Running Against Traffic Read online

  Eventually she couldn’t continue with this routine anymore because the liquor-induced nausea just didn’t mix with her depression, so she switched to coffee. After a few days that made her nauseous too, and being hyper-conscious at four o’clock in the morning was far worse than being drunk and oblivious at that hour, and it certainly did not make the fucking bird opera company that soon followed any more tolerable.

  What was left to her, she wondered one morning, after forcing herself into the shower and then into clean clothing. She brushed her teeth. She brushed her hair and moved her body from her bedroom to the kitchen by sheer force of will, wondering dully what to do next. She looked over at the kitchen door that led to the back of the house, and realized that she had not yet opened it.

  Half expecting to have a Dorothy experience, to wander out of her transplanted cottage into colorful Munchkin Land, Paige turned the key in the lock and pushed the kitchen door open. She squinted through the back screen and saw with bleary disappointment that there were no flowers or lollipops, and nary a yellow brick to lead her out of Wells Lake. The back yard was just like the front, only more of a mess. It was uneven and balding, patches of crumbling dirt dotted with tufts of tough weeds and grasses. Still, it was enclosed by a high, faded wood fence with a bowed gate, and was equipped with two Adirondack deck chairs and a little aluminum table set between them. She could be outside and still concealed.

  A small ditch paved in with concrete and filled with muddy water was in one corner of the yard. Paige approached it, and discovered two lumpy, gray-green frogs huddled together on one of the mismatched stones that had been assembled to encircle the ditch. The frogs moved even closer to one another as she came near.

  “You know,” Paige said, “canoodling in front of the recently separated isn’t very considerate. I’m just saying.”

  The frogs did not respond.

  She sat outside for the rest of the day, like one of the plants in the yard. A dried out stalk, crumpling over into itself.

  Chapter 4

  Thick humidity sent trickles of sweat down Paige’s neck as she slogged into town again to the grocery store. She had bought entirely the wrong items on her previous venture, being sick of peanut butter from the jar, yogurt and frozen dinners that required a microwave that it turned out she did not have.

  Carmen’s grocery was heavily air conditioned so Paige took her time, examining shelves of products lining the narrow aisles, certain that putting them together would create the food that she had always been served, or had delivered, but she had no idea where to begin.

  Unable to focus and still sweaty, Paige rounded a corner and found a large freezer. She opened the door, relieved by the arctic blast of air that dried her sweat and cooled her skin. Without thinking, her hand reached for a carton of vanilla ice cream.

  Paige’s mother had an air about her that the world was there to take care of her, and make her comfortable, and that she had done her part, living up to her end of the bargain by choosing a man she could control, but who also had plenty of money, and by looking a certain way, which required weekly visits to the salon and rarely eating solid food. She never seemed very interested in food anyway. Paige never witnessed her actually consuming anything other than fruit, white wine, and crackers at cocktail hours. She must have eaten more than that, sometimes, but the family never ate meals together, so who knew. Paige always ate what their silent and efficient personal chef set before her, well before her father came home from work or the country club, and before her mother drifted in to say goodnight.

  The only memory Paige had of her mother showing kindness was when she caught their cleaning woman, Inez, eating a large bowl of vanilla ice cream from the freezer, seated at the kitchen table, gazing out the bay windows onto the lawn and garden and smiling to herself. Inez was enjoying the ice cream immensely, and instead of reprimanding her, her mother made sure a tub of vanilla ice cream was purchased every week.

