When It All Comes Down to Dust (Phoenix Noir Book 3) (21 page)

“Thanks, babe. Just the thought of getting to do something interesting is all I need right now.” She laughed. “Now you just need to find a job for yourself.”

“Don’t I know it.”

“You haven’t seen anything?”

“Nothing today. I looked online, and there was nothing I’m remotely qualified for.”

“How worried are you?”

“Pretty worried, but not enough to regret quitting the paper.”

“Any ideas about what you’d like to do long-term?”

“Now that you mention it.”

“Really?”

“It’s just a thought. It occurred to me this afternoon when I came back here and started cooking. You know, I really do love to cook...”

“You want to be a chef or something?”

“Hell, no. I’ve worked in enough restaurant kitchens. It’s bad enough washing dishes. One week of being a chef, my nerves would be so shot I’d go back to newspapers. Anyway, I don’t want to work nights. But, check this out...” He opened a cupboard and took out a loaf of bread. He put it on a cutting board. “I baked this a few hours ago,” he said as he cut a slice. He put the slice of bread on a plate, buttered it, and handed it to Laura.

“Damn, that
is
good,” she said. It was brown, wholesome but light, with a flavor of garlic and some herbs she couldn’t identify.

“Yeah, I know. I’ve always been good at it. And, thinking about it today, I realized there are only two things I really like enough to never get tired of, and I did them both today. I had lunch with Headman, and then came back here and cooked. I realized that I like talking to people, and I like cooking, and I’ve always been into both of those things. So, I could either spend the rest of my life cooking or being a therapist, and being a therapist would mean spending a lot of years in school, which I ain’t crazy about.”

“But you don’t want to be a chef.”

“Right. But I bake good bread. So I wonder if I can start my own business doing that.”

“Have you looked into it yet?”

“Give me a chance, I just thought of it today. I’ll have to see how much it would cost, and whether I could get a loan. I don’t even know if it’s realistic, but I’m gonna find out.”

“If that doesn’t work out, since you like talking to people, you could always learn to cut hair.”

“You can joke. I could see myself as a grumpy old fart, telling other old codgers what’s wrong with the world while I cut the three hairs they’ve got left.”

“To be like that, you’d just have to get older. You’ve already got the rest of it down.”

“Quit picking on me. In one day, I get you a job, I feed you, I fuck you –”

“Not yet.”

“Soon as you like.”

“Let’s eat first.”

“See, that’s why I should cook for a living. You’d rather eat my food than fuck me.”

“Not always. I’m just hungry
and
horny right now.”

Later, as they were finishing dinner, David said, “I want it to always be like this.”

“So do I,” Laura said.

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I
t wasn’t the same world anymore. Frank had heard all about the Internet while he was in the joint, but he couldn’t have imagined what it was really like.

Virtual girlfriends. Webcams. People talking about “visiting” a web site, like it was a place you went to instead of just turning on a computer. Frank tried to remember if people used to say they “visited” a T.V. show, but the memory wouldn’t come. He looked at message boards and blogs and chat rooms, and he saw how angry, grasping, needy, mean and crazy people were. It reminded him of prison, but in prison there was nowhere else to go. He couldn’t believe that there were people who weren’t in prison, who could go wherever they wanted to and do whatever they wanted to, who chose to spend their time sitting at a computer, trying to upset people they didn’t know and never would know.

He wondered if most people were like that, and if you put them in prison or let them go on the Internet, out of the regular world, they’d show who they really were. He wondered if many people behaved that way in regular life, and he realized that, because of where and how he’d spent his life, he didn’t know.

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Y
ou could tell that summer was coming to an end. If you couldn’t actually feel it, you could hear it on the radio as you drove somewhere in your car and the talk show host would say, “It’s definitely cooling down – only a hundred and five degrees today...”

Then it was fall, and you could tell because, while visitors from out of state wore shorts and tank tops, the residents of the city wore sweaters and coats. Leaves fell from the non-native trees people had planted in their yards. The palm trees in the streets didn’t change, and the sky was as blue as ever.

