To Protect & Serve (34 page)

“We’ve got 700 applications for 500 spots, no idea which came in first because someone forgot to put a registration date on the form, and two weeks to figure it all out.”

“Basically.”

“Where are the applications now?”

“Most of them are in my car.”

“Most of them?”

“Hey, I lugged two bags over here. I thought that was doing pretty good.”

Lisa exhaled slowly, feeling like the second coming might happen before she got to leave that office again. “Fine. Bring them up.”

Jeff was putting it off. He was putting everything off—life mostly. The ring, now lying on top of his dresser, wasn’t helping. It stared at him like a judge set to pronounce sentence at any moment. Still he couldn’t put it away. He’d tried. But even the darkness was sad without it lying there. So he had relented, and now it sat there—a permanent resident that was going nowhere.

The clock on the wall read 10:30. It was too late to call her. She was probably asleep anyway. However, that afternoon Hayes had asked and again Jeff had promised. Until then he had always been a man of his word—
always done what he said he’d do—no matter the cost to himself. But this cost seemed far too high a price to pay.

Trying to find something to do other than sit and watch the clock all night, he stood and went to the bathroom. The stubble on his face blared how pitifully he was managing without her, and although shaving at night seemed rather strange, he pulled out the razor anyway. There was no reason to look like the return of the wolfman even though that’s what he felt like.

The phone in the kitchen rang, and the razor slipped. “Ow! Crud!” Bright, red blood sprouted from the cut, and Jeff grabbed for tissue even as the phone rang again. He raced for it and grabbed it just before the answering machine did. “Hello?”

“You’re there,” the female voice said in surprise, and Jeff’s spirit lifted.

“Where else would I be?”

“I figured you were working,” she said, and his mind slipped across the fact that it wasn’t Lisa. “I was coming up with all these brilliant things to say to your answering machine.”

“Eve.”

“Yeah?”

He tried to push the disappointment down. “Oh.”

“What?” she asked with concern.

“N… nothing. I just thought you were… someone else.”

“And this someone else wouldn’t have light brown hair, nice legs, and wear a lot of dress suits, would she?”

The exhale was a little too loud. “Did you need something?”

“Oh, no you don’t. We were talking about you.”

“Not a good subject.”

“And Lisa?”

“Worse subject.”

“Oh, man, Jeff. What happened? Things were going so good.”

He sat down on the barstool heavily and dabbed at the cut on his chin. “Life. Life happened. Just like it always does.”

“So, what? You’re taking a break?”

“Yeah, a permanent one.”

“Permanent?”

“No seeing, no talking. Not for the last month at least.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“Do I sound okay with that?”

“No, you sound pathetic.”

“Yeah, that’s pretty close.”

“Well, then why don’t you call her?”

“Because I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“And that’s different… how?”

“Ha. Ha.”

“I’m not laughing.”

He wasn’t either. “No, really what were you calling for?”

She sighed. “To check on some friends who I was really hoping could cheer me up.”

“Oh, boy. You called the wrong place for that.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured that out.”

His brain enumerated the excuses of why he hadn’t called Eve even as his heart said there was no excuse. “So, how’re you doing?”

“I’ve been better. You know last weekend marked the eleventh week he’s been gone.”

It seemed like a blink to Jeff, and yet he knew for her… “What’re you doing Sunday?”

“Sunday? Not much I guess. Church with my parents at nine, football with my dad after.”

“How about I pick you up at noon, and we go do something?”

“Like what?”

“Your choice. I’m sick of looking at this place. Please, Eve. You’ll be doing me a favor.”

“What about Lisa?”

“What about her?” he asked, not seeing any connection.

“Are you going to call her?”

He dabbed at the drying wound on his chin but said nothing.

“I’ll make you a deal,” Eve said teasingly serious. “You call Lisa, and we’ll go out on Sunday.”

“But…”

“And don’t flake out on me either. I’m going to want details. Lots of details, and I will ask. Okay?” She waited. “Jeff?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Great. Then I’ll see you Sunday.”

When he hung up with Eve, Jeff sat looking at the phone, knowing if he walked away from it now, it would be Sunday before he got up the nerve to try again. With an exasperated sigh, he reached for the receiver, dialed her number, and waited until the answering machine had gotten all the way finished speaking before he hung up. Somehow he had forgotten how much he missed that voice. It wrapped around him like a warm, thick blanket on a cold, dreary night.

He looked at the clock and wondered what she was still doing at work. It was after eleven already. She was at work. He knew that much. “Work and home, that’s my life.” Words from a different lifetime floated through him, and he smiled sadly as they slid through his consciousness. Picking up the phone that time wasn’t nearly as hard as it had been the first. In fact, if he was honest, an illogical excitement snapped him into its clutches as his fingers dialed. He felt like he’d lost his mind, and yet he felt more sane than he had in a month.

Envelopes sat in incoherent stacks all over her office as Lisa stood in the middle of them, shrinking before the hopelessness that stared her in the face. There was no way to make any sense of any of this. There couldn’t have been thirty opened envelopes. The rest made her want to cry, so much so that when the phone rang at nearly eleven-thirty although she knew it was a wrong number, she jumped for it. “Matheson Agency. Lisa speaking.” A moment of pause, and she thought the caller might hang up rather than acknowledge their mistake.

“Lisa?”

“Yes?”

“Hi,” the voice said, winding through her. “It’s Jeff.”

