A Dirty Job (Grim Reaper #1) (5 page)

“Uh, yes, yes, yes, and no.”

“Excellent. Are you gay?” She’d been single for a while in San Francisco.

“I asked you out.”

“That means nothing. I’ve had guys not realize they were gay until we’d gone out a few times. Turns out that’s my specialty.”

“Wow, you’re kidding.” He looked her up and down and decided that she probably had a great figure under the baggy clothes. “I could see it going the other way, but…”

“Right answer. Okay, I’ll have coffee with you.”

“Not so fast, what about
my
questions?”

Rachel threw out a hip and rolled her eyes, sighed. “Okay, shoot.”

“I don’t really have any, I just didn’t want you to think I was easy.”

“You asked me out thirty seconds after we met.”

“Can you blame me? There you were, eyes and teeth—hair, dry, holding good books—”

“Ask me!”

“Do you think that there’s any chance, you know, after we get to know each other, that you’ll like me? I mean, can you see it happening?”

It didn’t matter that he was pushing it—whether he was sly or just awkward, she was defenseless against his Beta Male charm sans charisma, and she had her answer. “Not a chance,” she lied.

“I miss her,” Charlie said, and he looked away from his sister as if there was something in the sink that really, really needed studying. His shoulders shook with a sob and Jane went to him and held him as he slumped to his knees.

“I really miss her.”

“I know you do.”

“I hate this kitchen.”

“Right there with you, kid.”

The good sister, she was.

“I see this kitchen and I see her face and I can’t handle it.”

“Yes, you can. You will. It will get better.”

“Maybe I should move or something.”

“You do what you think you need to, but pain travels pretty well.” Jane rubbed his shoulders and his neck, as if his grief was a knot in a muscle that could be worked out under direct pressure.

After a few minutes he was back, functioning, sitting at the counter between Sophie and Jane, drinking a cup of coffee. “You think I’m just imagining all this, then?”

Jane sighed. “Charlie, Rachel was the center of your universe. Anyone who saw you guys together knew that. Your life revolved around her. With Rachel gone, it’s like you have no center, nothing to ground you, you’re all wobbly and unstable, so things seem unreal. But you
do
have a center.”

“I do?”

“It’s you. I don’t have a Rachel, or anyone like her on the horizon, but I’m not spinning out of control.”

“So you’re saying I need to be self-centered, like you?”

“I guess I am. Do you think that makes me a bad person?”

“Do you care?”

“Good point. Are you going to be okay? I need to go buy some yoga DVDs. I’m starting a class tomorrow.”

“If you’re going to take a class, then why do you need DVDs?”

“I have to look like I know what I’m doing or no one will go out with me. You going to be okay?”

“I’ll be okay. I just can’t go in the kitchen, or look at anything in the apartment, or listen to music, or watch TV.”

“Okay then, have fun,” Jane said, tweaking the baby’s nose on the way out the door.

When she was gone, Charlie sat at the counter for a while looking at baby Sophie. Strangely enough, she was the only thing in the apartment that didn’t remind him of Rachel. She was a stranger. She looked at him—those wide blue eyes—with sort of an odd, glazed look. Not with the adoration or wonder that you might expect, more like she’d been drinking and would be leaving as soon as she found her car keys.

“Sorry,” Charlie said, averting his gaze to a stack of unpaid bills by the phone. He could feel the kid watching him, wondering, he thought, how many terry-cloth puppet people she’d have to blow to get a decent father over here. Still, he checked that she was securely strapped in her chair, then went off to grab the undone laundry, because he was, in fact, going to be a very good father.

B
eta Males almost always make good fathers. They tend to be steady and responsible, the kind of guys a girl (if she was resolved to do without the seven-figure salary or the thirty-six-inch vertical leap) would want as a father for her children. Of course, she’d rather not have to sleep with him for that to happen, but after you’ve been kicked to the curb by a few Alpha Males, the idea of waking up in the arms of a guy who will adore you, if for no other reason than gratitude for sex, and will always be there, even past the point where you can stand to have him around, is a comfortable compromise.

For the Beta Male, if nothing else, is loyal. He makes a great husband as well as a great best friend. He will help you move and bring you soup when you are sick. Always considerate, the Beta Male thanks a woman after sex, and is often quick with an apology as well. He makes a great house sitter, especially if you aren’t especially attached to your house pets. A Beta Male is trustworthy: your girlfriend is generally in safe hands with a Beta Male friend, unless, of course, she is a complete slut. (In fact, the
complete slut
through history may be exclusively responsible for the survival of the Beta Male gene, for loyal as he may be, the Beta Male is helpless in the face of charging, unimaginary bosoms.)

And while the Beta Male has the potential to be a great husband and father, the skills still need to be learned. So, for the next few weeks, Charlie did little but care for the tiny stranger in his house. She was an alien, really—a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine—and he didn’t understand anything about her species. But as he tended to her, talked to her, lost a lot of sleep over her, bathed her, watched her nap, and admonished her for the disgusting substances that oozed and urped out of her, he started to fall in love. One morning, after a particularly active night of the feed-and-change parade, he awoke to find her staring goofily at the mobile over her crib, and when she saw him, she smiled. That did it. Like her mother before her, she set the course of his life with a smile. And as it had with Rachel, that wet morning in the bookstore, his soul lit up. The weirdness, the bizarre circumstances of Rachel’s death, the red glowing items in the shop, the dark, winged thing above the street, all of it took a backseat to the new light of his life.

He didn’t understand that she loved him unconditionally—so when he got up in the middle of the night to feed her, he put on a shirt and combed his hair and tested to see that his breath was free of funk. Within minutes of getting poleaxed with affection for his daughter, he started to develop a deep fear for her safety, which, over the course of a few days, blossomed into a whole new garden of paranoia.

