John Brandon - A Million Heavens

“Don’t put your bag down,” she said.

She stood and faced Cecelia and informed her that her services were no longer required by the Office of Internal Resources. It was that simple. Cecelia’s boss thanked her for her time. It didn’t seem like Cecelia was getting fired, because the air was not charged, but she was. She was being fired. Her boss wasn’t going to be dramatic, but neither would she be unclear. No one ever got fired from OIR. Not even Marie, who missed a shift about once a week. True, everyone else could work the equipment. Cecelia had had plenty of time to learn how, to ask someone to teach her, and she hadn’t. She’d remained ignorant.

Her boss held her hand out and Cecelia reached and shook it. This lady wanted Cecelia to leave so she could get back to her zombie book. This lady had never been a bit curious about Cecelia and she wasn’t curious now. She was only curious about her undead pep squad. Cecelia had an impulse to tell the woman that sometimes her enemies became victims of arson, that the woman better watch her back, but she stifled it. Cecelia still hadn’t heard anything about the barn. Nate hadn’t said a word. Nate’s parents had probably decided to cover the whole thing up, for whatever reason, and they probably had the pull to do that, to make it like something that was important to someone had never happened. But there was another way to think about it. Maybe the barn was exactly why she was being fired. This was the world’s next trick, the next step in the dance. She’d taken the barn and now she had to give up her job.

“I can’t believe it took so long for you to do this,” Cecelia said.

The woman made a face.

“What’s the worst part about being old?” Cecelia asked her.

“I’m only forty-one. I guess that’s old to you.”

“You’re forty-one but you might as well be seventy-one, and when you were twenty-one you might as well have been seventy-one. Right?”

The woman’s face had very little animation, but there was fear in her eyes, if Cecelia looked hard enough.

“I’m broke,” Cecelia said. “Which means I wasn’t in a position to quit a job, so thank you for firing me. It was up to you and you finally did it.”

The woman set her book down on the counter. On the back cover was a terrified crossing guard. “You’re welcome,” she said. “It was my pleasure.”

“Yeah,” Cecelia told her. “It turns out I’m not a piddling kiss-ass nerd, so this wasn’t going to be the job for me. I’m not like you. I can be miserable and I can be happy. I’m in congress with music from the great beyond. It lands in my brain. It’s happening now, in fact. I’m important. I’m needed.”

“I’m not miserable,” said the woman.

“This job is beneath me. I have a higher calling.”

“So I guess this is perfect. Everyone’s happy.”

“I’m not happy that often anymore,” said Cecelia. “But I’m happy right now.”

He had sold his remaining three lunch trucks, but when Gee asked him what was new, he only shrugged. He had admitted to himself that inevitably he was going to wind up selling off the whole fleet, and a man selling three trucks was still a man selling a business, while a guy selling one truck was a guy selling one truck. If he let Gee know the business was gone, she’d double her efforts to recruit him to be the cook at her restaurant. The restaurant was going to happen, apparently. She’d even gotten an investor. She’d come to terms with the fact that Soren’s father wasn’t going to be her partner, wasn’t going to come up with any seed money or even an idea or two, and now she wanted him to be her “wing man.” She’d offered him thirty dollars an hour to learn how to make the chicken and then keep it coming. Then she’d offered thirty-five. If he were going to do it, he would’ve agreed by now. Soren’s father had more money in his bank account than he’d ever had, and the thought of that made him feel lost. It was supposed to mean something, having a hefty sum in the bank, but it felt like nothing. Everything was this way. He ought to have been over the moon to have Gee, but nowadays he felt lonelier during her visits than any other time. None of their talking felt right. He didn’t want to talk about the future, about plans, and small talk in the presence of a boy in a coma felt that much smaller. Gee could tell. She was testy. The last time she’d visited, a nurse had asked her if she could wear soft-soled shoes the next time she came to the clinic because her heels clacked and some of the patients slept in the afternoon. Gee had let her have it, a nurse Soren’s father had seen around but didn’t know yet. Gee had asked her if she thought the patients appreciated the toxic cloud of perfume she dragged into all their rooms. She asked if the nurse had had a run-in with a skunk and was trying to cover it up. She asked the nurse if she owned stock in the perfume company. She asked the nurse if she thought it would be pleasant to be trapped in a flower shop as it burned to the ground.

She’d broken up with Arn. She stood at the front window now, shifting her weight from one leg to the other, an eyebrow resting against the glass, gazing at the empty space where Arn always parked his truck. This time the truck would not be back. The permanently abandoned look of that particular parcel of concrete, this time, was not something Dannie was imposing. The oil stain would dry and fade and get blasted clean by the patient sand, sand that would never be anything but sand and would only grow finer.

There’d been no moment of disbelief. Arn hadn’t asked for a reason. He had never made a single demand on her since Dannie had known him and, this afternoon had held to form. He’d asked her to stay in the living room, out of his way, and he’d packed all his stuff in a duffel bag in about ten minutes. She had been the one crying, she who’d had a chance to prepare.

Standing at the window now, Dannie felt that she hadn’t known Arn at all. He could be an identity thief. He could be heir to a shipping fortune. Could be dying of a terminal illness. Dannie had watched him from the other end of the hall, stalking around with shirts and underwear in his fists, and he’d seemed ready and willing to be heartbroken but simply unable to pull it off. Emotions were a foreign language. They weren’t his element. His face had been empty as he jammed things in his bag and then sat on the bag and then jammed in the rest. It hadn’t all quite fit and he’d squeezed through the front door wearing two coats and with a hat on his head and a pair of sneakers in his hand.

Dannie didn’t want to keep playing the scene over and over. None of it was her problem anymore. She could quit trying to figure Arn out. She could quit wearing out her eyes on the empty spot in the world where his crappy pickup used to be. She’d had her explanation, her little speech planned out, and he hadn’t wanted to hear it. Now she felt like she had to tell it to someone. The words were lumped in her throat. She had to walk out into the desert and whisper them to a cactus or something.

Dannie pulled away from the window and went to the kitchen. She stared vacantly into her pantry. There were about a dozen boxes of crackers, all open. She didn’t even look in the fridge. She drank a glass of water and went to the back sliding door and looked out past the balcony. Her condo felt creepy, like a big country house.

Dannie remembered college, high school. She remembered all the breakups, the loss and the freedom. Breaking up back then had been exhilarating, but now she only felt adrift. Even her divorce had seemed positive, but there was nothing positive about losing Arn. Dannie didn’t open the sliding-glass door. It still wasn’t dark out, the moon a low bloom. Dannie was going to have to start from square one. She’d done it before and she was going to have to do it again. She was going to go to a fertility doctor and she was going to look for an appropriate partner. If she had to move back to LA to find one, that’s what she was going to do. She was going to set herself a deadline, and if she didn’t meet anyone by then she was going to look into other options. This thing with Arn had been built on deceit. It was a deceitful fling, and now all the deceit was gone, behind her. She was going to sit around for a couple days and wait to get her period. She could feel the start of it. Her periods had gotten worse in recent years. She would bleed like she’d been stabbed. She wouldn’t fit into her jeans. She would have horrendous thoughts. She’d be stuck in here alone, like someone coming off drugs.