  Paige’s father got wind of this, however, as no one else in the house ate vanilla ice cream, and declared that they paid Inez to clean, not to eat their food, and she could buy her own ice cream, damn it. Ten year old Paige watched Inez eat her ice cream from the kitchen doorway, and overheard her mother tell her father that if that’s the way he felt about it, he could tell Inez that, himself. Paige heard her father yell “FINE” and she quickly darted into the kitchen, grabbed a bowl and scooped some ice cream into it. She was at the table eating it when she heard his approaching footsteps. The footsteps stopped, and Paige shoveled a large spoonful of ice cream into her mouth and forced herself to look up, and look her father in the eye. This was her most vivid memory of him. It was a Friday afternoon and he was dressed in his tennis whites, on his way to the club. He was a tall man, and fit, but for his middle showing his age and the number of martinis he enjoyed with an extra layer of bulk. This he cinched in with a belt, his vanity giving him the appearance of being stuffed into his shorts. He was not tall in the way that Paige’s mother was tall. He was just tall in the world of averages. Her mother was striking because of her height, eye to eye with most men and heads above the women. She was a swan among ducks, Paige knew.

  Her father’s coffee-colored hair and eyes that were both the shape and color of almonds mirrored his daughter’s, the only two things in the world they shared. But those eyes were dark and darted from Inez to Paige and back again. Paige’s skin was hot and prickly and the ice cream stuck in her throat, but she spooned more in. Mr. Scott balled his hands and nodded rapidly at them, his face pulled in a grimace, twisting for words. Paige kept her eyes fixed on his. Inez smiled and nodded back to him, seemingly oblivious to the mental confrontation.

  The standoff ended. Her father blew out the door like a March wind and Paige blew out a breath, her heart racing. They had won, she thought, feeling strong for a moment.

  Until her father died, bloated from excess and squeezed by debt, Paige sat with Inez every Friday afternoon, tacitly united, eating vanilla ice cream. Bolstered by the victory, Paige would steal glances at Inez, fascinated and envious of her ability to render her father’s tyranny powerless by simply refusing to acknowledge it. Inez simply smiled, gazing out the window, savoring each bite as if it was the best thing that had ever crossed her lips, as if it made everything right with the world. Paige was just as mystified by her simple rapture as she was with her power against Mr. Scott.

  Paige practiced emulating Inez, usually failing miserably because her parents didn’t notice changes in her attitude or demeanor. Eventually she stopped bothering to try to taste what Inez had tasted, or to appear strong and oblivious. But she was growing up, and her outer layer was thickening without her tending to it.

  “Funny, you don’t strike me as a plain old vanilla kind of gal.”

  Paige looked up at Deirdre, then back at the ice cream in her hand. She dropped the carton into her cart. “It’s my favorite.”

  Deirdre peered into her otherwise empty cart. “Do you need some help, um, finding anything?”

  “Yes,” Paige said quickly, in a rush of relief. “What is there around here that I can eat?”

  Chapter 5

  The goddamn bird cacophony drove her from her bed with a vigorous early morning performance. Paige slumped at the Ugly Table, slurping at her coffee and building a little tower, like a house of cards, with the bills that she had extracted from the pile of junk mail. She had managed to rationally and calmly explain to Thomas that she just had this cuckoo need for privacy, sometimes, and the reason she had left a Mail Pail (actually a cobwebbed old bucket) outside on the porch was to accommodate a new arrangement of his not having to actually enter the house in the mornings. He had stood frowning down at the bucket, long teeth still spilling out of his mouth. Paige sighed and suggested that if he really wanted to pop in for a visit, he should leave her a note in the Mail Pail, indicating which day he was going to come in, so that she wouldn’t worry it was a burglar breaking in. Thomas had glanced around the room, clearly confu
sed as to why a burglar would choose her house, but the next day she retrieved a scrap of paper from the bucket with a scrawled “wensday”.

  She counted up the bills. Water, electricity, gas. No cell phone bill. She wondered how long her cell phone would work, under David’s plan. No mortgage statement. David must have bought the place outright. She realized that when it came to their finances, she had been, and still was, completely in the dark. She had never wondered what the mortgage payment on their condo amounted to, or how much was in their savings. She had simply wielded David’s credit card and assumed their accounts were brimming. All lifestyle evidence pointed that way.

