Chapter 11 – Grant
ELEVEN
GRANT
They told him the grief would get easier. They lied.
I was drunk. The good news was, I was still coherent enough to realize I was drunk. The bad news was, I was drunk enough to have lost all common sense. I was in that place where rational decision making was gone, replaced by bad ideas.
This, coming here, was a bad idea.
But it was September 28th and I didn’t do September 28th very well.
It was a Sunday. In the middle of the afternoon. I was already shit-faced drunk and Flowers wasn’t even home.
Of course, I knew where she lived. I’d approved of the apartment. I’d gotten the credit check waived. I’d even recommended several mattress stores. Because for some unknown reason, mattress stores abounded in Houston. You really had to know which ones to trust.
“Holy shit, E.G., is that you?”
I was sitting outside the door of her apartment.
The complex was an open one, without elevators or security, which I’d been unsure of at first. But having called a few Houston realtors, I’d been assured of the location and the overall safety rating of the building.
Flowers was on the third floor, something that had proven to be really irritating when navigating the flights of stairs drunk.
Fortunately, I’d managed not to fall over a railing and break something.
She was carrying two reusable shopping bags from a local grocery store chain. Made sense. Sunday would be a good day to shop for the week. Flowers liked to bring her lunch with her to work. Saved her money and forced her to eat healthier, she claimed.
She ate every day now. Multiple times a day. There was satisfaction in that.
“What is the matter? Did something happen…oh shit, you’re drunk.”
She’d gotten close enough to smell me, I suppose. It wasn’t because I was that drunk, I didn’t think, where it was leaking out of my pores. More because, as I’d been sitting here, lifting the whiskey bottle to my mouth, some had spilled on my shirt.
“I’m drunk, Flowers.”
Her lips pursed. “Yes, I can see that. What are you doing here?”
“You’re the only one I know who won’t ask me about the accident. I thought I would be safe here.”
She moved then to open her apartment door with her keys. “You’re going to come inside. I’m going to make you some coffee and alcohol-absorbing food. I hope you like the Kraft.”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to get sober. I want to stay drunk. I just don’t want anyone to ask me about it.”
“Then why not stay home? Alone.”
I sniffed. That made entirely too much sense. But since she’d invaded my home a few months ago, something had felt different about the space.
Bigger, more cavernous. Empty.
“Didn’t want to do that, either. Drink with me?” I held the bottle up for her.
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I don’t drink that much, and especially not before noon on a Sunday.”
“That’s good. I don’t drink either. Much. It’s just that today is the 28th and you won’t ask me about it.” I let my head fall back against the railing.
“No, I won’t,” she said softly. “If I let you keep drinking, will you promise to eat something? We can hang on the couch and watch Netflix movies until you pass out. That work for you?”
She was in her non-work clothes. Right. Because it was Sunday. She was wearing jeans and a simple t-shirt. Her long brown hair was loose around her shoulders, where she normally wore it up at work. She looked different, but also the same.
My Anna.
No. Not at all. Not my anything.
At least she wasn’t wearing those infernal leggings that showed off long lean legs and her tight ass. Or the tank top that barely contained her breasts. I wasn’t supposed to know she had breasts. That wasn’t a thing I should know.
I was thirty-six and she was twenty-three now. She told me she’d had a birthday at some point. I don’t remember saying happy birthday.
“Happy Birthday,” I announced.
Her forehead furrowed and she got that indent right between her eyebrows. A mark carved into her skin too early for her age.
“It’s not my birthday.”
I waved my hand in the air. “No, for when it was.”
“Three months ago?”
“Never too late.”
She laughed. “Uh, I think, yeah, it is. Can I just say E.G., you are full of surprises?”
“Good. I don’t like to be predictable.”
The door was open and she’d already put her bags inside.
“You’re too big for me to lift, so you’re either going to have to find a way to get to your feet or humiliate yourself by crawling inside.”
“Ha,” I thought. The joke was on her. “As if crawling would be the most humiliating thing I’ve ever done.”
Still, I did manage to push myself up onto my feet. I gave myself a minute to see if I could walk, then I stepped into her apartment. It was a fairly spacious one bedroom. Limited furniture except for a couch, an oversized purple bean bag chair, and a moderately sized television.
