David Ellis - The Last Alibi

He looks up at me, not terribly surprised to hear that number. “I think I can afford that,” he says. “I’ve been saving up.”

I don’t comment on the significance of that statement, but he-the innocent man who didn’t kill anybody-catches it himself.

“I mean, saving up for a rainy day of some kind,” he clarifies.

Fair enough. I don’t know if he’s innocent or not, but I do know that if I limited myself to innocent clients, the phone wouldn’t ring very often.

“Well, it sounds like it may be raining soon,” I say.

Shauna

Tuesday, June 4

A late dinner with Jason, just the two of us. My decision and my treat. He looks like he could use a good steak and maybe a stiff drink, but instead he orders some soup and a club soda. Surprising. I’ve never seen him pass on a drink or a steak. Then it suddenly occurs to me I’m not his mother.

“Is this some kind of diet?” I ask, but he just smirks. Heroically stoic again.

“Anyway, I told Drinker to make a list of anyone who might have a grudge against him and come back tomorrow,” Jason says.

“What a weird meeting. Have you ever had someone come to you and say they think they’re being framed?”

He shakes his head. “When I was a prosecutor, I’d hear that defense. But I’ve never used it as a defense attorney. And definitely not a guy telling me he’s being framed before he’s even charged.”

“Maybe he knows he’s going to be charged and he wants to lay the table for you.”

“For me?” Jason grimaces. “He doesn’t have to convince his lawyer.”

“Maybe he doesn’t know that.”

Jason doesn’t respond. He’s obliterating a piece of thick bread, shredding it to dust on his plate. But not eating it, I notice. There is a greenish pall to his skin, like he’s under the weather.

“So tell me,” I say.

“Tell you what?”

“What’s wrong. Are you sick?”

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m not sick.”

I sometimes forget that Jason’s had a rough time of things, probably because he never lets on about it. Losing your family in a car accident is beyond words, and that was only two years ago. But to make matters worse, he allowed himself a second shot at romance last year, a woman named Tori. Beautiful and elusive, just the way he likes them. I don’t know what happened with them. He never shared. But one day she was just gone. And our Jason took it hard. “Didn’t work out” was all he said, but he’s easy to read if you know him. He was crushed.

Then a month later, he rips his knee apart on the basketball court, and the jock, the guy who runs fifty miles on a slow week, was laid up for months and hobbling on crutches. His doctor said the pain could last up to a year or longer, depending.

“Either your knee still hurts, you’re still pining for Tori, or something else happened while I’ve been on trial.”

The mention of Tori brings a quick jerk of his eyes, but that’s all he gives me. “Tori is history. My knee hardly ever hurts. Comes and goes.”

He removes a tin of mints from his pocket and pops one in his mouth, chews it up. Not sure why his breath is of concern at the moment. I wasn’t planning a make-out session with him after dinner.

“What happened to your hand?” I ask. Each of the fingernails on his right hand has some corner or section blackened, like some kind of gothic manicure. “Have you been playing with fire?”

He seems to find something interesting, or maybe amusing, in that comment. He lets out a long sigh and leans against the back of the cushioned booth.

Our food comes. Caesar salad for me, French onion soup for the kid. I attack the salad, mixing it up, first picking off the anchovies. Jason stares off into space, his large cauldron of onion soup with the thick slab of Gruyere on top untouched.

“What’s with the loss of appetite?” I ask. “Are you pregnant?”

He doesn’t answer, so I don’t push. My salad is delicious. Probably loaded with calories, but yummy. I don’t work out as much as I should and don’t eat as well as I should, but I’m still in shape. Not supermodel thin, but not fat by any stretch. Never have been. But I’m in my mid-thirties now and sometimes I do check myself in the mirror, monitor my butt for signs of sagging and my legs for the first hint of cellulite.

Okay, I check every day. Every single day, after the shower, in front of my full-length mirror. Pure vanity, I guess, or primitive mating behavior. My mother has started asking on a weekly basis about my love life. It’s a short conversation. No, Mom. No, not even a date. Saving myself for Robert Downey, Jr., Mom, but too shy to call him. I left my number on his Facebook page, though. I have the equivalent of a Ph.D. in brushing off attempts by friends and family to set me up with men who would be absolutely perfect for me. It’s not that I don’t want a man who’s absolutely perfect for me. It’s that I’m so certain that the people they want me to meet aren’t that person that I’d rather forgo the stilted, painful dinner conversations and awkward kisses at the door and just wallow in my aloneness. I choose that word deliberately. I’m not lonely. I’m just alone . See the difference?

I’ve become so adept at pretending the lack of romance in my life doesn’t bother me that sometimes I even believe my own bullshit.

I’m halfway through my salad when Jason says, “You look nice.”

I look up from my plate, some dressing on my cheek, a mouthful of lettuce and crouton. “Huh?”

“I just said you look nice. Blue looks nice on you.”

I make a show of scanning the room behind me, like I can’t believe he’s saying this to me, a Who are you and what have you done with Jason? moment.

“I can’t compliment you? You look nice.”

“Um, okay. Thanks?”

I had a go-round with Jason our senior year at Bonaventure High-the prim-and-proper brainiac and the bad-boy athlete, my walk on the wild side-that lasted one night, or more accurately about fifteen minutes, upstairs in Rita Hoffman’s bedroom while a hundred kids got drunk or stoned below us. There we were, on top of the covers, our clothes in a bunch on the floor, “Drive” by R.E.M. blasting below us on the overworked stereo. “Uh, that was nice,” he said to me when it was over, when he was stripping the condom off and I was pulling on my panties. “This song sucks” was all I said. “This whole CD sucks,” he agreed. It was a more intimate moment than the sex. I didn’t speak to him again in high school.

I didn’t, in fact, even realize we were attending the same university until he became a last-minute addition to our off-campus house at State (when they kick you off the football team, apparently they evict you from the jock dorm, too). He drew the short straw (or one of us did) and got me for a roommate. First thing he said to me, even before hello, seeing me for the first time in almost two years: “Did you just hate that song, or do you hate R.E.M.?” I said, “I love R.E.M., but not the newer stuff so much.” He lit up like a Christmas tree. “Yeah, right, exactly!” And then go-round number two, which lasted about three weeks-sex about ten times, give or take-before we realized that we had to choose between being a full-blown couple or abstain and be buds, it was one or the other in the twelve-by-twelve room we shared. We went with abstinence and buds.

Now we’re as close to married as you can be without having sex or living together. He’s the only person who can make me laugh out loud, the one who’s never left my side, even holding my hand in the doctor’s office during that agonizing week that I had the cancer scare (negative, thank you), the one who knows exactly how to navigate my moods when I’m PMS-ing (it’s okay if I acknowledge it, not okay for him to so much as mention it).