head, it’s damp cold. He thinks of Mexico, burning sun, brown skin and the tang of tequila. Leave it be, he’d told Penny. They just need enough to get out of here, incognito.
“You know he’s not likely to come in.” Brandi squints up at him. The bus pulls up. They get on and sit down under the window, glaring yellow green bus lights, and Jason tips his head against the glass. “My boss don’t never come in on Mondays, usually.”
Jason doesn’t answer. He had to get out of that plaster-walled shoebox, away from her and her goddamn hounding. At the very least, he can bum another pack, skim a five or two off the register while Brandi’s out pumping gas. He has other plans too, ways to kill time in Portland Heights. “You’re putting in the good word for me with the boss, though, right? You see I’m solid.”
Brandi snorts, looks past him out the window. “I see you’re running out of options, mister.” But she’s smirking like it’s a joke, so he lets it go. Bitch. She’ll be sorry too. He hates her, ugly little crank whore with her picking and her black teeth. He thinks of Penny, his girl, loyal as the day is long, and the anger of before melts like dirty snow.
The sun doesn’t rise, but it’s a lighter gray now, and the bus winds up Vista, through the reaching green of trees he knows from logging, money trees; Douglas and Fraser firs, hemlocks, silvers and Shastas. Up here ferns as high as his waist grow up along the roadside, layer with moss so that everything between these mansions is covered in green, in the color of money. He knows she lives up here, looking down on the city, in a house hidden from the street by big money trees. They’re all up here, John and Francie too. Just have to find out exactly where.
The bus stops on Patton, her stop, and Brandi nudges him.
“You getting off?” The door hisses as it opens.
“Not just yet,” he says evenly. “Just going to do a little sightseeing first.”
What he means is, shake these money trees, let some golden green rain down on his bare head.
32
Modern Bride
CHLOE
Eight thirty on Monday morning, Chloe is lying on her stomach on the thick, rose-patterned area rug in her dormered office, dog-earing a Modern Bride. Paul didn’t show up for their Strohecker’s coffee date, so she gave up, came into the office early, signed in with Beverly, starting her meter, and now she’s just using up time.
It has been exactly four weeks since she left Maui, and she is hungry for contact with Dan, logged in to AOL with the monitor off so that if Dan e-mails, the man will chirp “You’ve got mail!” How she loves her perfect little third-floor office, the hollow wooden staircase separating her from everyone in the international programs, jammed in their cubicle adjacent to Judith’s glass-walled office and eagle eyes. Some days, this is still almost her dream job.
The intercom beeps; Beverly, and Chloe hopes like always that it is a call from Dan.
“Chloe—line two.”
Chloe pulls the phone off her desk, drags it to the floor with her, her back propped against the sofa. “Hello?”
“Where are you? I waited for you.”
Paul?
“What?” They have crossed a line now, she thinks. They shouldn’t be waiting for each other, but if they happen to be getting coffee in the same place at the same time, then—
“I banged on your door for a fucking hour.”
“Who is this?”
“You know who it is. You go in early today?”
“Hi, Jason.” She tries to sound casual, like Casey from the China program downstairs, who can be cheery-chatty when even the most irate couples call to rage about their dossier.
“Where are you?” he demands.
Chloe swallows, wants to ask him the same thing. He was at her house?
“What’s up?”
“You tell me. Where’s our fucking money?”
Chloe glances at the new 2001 calendar over her desk, Oregon nature scenes. This month, January, is a stock black-and-white of Multnomah Falls. It is the twenty-ninth. She calculates in her head—Penny’s baby born at the beginning of December, the standard six weeks of follow-up support are over. Their accounting file is closed.
“What?” she says, to buy time. She knows he knows the policy; he has bitched about it from their first meeting. He was at her house!
“I’ve got Julio hassling me for the rent, and I still ain’t got a job, Chloe. You still working on that?”