Women. They never understood priorities.
I remembered the couch purchase, because I’d walked into her office one day only to find her dancing to a song called:
“That’s right, I own my own couch now, bitch...”
She’d explained she was author of said song.
Not to be confused with her other great hit:
“The bed is mine. The bed is mine. It’s my bed...”
I flopped on the couch and noted how comfortable it was. I’d hired a ridiculously expensive interior decorator to furnish my modernist Spanish Colonial home. Other than the bed, which I picked out myself, there wasn’t a piece of comfortable furniture in the whole damn house.
I didn’t care if things were comfortable.
My life was uncomfortable.
Flowers picked up her shopping bags from inside the door and took them into the kitchen area, where she was efficiently unpacking them.
“What are you making me?”
“I told you, Kraft Mac & Cheese.”
“Don’t be prep..pop..pos..oster…don’t be silly. I’m not a child.”
She peaked around the corner of the half wall that hid part of the kitchen from view. “It’s delicious. It will fill you up. And best of all, it’s nice and soft, so it won’t be so bad when you’re heaving your guts up in a few hours.”
She came back into the living room with a glass of water.
“You said I can keep drinking.” I held up my empty hands. “Wait, where’s my whiskey? Did I leave it outside? That’s a four-hundred-dollar bottle of booze. It shouldn’t just be left to anyone to come along and drink it.”
“I have your whiskey,” she assured me. “Drink some water first and I’ll let you have some more.”
“You’re not the boss of me,” I muttered.
“I am when you show up at my apartment. Drunk. Then I am one hundred percent the boss of you.”
She pressed the water into my hand and took the time to wrap my fingers around the glass. Her fingers were long and thin and interlaced over mine. Other than shaking hands with people who came to the office, I really didn’t do human contact.
Her hands were cold, because as mild as a Houston fall could be, temperatures were dropping.
I sighed, my head falling forward. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” I admitted.
That was certainly true enough. I’d been wandering around my empty house, standing in front of the Dauphene, wondering how much it did look like a Picasso. My cell phone had been ringing.
It always did on this day, even though my parents and sister knew I wouldn’t answer the phone.
Then of course, there were Allison’s parents.
They wanted to stay close, too. Wanted to still be connected to me because somehow they thought it brought them closer to their daughter.
Their call, I took, because it seemed polite, but it was always the most awkward conversation.
It was after I’d hung up with them, that I started drinking.
Eventually, I had to leave the house or go insane. Somewhere, not there. I’d considered a bar, but I didn’t want to make small talk and I didn’t want someone counting my drinks.
Then I’d thought of Flowers.
Flowers wouldn’t judge me. She wouldn’t poke at me. She would do exactly as I asked, even if it was just watch me get drunker. Because I was her boss and she was indebted to me for her livelihood.
If it weren’t for me, she might still be on the streets. Or working in some shitty diner.
I’d never once asked her for a blow job.
I closed my eyes and groaned. God, when was the last time I’d even thought about sex? With anyone. It wasn’t that I’d made a choice to be faithful to Allison for the rest of my life. I simply didn’t care. About anything. I needed to eat food and drink water and breathe air, but that was about it.
I didn’t need to come. Physical pleasure didn’t appeal to me. I preferred the numbness.
Except lately, I’d felt that changing. There had been moments of humor. Frustration. Anger. Jealousy.
Not much. Pin pricks. As if my arm had fallen asleep and was suddenly waking up.
Tingles. I was experiencing tingles.
I needed to shut it down. I need to crawl back inside my beast cave. I needed to shut everyone and everything out.
“I need to go,” I said. The strange sense of panic I’d grown accustomed to since the accident threatened to overwhelm me. “I can’t be here. I don’t want to tingle.”
“Oh shit, did you say tinkle? Please, not on my new couch.” She came back into the room, this time holding a small glass of whiskey.
“Tinkle? No, Flowers, I’m not a five-year-old girl. I… I said…I can’t breathe.”
She could see my breathing was labored and she knelt down on the carpet in front of me.
Geezus, don’t fucking kneel.
“Hey, easy. You can do it. You know how to breathe. In and out. In and out.” She did this with me a few times until I settled down. “Panic attack? I get them too, sometimes.”
“I have to leave,” I repeated.