Chapter 7 Levi
I wake up Sunday morning with no food and no plan. The kitchen has been eaten down to the staging. The cheese and bread are gone. What’s left is tap water and a bowl of lemons. I guess I could eat a staging lemon, but I’m not there yet.
There’s a company credit card in the duffel that could fix this morning in about an hour. Groceries to the gate, tip in the app, done. Except I don’t own one single account on that phone. Janice set them up, the office pays for them, and anything I order arrives with a copy to Nashville.
The card stays in the duffel, and the errand gets done on foot.
I pull my boots on because they’re all I brought. Cap low, sunglasses, and the festival bandana from two summers ago tied around my neck in case I need to pull it up. Lee Streeter doesn’t get photographed stumbling down a Florida road looking like a hungover hitchhiker.
I let myself out the pedestrian gate. The phone stays back at the house. Freddie’s dashboard can spend the morning watching an empty house.
It takes ten minutes to walk out of the gated community, past the empty white buildings.
Out on the road there’s no shade, not a single tree.
I pass a locked restaurant with a chalkboard menu, and an art gallery selling paintings of the Gulf.
In a boutique window there’s a white linen dress on a mannequin with an eight-hundred-dollar tag.
Nothing on this coast opens before noon on a Sunday, because everybody who’d shop here is still horizontal, sleeping off three bottles of white wine from one of these fancy patio cafés. I’m the only man on 30A who needs anything this morning, and I need it now.
A half-mile in, the morning quits pretending.
The heat comes up off the asphalt through my soles.
The jeans are glued to me from the knees down and the shirt from the shoulders down, and under this baseball cap I’m sweating.
No sunscreen either, because sunscreen lives in a category of things I’ve never once bought for myself, and the back of my neck is already burning.
The bandana starts earning its living a half hour early.
I’m a quarter mile past the last locked storefront when a vehicle slows down behind me. My heart starts beating faster. A vehicle slowing is a sound I don’t like. The bandana goes up over my face before I turn around. If it’s somebody with a phone out, they’re getting a bank robber, not a headline.
“Get in the car.”
I recognize the voice and pull the bandana back down. The white SUV idles on the shoulder, and Dante leans across the passenger seat, sunglasses on, white Sunday polo pressed and perfect.
“Morning, officer,” I say. “Was I speed walking?”
“Get in the car, Levi. You’re walking in black clothes in ninety-degree heat with no water, and you’re already sweated through.”
I sure am. Through the shirt, through the cap, through the disguise he doesn’t know is one.
“Is that your professional assessment, or did you just miss me? I’m walking to a convenience store.”
“Neither. Get in. There’s nothing in this direction. The nearest grocery is four miles inland, across a highway that kills pedestrians crossing it every year.”
Well, damn. I should’ve checked a map before I left the house. I just figured walking toward nothing was better than waiting for it to arrive.
“Get in, Levi,” he says again.
I open the door, and sigh in relief when the AC closes over me.
I pull off the cap and my hair is soaked through.
The car smells like his cologne with the volume turned way down.
He’s traded the long-sleeved linen shirt for a polo, and it turns out the polo is worse for me.
Now I can see his forearms, and a fancy watch.
I take all of it in one quick glance, because a second glance is the kind of trouble the state of Tennessee builds churches against. I pretend there’s something fascinating along the side of the road.
“Cologne is turned down today,” I say. “That the Sunday setting?”
“It’s the same cologne every day.”
“Nah, it knows it’s Sunday. I can tell. Why are you driving around on a Sunday morning anyway?”
“Checking on the house,” he says.
“The outside of it?”
“Sure,” he says.
“It’s a Sunday.”
“I work every day. Sunday is no different.”
“You drove over here to stand in a driveway and look at a house you can’t go inside? Did you come by to make sure I hadn’t burned it down? Or maybe thrown a house party for a hundred close friends?”
He doesn’t answer. “When did you eat last?” he asks instead.
“Last night,” I say.
“What did you eat?”
“The staging cheese in the refrigerator.”
“Before that?”
“The bread.”
“All you’ve eaten is bread and cheese since you arrived?” he asks.
“I haven’t been hungry.”
“Because you’ve been drunk,” he says. “You still need to eat.”
“You always this concerned about tenants, or am I special?”
“You’re the first one who ate my staging.”
