Heather Lewis - Notice

I relegated it to the place of one-time slips and kept on as if it hadn’t happened. Spent the money from it quickly and without thought. Spent the money that same night and went back to my day job in the morning. Parked behind the store like I’d been doing ever since I took this job.

All along I’d parked there instead of at the station. I was doing this to avoid going backwards. I knew it couldn’t last for ever. Though, by this, I don’t mean some dark character flaw on my part, or even the events of the night before, but instead something as mundane as the town parking violations bureau.

This is the way things worked: the parking behind the store was free and for customers. It served the whole general shopping area, so you weren’t supposed to park there all day long. What you were supposed to do was park at the station, which had twelve-hour meters for commuters and workers.

Getting caught cheating this setup was inevitable. After a while they would recognize your car. I’d already lasted longer than I’d ever expected. But that I got nailed this same morning? Well, it was hard not to take it as fate, or futility, I’m not sure which. In any case it made it hard not to make more of it than it was. And unlike the woman with the bad hip who worked in greeting cards, I certainly couldn’t explain my particular reason and then ask for an exemption. So here I was back to walking across the street after work.

I didn’t tell Beth this, but then I had never told her of my parking scheme in the first place. I guess I thought she’d think I was dumb for trying to protect myself this way. I guess I thought I was dumb. And because I thought my solution dumb, or that I was dumb for needing it, I didn’t acknowledge that its end represented a risk.

I got caught midweek so I had the rest of it to practice walking across the street after work and driving to Beth’s office. Then I had to contend with Saturday. I hated working Saturdays so that first week when I called in sick I didn’t need to pinpoint what specifically I was avoiding. A whole other week went by before I needed to know that.

I expect you’ll think I’m making a lot out of nothing, but after work that next weekend I had some difficulty. Of course, the Saturday train station crowd is a little different than the Monday through Friday guys. Different enough not to be there at six, my quitting time. What I used to do was go have a drink in that same bar adjacent to the lot.

So that’s what I did this night, too. I went in and had a drink. Not right at the bar, but at a table close by. I sat there and watched the door pretty keenly, hoping and dreading I’d see someone. Hoping, I realized pretty soon, that I’d see Ingrid’s husband and this both surprised me and didn’t at all.

The guy who wound up joining me was named Burt. He said he thought we knew each other but I knew we didn’t. He said he was a friend of that bartender I sort of saw for a while. I had to admit that was possible – them being friends, not his having met me before.

Burt seemed okay. Not what I usually gravitate toward, but okay. He asked did I want to go for a drive and I said why not, still not sure what he meant, or how we were talking.

His car was big and a soft shade of red and not new, but I was too out of it to think cool or classic, I just thought old. The guy at the wheel had apparently been waiting there this whole time. Burt and I got in the back and that was that. We were off on the drive.

His house was a pretty long way away, though I still knew the area, was still on fairly familiar ground. He was having a party I guess because there were people on the lawn and more in the house. One guy headed for us as soon as we came in. He handed Burt a drink and they whispered and then he was gone again.

“Anything you need,” Burt said to me, “Jeremy’ll get it.”

“Which one?” I asked and he pointed his glass after the same guy, though he was no longer in sight. I guess I should say right up front that I found Jeremy more than attractive. I found myself scanning the crowd for him. And when Burt had business in the bedroom, Jeremy sat me down on a couch. Told the guy who’d driven the car to bring me a drink.

Before I’d had even a taste of it I was thinking too much about Jeremy and in the wrong ways. He, meanwhile, seemed anxious for me to understand that he and Burt were partners. That he held a much different position than the other guys running around.

Sitting with him and talking was okay. But I assumed sex was why I was here, and so when that part kept not happening I got edgy. I think that’s why I wound up staying so long. And besides I didn’t have my own car or enough cash for a taxi. Picking up some extra cash had been most of the point, and now Jeremy mixed in with this too.

It had gotten late by the time Burt called me into the bedroom. The traffic in and out of there had been pretty steady and obvious. He offered the coke and I did it. It wasn’t the best stuff but he had a lot of it. I figured there were other things he could get.

These reasons were enough for me to go with them to another house, which was somewhere even further away. And while I make it sound like I had all this in hand, I didn’t. Not really. I’d become nervous about getting home. And more nervous about the sex that still wasn’t happening because if that wasn’t the point of me being with them, then what the hell was?

At this house, Burt stayed in one bedroom on the phone, leaving Jeremy and me alone in another. The same driver was stuck outside again, waiting. Anyway, the two of us sprawled on the bed, curled up with a full-length mirror Jeremy had taken off the wall. We just did coke and did coke, and every so often I’d traipse across the hall and check in on Burt.

The first couple of times, I got on the bed with him. I sort of crawled up toward him, trying to figure out what he wanted. I got nowhere with this. Finally I took to just peering in from the hall, did it just to have a break from the other room where the only thing going on was the coke.

By the time it turned daylight I had trouble making it across the hall. I would have to sit down and rest. I would sort of fall down and stay there. This was a day I was supposed to go to that job. A day I was supposed to see Beth. I didn’t see how either of those things would be happening.

Jeremy said he’d call in for me. I knew this would look worse than me calling myself. But I couldn’t imagine doing it so instead of seeing it as crazy, I was grateful. He told them I’d gotten sick while spending the weekend at his house. He told me not to worry. That they’d sounded concerned. Of course, his perceptions by then were probably on par with mine, meaning off.

Not too long after this, when we’d gone back to what we’d been doing for hours, Jeremy said, “So, my guess is your bill’s up to about a thousand dollars.”

I froze when he said this, becoming cold and unable to speak. He said, “You didn’t think all this was free, did you?”

He smiled that smile he had on his face almost all night. It reminded me how handsome he was, and also how large, physically. Reminded me he took up more than his share of the bed and that I didn’t have a way home.

I hadn’t heard Burt but he stood at the doorway. His voice was what pulled my eyes there. “He’s kidding,” Burt said.

And while I regained some of my faculties I still wasn’t at all sure I believed him. And if they weren’t after sex, then what? Because it just couldn’t be as simple as money.

I never quite got myself calmed down. Jeremy made that same joke a couple of more times. And then there was all the coke. I was jagged from that. And still nobody’d laid a hand on me. There’d been talk about the three of us together. But even the talk didn’t go far. No one could focus long enough. Then they’d dropped me at home.