“It looks like Nerf world in here,” Jane said, one afternoon when she brought in the bills from the store and the checks for Charlie to sign. Charlie had padded every sharp corner or edge in the apartment with foam rubber and duct tape, put plastic covers on all of the electrical outlets, childproofed locks on all cabinets, installed new smoke, carbon monoxide, and radon detectors, and activated the V-Chip on the TV so that now he was incapable of watching anything that didn’t feature baby animals or learning the alphabet.

“Accidents are the number one cause of death among children in America,” Charlie said.

“But she can’t even roll over on her stomach yet.”

“I want to be ready. Everything I read says that one day you’re breast-feeding them and the next day you wake up and they’re dropping out of college.” He was changing the baby on the coffee table and had used ten baby wipes so far, if Jane had the count right.

“I think that might be a metaphor. You know, for how fast they grow up.”

“Well, it’s done when she’s ready to crawl.”

“Why don’t you just make a big foam-rubber suit for her, it’s easier than padding the world. Charlie, it’s scary-looking in here. You can’t bring a woman here, she’d think you’re nuts.”

Charlie looked at his sister for a long second without saying anything, just frozen there, holding a disposable diaper in one hand and his daughter’s ankles scissored between the fingers of the other.

“When you’re ready,” Jane stumbled on. “I mean, I’m not saying that you’d bring a woman here.”

“Okay, because I’m not.”

“Of course not. I’m not saying that. But you have to leave the apartment. For one thing, you need to go downstairs to the store. Ray has turned the point-of-sale computer into some kind of dating service and the truant officer has stopped by three times looking for Lily. And I can’t keep doing the accounts and trying to run things and do my job, too, Charlie. Dad left you the business for a reason.”

“But there’s no one to watch Sophie.”

“You have Mrs. Korjev and Mrs. Ling right here in the building, let one of them watch her. Hell, I’ll watch her for a few hours in the evening, if that will help.”

“I’m not going down there in the evening. That’s when things are radioactive.”

Jane set the stack of papers on the coffee table next to Sophie’s head and backed away with her arms crossed. “Play what you just said back in your head, would you.”

Charlie did, then shrugged. “Okay, that sounds a little crazy.”

“Go make an appearance at the shop, Charlie. Just a few minutes to get your feet wet and put the fear of God in Ray and Lily, okay? I’ll finish changing her.”

Jane slid in between the couch and the coffee table, nudging her brother out of the way. In the process she knocked the dirty diaper to the floor, where it fell open.

“Oh my God!” She gagged and turned her head.

“Another reason not to eat brown mustard, huh?” Charlie said.

“You bastard!”

He backed away. “Okay, I’m going downstairs. You’re sure you got this?”

“Go!” Jane said, waving him out of the room with one hand while holding her nose with the other.

H
ey, Ray,” Charlie said as he came down the steps into the storeroom. He always tried to make a lot of noise on the steps and usually fired a loud and early “hello” to warn his employees that he was coming. He’d worked a number of jobs before coming back to take over the family business, and had learned from experience that nobody liked a sneaky boss.

“Hey, Charlie,” Ray said. Ray was out front, sitting on a stool behind the counter. He was pushing forty, tall, balding, and moved through the world without ever turning his head. He couldn’t. As a San Francisco policeman, he’d caught a gangbanger’s bullet in the neck six years ago, and that was the last time he’d looked over his shoulder without using a mirror. Ray lived on a generous disability pension from the city and worked for Charlie in exchange for free rent on his fourth-floor apartment, thus keeping the transaction off both their books.

He spun around on the stool to face Charlie. “Hey—uh—I wanted to say that, you know, your situation, I mean, your loss. Everybody liked Rachel. You know, if I can do anything—”

It was the first time Charlie had seen Ray since the funeral, so the awkwardness of secondary condolences had yet to be forded. “You’ve done more than enough by picking up my shifts. Whatcha working on?” Charlie was trying desperately to not look at the various objects in the shop that were glowing dull red.

“Oh, this.” Ray rotated and pushed back so that Charlie could see the computer screen, where there were displayed rows of portraits of smiling, young Asian women. “It’s called Desperate Filipinas dot-com.”

“Is this where you met Miss LoveYouLongTime?”

“That was not her name. Did Lily tell you that? That kid has problems.”

“Yeah, well, kids,” Charlie said, suddenly noticing a matronly woman in tweed who was browsing the curio shelves at the front of the store. She was carrying a porcelain frog that was glowing dull red.

Ray clicked on one of the pictures, which opened a profile. “Look at this one, boss. It says she’s into
sculling
.” He spun on his stool again and bounced his eyebrows at Charlie.

Charlie pulled his attention from the woman with the glowing frog and looked at the screen.

“That’s rowing, Ray.”

“No it’s not. Look, it says she was a coxswain in college.” Again with the eyebrow bounce, he offered a high five.

“Also rowing,” Charlie said, leaving the ex-cop hanging. “The person at the back of the boat who yells at the rowers is called the coxswain.”

“Really?” Ray said, disappointed. He’d been married three times, and been left by all three wives because of an inability to develop normal adult social skills. Ray reacted to the world as a cop, and while many women found that attractive initially, they expected him eventually to leave the attitude, along with his service weapon, in the coat closet when he arrived home. He didn’t. When Ray had first come to work at Asher’s Secondhand, it had taken two months for Charlie to get him to stop ordering customers to “move along, there’s nothing to see here.” Ray spent a lot of time being disappointed in himself and humanity in general.

“But, dude, rowing!” Charlie said, trying to make it all better. He liked the ex-cop in spite of his awkwardness. Ray was basically a good guy, kindhearted and loyal, hardworking and punctual, but most important, Ray was losing his hair faster than Charlie.