Suddenly she couldn’t breathe, and the room felt at least ten degrees warmer. “Oh, Jeff. Hi.” She started to sit down in the chair because her legs went numb beneath her, but the two stacks of envelopes lying there sent her right back up again. “Oww! Oh, no.” Like a nightmare she could do nothing about, she watched one stack teeter, and then the letters slid one-by-one to the floor. “No! No, no, no, no, no.” They kept falling anyway until only three out of the 30 were left in the chair.

“What are you doing?” he asked with concern.

“Ugh! Trying to do the impossible,” she said in surrendered exasperation. “And it’s not working.” Under the desk she crawled gathering applications as she went. She stacked the ones she managed to round up back on the chair, and as she put her hand on the chair to pull herself up, she blew at the loose hair from her forehead in frustration. Her gaze slid around the room as she collapsed onto the carpet. Putting her back against the wall, she shook her head. “This is hopeless.”

“What?”

“The youth conference. I’ve got all these envelopes, and I don’t even know where to start, and I haven’t gotten six hours of sleep in the last three days. Right now, I’m about this close to totally losing it.”

His side went silent for a moment. “Would you like some help?”

“That would be nice,” she said, meaning from her employees and not together enough to realize what he really meant.

“It’ll just take me a minute to throw something on, and I’ll be there,” he said in a rush of words.

“Be… here…? Wait. What? Oh, no. I didn’t mean…”

“Sit tight. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

Lisa was sure Jeff hadn’t meant the sit tight comment literally, but that’s all she could do. After she hung up, she leaned back against the wall and stared straight ahead. It must be her imagination or a hallucination. She couldn’t have just said what she had. More than that, that couldn’t have been his answer. Her hand went up to her hair, but it was too late to fix it.

A shower? Make-up? A sandblaster? It would take at least that much to make her presentable again, but she had none of that, and he was on his way.

“Oh. My. Gosh,” Jeff said when he pushed her door open and saw her sitting on the floor, the bomb blast around her clearly apparent. “What in the world happened?”

“Welcome to my nightmare,” she said as if she was tilting on the edge of sanity, and he arched his eyebrows at the tone in her voice.

“What is all this?” Slowly he stepped over the piles of envelopes, into the room, and over to where she sat. One foot wrapped under the other, and he sat down on the floor next to her.

“This,” she said, holding up an envelope, “is the result of letting someone else do something for you. You see this?” She thrust a handful of papers into his hands. “See, no application date.
None. Nice, huh? Really great.”

He
took them from her and looked through them slowly.

“I’ve got 762 applications at last count, and not a date on a single one of them.”

“And the date’s important?”

“It’s first come-first serve, and I’ve only got 500 seats!” Like it was him who had made the mistake, she lunged for his throat, gripped it in her hands, and shook him hard. Then she let him go, smashed her palms against her
forehead, and slid them down slowly. “This is a disaster.”

“I can see that,” he said softly. His brain reeled through the problem, cart-wheeling over solutions that had no hope of working. “These didn’t have the envelopes?”

“Jan, Pat, Vera, somebody trashed them at Cordell Enterprises. Why?”

“Because the envelopes should have a postmark on them, so you could conceivably…”

A moment and her eyes widened in understanding. “Oh, my gosh, you’re right.” She jumped to her feet and grabbed a stack of letters from the chair. One at a time she picked through them. “September 5. September 17. September 3. Oh, thank You God.” The chair caught her on the way down.

“Yeah,” Jeff said, laying the stack of papers in his hand down beside him and picking up a small stack of envelopes next to him. “Now all we have to do is sort through them, put them in order, open them up, and…”

She waved at him with both hands to get him to stop. “One thing at a time.” Quickly she pulled something off of her desk, and then, as though it was the most natural thing in the world, she stood, marched back to his side, and sat down. Her fingers flicked the object up. “Box?”

He smiled at her. “I’d love one.”

About 3:30 a.m. Lisa yawned a small yawn, followed instantly by a larger one, and Jeff looked over at her even as she tried to squelch them.

“You look wiped,” he said gently.

“Gee, I wouldn’t know why,” she retorted, picking up another stack to start sorting it as she leaned back onto the hardwood of the side of her desk. Her fingers went back to work trying to get September 7 to follow September 4. She was zoning out. She felt it. With a stretch she tried to open her eyes wider, but that just brought on another yawn.

“Here.” Jeff reached over to take the stack out of her hand.

“What… what’re you doing?” Without a response, he took hold of her arm and lifted her from the floor.

“You’re not going to be good for anything if you don’t get some shut-eye.”

“But I can’t…” Not listening to the protest, he led her from the room. “But there’s…” Through the dark office they walked until they got to the conference room on the other side. She lowered her gaze skeptically at that room. “What do you want me to sleep on— the table?”

“I was thinking the carpet, but it’s up to you,” he said with half of that smile playing on his lips.

“I don’t have time for this.”

“And when you collapse from exhaustion tomorrow, are you going to have time for that?” He worked the black shirt atop his white T-shirt off as he knelt on the floor next to the wall. “Now, here. I know it’s not the Hilton, but…” When his hand touched hers to pull her down, life thudded to a stop. “Come on,” he said, his eyes gentle. “Just a few minutes.”

Reluctantly Lisa sat down and then flipped her hair over the shirt on the ground. Her cheek felt its warmth instantly, and all the fight in her vanished. Her eyes closed, and sleep swept over her. That’s when she felt it. His hand. Warm and soft lying across her arm.

“Get some rest.”

“Maybe just a few minutes,” she said already drifting away. “But don’t forget to wake me up.”