Laura was still working full-time at Keating Accounting, and was also doing some work for Bob Headman on the side. Sometimes she would have to interview witnesses to serious crimes, or track down family members of people facing charges, in the hope that they might be able to say something in mitigation. That was close to what she’d done at the Federal Public Defender’s Office, and she loved it. Sometimes Bob would just have her go look up public records for him. She didn’t love that, but she didn’t mind it, and she liked it a lot more than she liked her other job.

Bob said he’d like to hire her full-time, but he didn’t need that much investigative work. He told her that’d he’d like to have her combine that work with being his personal assistant, and she said she’d be willing to consider that, but Bob already had an assistant that he liked well enough, so there wasn’t going to be an opening unless she quit, which she had no plans to do.

David had run out of money, had borrowed some from Bob, and still hadn’t paid him back. He’d finally managed to get a job at a nonprofit organization that provided services for people who were trying to quit booze or drugs. David’s job was a hybrid of counselor and case manager. He liked it, and he knew he was lucky to find such a job without a college degree, but the pay was so low that he couldn’t cover all his bills. He was driving without insurance, because there was no money left over after he’d paid his rent, car payment and utility bills, and put some groceries in the fridge. Laura wouldn’t have been able to manage on the salary from her weekday job if she’d had a car payment, but she’d paid off her Subaru a year ago. There were days when David was so broke that it was only because of Laura that he was able to eat – and he had already begun baking bread every day.

He had asked Bob Headman and a few other people with money to risk if they’d be willing to lend him some start-up funds. Bob had said yes as soon as he was asked, and the others had said maybe. The more David had looked into it, the more cautious he had become. To start a bakery, he would need so much expensive equipment, with no idea of whether he could find enough customers to make it worthwhile.

So he’d decided to start slowly. He’d approached a couple of independent grocers and they’d agreed to take a few loaves every day.

He’d come home from his job and immediately turn on the oven. By the time he went to bed at ten, he’d have made six loaves. He’d wake at three in the morning, chug some coffee to clear his grogginess, and then start work on another six loaves. While the yeast raised the dough, he’d catch another forty minutes of sleep – or fuck Laura if she’d spent the night with him – then drink more coffee and put the loaves in the oven. He’d have made more, but six was as much as the oven would hold, and even that was a tight fit. While the bread baked, he’d eat breakfast, take a shower, get ready for the day. He’d let the loaves cool on the counter, and then he’d put them in paper bags labeled
Bread by Regier
, the six he’d made last night, now cold, and the ones he’d just made, that would stay warm for another hour or even two.

He’d drive to the shops that carried his bread, give it to them, and then head to his job. He’d spend the morning trying to stay awake while counseling addicts and working the phone to get services for them. When his lunch hour came, he’d quickly scarf some instant noodles, then set the alarm on his cell phone to go off forty-five minutes later. He’d lie down on the floor of his office and sleep until the alarm woke him. He told Laura that he was often so spaced-out from exhaustion that some of the people he counseled must have suspected that he had the same problem that they did.

The bread sold well enough that the shops were willing to keep carrying it. Even on weeks when every loaf sold every day, the money David made from it didn’t do much more than cover the cost of ingredients and the gas required to deliver the bread. But, he told Laura, and told himself, it was a start.

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W
orking at the dealership, Frank realized that he was just like he had been all those years ago. He only had to talk to people for them to like him and trust him. He saw that people responded to him more warmly than to even the best salesmen who worked there.

He wondered if he could get out of working security and get into sales. He found himself thinking “back into sales” as though it was something he’d done recently. It felt sometimes as though the last eighteen years hadn’t really happened, and that it wasn’t long since he was a young man selling cars in the sunshine. He felt as though he could easily go back to that life, even though the dark hair he’d had back then had mostly turned to silver. Sometimes those years, the time in prison, didn’t seem real, and what was real was the time before and after.