  She couldn’t bring herself to open the envelopes until she had a plan. She sipped more coffee, and thought back to the conversation with her uncle a week prior. He was right. She would have to seek out local counsel, and find some sort of job to pay for that, on top of her other expenses. How in the world it would all pan out was beyond her imagination, but there had to be an attorney somewhere in this depressed little town. A job opening was a different story. Especially for someone with no resume.

  Boxes had begun to arrive from Philadelphia, containing her clothes, the contents of her makeup drawer, perfume, CDs, jewelry, a few books. A lean volume of photographs, a few knick knacks and candles, a framed picture of her parents. There wasn’t much. She wasn’t much more than a wisp in this world, to be easily blown away and forgotten.

  Moreover, she truly didn’t care about what arrived except for the fact that the clothes were clean, so she didn’t have to keep using the town laundromat, while putting off trying out the washer and dryer that were in a closet in the kitchen. They looked like they might do more harm than good. They looked like crouching gargoyles, waiting to feast. She might open them after washing her clothes and they would be empty, but she would hear a low, echoing belch.

  Paige resolved to find an attorney that very day, and figure out how to pay for his or her services later. After a quick shower she pawed through one of the boxes of clothing, deciding on a khaki skirt, tennis shoes and a white tee shirt. She brushed out her long dark hair and pulled it back into a sleek ponytail. She applied a little makeup and a string of pearls, and looked at her reflection in the cracked bathroom mirror. The broken pieces of Paige Davenport looked back at her. Paige Scott turned away. She walked back to her bedroom, unhooked the pearls and tossed them onto the dresser. She extracted a few essentials from her Coach purse and stuffed them into a small, beaded satchel that she had once purchased from a street vendor in Key West to use for the beach.

  Once again Paige found herself gazing down the main road. The trees watched her with eyes that were old and suspicious. Deirdre was outside Carmen’s Grocery, chatting animatedly with a man unloading crates of produce from the back of a pickup truck. Carmen stood to the side of the building, smoking a cigarette with a blond twenty-something young man wearing torn jeans and a black leather vest with no shirt. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch Paige walk by. She felt like a peculiar zoo animal out for a stroll in its little arranged habitat. Except the people watching her also lived in the zoo.

  Paige walked quickly to the opposite side of the road. She moseyed to the next block, foolishly peering this way and that, trying to read signs on shop doors and peeking through windows.

  “Hey Baby, can I get some fries with that shake?”

  Paige whirled around and looked down at a striking light-skinned black man with long legs and muscular shoulders, lounging on a park bench beside where she stood. He was eating a sandwich from a take out container and unabashedly eyeing her up and down, grinning and chewing.

  Paige shaded her eyes with one hand. Her annoyance was warmed for a moment by wide-set eyes looking up at her, extraordinary eyes, kaleidoscopes of greens and golds. He wore a backward baseball hat and a fitted white tee shirt and faded jeans. He stretched his long legs out in front of him languidly, soaking up her stare like rays of sun.

  Paige snapped out of it, drew herself up taller and awkwardly turned to walk away. Behind her, the man laughed, and called out to her again. “Yo, I didn’t mean to offend you. Come on back.”

  Paige felt a prickle of irritation spread like a rash. She turned and stalked back to the bench.

  The man drew back in surprise, his grin growing wider as he cringed into the corner of the bench.

  “Excuse me?” Paige asked, folding her arms across her chest and exuding her best Philly Girl attitude. “What did you say to me?”

  “Come on back?”

  “Before that.”

  “I said, ‘hey baby, can get some fries…’”

  “I heard you.”

  “Then what exactly are you asking?” He took another bite out of his sandwich and wiped his hand on his jeans.

  “I just wanted to make sure I had it right,” Paige snapped. “Is that seriously the best you could come up with?”

  The man swallowed and held up his hands in protest. “Girl, slow down. Chill. Can’t a man eat his lunch and admire the scenery?”

  Paige felt too disheartened to argue. The wind abandoned her sails in an instant, lately. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just having a bad life. Day. Could you tell me where I can find Howard Hackney’s office? The attorney?”

  He pointed across the road. “Right there, the green door, representing all the cash he’s gonna take from you.”

