Baggage Check (27 page)

 

29

Jake was still tousling her hair as Rebecca turned to see Deputy Alex Chen and his familiar boots exiting the patrol car. Of course it was him. Didn't Grier respond to any calls? She gently clasped Jake's hand and removed it from her head, realizing before he did that Alex thought Jake was hurting her.

“Everything all right here?” he said to the two of them. “I was just driving by—Rebecca, you okay?”

“Hey, Alex,” she said. She tried to sound friendly. “I'm fine. Just an emotional morning, that's all.”

Alex's face was ashen and stiff. His hand touched the handle of his pistol lightly, and he glanced down at Rebecca and Jake's linked hands. “Are you sure? You look like you've been crying.”

She pulled her hand from Jake's and sniffed. “I'm fine now. I was just … venting.”

Alex nodded stiffly, looking at Jake.

“Oh, sorry!” Rebecca said, as though this were a cocktail party and not a police incident in the Waffle House parking lot. “Deputy Alex Chen, this is my old friend from college, Jake Stillwell. Actually, Alex is kind of an old friend, too.”

“Kind of,” Alex muttered.

“Pleasure,” Jake said, extending his hand. “Sorry for the trouble.”

“As long as everyone is fine,” Alex said. His words were polite but the tone was wary. “I'm going in for some coffee. Rebecca, you know I'm right here if you need me.”

“I do, thanks, Alex. Really, I'm fine.”

He glanced back at Jake, nodded, and walked away.

“Wow,” Jake said, once Alex had swung open the Waffle House door and stepped inside. “That is one scary Asian redneck.”

Rebecca laughed. “I guess he is, when he wants to be. He probably thought we were fighting. He's actually a good guy.”

“He seems to think highly of you,” Jake said, nudging her with his elbow. On the other side of the glass, Alex glanced back at them while he waited for the waitress to get his coffee. He gave Rebecca a slight wave as he exited. Jake went on. “I didn't see a wedding ring on the deputy. Did you find yourself a boyfriend out here and not tell anyone?”

Rebecca shrugged him away. “Shhh! He'll hear you. He is not my boyfriend,” she said. When Jake raised an eyebrow, she added, “He was a football teammate of my brother's in high school. He's been … helpful.”

“Uh-huh, helpful. I bet.”

“It's not like that. He has a daughter.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jake retorted. “I can see how that instantly makes him less attractive.”

“Shut up,” she said. Rebecca was aware both that she was blushing and that she sounded like she was back in high school herself, so she turned and headed for the passenger's side of his truck.

Jake said no more, but he continued to look like the cat that ate the canary until they were almost at her mother's house.

He pulled into the familiar gravel drive at her direction and parked next to the Dumpster. “So what are we doing?”

“What?” Rebecca had been thinking of Alex, and the look in his eyes when he saw her with Jake.

“I'm here to help. What are we doing?” Jake exited the truck and pulled work gloves out of the bed.

“Well, basically, there's a lot of junk to clear out. I mean, a lot. And it … smells awful in there. I'm sorry.”

“Hey, I've been in the Georgia football locker rooms after the third week of two-a-days,” Jake said. “Trust me, I'll be fine.”

Inside, Rebecca explained her system and Jake got to work cheerfully. He started in the kitchen she'd been avoiding since her arrival, but none of what bothered her seemed to make him squeamish. Jake was energetic and patient, and carried piles of seeping, smelly trash to the Dumpster as though everyone's home were just like this one. As though there were nowhere else he would rather be than Oreville, Alabama, carrying urine-soaked cat cushions to a rented Dumpster.

The work also went more than twice as fast as it had been going, because he could carry much more than she could at once, and instead of huffing and puffing in and out of the house between each load, Rebecca had more time to spend sorting. Never once did he question her decisions, or comment on the squalid state of the house. He didn't ask intrusive questions about her mom.

Normally she had to remind herself to eat while she was working, but by one o'clock Jake had already run out for grilled chicken sandwiches from the tiny cafe in town, and he picked up Gatorade as well. They sat on the front steps, chewing quietly, while the classic rock station played in the background. “So this is where you grew up?”

