Too Close to Home

I said, “You have any problems, you call me, okay? If you decide to take this further, you’ll need a witness to back up your story.” I didn’t have much hope that Sherry would make a complaint to the police, but you never knew about these things.

She didn’t even look in the notebook when I handed it, along with her wallet and purse, back to her. “Whatever,” she said.

“You need to get your shit together,” I said. “You’re a kid. Jesus, you’re too young to be on your own like this. How long you been doing this? Stop now while you’ve still got a chance.” She wouldn’t look at me. “Are you listening to me? Getting kicked in the jaw, that could be the best thing that ever happens to you if it knocks some sense into your head.”

She shrugged.

As she started to head for the hotel room door, the mayor came out of the bathroom and said, “You forgettin’ something, honey?”

She looked at him, cocked her head. “Huh?”

“My money,” he said. “I want it back. I might have to pay for some fucking rabies shots.”

Sherry shot him the finger. The gesture so enraged Finley that he started moving across the carpet for her, pretty quickly for a middle-aged guy with a wounded pecker. He grabbed the girl by the elbow, hard enough to make her yelp. Her purse slid off her shoulder and down her arm as she tried to wrest herself away from him.

“Hey,” I said.

“I want my money back right now, all of it.” He had his hand locked on that elbow, and he was shaking the girl.

“Randy,” I said for the second time, figuring further disrespect from me would make him direct his anger my way, and he’d let the girl go.

No such luck. With his free hand, the mayor reached for the girl’s neck. That was when I did it.

I made a fist and ran it right into the mayor’s nose.

Finley released Sherry, screamed, threw both hands to his face, tenting them over his nose.

“Jesus!” he screamed, blood trickling out between his fingers. “My nose! You broke my fucking nose!”

I hadn’t, as it turned out. I’d only bloodied it. But at that moment, I knew, regardless of whether his nose was broken, I was going to be looking for a new job the next day. As the mayor returned to the bathroom for more tissue, I thought about the best-paying job-something that didn’t involve putting a brush to canvas-I’d ever had.

It would have been when I was eighteen, cutting grass all summer for a landscaping outfit in Albany. I think I liked it so much because it was a job where you could see what you’d done. You cut a front yard, every pass with the lawn mower, back and forth, you could see the progress. You knew how much you’d accomplished, you knew how much you still had to do. Pushing the Lawn-Boy, watching the perimeter shrink with every trip, the sense of job satisfaction grew. How many jobs could you say that about?

That was more than twenty years ago, and I hadn’t had that sense of accomplishment since. Certainly not during my stint trying to make it as a welfare investigator. I’d felt like shit every day in that job. And the time I’d spent working for a large security firm hadn’t been much better. I already had a pickup truck. Buy a trailer, a secondhand lawn tractor, some mowers, I’d be in business. Get some kids working for me, maybe Derek could help out during the summer. Good hours, might even lose a bit of weight.

I wasn’t sure how Ellen would respond, but I had a feeling she’d be okay with it. “You’re still not pursuing your dream,” she’d say, “but it’s no worse than what you’re doing.”

All that went through my mind in a couple of seconds. Then, back to reality, as the mayor tended to his wounds in the bathroom, I said to Sherry, “Take off.”

She slipped out the door. “Jesus,” I heard Linda say, probably looking at Sherry’s face. “What the fuck?”

When the mayor came out of the bathroom, I took hold of his hand and with my other slapped the Grand Marquis keys into his palm. “Take it easy around the corners,” I said. “It turns wide.”

I ran into Lance in the lobby.

“What happened?” he asked, breathless. “What’s going on?”

“He’s in there. If he asks you to bandage his dick, get a raise first.”

“Jesus, what the hell happened?”

I didn’t have the energy to explain. Instead, I phoned Ellen and asked her to come pick me up.

SEVEN

A typical Sunday morning, we might have slept in. It’s the one day of the week where I don’t feel guilty sleeping late. If it weren’t for the goddamn work ethic drilled into me by my father, I think I might be happy to stay under the covers until noon most days, but I generally wake up before six, thinking about the things I have to get done. Not just work stuff, but things around the house. If there aren’t clients’ yards to mow, there’s a screen door that needs new screening, a slow drain that needs to be unclogged, a busted lawn mower that needs to be fixed.

But Sundays, screw it.