Look Closer(14)

When I’d get off the bus every day, there he’d be, just outside the fence, calling out to me, “C’mere, Mini-Me!” He’d shout it in the hallways. He’d call it out when I walked into math class (yes, a senior was taking the same math class as a freshman, to give you an idea of his scholastic advancement). Initially, I tried ignoring him, not responding, but that only made him shout it over and over again and that only made things worse, so eventually I started responding the first time.

Yeah, I didn’t like Mitchell. I don’t obsess over him or anything. But if I’m ever tempted to forget him, I just have to look in the mirror and see the scar below my eye, that day he lost his temper.

? ? ?

“A good lawyer knows the answer to every question before she asks it,” my mother used to say. “A good lawyer knows what she wants to say in closing argument before the trial has even begun. You work backward from how you want it to end, and you plan out the trial so that, by the end, you can support everything you wanted to tell them with evidence.”

? ? ?

By quarter after six, I’m shaving after my shower, rubbing a circle out of the steam on the mirror so I can get a fuzzy reflection.

Vicky pushes through the bathroom door with a moan, her eyes all but shut, her hair all over her face. She leans against my back and says, “How do you get up this early?”

“My favorite time of day,” I say.

“That bed . . . is so comfortable.”

“Glad you like it.”

She drops onto the toilet to pee, while I finish up shaving and tap my razor in the sink.

“Late night?” I ask.

Her head drops. “We got a call five minutes before midnight.”

“Ugh. Five minutes before your shift ended? You could’ve pawned it off.”

“Well, I didn’t. Her husband was at the ER, too, trying to get her to come home and drop the charges. It was a real scene. Took three cops to restrain the guy. He even swung at me.”

“Yeah? Did he connect?”

“No.”

That’s probably lucky for the guy.

“And the woman?” I ask. “Did she go with you?”

“Yeah, eventually. I didn’t leave until about two in the morning.”

She flushes and drags herself to the sink to wash her hands.

“Go back to sleep,” I say.

“Don’t worry, I will.” She shuffles back to bed, the Bataan Death March, then drops face-first onto the pillow and moans with satisfaction.

I get dressed and put on some coffee. I take a cup for the road. I have a decent drive ahead. I walk back up to the bedroom to say goodbye. “Hey, gorgeous, Daddy’s leaving.”

She opens one eye. “Creepy.”

I watch her for a while. She looks sexy just lying there in that oversize Cubs shirt, this hard, tough woman so innocent and vulnerable in sleep.

I have to protect her. I have to make sure she comes out of this okay.

? ? ?

Before I head up to Wisconsin, I drive by Lauren’s house. I don’t stay long. By now, her husband, Conrad, is long gone, chauffeured downtown for his workout at the swanky East Bank Club before lording over his millions of dollars of investments. Is he checking out all the hard-bodied women in their spandex workout gear? Does he have one eye out for wife number four, should the mood strike him? Is that what he did with Lauren—got bored with his aging second wife and traded her in for a younger model?

Well, you better start looking again, Conrad, old boy. Three years with Lauren wasn’t a bad run. You’re not getting a fourth.

I look across the street at her place. The master bedroom takes up the entire north side of the house, with a terrace behind it where Lauren likes to sunbathe in privacy. Or so she thinks. I’d bet green money the men who live nearby have managed to find their binoculars.

Or maybe she knows that. Do you, Lauren? Do you like to tease other men, make them want you? Do you still need that validation? Have you figured out that none of that matters?

Or will you always want more?

? ? ?

“The pink one,” I say. “No, the hot pink.”

The chubby clerk with the pock-marked face in the “superstore” in Racine, Wisconsin—about eighty miles north of Chicago—lifts the phone case off the rack and runs it over the scanner.

“So this is a thousand minutes?” I confirm.

“Yeah, a thousand minutes. And with our plan, you can get monthly—”

“Nope, no plan.”

“You don’t want a plan?”

“No. Just this phone, a thousand minutes, and that hot pink case. Don’t worry,” I add with a chuckle, “I’m not a criminal. This is for my daughter. It’s a trial run. I want to see how quickly she burns through these minutes before I decide whether a ten-year-old needs a phone.”

I wish I did have kids. Vicky said no way. She thinks the taint of her rotten childhood would somehow seep into any children she had.

The clerk glances at me briefly before nodding and taking my wad of cash and giving me another look. A no-plan, prepaid phone, paid for in cash.

? ? ?

“The green one,” I tell the elderly saleswoman in the “superstore” in Valparaiso, Indiana, which is 130 miles southwest of Racine, Wisconsin, and about 60 miles from Chicago. Green again, like my green journal, for fresh and new and blossoming and, you know, all that shit.