“Until senior year,” she said. She knew Jake was from old money, and had grown up in a seven-bedroom historic house that was basically an old plantation. This must have looked like hell on earth to him.

“And that's when you met Marci and Suzanne,” he confirmed.

“Yes. I moved in with my aunt. I wanted … I really wanted to go to Georgia.”

He swallowed the last bite of his sandwich and washed it down with the Gatorade. “I'm glad you did,” he said, play-punching her gently on the arm as he rose. He went inside the house as though he'd grown up here, too. “I think we're going to need some different trash bags soon. They make contractor-grade ones that will hold a lot more stuff and you don't have to worry about sharp edges poking through them.”

“Oh,” Rebecca said, feeling stupid she hadn't known this.

“I'll run over to Gadsden this afternoon and pick some up.”

“You don't have to do that,” she called in to him, as she crumpled up her sandwich wrapper and stood up to straighten her shorts.

He reappeared in the doorway. “I know I don't have to, Rebecca. I'm your friend. Let your friends help you.”

“Okay,” she said softly.

*   *   *

Alex came by at three fifteen, while Rebecca was sorting things in her mother's bedroom and Jake was on his way to Gadsden for the superpowered trash bags. When she first heard the knock on the door, she thought Jake had forgotten something and yelled, “It's open!” from her spot behind a stack of plastic tubs.

“You've made real progress in here,” Alex said a minute later, his deep voice making her jump as he stuck his head in the door to her mother's room.

“Thanks,” she said. “I didn't expect to see you again today.”

“My shift just ended,” he said.

“Oh,” she said. “Great.”

He stood as though he were too big for the hallway.

“Sorry there's no place to sit,” she said. Then, sheepishly, “I have a half bottle of Gatorade over here if you're thirsty.”

“No, thanks. I just wanted to make sure you're okay. After today.”

“I'm fine,” she said. “Jake is just an old friend.”

“From college,” Alex said. “You said.”

“Yeah. His wife is a good friend as well, from my Georgia high school.” She felt defensive but she wasn't sure why. “I just had a little breakdown about my family and he was helping me through it. Really, it was nothing.”

“I was worried about you,” he said. “You can't blame me for that.”

“Of course not. It's just that everything is—”

“Fine,” he finished.

“It is fine. Alex, there is nothing between me and Jake.”

“Hey, you don't have to explain anything to me.”

“I want to. And I want to talk about Saturday,” she began.

“Forget it. I get it now.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. Doesn't matter.”

Rebecca could not tell what he wanted her to say or do. She hated that. It was so much easier when people just pushed the button and asked for what they needed.

“Jake just showed up on my doorstep this morning to help. I couldn't exactly turn him away. His wife sent him.”

Alex nodded. “I can see that he—that you are good friends.”

“Yes. We are.”

“I have to run,” he said. He gestured vaguely toward the door.

“Of course,” she said.

He hesitated, and left.

 

30

Jake and Rebecca worked the rest of the week together at her mother's house. She had not realized how lonely her work had been until she had someone helping her. Even when they went for hours without speaking, just the sound of his whistling in the other room or the door opening and closing as he went in and out was comforting. They worked well into the evenings, surviving on peanut butter, Waffle House, and a couple of trips to Dickie's for burgers and beer. On both these occasions, Rebecca looked around the bar for a sign of Alex, but he never appeared.

Rebecca was so tired by the end of the week that she was sure she could sleep for a full twenty-four hours if it were not for Jake's loud snoring on the couch. She caught him rubbing his back and neck a few times when he thought she wasn't looking, but he never complained. What they accomplished, however, was astonishing: by Friday afternoon, when they were joined by Marci and Suzanne, Jake thought the Dumpster was close to ready for pickup.

“It looks like there is more in here than in the house,” Suzanne said, looking doubtfully into the Dumpster once Rebecca had given them a tour. “This must have been awful, Rebecca. I'm sorry we didn't come out sooner.”