But he knew there were records that made it all real. He knew anyone could look up those records, and the records wouldn’t tell them about all the sadness, all the regret. He wondered if all the good places to work would do background checks. He wondered how he could explain his lack of verifiable work history. He wondered and wondered.

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L
aura was still running up A-Mountain a few mornings a week. David kept saying that he’d like to join her, but that he was too busy baking in the mornings. She said they could do it some Saturday or Sunday, and he said he didn’t think he was in good enough shape to run up a mountain.

“Poo widdle Davy-Wavy,” Laura said. “So do you really want to run, or are you gonna wuss out?”

“Yeah, I want to run. I want to get in better shape, but I think I should start with something that won’t kill me.”

“How about Encanto Park?”

“Sure, that’ll work. Are you okay with going there?”

“Yeah, I must have been there a hundred times since I met him. I don’t even associate him with it anymore.”

She didn’t know that a couple days after she’d told David what had happened, he had gone to the park and walked around, trying to imagine how it had been, trying to see it, wondering which tree Laura and Frank had sat under.

When they went to the park on a Sunday morning, he had to fight a temptation to ask her to show him exactly where the first conversation with Frank had happened. He forgot about it almost as soon as he and Laura started to run.

He already knew she was fitter than him, but he hadn’t realized how much. He had to dig in hard just to keep up with her, and she wasn’t even breathing heavily. If she’d talked to someone on her cell phone while she ran, they wouldn’t have been able to tell that she wasn’t relaxing on a couch.

When they’d gone maybe a mile, Laura said, “Okay, that was a good start, but it’s probably enough for your first day.”

David nodded, not wanting to even try to speak. They slowed to a walking pace and then they both lay down in the grass – David to rest, Laura to do fifty push-ups.

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F
rank liked to walk in that park too. He wasn’t sure at first if he would like it or if it would be horrible, and the first couple times he walked there after his release, he didn’t know what he felt, or if he felt anything. He walked the same steps he had taken before, towards where Laura was sitting. He’d expect the park to look different, and in some ways it did, but it was mostly the same. The tree was still there, and he could sit under it, and Encanto Kiddie Land had closed, but it was still there, and he could sit at a picnic table and eat a hot dog and drink a Coke. He did that and tried to find some feeling he could give a name to, but nothing came.

The more he went back, the more he could feel. He liked it there, because it helped him to wipe out the eighteen years that didn’t seem real, and he could feel like a young man and remember how it felt to sit on the warm grass with a child who needed him.

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A
fter running in the park, David felt fine, but the next day his muscles hurt so badly he could barely move. It wasn’t just his legs, it was his back and shoulders and even his neck. He laughed about it with Laura, but it scared him. He thought that this must be what it’s like to be old, and that was something that terrified him. He had once interviewed an old woman who lived alone and kept being beaten up by people she invited into her home. Now, as he limped around his house, he felt afraid of being like her, old, alone and vulnerable, preyed upon by brutal strangers who’d take advantage of his loneliness. She’d told him what a nice neighborhood hers had been when she and her late husband had moved in, and now it was in one of the worst parts of town. He wondered if he would ever have enough money to live in a “safe” neighborhood, and if it would still be safe when he was old.

He asked Laura if she had the same fears, and she said no, because she couldn’t imagine ever being too old to fire a gun.

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T
hanksgiving. Two days earlier, Frank had gotten word that his mother had died in Florida, where she lived in a retirement community. It was still the best Thanksgiving he had ever had. A friend had gotten out of the joint, and he and Frank ate cheeseburgers and drank beer and drove in the sunshine, Tommy feeling it all for the first time in years, and Frank feeling it for the first time all over again.

Laura and David spent the day together. Laura had mocked David a few days earlier when he’d asked if she had any plans for Thanksgiving. “Yeah, I’m gonna head up to Flagstaff and spend it with my parents,” she said.