Chapter 14
Back at the inn, Denise and I took up our positions propping up either side of Ricky as we dragged him from the parking lot to the lobby. He was increasingly uncooperative as he grew sleepier from the painkillers. “My armpits hurt,” he groused.
“We’re almost there,” I said. I was aiming for soothing, but it might have come out closer to a grunt.
We made it to the elevator, and when it opened, Lis stepped out, her eyes going wide as she saw Denise.
“Hey, babe,” Denise said. “Look who I found.”
“Oh, uh—oh!” Lis stammered in surprise. Quickly assessing the situation as we shuffled onto the elevator, she called after us, “I’ll ask Mary Alice to send some ice down to your room!”
“See, she’s a good egg,” Denise said as we rode down the elevator.
Or eager to make us think she is, anyway, with your help, my inner Ricky intoned, as my outer Ricky whimpered on my shoulder.
Denise and I finally got him into our room, and deposited him onto the bed. I piled all but one of the pillows in the room up and hoisted his leg, shoving the pile under his ankle.
“Well, I better go find Lis,” Denise said.
“Thank you again, so much,” I said, relieved that, with her help, I’d been able to actually take care of Ricky in an emergency.
We met Erik at the door, bearing a bag of ice. He craned his neck to look into the room, trying to catch a glimpse of our patient—everyone loves to look at a car wreck, don’t they?—but I didn’t invite him in.
Ricky and I were finally alone. We had made it past the moment of crisis, and I was determined to take the best care of him I possibly could.
I brought the bag of ice to the bed, arranging it on top of his ankle.
He started squirming, trying to scoot up into a sitting position, so I helped shift the pile of pillows under his ankle, then pulled the pillow up behind his back so he could comfortably sit against the headboard of the bed.
I went around to the other side of the bed and hopped up to sit next to him.
“Do you need anything else?” I asked.
“Can I have more medicine?”
“No,” I said. “That stuff was strong. You shouldn’t have any more for several hours.”
He screwed up his face into a pout. “Fine. Can I have something to drink?”
“Some water?” I got up, thinking of the tumblers in the bathroom.
“I was thinking more like a beer.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Not with those painkillers in your system.”
“Wine?”
“No!”
“Unh,” he whined. “A Diet Coke?”
“Yes,” I conceded. “You can have a Diet Coke. Will you be okay here while I run up to the lounge to get it?”
He nodded listlessly, then tilted his head back to the headboard and closed his eyes.
I passed Rachel exiting the lounge as I went in, so I wasn’t surprised to find Erik holding court behind the bar while her red-haired daughters, Reille and Rayleigh, sipped sodas.
The girls regarded me coolly, but Erik jumped to attention, as eager as ever. “Do you need something else, Mr. Popp?”
“Ricky would like a Diet Coke, please,” I said.
The younger of the girls shot an amused look back and forth between me and Erik. “Who’s Ricky? Your boyfriend?” She giggled, though I wasn’t sure what was funny about this.
“Reille, stop. Don’t be inappropriate,” her older sister admonished.
At least, I thought she said “Reille.” She had a mouth full of soda and ice when she started speaking, which dribbled out as she spoke, so the name really sounded like “Rugherre.” If asked in court to swear to whether she’d said “Reille” or “Rayleigh,” I’d have had a very hard time.
“Erik’s jealous of your boyfriend,” the younger girl whispered while her cousin’s back was turned.
“Yeah, well, you’re jealous of anyone who has a boyfriend,” her sister taunted. “God, I can’t wait to go home and see my boyfriend. He won’t believe what a horrible time we’ve had.”
I figured these girls were bored and lonely and dealing with tremendous loss, and the least I could do was make a little idle conversation with them.
Unfortunately, I’d never really known how to talk to teen girls, even—especially—when I’d been a teen boy.
“Where is home?” I attempted. “Where are you from?”
The older girl rolled her eyes at my weak attempt, but replied, “We live in California.”
“Really? Me too. Where?”
“We live in Kensington,” the younger girl said. “You’ve probably never heard of it. It’s near Berkeley.”
“I know where Kensington is,” I said. “I live in Oakland.”
The younger girl took this in disdainfully. “Like, the poor part?”
Compared to Kensington, most of Oakland was poor, but I wasn’t sure what to say in the face of this rudeness.
“Rauaughaugh!” Her sister, through another mouthful of soda, again chided her poor manners.
Erik placed the Coke on the bar in front of me. I was determined not to leave having let these girls get the best of me. They may have considered me their economic inferior, but at least we knew a common geography. “Where do you go to school? Do you go to El Cerrito High?”
