Chapter Forty-Seven
Forty-Seven
Kendrick played possum until Crystal donned her sweats and left the house for a run. She would have opted to use her treadmill had it not been for the mountain of clothes he had thrown across it.
His eyes rolled to the clock. It was just after ten, and the city was already bustling and loud.
His head was pounding, but that did not stop his progress. He pulled himself up into a sitting position and scratched at his balls.
He supposed it had been a few days since he’d last showered, but he couldn’t remember just how many. The days and nights seemed to stream into each other. Even as he sat there scratching, he couldn’t remember what day of the week it was.
Climbing out of bed, he stumbled to the bathroom and took a long piss. Most of which ended up on the toilet seat and the white tiled floor below.
After he turned on the faucet for the tub, he pushed the stopper down into the drain and went off to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator door, and peered inside.
There was a loaf of whole wheat bread, a half-empty bottle of low-fat milk, a bowl of sliced watermelon, and a container of leftover egg foo young.
He removed the egg foo young, watermelon, and wheat bread and placed all of the items on the table. He then began greedily stuffing the food down his throat with his bare hands.
After he felt that his stomach was full, he left the scraps on the table, walked past the open refrigerator door, and moved into the living room, where he plopped himself down onto the couch, snatched the remote control up from the table, and turned the television on.
He’d been missing the goings-on in the world, so he flicked through the channels until he stumbled onto CNN. But soon his eyelids began to droop and he dropped off to sleep.
When he awoke due to an overly loud Nissan commercial, he jumped up from the couch, frantically looking around for the source of the noise. Finding it, he grabbed the remote and pressed the off button.
Standing there in the early-afternoon light of the living room, he tried to decipher a strange sound filling the apartment.
“Sounds like running water,” he mumbled to the walls before turning into the kitchen and looking down into the bone-dry kitchen sink.
Heading off to the bathroom, he walked across the now sopping wet bedroom carpet to find that the tub was overflowing.
“Shit,” he muttered under his breath, but failed to turn the faucet off.
Instead, he grabbed the bath towels and tossed them down onto the floor, which was covered in three inches of water.
When the towels sank helplessly to the bottom, he tossed the bath mat, washcloths, and face towels down and watched as they succumbed to the same fate.
“Fuck it,” he said as he moved to the basin, where he haphazardly brushed his teeth and washed his face.
With no thought to the rest of his body or the scraggly beard that covered his face, he moved back into the bedroom and dressed himself in a pair of green chinos, a black T-shirt, and a pair of black Nike sneakers and started toward the door.
Realizing he didn’t have a dime on him, he backtracked to the bedroom and saw that Crystal had left a fifty-dollar bill on the dresser, which he greedily snatched up before helping himself to her jewelry chest, from which he lifted a pair of diamond and ruby earrings, a solid gold bangle, and a string of freshwater pearls.