  “Thanks.” Paige turned to go.

  “Hey, Mrs. Davenport?”

  She turned. “Scott. Paige Scott. Just call me Paige.”

  “Paige Scott.” He tasted her name. “I’m Al Martin. We were all wondering when we would finally see you out and about.”

  Her mouth opened but the question stuck in her throat so she snapped her lips together. What I don’t know can’t scare me.

  “Paige?”

  “Al?” She turned back wearily to see him smiling again, leaning forward with his elbows resting on his knees. Damn your eyes, she thought. They were as distracting as Deirdre’s hair. “Stop back here when you’re done and I’ll show you around town.”

  “Isn’t this it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Look, I’ve already found the liquor store and the grocery store. That’s all I need for now.”

  “Stop back anyway. I’ll either be here or there,” he said, pointing to the bar on the corner.

  Paige looked up at the sign – Darnell’s Bar and Grille. “Isn’t it a bit early?” She asked, feeling guilt tapping her on the shoulder, reminding her of the days of four a.m. martinis. You couldn’t get much earlier than that.

  “It’s not like that,” Al said. “I work there from time to time when Darnell needs me to. Hey, in this economy you do what you can do.”

  Paige looked back across the street to Hackney’s green door. “I hear that.”

  “How many people called this morning?” a squat man who had to be Mr. Hackney yelled at the woman seated behind the desk in the stuffy reception area. His red hair had receded far back on his freckled scalp. He was angrily bouncing on the balls of his feet, gulping air the way a puffer fish gulps water to blow itself up into a prickly ball when agitated. The petite, blond woman behind the desk was glassy-eyed and dolefully gazing at the switchboard before her.

  “Damn it, Mindy,” Hackney said, “how many? How many people have you hung up on today, so far?”

  “Howard, I jus’ can’t figure out this phone system. Iss too complicated!”

  The man threw up his hands and emitted strained choking sounds, shaking his fists at the ceiling.

  “Howard, really…” Mindy looked like she might cry or slide under the desk at any moment.

  He dropped his hands and looked down at her. “Mindy,” he said between clenched teeth. “You hit ‘transfer’ and dial my extension. How is that complicated?”

  Mindy looked unsteadily down at the phone again, then up at Hackney with a serious expression. “Whass your extension?”

  Mr. Howard Hackney, Esquire was beet r
ed and sweating. Paige cleared her throat quickly to deter another outburst, as he looked about to go into cardiac arrest.

  He whirled around. Mindy continued to study the phone, her head swaying slightly back and forth.

  Hackney darted forward, his hand jutting out to shake hers. “Sorry, sorry,” he muttered. “Why don’t you come on back.” He shot Mindy a withering glare and hustled Paige into his office, slamming the door behind him.

  Hackney scuttled around the desk, gesturing at the chairs in front of it for her to sit. “Sorry about that, out there,” he said, sitting down and pressing his fingers to his forehead. “My wife has been running the office for a while now and it’s been a disaster.”

  “It looked it.”

  “Well, some days are better than others. Today’s one of the not better days. So. Mrs. Davenport, how can I help you?” He dabbed his shiny forehead with a tissue, his skin returning to a more natural shade.

  “How does everyone know who I am before I tell them?” Paige asked.

  He leaned back in his chair, not smiling. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I need to talk to you about money.”

  “My favorite subject.”

  Paige closed the green door behind her, shivering. She felt like she needed a shower after that discussion. She looked hopefully across the street to the bench. Al was still lounging there, reading a newspaper. He looked up and waved as she crossed the street.

  Al patted the bench beside him and she sat down heavily. “What happened?” he asked. His tone was turn that fwown upside down.

  Hackney had listened surprisingly patiently as she blathered her situation to him about David, and having no money, including to pay him for his services. After explaining the slimy legal process ahead of them, he cheerfully offered her Mindy’s job, and said he would discount his fees and deduct them from her salary. There seemed to be no other way, so Paige agreed.