens of houses there. All the same size and shape, two-and-a-half-story rectangular boxes with gable roofs, each with a round window centered under the front ridge, each sided with clapboards painted in shades that varied only slightly from gray to sage to steel blue. There was a deck built onto the rear of the houses which overlooked square yards seeded with green grass and surrounded by fences or hedges, and they were not ugly homes, April thought, but their exact sameness was and she’d always figured if she ever had the down payment to buy one that she’d paint it red, build a deck in the front, take out the round window and put in an oval, something—anything—to stand out more. And that night in October, driving past the new homes in what were once meadows of long grass and purple loosestrife and tall stands of pines behind three-hundred-year-old stone walls, she couldn’t stop hearing that woman’s voice in her head.
More in one night than two weeks working for that one
.

How much
was
that? Because before taxes, Fuad paid her three hundred dollars a week. Could she make twice that in one
night
? How could that be possible? How could anyone make that much money? But there was all that jewelry this Stephanie wore, her clothes and shoes and handbag, the new Acura she’d park out front where she could see it from the window.

The club was tucked away on the other side of an overpass: it could be a secret thing she did for just a short time. Just till she’d made enough to leave the house she’d had to return to, to leave her dried-up, bitchy old mother who’d never seemed to like being a mother in the first place. April thought of her dad, dead ten years—what would he say? Though he never did say much. He was big on praying at dinner and at bedtime, big on running his printing company and spending the weekend away from home doing whatever he did. If his spirit saw her in such a place, would he care?

Would she care herself? She didn’t know. She’d never been inside a place like the Empire, just seen a few movies where there were scenes of women dancing naked onstage for men seated politely in tables below. The lights were always dimmed and the women moved up there like teasing cats, cash stuffed into their garter belts. She imagined herself up there. She’d had to wean Franny early so she could work, and her breasts had only just begun to lose their milk-heaviness. Her belly was flat again but with looser skin. She’d have to look better before she took off her clothes for strangers, a thought that turned her on a little bit—it did. Not about being naked but in breaking a rule flat out. Like doing something wrong just to do it. Like quitting high school and never going back. Getting shit jobs like this. Spending too much time in bars and pubs and sometimes waking up with someone at his place. And the money. How else could she get that kind of money?