Chapter 9 Levi
The giant washing machine in the laundry room looks like it could dock with a space station.
I stand in front of it with everything I brought with me in a pile on the lid, and decide that today I’m doing my own laundry.
Every shirt smells like yesterday’s walk in the sun, and I can’t negotiate fairly with a handsome fella if I’m wearing a shirt that’s already lost.
Under the kitchen sink there’s a box of pretty pods, bright as candy.
I know what they are. I’ve watched television commercials.
Pods are pods. I load the drum, drop in three because my clothes have been through a lot, and press the button that looks the most like a beginning. The machine fills and turns.
I leave it going and walk out to the curb at seven twenty-five, duffel on my shoulder out of years of habit.
The SUV is already waiting for me, because a guy who doesn’t swear runs early. Dante’s back in the fancy linen clothes, pressed and shaved, cologne at full Monday volume. I take the one glance I’ve budgeted myself for this morning.
“Seven twenty-five and you’re already idling.” I slide into the passenger seat. “You ever arrive on time, like a normal person?”
“My father always told me if I wasn’t fifteen minutes early, I was late.” He hands me his spare key at the traffic light. “Crew’s done at five. I’ll come pick you up. Same rules as last time.”
“Got it,” I say. “Eat whatever’s in the kitchen. Don’t trash the place. Don’t smoke inside.”
“You remember the script.”
“Sure do. I’m a quick study. You’d be surprised.”
The light goes green and he rolls through it. I keep going, because a silent car gets to me and he’s the only thing to do on this highway.
“Course, a quick study always reads between the lines. ‘Eat whatever’s in the kitchen’ — you say that like a man who’s never watched somebody take him at his word. How do you know I won’t eat everything you’ve got?”
“Eat what you want. It’s replaceable. It’s food, not a test.”
“And ‘don’t trash the place.’ Define the word trash. My bar and a man who irons his underwear might be set at different heights.”
“Simple rules. Don’t break anything, don’t burn anything, leave it how you found it.”
“Leave it how I found it.” I let that sit a second. “Can’t promise that. I tend to improve a room just by being in it.”
“Then leave it cleaner. I’ll take cleaner.”
“Listen to you, making counteroffers.” I settle back. “We’ll turn you into a negotiator yet.”
He doesn’t bite, and I let a mile go by before I can’t help myself. “Ran a load of laundry before I left, by the way. First time I’ve done my own wash in I don’t know how many years.”
“You did laundry?”
“Don’t look so surprised. Found the machine, sorted it myself, pushed the button that looked like go. I’m downright domestic this morning.”
He pulls into the spot in front of his building and I step out. This time he doesn’t wait for me to go inside. He’s gone before I get the key in the lock. Once inside, I put the doors where I like them and prop the front one with the kitchen chair again. His place almost feels like home to me now.
Then I stand in the middle of a real estate agent’s living room with seven hours and no audience. On the ride over, I promised myself I’d keep my prowling to surfaces only. Anything more than that would be rude. That rule lasts five minutes.
The apartment is cheap and Dante is not. The discrepancy between those two facts is everywhere. The furniture looks like it came with the lease, but he squared all of it to the walls exactly right, and the quilt on his bed is tucked military-tight.
The kitchen is short on counter space with an old refrigerator that hums like a tour bus.
It’s the room that changes my appraisal though.
The cabinet by the stove is full of spices, labels faded, lids loose from use.
Under foil in the refrigerator there’s shredded beef with peppers and olives, golden rice packed underneath.
I don’t know what it’s called but I recognize home-cooked labor when I taste it.
He told me twice to eat whatever’s in the kitchen, so that’s what I do and I don’t feel guilty about it. Standing up, with the beef cold. It’s the best home-cooked meal I’ve had in years, and he didn’t even know I’d be the one eating it.
It’s weird, though. When Dante goes out, there’s not a hair out of place, and then he comes home to this pitiful kitchen and cooks like his grandmother is grading him.
After I eat, I check out his bathroom. It smells like him at quarter volume. The counter is a row of small expensive jars lined up. The Dante the world gets is carefully assembled right here every morning, two feet from a bathtub with a rust stain.
I uncap the cologne and breathe it once, straight, no mixer. Then once more, because nobody’s here to judge me. I set it back on its exact footprint, because he’d notice a drift.
His closet is organized like a store. Shirts hung by color, shoes lined up on a rack, the brown loafers with two more pairs beside them and one casual pair at the end.
A shelf of t-shirts, soft and expensive.
One pair of broken-in jeans. The jeans stop me cold for a second.
Sometime, somewhere, maybe in Miami, there was an off-duty Dante walking around casually in faded jeans and a t-shirt.
Damn, I bet that would be something worth seeing.
I don’t dwell on that picture as long as I’d like to.
The dresser drawers are folded as neat as the bed.
The bed itself I consider trying out for about four seconds, which is three too many. He’d spot the wrinkles right away. Touching his bed is a step too far gone, even for me.
The second bedroom tells a story of his career in boxes. Yard signs stacked face-to-face, a carton of flyers, his photograph on every one of them smiling with confidence as if the closing already happened.
Dante Reyes.
The flyer smile shows teeth. He’s never once shown me teeth when he smiles. Actually, he’s never smiled at me at all. Wonder what it would take to get one of those smiles out of him?
The entire coast along these parts probably knows his name, and now my duffel bag does too. The stack of flyers runs four hundred deep and he won’t miss one. It goes flat against the bottom of my duffel.
Beside the flyers there’s a box of business cards, and I take one of those too, but the card gets a legitimate reason. I should have one phone number in this town that doesn’t report to Freddie. It goes in my back jeans pocket, where it’ll stay.
The small, familiar gap between the boxes and the wall is where I land.