Chapter 16 Dante
I get out of the kitchen fast before I do something I can’t take back.
“Listen before I go.” I stop at the door, because this is business.
“Saturday’s the showing. The client walks through at noon, and the house needs to look like no one ever breathed in it.
Which means Friday it gets torn apart and put back together.
Cleaning crew in every bathroom, Benji and a truck full of flowers, the entire house scrubbed and re-staged start to finish.
On Friday, you’re gone all day, not just Saturday morning. I’ll sort out where to take you.”
“That’s two days,” he says.
“Yes.” The water’s tracking down him, and I keep my eyes on the cabinet over his shoulder.
How can a man’s hair possibly drip this long?
“And between now and then I’m coming by daily to check the humidity.
That door’s been open since Saturday and the compressor is on borrowed time.
I need eyes on the meter every day until the client walks through. ”
Apparently, I need eyes on a lot of things.
“Daily?” he repeats.
“Yes, you’ll let me in.”
It isn’t a question, and we both know why it isn’t. He handed me all the leverage, the tracking, the man who can’t know this house is for sale. He needs me silent the same way I need him agreeable, and what my silence buys me is a door that opens when I knock.
“Sure, I’ll let you in,” he says, shrugging. “Not a problem.”
“Great.” I’m already through the door. “I need to head out to a closing.”
“That’s a lot of concern for a compressor. Coming by every day. You could call me. I’ll give you a number.”
He’s enjoying this. I can hear it.
“It’s a twenty-thousand-dollar repair.”
“Well, we can’t have that, can we?” He moves around the island, in no hurry at all. There’s nothing between me and that towel now. “Come check your meter, Dante. Every day. I’ll be here.”
The way he says it, it isn’t about the meter. I keep my hand on the doorframe and my eyes on the cabinet. I pull out of the cul-de-sac without checking the rearview mirror. The mirror has bare-chested, barefoot Levi in it, and I need both hands and my head for the road.
Five minutes east and I’m at the other end of my own week.
The Rosemary Beach closing is a deal I could run in my sleep, and thank God, because half of me is still standing at a marble island watching water drip off Levi’s hair and down his shoulders.
I pull in behind the buyer’s Tahoe and put Levi away for the length of a showing. This is the job I’m good at.
“Mr. Caswell.” I’m across the courtyard with my hand out and the big smile on. “You beat me here. That’s a man who wants a house.”
“Wanted it three weeks ago.” He’s grinning, because Caswell likes to be handled and I’m very good at handling him. “My wife’s already measuring for drapes.”
“Then we close before she finds one she likes better.” I get the door, I get him moving, and my business works like it’s built to.
This is who I am. The hand on the shoulder, the right question at the right second, the deal closing because I made it feel inevitable. Not someone who throws a man into a refrigerator and then runs around buying pink boxes of donuts.
Caswell signs. His wife signs. The keys go across the table on a leather fob I had cut, because my clients deserve it.
“You’re the best on this coast, Reyes. Everyone said so and they were right.”
“Tell your friends in Birmingham.” I put a card in his hand. “I work the whole corridor.”
He laughs, the agent laughs, and for four minutes I’m only a businessman. It lasts until the car door shuts. The smile shuts off the second I’m alone.
I had the move. In that kitchen, an hour ago, I had the move that ends the entire problem with Levi.
One call to Rebecca at the property management company.
The house is listed, the renting party should be informed.
The info climbs the line to whoever rented it for him, and he’s relocated by dinner. It’s the move. I didn’t take it.
The phone buzzes.
Benji: How’d Rosemary close?
Dante: Clean. Caswell cried about drapes.
Three dots.
Benji: And Levi?
I look at the dots a second. Benji’s the one person on earth I tell things to. I could tell him about the towel and the leverage I didn’t use. He’d know what every piece of it meant before I finished typing. That’s exactly why I don’t.
Dante: He’s fine. Saturday’s handled. Friday, I need you and a truck of flowers.
Benji: You didn’t answer me.
Dante: Closing wiped me out. Busy day. Talk tomorrow.
I put the phone face-down on the passenger seat before he can come back at me. I have never hidden my life from Benji. He’d call me out on it. It’s his best quality and the reason I’m not typing another word tonight.
I start the car and take the highway back, because 30A runs past Levi’s gate and I don’t trust myself not to turn in. I take the long way, past the dark donut shop, past the Walmart, past every cheap bright thing on this stretch that the people behind the gates will never lay eyes on.
Who is tracking him?
I keep coming back to it. Somebody who thinks he owns me. The tracked phone, the tracked cards, the he that fell out of his mouth.
The man the pieces all point to has money. You don’t track a person that thoroughly for that long on a budget. Age on him, too, and the kind of certainty that rents a twenty-million-dollar house for someone and calls it taking care of him. A husband, maybe? A keeper, and Levi is who he keeps.
I don’t like it.
Not at all.
I tell myself what I don’t like is the arrangement. A grown man being controlled. That’s the professional objection and it’s even true. But underneath it there’s a smaller, uglier thing that isn’t professional.
There’s a man out there who knows where Levi is every hour of the day, and this morning I stood across an island from him and had to fight my own eyes to stay off him.
I go back to the apartment and carry the two sleeping bags up the metal stairs. I don’t make a bed out of them. Instead, I open my closet and set them on the shelf, both of them, squared to the edge. Then I shut the door on them. Same as everything else I don’t know what to do with yet.
Three mornings left between now and Friday when I’ll knock on that door and he’ll open it, because he has to. He handed me the reason this morning.
By Saturday, the house has to forget him.
I have the same days to do the same thing, and only one of those jobs is in the contract.