I don’t argue, because he isn’t wrong. He pulls onto the road heading back the way I came. Past the closed shops, past the gate without turning in.
“Where are we going?” I ask. “I thought you were taking me back to the house.”
“To get you food. Then we’re going to talk.”
“What if I don’t want to talk?”
“I don’t care what you want,” he says. “I want my listing to survive the month. You want food and a ride. We both need things from each other, and right now we’re pretending we don’t.”
“You practice that speech in the mirror?”
“Here’s what I see,” he continues as if he didn’t hear me. “You have no car and no food. You have no one to call, or you’d have called them instead of walking your feet bloody in cowboy boots. You’re stuck in a house with no provisions and no way to get any.”
That’s not exactly true.
What he doesn’t see is that I’ve been waiting for this conversation since the staging cheese ran out.
“Bold read for a man who met me yesterday.”
“I have the receipts,” he says. “Here’s what I need.
The crew comes tomorrow at eight and gets in without a fight.
Nothing gets smoked inside that house, this week or any week.
The terrace is yours, we agreed on that, but the inside stays shut enough that my compressor survives, because that repair runs twenty thousand dollars.
Maybe the terrace door can stay open a foot instead of all the way.
And next Saturday, when the client walks through, you’re elsewhere. ”
“And in exchange for all that?”
“I make sure you eat this week. Rides, groceries. Starting now.”
“I behave and you feed me? You’re describing a dog.”
“A dog would be cheaper and a lot less trouble.”
“Don’t forget the liquor store,” I say, trying to see how far I can push him. “That’s the most important point. Regular liquor store runs or no deal.”
His hands tighten on the wheel, and ten seconds of highway go by before he answers.
“Fine.”
“Not as a favor either. One that you’ll try to hold over my head. As part of the deal. You get cooperation on your listing. I get rides and supplies, and the supplies include tequila. It’s all transactional. No strings. No lectures from you about the drinking.”
“I understand what transactional means.”
“Do you? You keep drifting toward favor. Favors carry interest and I’ve paid enough of it.”
“It’s a business arrangement. There’s no interest.”
“Then say the liquor store is part of the deal, Dante. Out loud. I want to hear it.”
“It’s part of the deal,” he says. “But if you’re drunk at a showing or you smoke inside that house, the deal is off. Anything that costs me Saturday, the deal is off.”
“Fair enough.”
“I know it’s fair,” he says. “I wrote the terms.”
“You wrote the breach clauses.” I put my sweating head back against the seat. “I wrote everything else.”
“You wrote a grocery list and called it a contract.”
“Yep. Best deal I’ve closed in years.”
He drives the next mile without saying a word. We pull into a grocery store off the highway and he parks.
“Go in,” he says. “Get what you need for the week.”
I hesitate, my hand on the door. “You’re not coming in with me?”
He turns to look at me. “No, why would I? I’m not your personal shopper. I’ll wait here.”
“Some host you are.”
“I’m not your host either.”
The cold air hits me just inside the entrance, and I stand there for ten seconds with my buggy because I can’t remember the last time I bought my own groceries.
In Nashville, there’s a delivery service.
On tour there’s catering, and hotels bring trays to the door.
The last time I picked out my own food, I was seventeen and my mother sent me to the Piggly Wiggly for milk and eggs.
I don’t know what a week of food looks like or what it costs anymore, because food has always just arrived.
They have a deli counter here, though. Right up front.
Sandwiches I understand. You point at ingredients, somebody makes you a sandwich and hands it over.
That’s a system I can operate like a pro.
I walk up to the counter. “Give me an Italian, a turkey, a ham, a roast beef, a meatball, and one of whatever you’d make for yourself.”
The deli man stares at me for a second. I’m ordering six sandwiches early on a Sunday morning, sweated through and sunburned, so I understand the look. He doesn’t recognize me though, so there’s that to be thankful for.
“Having a party?” he asks. “Or going fishing?”
“Party of one. Just me.”
While he builds them, I push the buggy through the store and shop like a teenager.
Five bags of chips and a key lime pie. Oreos and a rope of beef jerky.
Four two-liter Cokes riding in the child seat.
No water, because the house has a sink and an icemaker, and nothing that might need cooking, because I don’t cook.
Everything in the buggy can be eaten straight out of the package, no plate and no plan required.