“No,” the older girl sniffed. “We go to College Prep.”
“Ah,” I said. “That’s a very impressive school. What grade are you in?”
“I’m going to be a junior and she’s a freshman,” the girl said.
“A junior, huh. Time to start thinking about college.”
“Daddy wanted me to go to Cal, ’cause it would be free since he worked there, but I don’t think I’m going to college. I’m going to be an influencer.”
“Hmm,” I said. “That seems like a tough job to really succeed in.”
“I already made forty grand last year”—the girl shrugged—“and I figure I can go to cosmetology school if I really need a backup. Like Tawny.”
It struck me as odd that these girls were so fond of the misfit wife of their father’s cousin. She seemed like the kind of person their mother would try to train them to steadfastly avoid. “You guys like hanging out with Tawny, huh?”
“She’s so awesome,” the younger girl said. “She’s, like, a free spirit.”
“You get to see much of her?”
“She has an aunt, I think, who lives in Oakland, so she’s come to see us a couple of times when she was going to see her aunt,” the older girl said.
“It’s funny, though,” her sister mused. “She said she was coming to visit her aunt, but then she spent all her time with us.”
“She gets along well with your parents?”
The younger girl shrugged. “She liked Daddy okay, I guess. Every time she’s come so far, Mother’s been traveling for work. She does that a lot.”
“Mmm, zip it,” the older girl warned, elbowing her sister in the ribs and pointing with her eyes. Rachel had returned to the lounge and was heading our way.
“What are you talking about?” It was less an effort to join into the conversation than an imperious demand. The girls rolled their eyes at their mother.
I jumped in. “We just discovered we’re neighbors.”
“We’re not neighbors,” the elder daughter corrected me. “He lives in Oakland.”
“Like Tawny’s aunt,” her sister added, which earned her another shot to the ribs.
Rachel glared at all of us. “Tawny has an aunt who lives in Oakland? How fascinating. But why,” she demanded, “are you talking to that woman about her undoubtedly appalling family?”
“She was staying with us,” the younger girl said. “It would have been rude not to talk to her.”
“Staying with us here, we mean,” her sister added quickly.
“Mmm-hmm,” Rachel said through pursed lips, her eyes flashing.
“From now on, rude or not, you are not to speak to that woman, do you understand? Now go down to the room and start packing. I need to find out if there’s going to be a reading of your grandmother’s will, but I want to be ready to leave as soon as we can. ”
“Yes, Mother,” the girls said in concert, slipping down from their bar stools. As they neared the door, the younger girl called back to me, “Hey, tell your boyfriend I think Erik should be jealous of him, ’cause he’s so hot he melts my butter.”
“Reyuhhh!” her sister chided, her voice trailing off as they ran through the lobby before I could be sure what name she had said.
Rachel sighed in exasperation at her daughters, then turned to me. “They lied to me there, didn’t they,” she said curtly. “About Tawny. What did they tell you? Did they give me the same story they gave you?”
I squirmed uncomfortably on my stool. I didn’t want to lie to Rachel, but it didn’t seem like my place to get involved.
“Never mind,” she said. “I can tell by your face they lied to me. That woman was in my house, wasn’t she?”
She sank down onto the stool next to me and put her forehead in her hands. After a second, she looked up again to ask me, “Do you have a cigarette?”
“No, I don’t,” I reminded her.
She eyed Erik, wiping down the counter along the back of the bar and trying not to get involved in our conversation.
“No use asking him, either, I suppose. Nobody smokes anymore. Not even Tawny all of a sudden, who you’d think would be the kind of person to puff her way right through the third trimest—” She cut herself off, staring into space for a beat, then straightened up.
“Of course, I don’t smoke, either. It’s a disgusting vice.
Erik,” she called, “give me a vodka rocks.”
Erik turned reluctantly to join us. “I told you, I can’t serve you alcohol. I’m not old enough.”
“Seriously? Who’s going to tell?”
“I’m sorry,” he said with a shrug. “My mom might be back in a minute. She could do it.”
“Look,” Rachel snapped. “Give me the bottle. I’ll pour it myself.”
“I don’t think—”
“Give me the bottle! Until your mother pays me back, I own half this place anyway. Give it to me, or I’ll … I’ll repossess your hot tubs!”
This was getting ugly, and Ricky’s Coke was at risk of going flat.
“Excuse me,” I mumbled, slipping off my stool and making a break for the lobby as Rachel stood on the rungs of her stool and started leaning over the bar, slapping the air in Erik’s direction with one hand and reaching for the vodka with the other.
Ricky accepted his Coke with a reproachful, “Took you long enough.”