“That's okay,” Rebecca said. “I told you not to.”

“Next time, I'm not taking no for an answer,” Suzanne said. “Sometimes we get caught up in our own stupid lives and don't pay enough attention. You shouldn't have to ask us to be there for you, but sometimes … well, sweetie,
ask
.”

“Really, it's not such a big deal,” Rebecca said.

“Everything is a big deal for Suzanne the last few days,” Marci said. “Dylan has been out of town and she is lost without her new husband.”

“Shut up, Marci,” Suzanne said. “That has nothing to do with it. I'm just sorry that Rebecca didn't tell us how bad this was. We could have come sooner.”

“I was a little embarrassed, I guess,” Rebecca said. She gestured at the Dumpster and the ramshackle house behind her. “This isn't exactly the Atlanta Country Club.”

Suzanne put her hands to her mouth, and then stepped forward and wrapped Rebecca in an unexpected embrace. “Oh, honey,” was all she said.

Sunday afternoon, the Dumpster Dude returned. Suzanne, Jake, and Rebecca had spent the day before and all that morning carting things from the house, while Marci opened boxes and bins using Rebecca's mask and gloves, looking for obvious trash. She took frequent breaks for fresh air but never complained about the smell of the house and her sensitive pregnancy nose.

Even once the Dude had parked in the driveway and was directing a team of unhappy-looking young men in tie-dye, Rebecca continued to pull things out of the bedrooms and toss them on top of the pile in the giant metal container.

On her third trip, Jake stopped her in the hall. “Let it go, sweetheart. You still have trash service, and maybe your mom will want to keep some of what's left. I'll bring the truck back in a few weeks and help you take more to the dump if you need it, okay?”

Rebecca nodded and joined the others on Lorena's front steps. The four of them stood and watched more than a decade of squirreled-away items and rotting trash be lifted onto a large flatbed truck for disposal at the county landfill.
If I'd had more time,
Rebecca thought,
I could have recycled more of it, or gone through some of those moldy boxes to see if anything in them was salvageable for charity.…
That road led nowhere, and she knew it, but her brain could not turn it off.

“Has your mom seen any of this?” Marci asked as the Dumpster Dude drove away, and they turned back into the house.

“No. I don't think she can handle it.”

“Do you worry what she'll say when she does?”

“Every minute.”

*   *   *

They walked in silence from one room to the next. The living-room furniture and floor were now visible, including her mother's antique couch with the green cushions, which seemed to have been spared most of the cat urine by being the first piece of furniture Lorena had covered with boxes and newspapers. Except for a couple of boxes in the middle of the floor, the kitchen looked almost usable again thanks to Jake. As he wiped the scratched wood of the kitchen table with a rag, Rebecca had a sudden, vivid memory: sitting with Cory and her parents, playing rummy one rainy afternoon. The smell of microwave popcorn, and the delightfully fizzy-soggy feel of it on her tongue, soaked with orange soda. Cory's favorite. For a span of several years, every memory of her brother included the soft line of an orange mustache.

In a true gesture of friendship, Suzanne had bleached and scrubbed both bathrooms. There was a pile of musty towels in a basket ready for the Laundromat. The master bedroom still had a fair number of plastic bins in it, but they had been sorted by the girls into type and size of items and meticulously labeled by Marci, using multicolored sticky notes she'd pulled from her purse.

Cory's room had been the hardest. After Rebecca's outburst of throwing things against the wall weeks earlier, she had still found it difficult to decide what to do with her brother's things. Jake had boxed up and labeled a few of the surviving trophies, and whatever he had done with the things she'd broken, she did not know. He had set aside the toys and baseball cards he thought might be worth something on eBay, and a couple of Cory's football uniforms. Everything else they had thrown into boxes and piled near the closet, ready to donate to charity. The bed, however, was still made, and the teddy bear her brother had loved since early childhood still sat in his spot.

Rebecca picked it up. “I think I'll keep Simpson,” she said. “He's a bit dusty, but he can be washed.”

“That's sweet,” said Marci.